Evelyn Blackwood
Emeritus Faculty
// Anthropology
Emeriti Faculty
Emeritus Faculty
// SIS
Emeriti Faculty
Office and Contact
Email: blackwood@purdue.edu
Professor Emerita of Anthropology Click here to go to Dr. Blackwood's Personal Website
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.
Dr. Blackwood’s research on the matrilineal Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, explored social change in a rural farm community and resulted in her first monograph, entitled Webs of Power: Women, Kin and Community in a Sumatran Village (2000). Her earliest work on women’s same-sex sexuality is a now classic ethnohistoric piece on Native American female two-spirits. She edited the first collection of papers on anthropology and homosexuality, entitled The Many Faces of Homosexuality: Anthropological Approaches to Homosexual Behavior, which came out in 1985. In the early 1990s she began a collaboration with Dr. Saskia E. Wieringa that has resulted in the publication of two award-winning anthologies on women’s same-sex sexualities and female masculinities, Female Desires: Same-sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures (1999) and Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia (2007).
Dr. Blackwood served on the Board of Directors of the Association for Feminist Anthropology, a section in the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and was one of the leaders in various capacities of the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists (currently the Association of Queer Anthropologists), also a section of the AAA. Internationally she is a founding board member of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society.
At Purdue, she served on the University Senate for two terms and the Senate’s Faculty Affairs Committee. She also served as a Diversity Catalyst, a position that supports the ADVANCE Project and the Center for Faculty Success at Purdue University, and was a member of the CLA Sexual Harassment Advisors Network.
Positions at Purdue
2010 - 2017, Professor
2000 - 2010, Associate Professor
1994 - 2000, Assistant Professor
Specialization
Gender and sexuality, kinship, self and identity, lesbian identity, transgender studies, women’s same-sex relations, globalization and sexuality, transnational feminisms, feminist theory, social movements, Island Southeast Asia, U.S. LGBT history
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY TEXTBOOK, 1st ED.
Cultural Anthropology: Mapping Cultures across Space and Time, by Janice E. Stockard and Evelyn Blackwood, is an innovative new Cultural Anthropology textbook (not your traditional anthro textbook). It provides introductory college students with the tools they need to both understand and live in a fast-changing global era. Each chapter builds on the previous ones so that students slowly and carefully piece together a number of anthropological concepts that are cross-cut with our primary themes of identity, gender, race and ethnicity, enabling them to address the complexities of our global world.
CURRENT AND RECENT BOOKS
Dreams of a New World: San Francisco Bay Area Lesbian Histories
This ethnohistorical research project chronicles the lives of a generation of lesbian-identified baby-boomer women in the San Francisco Bay Area, set in the context of the larger history of lesbians in the U.S. It explores race and class difference across time and space, and how these factors shaped meanings of butch/femme and lesbian identities more broadly.
Women who came of age in the 1970s constitute a diverse cohort of women that was instrumental in the transformation of lesbian identities and communities. These young women grew up in the explosive 60s, and were heirs to dynamic yet underground homosexual communities present in the US since the 1920s. Through social and bar-based networks as well as political activism, Bay Area lesbians in the 70s lived their everyday lives in ways that forever transformed gender and sexual practices and norms. See www.evelynblackwood.com for news and updates on this current project.
See https://www.evelynblackwood.com/ for news and updates on this current project.
Indonesia: Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia (2010) is an ethnographic study of a different sort of “queer” in a locality in Indonesia that is neither isolated, out-of-step, nor distant from global queer circuits. It explores the everyday lives of tombois (masculine-identified females) and their girlfriends in the city of Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia. Their desires reflect the multiplicity of queer subjectivities in Indonesia even as they confound the expectation of “modern” LGBT sexualities. Through rich, in-depth and provocative stories and analysis of their experiences, this book speaks to the struggles and experiences of all sexual and gender minorities in a globalized world.
See additional publications listed below.
AWARDS
Three-time winner of the Ruth Benedict Prize, awarded by the Association of Queer Anthropologists (formerly known as the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists) for:
Female Desires: Same-sex Relations and Transgender Practices Across Cultures, 2000
Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, 2007
Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia, 2011
Title IX Distinguished Service Award presented by Purdue University for the Title IX 40th anniversary, 2012.
MEDIA INTERVIEWS
“Gender Shifts,” feature interview on PRI’s weekly program “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” Aug. 30, 2013.
Expert interview on men living in matrilineal societies, aired on BBC Radio 4 “Today Programme” (U.K.) for a mini-series examining changing Western conceptions of masculinity, June 19, 2013.
“A Rare Look at Lesbian Issues in Indonesia,” by Katrin Figge, Jakarta Globe, Nov. 9, 2102.
“Islam’s Secret Feminists” by Danielle Shapiro, about the Minangkabau in West Sumatra, Indonesia, The Daily Beast, Sept. 4, 2011.
PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
2018 Cultural Anthropology: Mapping Cultures across Time and Space. 1e. Available on-line and in print. Janice E. Stockard and Evelyn Blackwood. San Francisco: Cengage Publishers
2010 Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
2007 Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia. Saskia E. Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood and Abha Bhaiya, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2000 Webs of Power: Women, Kin and Community in a Sumatran Village. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
1999 Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices Across Cultures. Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia E. Wieringa, eds. New York: Columbia University Press.
1986 Editor, The Many Faces of Homosexuality: Anthropological Approaches to Homosexual Behavior. New York: Harrington Park Press. Originally published as Journal of Homosexuality 11 (3/4).
JOURNAL ARTICLES (refereed)
2012a From butch-femme to female masculinities: Elizabeth Kennedy and LGBT anthropology. Feminist Formations 24(3): 92-100.
2012b Evelyn Blackwood and Mark Johnson. Queer Asian subjects: Transgressive sexualities and heteronormative meanings. Asian Studies Review 36(4):441-451.
2009 Trans identities and contingent masculinities: Being tombois in everyday practice. Feminist Studies 35(3): 454-480.
2008 Transnational discourse and circuits of queer knowledge in Indonesia. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14(4): 481-507.
2007 Regulation of sexuality in Indonesian discourse: Normative gender, criminal law and shifting strategies of control. Culture, Health and Sexuality 9(3): 293-307.
2005a Gender transgression in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia. Journal of Asian Studies 64(4): 849-879.
2005b Transnational sexualities in one place: Indonesian readings. Gender & Society 19(2): 221-242.
2005c Wedding bell blues: Marriage, missing men, and matrifocal follies. American Ethnologist 32(1): 3-19. Featured article with commentary.
2005d The specter of the Patriarchal Man (rejoinder). American Ethnologist 32(1): 42-45.
2001 Representing women:The politics of Minangkabau adat writing.Journal of Asian Studies 60(1):125-149
2000 Culture and women’s sexualities. Journal of Social Issues 56(2): 223-238.
1999 Big houses and small houses: Doing matriliny in West Sumatra. Ethnos 64(1): 32-56.
1998 Tombois in West Sumatra: Constructing masculinity and erotic desire. Cultural Anthropology: 13(4): 491-521.
1997 Women, land and labor: Negotiating clientage and kinship in a Minangkabau peasant community. Ethnology 36(4): 277-293.
1985 Breaking the mirror: The construction of lesbianism and the anthropological discourse on homosexuality. Journal of Homosexuality 11(3/4): 1-17.
1984 Sexuality and gender in certain Native American tribes: The case of cross-gender females. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10(1):27-42.
See personal webpage for more extensive CV.