Anthropology and Homosexual Behavior

Evelyn Blackwood is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Purdue University. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 1993. Author of numerous journal articles and books, her work investigates the critical intersections where localized, state and transnational processes meet individual understandings and experiences of gender, sexuality, identity and kinship. She explores these topics through two related areas of ethnographic research, the study of a matrilineal society in West Sumatra, Indonesia, and the study of the social construction of sexualities and genders, focused on Indonesia and the United States. Dr. Blackwood was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholarship and the Martin Duberman Fellowship (Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York) for her research on emerging sexual and gender identities in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. This research resulted in several articles and an award-winning monograph, entitled Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia (2010). The monograph explores the complexities of gender and sexuality in Indonesia for masculine-identified tombois and their girlfriends. Her ongoing project combines anthropology and history to explore the construction and negotiation of identity, selfhood, and sexuality among baby boomers in the U.S., focusing on women in the first generation of “out” lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s. She is a three-time winner of the Ruth Benedict Prize.