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-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T18:48:35.293Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Critical Ethnography as a Collective Feminist Project

from Part One - Openings and Orientations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2023

By
Henrike Donner
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

This chapter provides and overview of feminist and queer anthropologies that engaged with questions of gender and sexualities from the early 1970s onward, highlighting the role of ethnography as an epistemology pushing theoretical debate beyond anthropology.

Keywords

gender inequalityfeminist epistemologyfeminist anthropologyanthropology of womensex/gender systemsfeminist ethnographyqueer anthropologiesnature/culture debates
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality , pp. 65 - 93
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

Abu-Lughod, L. (1996). Writing against culture. In Fox, R. G., ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. pp. 137–62.Google Scholar
Aggleton, P. (2012). Understanding Global Sexualities: New Frontiers. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ahmed, S. (2013). Changing hands. Feminist Killjoy, August 28. Available at https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/08/28/changing-hands/ (accessed July 7, 2021).Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute.Google Scholar
Arondekar, A. (2007). The voyage out: transacting sex under globalization. Feminist Studies, 33(2), 337–49.Google Scholar
Atkinson, J., and Errington, S., eds. (1990). Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Blackwood, E. (1986). Anthropology and Homosexual Behavior. New York: Haworth Press.Google Scholar
Boddy, J., (1989). Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.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(1), 17–35.Google Scholar
Bolles, A. L. (2013). Telling the story straight: Black feminist intellectual thought in anthropology. Transforming Anthropology, 21(1), 65–9.Google Scholar
Bolles, A. L. (2016). The curious relationship of feminist anthropology and women’s studies. In Lewin, E. and Silverstein, L. (eds.), Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 84–102.Google Scholar
Borneman, J. (1992). Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borneman, J. (2001). Caring and to be cared for: displacing marriage, kinship, gender, and sexuality. In Faubion, J. and James, D., eds., The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 29–46.Google Scholar
Boyce, P., Engebretsen, E. L., and Posocco, S. (2018). Introduction: anthropology’s queer sensibilities. Sexualities, 21(5–6), 843–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brandes, S. (1980). Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and Status in Andalusian Folklore. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Bringa, T. (1995). Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.Google Scholar
Busby, C. (1997). Permeable and partible persons: a comparative analysis of gender and body in South India and Melanesia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 3(2), 261–78.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Caplan, P. (1987). The Cultural Construction of Sexuality. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Christian, B. (1987). The race for theory. Cultural Critique, 6, 51–63.Google Scholar
Collier, J. F., and Yanagisako, S. J. (1987). Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Comarroff, J., and Comarroff, J. L. (1991). Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dave, N. (2011). Activism as ethical practice: queer politics in contemporary India. Cultural Dynamics, 23(1), 3–20.Google Scholar
Delaney, C. (1992). The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Diederichsen, D. (2018). The price of intimacy: Diederich Diederichsen on Hubert Fichte. Artforum, 57, 3.Google Scholar
Dube, L. (1997). Women and Kinship: Comparative Perspectives on Gender in South and South-East Asia. Tokyo: UNU Press.Google Scholar
Eribon, D. (2013). Returning to Reims. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Errington, S. (1990). Recasting sex, gender and power: a theoretical and regional overview. In Atkinson, J. and Errington, S., eds., Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–58.Google Scholar
Etienne, M., and Leacock, E., eds. (1980). Women and Colonialisation: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Fichte, H. (2018 [1990]). The Black City: Glosses. London: Sternberg Press.Google Scholar
Godelier, M. (1986 [1982]). The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grewal, I., and Kaplan, C. (1994). Introduction: transnational feminist practices and questions of postmodernity. In Grewal, I. and Kaplan, C., eds., Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1–36.Google Scholar
Grusin, R. (2017). Introduction. Anthroposcene feminism: an experiment in collaborative theorizing. In Grusin, R., ed., Anthroposcene Feminism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. vii–xix.Google Scholar
Gundermann, C. A. (1999). Transforming modernity’s primitivisms: Hubert Fichte’s queer ethnography in the postcolonial Latin American context. Thesis, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Gupta, A., and Ferguson, J. (1997). Beyond “culture”: space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology, 7(1), 6–23.Google Scholar
Hage, G. (2012). Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today. Critique of Anthropology, 32(3), 285–8.Google Scholar
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2019). Liebe und Ethnologie: curatorial statement. Available at www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2019/liebe_und_ethnologie/kuratorisches_statement_hubert_fichte/hubert_fichte_kuratorisches_statement.php (accessed March 26, 2023).Google Scholar
Helms, E. (2013). Innocence and Victimhood: Gender, Nation, and Women’s Activism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Herdt, G. (1981). Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Herdt, G. (1982). Rituals of Manhood. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Herzfeld, M. (1985). The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hundle, A. K., Szeman, I., and Hoare, J. P. (2019). What is the transnational in transnational feminist research? Feminist Review, 121(1), 3–8.Google Scholar
Johnson, M. (1997). Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Kahn, S. (2000). Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Kolenda, P. (2003). Caste, Marriage and Inequality. Jaipur: Rawat Publishers.Google Scholar
Kulick, D. (1998). Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lewin, E., and Leap, W. L., eds. (2002). Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Louis, É. (2017). The End of Eddy. London: Harvill Secker.Google Scholar
Louis, É. (2018). History of Violence. London: Harvill Secker.Google Scholar
Louis, É. (2019). Who Killed My Father? London: Harvill Secker.Google Scholar
Lunny, D. R. (2019). English Hegemony, Anglo privilege and the promise of “allo”lingual citational praxis in transnational feminisms research. Feminist Review, 121(1), 66–80.Google Scholar
