Margot Weiss is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology. Her ethnographic research focuses on contemporary sexual cultures and politics in the United States. At Wesleyan, she teaches courses in queer studies, transnational sexualities, feminist anthropology, neoliberalism and American culture, and performance studies.

Her first book, Techniques of Pleasure, Scenes of Play , is based on her dissertation fieldwork in the San Francisco Bay Area’s BDSM communities. It explores new subjectivities, communities, and politics produced at the intersection of late-capitalism/commodification, neoliberalism/American culture, and gendered and raced SM performances. The book will be published by Duke University Press.

Her current research project focuses on the multiple discourses of “sexual rights” among contemporary queer activists. She is especially interested in the interconnections between sexual rights, concepts of “freedom,” normativity, and US and transnational iterations of neoliberalism (most crucially privatization and individualization). She is also at work on a small project comparing BDSM ethnic/racial play in the US and Germany, with attention to the politics of “replaying” national trauma (e.g. slavery, the Holocaust) in queer temporal and spatial registers.

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); and on neoliberalism, homonormativity, and new queer activisms (in Radical History Review).