Margot Weiss is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology. She specializes in the ethnography of contemporary sexual cultures and politics. At Wesleyan, she teaches courses in the anthropology of sexuality and gender, queer studies, and social theory.

Her first book, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (2011, Duke University Press), is based on ethnographic fieldwork with BDSM (SM) communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. The book complicates the often-polarized discussions of BDSM play within queer and feminist theory, instead linking sexual communities like BDSM to broader dynamics of US neoliberalism, late capitalism, and the circuits between erotic pleasure and gendered and racialized social norms. She is also completing a small comparative project on the queer temporality of BDSM play with national trauma in the United States and Germany.

Her current research, Visions of Sexual Justice, is a comparative ethnography of discourses of sexual rights, freedom, and justice among contemporary LGBT/queer activists in the United States and Canada. The research is supported by a Wenner-Gren Post-Ph.D. Research Grant, Osmundsen Initiative Award, and CLAGS Joan Heller-Diane Bernard Senior Fellowship in Lesbian and Gay Studies.

She has published articles on the politics of BDSM media visibility (in Journal of Homosexuality); on labor, leisure, and commodified sexuality (in Anthropologica); on the performative effects of BDSM interrogation scenes and the Abu Ghraib photographs (in Out in Public); on neoliberalism, homonormativity, and new queer activisms (in Radical History Review); and on method in queer anthropology (in GLQ). With Naomi Greyser, she is putting together a special journal issue on the tensions between academic and activist work (see Symposium website).