Feminist Ethnography

Catalog description

This course will investigate the relationships among women, gender, sexuality, and anthropological research. We will begin by exploring the trajectory of research interest in women and gender, drawing first from the early work on gender and sex by anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; moving through the 1970s and 1980s arguments about gender, culture, and political economy; arriving at more current concerns with gender, race, sexuality, and empire. For the rest of the semester, we will critically read contemporary ethnographies addressing pressing issues such as nationalism, militarism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism. Throughout, we will investigate what it means not only to "write women's worlds", but also to analyze broader socio-cultural, political, and economic processes through a gendered lens. We will, finally, address the various ways feminist anthropology fundamentally challenged the discipline's epistemological certainties, as well as how it continues to transform our understanding of the foundations of the modern world.