This article engages with current debates in queer anthropology that interrogate gender and sexuality as discrete analytical domains and highlight their complex entanglement in colonial and capitalist structures of power. It focuses on the epistemological and methodological challenge of studying queerness while moving beyond both identity-based approaches and definitions relying on anti-normativity. Grounded in ethnographic material from Hyderabad (South India), the article explores intrinsic contradictions of normative regimes of kinship, gender, and sexuality and how they affect queer people in specific ways. It introduces the concept of “ethical labor” as an analytical tool for describing how living with those contradictions exacts unequal costs and yields unequal rewards for different kinds of people and thus allows to specify both the difference of queerness and differences within it.
