ABSTRACT
The body of the researcher is always an important tool in ethnographic fieldwork, but it can be a messy thing with which to work, too. For one thing, it is the body that determines the first impressions our subjects have of us and how they apprehend us racially and sexually. When doing queer anthropology in highly-sexualized spaces, the body can also be an added source of anxiety when considering how one is perceived, taken up, and interpellated sexually into one's field site. A key difference between the straight and gay venues is that a termas is usually well-marked with signage and advertisements, but a sauna is often unmarked and one must know where to look. Working in these venues produced a newfound awareness and anxiety about masculinity—specifically his own. In Brazil, saunas (gay bath houses) are said to come either with "boys" or without.
