ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on anthropological research on transnational adoption in Guatemala and explores how ethnographic objects such as signatures, documents and archives, in their presence and absence, queer scale. ‘Queering’ is understood to be an ‘ethnographic effect’ (Strathern 1999) that operates through scale, and more specifically, through a postplural scale. The chapter foregrounds postplural framings to show how these fundamentally problematise assumptions regarding the assumed self-evidence of notions of bounded, organic and/or integrated social wholes or individual subjects, as well as the assumed transparency of analytics of gender and sexuality – and the idea of ‘proper objects’ of queer anthropology.
