David Valentine is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist with interests in gender, sexuality, US social movements and politics, and conceptions of the future.
He won the Ruth Benedict Prize for his first research project, an ethnographic investigation of the category "transgender" in the 1990s, where he examined how the emergence of this term enabled activists and others to imagine a new calibration of gender and sexuality vis a vis one another in order to work toward a more just world for gender variant individuals.
