DEBORAH A. ELLISTON

Email: elliston@binghamton.edu

(PhD New York University, 1997), Assistant Professor of Anthropology, is a sociocultural anthropologist pursuing questions of gender, culture, sex, and power. Dr. Elliston's areas of expertise include critical engagements with nationalism, colonialism, and postcoloniality, with “race” and racialization processes, and with modernity, sex, and desire; Third World/postcolonial feminist theories and politics; feminist sexuality studies; and Polynesia/ Oceania with a specific focus on the Society Islands of French Polynesia (an “overseas possession” of France also known as “Tahiti and its Islands”). Her current research project there engages questions of sexuality, gender, desire, and labor through fieldwork with raerae (transgender) sex workers. On leave for Spring 2007, Dr. Elliston is completing an ethnography of the politics of gender and culture in the Polynesian nationalist struggle for independence, Sites of Struggle: The Politics of Difference in Polynesian Nationalism & Beyond.

Journal Articles

2005. Critical Reflexivity & Sexuality Studies in Anthropology. Reviews in Anthropology 34(1):21-47.

2004. A Passion for the Nation: Masculinity, Modernity, and Nationalist Struggle. American Ethnologist 31(4):606-630.

2000. Geographies of Gender & Politics: The Place of Difference in Polynesian Nationalism. Cultural Anthropology 15(2):171-216.

1995. Erotic Anthropology: “Ritualized Homosexuality” in Melanesia and Beyond. American Ethnologist 22(4):848-867.

Book Chapters

2005. Erotic Anthropology: “Ritualized Homosexuality” in Melanesia and Beyond. In Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader . Jennifer Robertson, ed. Pp. 91-115. London: Blackwell Publishers.

2002. Anthropology's Queer Future: Feminist Lessons from Tahiti. In Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology . Ellen Lewin and William Leap, eds. Pp. 287-315. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. (Anthology was awarded the 2004 Ruth Benedict Prize.)

2000. “ Mahu ” and “Pacific Islands.” In Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia (Vol. 1 of The Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures ). Bonnie Zimmerman, ed. Pp. 483-484, 563-565. New York: Garland Publishing.

1999. Negotiating Transnational Sexual Economies: Female Mahu and Same-Sex Sexuality in ‘Tahiti and Its Islands.' In Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures . Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa, eds. Pp. 230-250. New York: Columbia University Press. (Anthology was awarded the 2004 Ruth Benedict Prize.)

1999. Erotic Anthropology: “Ritualized Homosexuality” in Melanesia and Beyond. Reprinted in Across the Boundaries of Belief: Contemporary Issues in the Anthropology of Religion . Morton Klass and Maxine Weisgrau, eds. Pp. 133-158. Boulder: Westview Press.

Book & Film Reviews

2005. Review of Opacity: Gender, Sexuality, Race, and the “Problem” of Identity in Martinique , by David A.B. Murray (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2002). Ethnos 70(1):133-135.

2000. Review of Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific , eds. Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). American Ethnologist 27(1):211-212.

1997. The Not So Pacific: Pacific Islander Films at the 1996 Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, New York. Pacific Studies 20(1):150-161.

1993. Review of Oceanic Homosexualities , ed. Stephen O. Murray (New York: Garland, 1992). Journal of the History of Sexuality 4(2):319-321.

Courses for the Spring 2008 Semester: ANTH 354, ANTH 504 (w/A. Stahl)

 

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