From Arcadia To Utopia: Manipulating Same-Sex Desire in Ethnographic Texts

Ethnographers complicit with the ideology of compulsory heterosexuality generally use two metanarratives to obviate the need to discuss same-sex desire from their texts. In the Utopian metanarrative, same-sex desire is simply absent from human interactions, while in the Arcadian, it is present everywhere, a simple part of the background that can be endlessly deferred. Classical, modern, and postmodern ethnographies of both Western and non-Western cultures are analyzed. It is suggested that future ethnographies might avoid the metanarratives to fully explore the fluidity and complexity of same-sex desire.