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2 - Remixing Feminist Epistemology and Methodology

from Part One - Openings and Orientations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2023

By
Sameena Mulla  and
Dána-Ain Davis
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
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Summary

This chapter centers voices that are traditionally excluded from the anthropological canon in order to read a feminist praxis back into anthropology’s feminist theory and methodology. The authors excavate key debates and practices that yield insight into the liberatory potentiality of feminist anthropology. First, they explore questions around gender, sexuality, and the authority of the knowledge producer. Then, they query how the sexual and gendered mythos of the researcher clings to their research and the way the researcher is integrated into the field of anthropology, taking examples from anthropological history and debates around auto-ethnography. The third section explores how self-knowledge folds into feminist traditions of situated knowledges, particularly as it is engaged by Black feminist anthropologists, women of color, and queer thinkers. The fourth section revisits the work of performance and choreography in our field, navigating the political forces and forms of embodiment revealed through these methodological approaches. The chapter ends by drawing together questions of authority, autoethnography, situated knowledge, and the high stakes of performance through the case of sexual and gender-based violence to illustrate methodological and epistemological possibilities within anthropological research.

Keywords

auto-ethnographyepistemologyperformancefeminist methodologysexual violence
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality , pp. 39 - 64
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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