Alyssa Cymene Howe (University of New Mexico) won the award for her paper: “Queers and televisionaries: The strategics of sexuality in neoliberal Nicaragua.”
Howe’s paper discusses the shifting strategies of “queer” activists in Nicaragua. She does an excellent job of showing the relation of local practices and discourses to international lesbian/gay circuits. The paper also makes a convincing case connecting changing laws in Nicaragua to the changes in activist strategies. Overall, Howe deftly provides a complex and rich ethnography that emerges out of and contributes towards contemporary queer anthropological theory.
The insights towards invisible bodies as part of an engagement of strategic sexuality in modern Nicaragua lead us to reflexively destabilize the visible queer in our own midst.
We feel that Howe’s work best represents the qualities that we seek to encourage, both in its originality and scope, and in its promise for the development of “queer” studies in anthropology.
