After Difference

de Paolo Heywood

Queer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference. Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways. The Italian queer activist groups in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics they find around them. Conversely, anthropologists have often been concerned with collapsing differences, in particular with collapsing the difference between anthropological theory and the ethnographic material it elucidates. This book describes problems faced by an activist `politics of difference', and issues concerning the identity of anthropological reflection itself - connecting these two conceptions of difference whilst simultaneously holding them apart.