Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T18:12:15.993Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - The Postmodern Moment in Gender Studies and Anthropology

from Part Two - Knowledges and Domains

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2023

By
Sarah Green  and
Tuija Pulkkinen
Edited by
Cecilia McCallum ,
Silvia Posocco  and
Martin Fotta
Cecilia McCallum
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil
Silvia Posocco
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
Martin Fotta
Affiliation:
Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Get access

Summary

The postmodern moment was both important and turbulent in both anthropology and gender studies. This chapter focuses on how postmodern thought, which is described as being ant-foundational, engaged with thinking about gender and sexuality in gender studies and in anthropology, both in conjunction with each other as disciplines and in conjunction with feminist (and gay and lesbian) movements, which were influential during the same period. As an intellectual trend, the postmodern moment never attracted sufficient advocates to become a majority approach, and its time in the limelight was quickly over; nevertheless, the authors argue that the moment had lasting effects, particularly in terms of thinking about gender and sexuality. More specifically, they suggest that the introduction of postmodern thought affected the politicization of thought about gender and sexuality in the academy. In gender studies, it coincided with the founding of the discipline; in anthropology, it initially most notably came through the route of feminist-inspired kinship studies, and later through the influence of queer on studies of sexuality and embodiment.

Keywords

postmodern theorygender studiessexualityfeminismqueerLGBTQI+kinshipJudith ButlerMarilyn Stratherndeath of the subject
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality , pp. 184 - 212
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Asad, T., ed. (1973). Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.Google Scholar
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Benhabib, S., ed. (1995). Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Berger, A. E. (2014). The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Besnier, N. (1997). Sluts and superwomen: the politics of gender liminality in urban Tonga. Ethnos, 61(1–2), 5–31.Google Scholar
Boellstorff, T. (2005). The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Boellstorff, T. (2007). Queer studies in the house of anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 36, 17–36.Google Scholar
Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, J., and Scott, J. W., eds. (1992). Feminists Theorize the Political. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Carsten, J. (1995). The substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth: feeding, personhood, and relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi. American Ethnologist, 22(2), 223–41.Google Scholar
Carsten, J. (1997). The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Chambers, S. A., and Carver, T. (2008). Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clifford, J. (1983). On ethnographic authority. Representations, 1(2), 118–46.Google Scholar
Clifford, J., and Marcus, G. E., eds. (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collier, J. F., and Yanagisako, S. J., eds. (1987). Gender and Kinship: Essays toward and Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Coole, D. H., and Frost, S., eds. (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
de Beauvoir, S. (1989 [1952]). The Second Sex. Trans. Parshley, H. M.. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
del Valle, T., ed. (1993). Gendered Anthropology. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Derrida, J. (1977). Signature, event, context. Trans. Weber, Samuel and Mehlman, Jeffrey. Glyph, 1, 172–97.Google Scholar
di Leonardo, M., ed. (1991). Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, J. (2000). Born and Bred: Idioms of Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, J., Franklin, S., Hirsch, E., and Price, F., eds. (1999). Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Eloit, I. (2018). Lesbian trouble: feminism, heterosexuality, and the French nation (1970–1981). Doctoral thesis, London School of Economics.Google Scholar
Engels, F. (1973 [1884]). The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. London: Lawrence and Wishard.Google Scholar
Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Feyerabend, P. (1975). Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London: NLB.Google Scholar
Firestone, S. (1974). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution New York: William Morrow.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1974). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences London: Tavistock.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1987). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. London: Peregrine Books.Google Scholar
Franklin, S. (1997). Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Franklin, S., and Ragone, H., eds. (1998). Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books.Google Scholar
Friedan, B. (1992 [1963]). The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Geertz, C. (1989). Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Graeber, D. (2001). Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Green, S. (1997). Urban Amazons: Lesbian Feminism and beyond in the Gender, Sexuality and Identity Battles of London. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–99.Google Scholar
Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.Google Scholar
Harding, S. G. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Harding, S. G., ed. (2004). The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hemmings, C. (2006). The life and times of academic feminism. In Davis, K., Evans, M., and Lorber, J., eds, Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies. London: Sage, pp. 13–34.Google Scholar
Hemmings, C. (2011). Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Herdt, G., ed. (1993). Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Hutcheon, L. (1989). The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Irigaray, L. (1974). Speculum de l’autre femme. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.Google Scholar
