November 22, 2002

Practices, Identities, and Desires

By DAVID GLENN

Gay and lesbian anthropology challenges the received wisdom about culture and kinship

In the mid-1960s, Esther Newton spent hundreds of evenings in Chicago's drag bars. She was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago, conducting fieldwork for a dissertation that eventually became Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Prentice-Hall, 1972).

Early in the project, Ms. Newton wondered if the drag world was, as it appeared, purely the creation of a

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