KD Thompson's Blog

I’ve written a response to the critics of “African Studies Keyword: Autoethnography.”

The press didn’t go with the art I suggested, but they took my general idea for images and colors and came up with something that really pops. I’m very pleased with it.

My book has a new title, Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America. It should be out in early 2023 from NYU Press. We’re still working on cover art, but I’m hoping we may use this watercolor my friend Azeem painted.

Rainbow mosque, watercolor by Azeem Khan. Used with permission.

Last week I gave a talk for our Middle East Studies Program, titled “Queer-Jewish-Muslim: Constructing Hyphenated Religious Identities through Tactics of Intersubjectivity.” It was based on a chapter I wrote for an edited volume that Adi Saleem Bharat (U. of Michigan) is putting together for submission to Duke University Press on Queer Jews and Muslims. You can watch the recording of my talk here.

I was invited to review Sarah Hillewaert’s book, Morality at the Margins, for Anthropos, and my review is now published. Send me a message if you don’t have access and would like a copy. But more importantly, go read Sarah’s excellent book!

Yesterday I signed a contract with NYU Press to publish Misfits, Rebels, and Queers: An Ethnography of Muslims on the Margins in their North American Religions series. I’ve been so impressed with the Editor, series editors, and reviewers so far, and am thrilled that the book will be part of this series. I have a few chapters left to write, with a January deadline, then inshallah the book will be out next year. Starting in August I’ll be on sabbatical for the whole academic year, so I should have plenty of time to devote to this labor of love.

On 1 October, I officially came on as Editor-in-Chief of Anthropology and Humanism, with my colleague Neni Panourgia.

Neni and I began shadowing outgoing Editor David Syring last November, stepped up learning the ropes over the summer, and are now fully immersed. It’s been a fun process so far, with lots to learn, and I’m excited about this important work.

We’ve brought on one of my graduate students, Kathryn Mara, as Editorial Assistant, and Dr. as Book Reviews Editor.

And we now have a Twitter profile. Follow us @AnthroHumanism!

An early view of my latest publication is out in American Anthropologist:


“Making Space for Embodied Voices, Diverse Bodies, and Multiple Genders in Nonconformist Friday Prayers: A Queer Feminist Ethnography of Progressive Muslims’ Performative Inter-Corporeality in North American Congregations,” American Anthropologist 122, no. 4 (final version forthcoming in December 2020).


https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/2XXRNMGIZYQU5JB2EUBK?target=10.1111/aman.13478

I was excited to see a new journal of autoethnography in the works and it’s finally here! Even more exciting is that this essay I started working on the first time I taught my seminar in Literary Ethnography is finally out in the world.

Through my own narrative about my relationship with my fictive father in Zanzibar and the impact of this relationship on my research, in this autoethnographic essay I explore three themes: fictiveness, fatherhood, and the field. These themes tie together different aspects of the term “patriography,” linking them to ethnography and its subgenre autoethnography. Drawing on the term “patriography” as the science or study of fathers, I use the concept of “the field” to examine the impact of narratives about fathers on not only the field as a site of ethnographic research but also on the field of African cultural studies.

My latest article, “Queering language socialization: Fostering inclusive Muslim interpretations through talk-in-interaction,” is now out in Language & Communication. It emerged from a paper I presented last fall at the American Anthropological Association in Vancouver, on a panel on language socialization organized by my graduate student Kathryn Mara.

Examining various frames during talk at an LGBTI-majority Canadian mosque, I address queer language socialization through analysis of the mutual socialization dialectic between the formation of members and the formation of their community, one in the process of being freshly imagined. I demonstrate how not only queer but also otherwise nonconformist Muslim values and communicative practices are being socialized as part of a purposefully intersectional community. Participants transform one another’s use of language as they move toward their collective goal of intersectional inclusivity of people of diverse sects, genders, sexual orientations, relationship to Islam, age, and position of religious authority.

This link should give access until 23 August. If it doesn’t work, please let me know and I’ll be happy to share a PDF with you.

Please read, share, and let me know what you think!