Margot Weiss

Margot Weiss is Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she directs Queer Studies. A cultural anthropologist, Weiss researches the contradictory relationships between sexual cultures, neoliberalism, and the US economy. Her award-winning first book, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011), is an ethnography of BDSM communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. The book charts the sexual politics of neoliberalism by linking BDSM’s spectacular performances of race, gender, and sexuality to class, consumerism, and the social dynamics of late capitalism. Techniques of Pleasure won the 2012 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Association for Queer Anthropology and was a finalist for best book in LGBT Studies by the Lambda Literary Foundation. Weiss is currently writing a book on how queer left activists cultivate a radical political imagination in the midst of crisis and closure. Her work has been published in GLQ, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, New Labor Forum, Journal of Homosexuality, Anthropologica, Radical History Review, American Quarterly, The Routledge History of Queer America, Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century, Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian / Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World, and Global Justice and Desire: Queering Economy. Margot Weiss is the former chair of the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA), a section of the American Anthropological Association. She holds an AB from the University of Chicago (1995), a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies, and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University (2005).