Feminism(s) and Anthropology

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course examines the fraught yet generative relation between various movements of feminism and the discipline of anthropology. Both feminism(s) and anthropology emerged in the 19th century as fields invested in thinking "the human" through questions of alterity or Otherness. As such, feminist and anthropological inquiries often take up shared objects of analysis--including nature/culture, kinship, the body, sexuality, exchange, value and power-even as they differ in their political and scholarly orientations through the last century and a half. Tracking the emergence of feminisms and anthropology as distinct fields of academic discourse on the one hand and political intervention on the Other, we will pursue the following lines of inquiry: 1) a genealogical approach to key concepts and problem-spaces forged at the intersection of these two fields 2) critical analysis of the relation of feminist and postcolonial social movements to the professionalizing fields of knowledge production (including Marxist inspired writing on women and economy, Third World feminism and intersectionality, and feminist critiques of science studies) and 3) a reflexive contemporary examination of the way these two strands of thought have come together in the subfield of feminist anthropology and the continual frictions and resonances of feminist and anthropological approaches in academic settings and in the larger world (e.g., #MeToo, sex positive activism, queer politics, feminist economics).