Brian Horton
Degrees
Brown University, Ph.D.Brown University, M.A.
Texas Tech University, B.A.
Expertise
queer anthropology; queer of color critique/queer theory; popular culture; African diasporas in India; race; digital anthropology; virtual subjectivities; social media; South AsiaProfile
Brian is a cultural anthropologist working at the intersections of queer studies, critical theory, popular culture, digital anthropology, and South Asian studies. His research projects broadly focus on sexual, gender, and racial minority subjects and the social worlds that they build at the interstices of recognition and discrimination.Brian is currently working on a book project provisionally titled Shimmers of the Fabulous: Reinventions of Queer Life and Politics in Mumbai. Drawing on years of fieldwork in queer activist and social spaces in India, he asks how anthropology might view queer subjects in India—and the global south more broadly—as fabulous? Turning to the lives of gender and sexual minority subjects in Bombay, this project explores how sites like parties, pride parades, and cruising sites offer valuable political and ethical work centered on fun rather than suffering. Taking these spaces seriously, this project highlights productive, messy, and tense ways of living; about feeling good as a mode of queer refusal and as an endurance of present precarities. Through his scholarly attention to sites of queer joy, Brian argues that there are crucial forms of queer worlding that might reshape scholarly and journalistic preoccupations with queer death, particularly the deaths of black, brown, and indigenous bodies living in the global south.
Building on his interest in contemporary India, Brian’s next project Cannibalizing Race: Gossip, Rumor, and the Queer Life of Racism in Urban India profiles African immigrants living in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore. This project draws together Brian’s scholarly commitments to queer studies with his interest in recent waves of migration from Africa to India. Through an attention to uses of black face in South Asian media, viral videos of anti-African riots, and ethnographic research in African-populated neighborhoods, this project traces how fabricated narratives of African moral and ethical deficiency become viral, digital avenues to consume racial others as subjects who queer (and disrupt) the very terms that define autochthonous subjects as Indian. As part of this project, Brian is currently working on an essay loosely titled Bollywood in Blackface: Racial Unremarkability and Indian Cinema, which explores the history and uses of blackface in Indian film and television. This essay is part of a larger digital project Brian is beginning; to catalogue and document images of blackface and minstrelsy in South Asian popular culture.
Brian’s work has appeared in Sexualities and QED GLBTQ Worldmaking. Prior to joining Brandeis University, Brian was a PhD student in Brown University’s Department of Anthropology.
Courses Taught
| ANTH | 138a | Digital Cultures |
| ANTH | 166b | Queer Anthropology: Sexualities and Genders in Cross-Cultural Perspective |
Awards and Honors
Alternate/Honorable Mention Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2018)
Social Sciences Research Council Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2016 - 2018)
Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Award (2015 - 2016)
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2013 - 2018)
Scholarship
Horton, Brian A. "'What’s So ‘Queer’ About Coming Out: Theorizing Kinship Agonistically in Mumbai." Sexualities 21. 7 (2018): 1059–1074.
Horton, Brian A. "The Queer Turn in South Asian Studies? or “That's Over & Done Queen, On to the Next”." QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 5. 3 (2018): 165-180.