Congratulations to Gayle Rubin, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies, one of the 2012 winners of the Ruth Benedict Book Prize for outstanding scholarship on a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic.  This prize, from the Association for Queer Anthropology is presented each year at the American Anthropological Association’s national meeting to acknowledge excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a topic that engages issues and theoretical perspectives relevant to LGBTQ studies.

The prize for Gayle Rubin is in the category of “Outstanding Edited Volume” for Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader  (Duke University Press, 2011).  The book is an edited collection of previously published and new work that brings together essays that span Professor Rubin’s career. The collection, which includes her classic essays “The Traffic in Women” and “Thinking Sex,” excerpts from her groundbreaking anthropological work with the gay male leather community in San Francisco in the 1970s, previously anthologized essays such as “Studying Sexual Subcultures: Excavating the Ethnography of Gay Communities in Urban North America,” and hard-to-find pieces in and about LGBTQ studies, richly contextualized through Professor Rubin’s thoughtful and introspective introductory essay, models how ethnography of sexuality can be used as an important “intellectual tool to think about the present."