Queering Knowledge

Analytics, Devices, and Investments after Marilyn Strathern

Paul Boyce, E.J. Gonzalez-Polledo, Silvia Posocco, Paul Boyce, E.J. Gonzalez-Polledo, Silvia Posocco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367777418
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315316468
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume draws on the significance of the work of Marilyn Strathern in respect of its potential to queer anthropological analysis and to foster the reimagining of the object of anthropology.

The authors examine the ways in which Strathern's varied analytics facilitate the construction of alternative forms of anthropological thinking, and greater understanding of how knowledge practices of queer objects, subjects and relations operate and take effect.

Queering Knowledge offers an innovative collection of writing, bringing about queer and anthropological syntheses through Strathern's oeuvre. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology as well as a number of other disciplines, including gender, sexuality and queer studies.

*Winner of the 2020 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Edited Volume*

1 Wild gender

EJ Gonzalez-Polledo

DOI: 10.4324/9781315316482-2

This chapter draws on Marilyn Strathern’s early characterisation of gender, which emerged after her fieldwork in Melanesia, in the wider context of the emergence of a feminist anthropology, to explore ways in which this could be understood to relate to trans perspectives on embodiment. Particularly, reading the evolution of Strathern’s gender thinking after being in the field in Melanesia from 1969 to 1976 and rewriting those arguments from Women in Between to the Gender of the Gift, the notion of gender brought forward a kind of thinking that has been termed speculative and intensively differential. Whereas her original intention as an ethnographer had been to investigate conflicts and disputes between men and women, and how these played out in civil court processes, in dialogue with the material collected, Strathern’s ethnography of gender relations evolved by entangling the dynamics under description and meta-reflections emerged around the task of doing anthropology. As ‘gender’ became normalised as a key analytic in anthropological analysis, however, it opened up a way of thinking through and across natural categories that ultimately challenged its own existence. This chapter invokes some threads in Strathern’s thinking to reframe some of the key questions that animate trans and queer studies today: How did gender, as a category, become a productive threshold capable of attuning abstract sensibilities towards sets of relations and associations not hitherto understood to be attuned? If multiplicity marked the beginning of gender, opening up ways to study relations which did not take for granted binary gender, is this notion now obsolescent? What forms of thinking emerge after gender?

Arguably, at the time of its normalisation in anthropology ‘gender’ had been used as a clinical marker in the biomedical and the psy- sciences, from the 1970s it also became a ‘shock to thought’, particularly of a shock to scientific thinking, as well as a conceptual and political evolution of anthropology’s engagement with relations. Indeed, Strathern’s long lost thesis – now re-edited as Before and After Gender (2016) – has recently reopened, again, a space to think gender through and against semantics and semiotics of representation. Gender, for Strathern, was always a ‘whole society’ issue (ibid.), a generative notion that rooted mythologies and genealogies in the thinking processes on which social hierarchies rest. Following Ann Oakley, Strathern delved into western assumptions that ‘the differences between the sexes are more important than any qualities they have in common’ (Oakley quoted in Strathern 2016: 264). Strathern’s project was framed as a study of social worlds shaping differences between kinds, a project chiefly concerned with how these differences, in turn, shaped fundamental aspects of social structure. In fact, in the Gender of the Gift, Strathern relates the problem of gender to the fiction of singular persons, which ‘only emerges as a holistic unitary state under particular circumstances’ (1988: 15). Singular persons, understood as a derivative of multiple substances or identities, may only be transformed in distinct male or female elements under particular modes of thinking. Indeed, the type of thinking that results in binary gender is analogous to the kind that produces individuals from society – a fiction that produces homogenity by way of eclipsing difference or through detachment. For Strathern the genders contain each other, as individuals contain societies, but the existence of one ‘individual’ or ‘society’ is predicated on gender, as gender ‘provides a form’ through which visions of individuality are realised, while at the same time it is formed by them (1988: 17). In this context, figurations of nature and individuality bring to life the continuities and discontinuities underlying structures and animacies of social worlds. Categorical relations, and relations mediated by categories, naturally truncated as they may be (Sedgwick 2015), bring forward ways in which knowledge and practice are often productive together, highlighting that boundaries must be conceptualised at the right level of complexity (see Valentine 2007, for instance). Strathern shows that the relations between these realms implicate and produce the analyst. In the field, knowledge is always grounded in a particular body and its chance encounters, its condition of being ‘in place’ (Strathern 2002: 91).

Three decades after the notion of gender opened up new social idioms of identity and relations, the notion of gender as a marker of differentiated social identity is arguably becoming a sign of times past (Thurer 2005; cf. Moore 1988). Not only have gender specific perspectives been mainstreamed and absorbed within traditional academic disciplines, but the promise of emancipation from the limitations of reproductive biology has become testament to how categories demonstrate the inherent artificiality of gender as a system of relations, while pointing to the forces that persistently sustain it in place. Reading herself backwards, Strathern identifies as elements of her early field guide, including gender signs and symbols, stereotypes, families and roles in reproduction, heuristics that enable an analyst to think with relations about the different kinds of environments that enable the practical functioning of social worlds, which can include anthropological writing practices. Strathern shares with feminist technoscience scholars, such as Susan Leigh Star, a concern with the moral consequences of representations.¹ She maps out this relational field of symmetries between worlds and thought, such as those that preoccupied Charles Sanders Peirce and Gregory Bateson, productive frictions where homologies, affinities and symmetries define complexity, mental and organic systems (see Parisi 2012; Bateson 2000). After all, as Viveiros de Castro has noted, an investment in multiplicity constitutes ‘the main tool of a “prodigious effort” to imagine thought, an activity other than that of identifying (recognition) and classifying (categorisation), and to determine what is there for thought to think as intensive difference rather than as extensive substance’ (2010: 223).