Lyons, A., and Lyons, H. D. (2006). The new anthropology of sexuality. Anthropologica, 48(2), 153–7, 159–64.Google Scholar
MacCormack, C., and Strathern, M., eds. (1980). Nature, Culture, Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Malinowski, B. (2001 [1927]). Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Manderson, L., and Jolly, M. (1997). Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mankekar, P. (1999). Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Mankekar, P., and Schein, L. (2012). Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University PressGoogle Scholar
Mathieu, N. (1989 [1985]). When yielding is not consenting: material and psychic determinants of women’s dominated consciousness and some of their interpretations in ethnology. Part 1. Feminist Issues, 9(2), 3–49.Google Scholar
Mead, M. (2010 [1928]). Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Meillasoux, C. (1981 [1975]). Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mies, M. (1982). The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market. London: Zed.Google Scholar
Mohanty, C. T. (1988). Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. Feminist Review, 30(1), 61–88.Google Scholar
Moore, H. (1988). Feminism and Anthropology. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Moore, H. (1994). A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Moore, H. (1999). Whatever happened to women and men? Gender and other crises in anthropology. In Moore, H., ed., Anthropological Theory Today. Oxford: Polity Press, pp. 151–71.Google Scholar
Nagar, R. (2014). Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Nagar, R., and Sangtin Collective of Writers. (2006). Playing with Fire: Feminist Thought and Activism through Seven Lives in India. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Neumann, K. (1991). Hubert Fichte as ethnographer. Cultural Anthropology 6(3), 263–84.Google Scholar
Newton, E. (1972). Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Nnaemeka, O. (2004). Nego‐feminism: theorizing, practicing, and pruning Africa’s way. Signs, 29(2), 357–85.Google Scholar
Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, Gender and Society. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Olujic, M. B. (1998). Embodiment of terror: gendered violence in peacetime and wartime in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 12(1), 31–50.Google Scholar
Omvedt, G. (1980). We will smash this Prison! Indian Women in Struggle. London: Zed Press.Google Scholar
Ong, A. (2016). Situating global forms. Available at http://bb9.berlinbiennale.de/situating-global-forms/ (accessed May 11, 2020).Google Scholar
Ong, A., and Collier, S. J. (2005). Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Ortner, S. (1996). Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Ortner, S. B. (1974). 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. 68–87.Google Scholar
Ortner, S. B. (2005). Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Ortner, S. B. (2006). Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Plummer, K. (2012). Critical sexualities. In Ritzer, G., ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sociology. Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell, pp. 243–69.Google Scholar
Povinelli, E. (2006). The Empire of Love. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Puri, J. (2016 ). Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Rajeha, G. G., and Gold, A. G. (1994). Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ram, K. (1991). Mukkuvar Women: Gender, Hegemony and Capitalist Transformation in a South Indian Fishing Community. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Ram, K., and Jolly, M. (2010). Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ramberg, L. (2014). Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Reddy, G. (2005). With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Reiter, R. R., ed. (1975). Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Ring, L. (2006). Zenana: Making Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building. Urbana, IL: University of Indiana Press.Google Scholar
Robertson, J., ed. (2005). Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rofel, L. (2012). Queer positions, queering Asian studies. Positions, 20(1), 183–93.Google Scholar
Rosaldo, M. Z., Lamphere, L., and Bamberger, J., eds. (1974). Women, Culture and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex. In Reiter, R. R., ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210.Google Scholar
Rubin, G. (2011). Blood under the bridge: reflections on “thinking sex.” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 17(1), 15–48.Google Scholar
Sangari, K. (2015). Solid: Liquid: A Transnational Reproductive Formation. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Schneider, D. (1984). A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Searle-Chatterjee, M. (1981). Reversible Sex Roles: The Special Case of Benares Sweepers. Oxford: Pergamon.Google Scholar
Sehlikoglu, S. (2018). Revisited: Muslim women’s agency and feminist anthropology of the Middle East. Contemporary Islam, 12(1), 73–92.Google Scholar
Silverstein, L. M., and Levin, E. (2016). Introduction: anthropologies and feminisms – mapping our intellectual journey. In Lewin, E. and Silverstein, L. M., eds., Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the 21st Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 6–38.Google Scholar
Spivak, G. C. (2004). Righting wrongs. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2–3), 523–81.Google Scholar
Srivastava, S. (2004). Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities and Culture in South Asia. New Delhi: SAGE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoler, A. L. (1995). Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Stout, N. M. (2014). After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Strathern, M. (1980). No nature no culture: the Mount Hagen case. In MacCormack, C. and Strathern, M., eds., Nature, Culture, Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 174–221.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
Trinh, T. M.-H. (1991). When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Valentine, D. (2007). Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Visweswaran, K. (1994). Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Wekker, G. (2006). The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Encounters in Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Weston, K. (1991). Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Weston, K. (1993). Lesbian/gay studies in the house of anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 22, 339–67.Google Scholar
Wikan, U. (1977). Man becomes woman: transsexualism in Oman as a key to gender roles. Man, 12(2), 304–19.Google Scholar
Yalman, N. (1963). On the purity of women in the castes of Ceylon and Malabar. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 93(1), 25–58.Google Scholar
Yanagisako, S. J., and Collier, J. F. (1987). Toward a unified analysis of gender and kinship. In Collier, J. F. and Yanagisako, S. J., eds., Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 14–52.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
×