Kirk Fiereck

Kirk Fiereck, Ph.D., M.P.H. is a medical anthropologist (Columbia, 2015) of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, financial cultures and financialization. He is currently working on two long-term ethnographic research projects.

The first translates three-plus years of field research into a book-length monograph, “Ethnointimacies: Cultural Authenticity and Sexual Ideology in South Africa.” His book, studies the interrelationship of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality primarily among groups of black LGBTQ South Africans. Such groups politicize new forms of hybrid queer personhood through the juxtaposition of customary gender roles with “liberal” constitutionally protected LGBTQ sexualities. For example, in black townships across South Africa “gay women” identify socially as gay men and also women—not necessarily trans women—alternating sexual subjectivities according to the predominant type of social spaces they navigate. These spaces include liberal, civil society contexts like LGBTQ NGO meetings, or customary rituals such as initiation rites of passage. The book concludes that ethnointimacies eschew traditionalists’ essentialisms, while exposing silent ethnocentrisms of feminisms and queer studies. Unlike divisive ethnic politics, the customary exceeds customary laws as contingent crucibles of cultural meaning; democratized reservoirs of communal values, which renders the promises of “universal” human rights campaigns as cynical chimeras of neoliberal capital. Here is a recent academic, open access publication about ethnointimacies (1450 words; 7 min read): http://www.medanthrotheory.org/read/10018/queer-customs-customarily-queer

The second, based on an additional three-plus years of ethnographic field work, is a multi-sited global ethnography of biofinance, which explores the rapid financialization of political economies by examining “the derivativization of sociality”. Financial derivatives are the contracts—like credit-default swaps—behind the 2007/8 financial meltdown, creating more economistic value than all commodities including stock markets, debt, currencies, etc. Biofinance uncovers ignored derivative markets that produce “big data”. Derivative-based markets produce values—economistic, semiotic and ethico-political—fundamentally different from, yet linked to, commodity-based economies through three derivative types. Firstly, domicile derivatives traded on Airbnb produce risk- not labor-based social relations. Pharmaceutical derivatives are exchanged through medical prescriptions that treat risk, not disease. The most prolific, yet ignored, are social derivatives like Facebook’s user agreement. Coerced users “accept” trading exploitative social derivatives; “consent” obtained by social media companies is a ruse. Social derivative traders gift Facebook—who happily takes—invaluable data. Fetishized as gifts, derivatives threaten democracies globally when bioderivative cyberwarfare undermined elections across Euro-American societies. As such, biofinance aims to understand the root causes of still opaque forms of political violence. Here is a recent public engagement publication about biofinance (2,000+ views; 1500 words; 8 min read): https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisonbatemanhouse/2018/04/10/why-grindrs-privacy-breach-matters-to-everyone/#531318cd67f4