A drive to understand divorce practices through anthropological conventions of the time – particularly through a perspective influenced by Leach and Meyer Fortes – led Strathern on a path of exploration primarily concerned with understanding ‘all kinds of hidden political choices that arise when we activate our knowledge’ (2013: 244), while enmeshed in the bureaucratic and everyday rhythms of academic life. Strathern’s method is as concerned with aesthetics, as with the pragmatics of knowledge.² While we can talk about gender norms in contexts where gender is taken for granted, or given in particular relations, but when by association with analytics that destabilise the boundaries, practices and infrastructures of gender, the notion of gender becomes a proxy for both engaging with locality and utopian, conceptual deterritorialised forms of anthropology. Strathern uses concepts and ‘the concreteness of certain forms’ to connect multiplicity while preserving the stability of particular formations. Categories extend heuristics to social process: without elucidating these models, one cannot frame the problem of their effects. Categorical analysis brought Strathern to compare the symmetries and asymmetries of nature and culture through relations of analogy that hinge on the possibility of reversibility, a figure-ground reversal in dialogue with Roy Wagner. Wagner illustrates this analytic leap in relation to anthropological thinking:

Coyote: We come to a point where the difference between organic and inorganic SYMMETRIES disappears—the vanishing point between what the old anthropologists used to call ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ All ‘cultures’ merge with one another—as you say, holographically—and so, in fact, do all ‘natures.’

Roy: The anthropologist wants to be the figure as well as the ground. And so, in fact, the figure-ground reversal itself honestly believes it is an anthropologist.

Coyote: Though it is really the interference-patterning between the two that counts most: the way in which any two polarities interfere with one another.

(Wagner 2010: 138)

Gender, rather than a unit predicated on presence or experience, suggests both disjunction and conjunction, a composite of the relations that make up persons and things. Strathern writes:

The succession of images allows no between: for a person or body is either the inside our outside of another person/body or else its pair form, its other half (…) If forms are thus conceived in an either/or mode, both are always present.

(Strathern 1992a: 81)

Figure 1.1 Nishimura – Random Structures 01-B, courtesy of the artist

Strathern notes that the task of knowing ethnographically reveals something about how something becomes understood. After all, Strathern is concerned with workings of relations, including genealogies, conceptual infrastructures and analogies; the capacities of thought to conjure up relations and dispositions, orientations, binaries, bodies and persons, the commoning and practice of knowledge. Gender can be understood through its capacity to conjure up multiple, combinatory ways in which a problem can be grappled with, an iterative process which could be seen to work not unlike an artist’s composition (see, as my own suggested illustration, Figure 1.1).

Holbraad and Pedersen (2009) have argued that Strathern’s thinking and method relies on making visible the space of distance to perform anthropology through theorisation and abstraction. But where Holbraad and Pedersen describe Strathern’s contribution as playing on the conflation between analytics and objects in the figure and work of the analyst – M, for Marilyn or Melanesia, and a reference to Alfred Gell’s description of Strathernian analytics in ‘Strathernograms’ – here I read her conceptual toolkit as a field guide that purposefully evades classification and makes a point of not fitting in, queering its position vis-à-vis other responses to the problem of representation. Conflation and detachment between object and analytic form, in other words, need not necessarily produce either alienation or convergence, but, rather, a perspectival diversity and multiplicity, a movement of thought that provides a sense of continuity between modes of being and knowing.³ Here the task of writing anthropologically, as Corsin Jimenez notes, ‘amounts to an incursion into and out of the social in order to de-stick it from its own internal recursions. It is the reversibility – the inside-out – that accomplishes the analysis’ (2013: 22). Indeed, optical games and interpretative shifts are a key to how anthropologists perform a figure-ground reversal, which, for Strathern,

takes a divergent form: at some moments it seems as though there is nothing beyond interpretation, for there is nothing that is not amenable to human comprehension and in that sense the product of it, whereas at other moments one appears to see through the practice of interpretation for the very artifice it is.

(Strathern 2002: 88)

Gender after the fact

Looking back at the history of the gender category in the biosciences, the ‘facts’ of gender include quantifiable traits and classification; capacities, clinical and observational, that constituted gender’s perfomative prerogative. This facticity ran through the course of gender’s multiple scientific histories. Fausto-Sterling (2000) points at how the distinction between sex and gender in fact provided solid ground for a populational biopolitics,⁴ a trend historians trace back to scientific cultures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Facts allowed thinking gender, against a continuous experiential form, around categories, diagnostic strata and classifications, as alternate figures and grounds of experience. In its becoming fact, gender was de facto anthropomorphised, linking physical attributes and social function through standards that enfo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Queering knowledge: An introduction
• 1. Wild gender
• 2. The (im)possibilities of transgression, or, reflections on the awkward relation between Strathern and queer politics
• 3. Gay Back Alley Tolstoys and inheritance perspectives: Re-imagining kinship in queer margins
• 4. Partial perversity and perverse partiality in postsocialist Hungary
• 5. Properties, substance, queer effects: Ethnographic perspective and HIV in India
• 6. Prefigured “defection” in Korea
• 7. Postplurality: An ethnographic tableau
• 8. On feminist critique and how the ontological turn is queering anthropology
• 9. Conceptuality in relation
• 10. How exactly are we related?
• Index