Margot Weiss is Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan, where she coordinates Queer Studies.

Her scholarship brings together queer theory and anthropology to understand the contradictory relationships between queer sexual cultures/politics and contemporary US capitalism. Her books include Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011), which won the Ruth Benedict Book Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies; Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures, 2002-2020 (The Feminist Press, 2023); and Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures (Duke University Press, 2024). She has published over 20 articles and essays in a range of anthropology, queer studies, and American studies journals, including GLQ, American Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, New Labor Forum, Sexualities, American Anthropologist, and Feminist Anthropology. Currently, she is writing a book about the politics of institutional knowledge production and the place of desire in queer/left activism.

Professor Weiss has taught at Wesleyan University since 2008. She established the clusters in Disability Studies (in 2010) and Queer Studies (in 2013), and she chairs the GLASS Prize, awarded yearly for the best undergraduate research and writing in queer, trans, LGBT, or sexuality studies. She offers courses in queer theory, the anthropology of sexuality and gender, ethnographic methods, and social theory. Recent courses include: “Global Queer Studies,” “Theory in Anthropology: Anthropology of Affect,” “Queer Theories,” “Social Movements Lab,” “Crafting Ethnography," “Sex, Money, and Power,” “Reading Ethnography: Toward an Otherwise Anthropology,” and “Politics of the Body,” a course she taught simultaneously on Wesleyan’s campus and at York Correctional Institute in Niantic, CT.

Past president of the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA), Margot Weiss currently serves on the board of CLAGS: The Center for LGBT/Queer Studies and the Society for Cultural Anthropology. She is a founding member of the Wesleyan University Chapter of the AAUP. 

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