Drawing on the portrait of Vesta, this article explores the “politics of the pronoun” in two interrelated key ways. First, it analyses the stakes of using the portrait to convey a queer experience marked by disciplinary processes that seek the physical and/or linguistic erasure of bodies perceived as transgressive. It then extends this reflection to question the production of anthropological knowledge itself. The analysis of an individual experience through a collective “we” disrupts the traditional divide between a singular anthropological “I” and a plural yet homogenized “they”. The politics of the pronoun thus highlight both the processes of selecting and rearticulating data in order to generate an inevitably reductive coherence of queer lived experience, and the staging of the research team through the question of the researchers’ positionalities—caught between a desire for epistemological honesty and the risk of tokenism.
