The Ruth Benedict Prize is an award given annually by the American Anthropological Association's "to acknowledge excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic". The award was established in 1986 in honor of anthropologist, Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) and is given in two separate categories: a monograph by a single author and an edited volume. [1] [2]
Year | Author | Title | Category |
---|---|---|---|
1986 | Walter L. Williams | The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture | Monograph |
1987 | Gilbert Herdt | The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea | Monograph |
1990 | Serena Nanda | Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India | Monograph |
1990 | Kath Weston | Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship | Monograph |
1991 | Richard Parker | Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil | Monograph |
1992 | Ellen Lewin | Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture | Monograph |
1993 | Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis | Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community | Book |
1993 | Roger Lancaster | Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua | Monograph |
1994 | Esther Newton | Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town | Monograph |
1995 | Joseph Carrier | De Los Otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality Among Mexican Men | Monograph |
1996 | Carter Wilson | Hidden in the Blood: A Personal Investigation of AIDS in the Yucatan | Monograph |
1996 | William L. Leap | Word’s Out: Gay Men’s English | Monograph |
1997 | Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang | Two-spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality | Edited Volume |
1997 | Kath Weston | Render Me, Gender Me: Lesbians Talk Sex, Class, Color, Nation, Studmuffins | Monograph |
1998 | Jennifer Robertson | Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan | Monograph |
1999 | Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa | Female Desires: Same Sex Relations and Transgender Practices Across Cultures | Edited Volume |
2000 | Barbara L. Voss and Robert A. Schmidt | Archaeologies of Sexuality | Edited Volume |
2000 | Stephen O. Murray | Homosexualities | Monograph |
2000 | Esther Newton | Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas | Monograph |
2001 | Arlene Stein | The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights | Monograph |
2002 | Hector Carrillo | The Night is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS | Monograph |
2003 | Martin F. Manalansan IV | Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora | Monograph |
2004 | Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap | Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology | Edited Volume |
2004 | Megan Sinnott | Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand | Monograph |
2005 | Tom Boellstorff | The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia | Monograph |
2006 | Tanya Erzen | Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement | Monograph |
2007 | Saskia Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya | Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia | Edited Volume |
2007 | Gloria Wekker | The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora | Monograph |
2007 | David Valentine | Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category | Monograph |
2008 | Barbara L. Voss | The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco | Monograph |
2008 | Mark Padilla | Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic | Monograph |
2009 | Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap | Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World | Edited Volume |
2009 | Mary L. Gray | Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America | Monograph |
2009 | Rudolf Pell Gaudio | Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic City | Monograph |
2010 | David A. B. Murray | Homophobias: Lust and Loathing Across Time and Space | Edited Volume |
2010 | Ellen Lewin | Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America | Monograph |
2010 | Deborah Gould | Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS | Monograph |
2011 | Peter A. Jackson | Queer Bangkok: 21st Century Markets, Media, and Rights | Edited Volume |
2011 | Roger Lancaster | Sex Panic and the Punitive State | Monograph |
2011 | Evelyn Blackwood | Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia | Monograph |
2012 | Gayle Rubin | Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader | Edited Volume |
2012 | Margot Weiss | Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality | Monograph |
2013 | Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura | The Transgender Studies Reader 2 | Edited Volume |
2013 | Naisargi Dave | Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics | Monograph |
2014 | Lal Zimman, Jenny Davis, and Joshua Raclaw | Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality | Edited Volume |
2014 | Noelle M. Stout | After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviety Cuba | Monograph |
2015 | Linda Rae Bennett, Sharyn Graham Davies | Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia: Sexual Politics, Health, Diversity and Representations | Edited Volume |
2015 | Lucinda Ramberg | Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion | Monograph |
2016 | Uriel Quesada, Letitia Gomez, Salvador Vidal-Ortiz | Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism | Edited Volume |
2016 | David A. B. Murray | Real Queer? Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Refugees in the Canadian Refugee Apparatus | Monograph |
2017 | Eric Plemons | The Look of a Woman: Facial Feminization Surgery and the Aims of Trans- Medicine | Monograph |
2018 | George Paul Meiu | Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money and Belonging in Kenya | Monograph |
2019 | Amy Brainer | Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan | Monograph |
2020 | Ana-Maurine Lara | Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty | Monograph |
2020 | Sarah Luna | Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex & Finding Jesus on the Mexico US Border | Monograph |
2021 | Vaibhav Saria | Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India | Monograph |
2022 | Serena Owusua Dankwa | Knowing Women: Same-Sex Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana | Monograph |
2023 | Omar Kasmani | Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan | Monograph |
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.
Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist.
Lois Wendland Banner is an American author and emeritus professor of history at the University of Southern California. She is one of the earliest academics to focus on women's history in the United States. Her work includes biographies of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo as well as the textbook Women in Modern America: A Brief History.
The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences. The AWM was founded in 1971 and incorporated in the state of Massachusetts. AWM has approximately 5200 members, including over 250 institutional members, such as colleges, universities, institutes, and mathematical societies. It offers numerous programs and workshops to mentor women and girls in the mathematical sciences. Much of AWM's work is supported through federal grants.
Esther Newton is an American cultural anthropologist who performed pioneering work on the ethnography of lesbian and gay communities in the United States.
Tom Boellstorff is an anthropologist based at the University of California, Irvine. In his career to date, his interests have included the anthropology of sexuality, the anthropology of globalization, digital anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, the anthropology of HIV/AIDS, and linguistic anthropology.
Ruth Landes was an American cultural anthropologist best known for studies on the Brazilian religion of Candomblé and her published study on the topic, City of Women (1947). Landes is recognized by some as a pioneer in the study of race and gender relations.
Roger Lancaster is a professor of anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where from 1999 until 2014 he directed the Cultural Studies PhD Program. He is known for his writing in LGBT studies, gender/sexuality, culture and political economy, and critical science studies. His research tries to understand how sexual mores, racial hierarchies, and class predicaments interact in a changing world.
Ana-Maurine Lara is a Dominican American lesbian poet, novelist and Black feminist scholar.
Barbara L. Voss is an American historical archaeologist. Her work focuses on cross-cultural encounters, particularly the Spanish colonization of the Americas and Overseas Chinese communities in the 19th century, as well as queer theory in archaeology and gender archaeology. She is an associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University.
Ellen Lewin is an American author, anthropologist, and academic. Lewin, a lesbian, focuses her work on areas of motherhood, sexuality, and reproduction. Lewin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa. She is a recipient of the Ruth Benedict Prize.
Tanya Erzen is an associate professor of Religion and Gender Queer Studies at the University of Puget Sound. She is also an author who has written four books as well as articles about religion, sexuality, gender and American conservatism. Her book Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement received the Ruth Benedict Prize from the American Anthropological Association and the Gustave O Arlt Award from American Anthropological Association.
Kath Weston is an American anthropologist, author and academic. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has twice received the Ruth Benedict Prize for anthropological works.
Jenny L. Davis is an American linguist, anthropologist, and poet. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, American Indian Studies, and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program. Her research is on contemporary Indigenous languages and identity, focusing on Indigenous language revitalization and Indigenous gender and sexuality, especially within the Two-Spirit movement.
Serena Nanda is an American author, anthropologist, and professor emeritus. She received the Ruth Benedict Prize in 1990 for her monograph, Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India.
The Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize was established in 2015 by the Association for Femininist Anthropology (AFA) in honor of anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo (1944-1981). Rosaldo is recognized for her research on the Ilongot people of the Philippines and for her leading role in the anthropology of gender. The prize is awarded to a first book by an author that makes a significant contribution to feminist anthropology.
Lucinda Ramberg is an American anthropologist whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, religion and health. She was awarded multiple prizes in 2015 for her first book, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion. Ramberg is associate professor in anthropology and director of graduate studies in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Cornell University.
Evelyn Blackwood is an American anthropologist whose research focuses on gender, sexuality, identity, and kinship. She was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize in 1999, 2007 and 2011. Blackwood is an emerita professor of anthropology at Purdue University.
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community is a 1993 book by Madeline Davis and Elizabeth L. Kennedy on the history of lesbian women in Buffalo and western New York state from the 1930s to the 1960s. Based on oral histories of 45 women, the book won awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Anthropological Association and the Lambda Literary Foundation. Published by Routledge, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold was reprinted for its 20th anniversary.