Jagger, G. (2008). Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the Performative. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jagose, A. (1996). Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Karhu, S. (2017). From violence to resistance: Judith Butler’s critique of norms. PhD thesis, University of Helsinki.Google Scholar
Kollontai, A. M. (1977 [1922]). Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai. Trans. Holt, Alix. London: Allison and Busby.Google Scholar
Kornak, J. (2014). Queer as a political concept. Doctoral thesis, University of Helsinki.Google Scholar
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kulick, D. (1998). Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kuper, A. (1983). Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kuper, A. (1988). The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Leach, E. (1982). Social Anthropology. London: Fontana Paperbacks.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1972). The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.Google Scholar
Lienhardt, R. G. (1961). Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Lloyd, G. (1984). The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Lloyd, M. (2007). Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Loizidou, E. (2007). Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. London: Routledge-Cavendish.Google Scholar
Lykke, N., ed. (2010). Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lyotard, J.-F. (1988). The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Lyotard, J.-F., and Thébaud, J.-L. (1985). Just Gaming. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
MacCormack, C., and Strathern, M., eds. (1989). Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mead, M. (1935). Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Mead, M. (1943). Coming of Age in Samoa: A Study of Adolescence and Sex in Primitive Societies. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Millett, K. (1971). Sexual Politics. New York: Avon BooksGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, J. (1971). Woman’s Estate. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Morris, R. C. (1995). All made up: performance-theory and the new anthropology of sex and gender. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 567–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nash, J. (1997). When isms become wasms: structural functionalism, Marxism, feminism and postmodernism, Critique of Anthropology 17(1), 11–32.Google Scholar
Newton, E. (1972). Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Newton, E. (2000). Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Nicholson, L. J., ed. (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Obeyesekere, G. (1992). The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ortner, S. B. (1984). Is female to male as nature is to culture? In Rosaldo, M. Z. and Lamphere, L., eds., Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 67–87.Google Scholar
Pulkkinen, T. (2000). The Postmodern and Political Agency. Jyväskylä: SoPhi.Google Scholar
Pulkkinen, T. (2009). Tradition, gender and democracy to come – Derrida on fraternity. Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual Change and Feminist Theory, 13(1), 103–24.Google Scholar
Pulkkinen, T. (2015). Identity and intervention: transdisciplinarity and disciplinarity in gender studies. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(5–6), 183–205.Google Scholar
Pulkkinen, T. (2016). Feelings of injustice: the institutionalization of gender studies and the pluralization of feminism. differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 27(2), 103–24.Google Scholar
Rich, A. (1995 [1976]). Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Riley, D. (1988). Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Robcis, C. (2013). The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: notes on the political economy of sex. In Reiter, R., ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210.Google Scholar
Schneider, D. M. (1984). A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Scott, J. (1986). Gender: a useful category of historical analysis. The American Historical Review, 91(5), 1053–75.Google Scholar
Scott, J. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17(4), 773–97.Google Scholar
Scott, J. W., ed. (2008). Women’s Studies on the Edge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Sorainen, A. (2019). How the inheritance system thinks: queering kinship, gender and care in the legal sphere. In Agha, P., ed., Law, Politics and the Gender Binary. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 81–103.Google Scholar
Spivak, G. C. (1993). Foundations and cultural studies. In Silverman, H. J., ed., Questioning Foundations: Truth, Subjectivity, Culture. New York: Routledge, pp. 153–75.Google Scholar
Stocking, G. W. (1983). The ethnographer’s magic: fieldwork in British anthropology from Tyler to Malinowski. In Stocking, G. W., ed., Observers Observed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 70–120.Google Scholar
Stoler, A. L. (1999). Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (1981). Culture in a netbag: the manufacture of a subdiscipline in anthropology. Man (n.s.), 16, 665–88.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (1988). The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (1992). Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Tambiah, S. J. (1990). Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tuin, I. v. d. (2015). Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Turner, W. B. (2000). A Genealogy of Queer Theory. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Warner, M., ed. (1993). Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Weiner, A. B. (1976). Women of Value, Men of Reknown. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Weston, K. (1991). Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Weston, K. (1993). Do clothes make the woman? Gender, performance-theory, and lesbian eroticism. Genders, 17, 1–21.Google Scholar
Wiegman, R. (2003). Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Wiegman, R. (2012). Object Lessons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Wittig, M. (1992). The Straight Mind and Other Essays. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Wolf, M. (1992). A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×