‘The time has come to think about queering the state’, Lisa Duggan wrote in 1994, amid a record year of anti-gay ballot campaigns by the religious right (Duggan 1994: 1). Her intervention responded to a politics that casts gay rights as ‘special rights’, leaving state support for heterosexuality – for example, through marriage and tax law – unnamed. ‘Queering’, for Duggan, shifted the question from minority inclusion to how the state itself produces heterosexuality as the norm.

In 1995, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner explored the possibilities that ‘queer’ offers in an article whose title is its guiding question: ‘What does queer theory teach us about x?’ At a time when queer theory was becoming a recognized field of study, they worried that ‘queer theory’ would imply that the field was already settled. Their x resisted defining queer through a single object or program. Queer instead oriented an analytical move in which queer work would not ‘be assimilated to a single discourse, let alone a propositional program’ (Berlant and Warner 1995: 343). David Halperin (1995) also famously understood queer less as a stable identity than as a positionality in relation to the normative. Duggan’s call to ‘queer’ the state, then, was an early call to make queer(ing) a practice: a way of asking how arrangements and assumptions that appear given are produced and sustained, and of bursting open what had been declared a certainty.

Yet, the expansive promise that gives queer theory its analytic reach has also been a source of suspicion almost from its beginnings. Teresa de Lauretis, who introduced the term ‘queer theory’ in 1991, distanced herself from it only three years later. She described its rapid institutionalization as producing a ‘conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry’ (1994: 297). Two decades later, Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson (2015) questioned another convention within the field: the assumption that queer theory derives its political value from an antinormative stance. Their intervention asks what happens when opposition to normativity itself becomes a norm for what ‘properly’ queer critique should do. The tension, then, lies not only within queer critique, but also between queer critique and normativity, as a practice committed to unsettling conventions may generate conventions of its own.

This problem is political as well as conceptual. Work on homonormativity (Duggan 2003) and homonationalism (Puar 2007) showed that queer subjects do not necessarily stand outside dominant formations, but have gained (conditional) incorporation into institutions that queer critique once sought to trouble (Duggan 2003; Puar 2007; Eng 2010). ‘Queer,’ therefore, refers neither to an inherently oppositional subject nor to an automatically critical politics, as it may become complicit in structures of violence and oppression.

Duggan returned to her provocation ‘queering the state’ in 2022. Nearly three decades after her original intervention, she asked again what state classifications of sex and gender do. Her return shifted attention from recognition toward the distribution of power and resources (Duggan 2022). This question remains pressing as queer and trans lives again become objects of political anxiety and anti-gender movements gain renewed political force (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017; Grinspan et al. 2023; Butler 2024), while pinkwashing efforts continue to enable genocidal states to brand themselves as (gay) friendly (Puar 2007).

‘Queer’, then, remains attached to particular histories and political struggles, even as queer(ing) has come to name an analytic practice that extends beyond sexuality and gender. This mobility gives queer much of its critical force. Yet it also raises a recurrent problem: what happens when queer(ing) becomes so mobile as an analytic that the actual struggles and people that ‘queer’ stands for become difficult to locate (Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005; Eng and Puar 2020)? How far can queer stretch before it means everything, and nothing at the same time (Isenia and Steinbock 2020)? The parentheses in QUEER(ING) hold this tension open. We do not seek to resolve whether queer is best understood as a category or as a practice of queering. Rather, we ask what becomes visible by moving within or between them – between the noun and the verb, the category and the practice.

These questions also have particular consequences for anthropology. Destabilising seemingly stable classifications, queer theory asks anthropology to reconsider the categories through which ethnographers recognise subjects and organise knowledge. It troubles assumptions about what counts as kinship, normality, or a coherent social world, while also raising questions about ethnography itself. At the same time, anthropology’s attention to situated meanings unsettles queer concepts that travel as if they were universal (Rubin 1984; Boellstorff, Weis 2016; Love 2016; Ghaziani and Brim 2019). Ethnography asks what queer means in practice, including where the term does not circulate or fails to describe the lives under study. We therefore invoke Berlant and Warner’s (1995) question ‘what does queer theory teach us about anthropology?’, while also reversing its direction. Anthropology, then, becomes both an object of queer analysis and a vantage point from which queer theory itself can be further pushed and expanded. What can queer theory tell us about anthropology, and what does anthropology, in turn, teach us about queer theory and queer(ing)?

For this special issue of Etnofoor, we invite contributions that explore these questions through ethnographic and anthropological work. How, for instance, is queer named or refused in particular social worlds? What happens when queer categories enter workplaces or state bureaucracies? How do people inhabit norms around sexuality and gender in everyday life? What normativities may queer(ing) help to unsettle, and which may it become entangled with? How do practices of queer(ing) reshape the forms through which ethnographic knowledge is produced?

We especially welcome contributions that ‘queer’ ethnographic academic form itself, experimenting with how argument, ethnography, citation, image, voice, or genre might be otherwise organized. We also welcome book reviews, methodological reflections, or multimodal contributions based on ethnographic research. We invite authors to submit an abstract of no more than 200 words to editors@etnofoor.nl by October 30, 2026. The deadline for authors of accepted papers to submit their full paper is February 15, 2027. The issue is scheduled for publication in the summer of 2027.

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