Aves, Rev. Anthropol. 1997, 26:S91-621 Copyright © 1997 by Annual Reviews Ine. All nights reserved HISTORIES OF FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHY Kamala Visweswaran Department of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin, Au 1086 , Texas 78712- KEY WORDS: gender analysis, feminism, women anthropologists ABSTRACT This review essay illustrates how changes in the conception of gender define the historical production of feminist chnography in four distinet periods. Ia the first period (1880-1920), biological sex was seen to determine social roles, and gender was not seen as separable from sex, though it was beginning to emerge as an analytical category. The second period (1920-1960) marks the separation of sex from gender as sex was increasingly seen as indeterminative of gender roles. In the third period (1960-1980), the distinction between sex and gender was elaborated into the notion of a sex/gender systern—the idea that different societies organized brute biological facts into particular gender regimes. By the contemporary period (1980-1996), critiques of “gender es- sentialism” (the reification of “woman” as a biological or universal category) suggest that the analytical separation between sex and gender is miscast be- cause “Sex” is itself a social category. Introduction Although the term “feminist ethnography” has only recently emerged (Abu- Lughod 1990, Stacey 1988, Visweswaran 1988), and is now included in feminist research manuals as one of a variety of interdisciplinary research methods (Rei- narz 1992), its relationship to the “writing culture” critique of anthropological representation (Clifford & Marcus 1986, Marcus & Cushman 1982, Marcus & Fisher 1986) has meant that discussions of feminist ethnography have focused more on redefining the genre of ethnography than in actually exploring what is meant by “feminist” Women in the discipline, however, have long experi- mented ath Torin: Elsie Clews Parsons (Babcock 1992), Ella Deloria (1988), Zora Neale Hurston (1938), and Ruth Landes (1947) are but a few examples. 591 0084-6570/97/1015-0591$08.00592 VISWESWARAN ‘Thus, the focus on form and genre has meant that a lineage from Elsie Clews Parsons to current feminist cthnographers has been established at the expense of a more detailed examination of what distinguishes Parsons’s ethnography from that of her contemporaries or later writers. This 16 firect such discussion by looking specifically at what modifies th s “feminist” to assess the historical influence o} feminist cthnography upon the discipline (sce also Collier anagisako 1989} vis an attempt fo move away from the dominant torms that inform the history of anthropology—eVolutionist or particularisi, functionalist oF Struc- turalist, Marxist or symbolic (Ortner 1984)—to understand how gender has become an ordering catszans afanitaanalosicalanalisis Tefurther attempts to usé ethnography as a means of tracing shifts in the conceptualization of gender in the anthropological literature. ‘The question of whether the term “feminist” is appropriate to describe the thoughts and actions of women in other times and places is not an easy one (Burton 1992, Offen 1988, Riley 1990). If “feminism” has changed substan- tially in the past one hundred years, so too has our understanding of what con- stitutes gender; thus, different forms of feminism have produced different un- derstandings of gender, where gender itself cannot be separated from the cate- gories of race, class, or sexual identity that determine it. Gender is today the site of considerable cross-disciplinary and transnational crisis. As Ri radiotti has noted, “the sex/gender distinction, which is one of the i contexts, where the notions of ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual difference” are used in- stead” (Bradiotti & Butler 1994, p. 38). “For some theorists, gender itself is a sociologism that reifies the social rela- tions that are seen to produce it by failing to account for how the terms mascu- line and feminine are founded in language prior to any given social formation. The focus on sex difference, by contrast, examines how masculine and femni- nine are constituted differentially, insisting that “this differential is nondialec~ tical and asymmetrical in character,” where “recourse to a symbolic domain is ‘one in which those positionalities are established and which in turn set the pa- rameters for notions of the social” (Butler 1994, p. 18). In this view, gender is seen less as a structure of fixed relations than as a process of structuring sub- struction of “sex,” neither of which can exist before representation, the major challenge to gender as an analytic concel ome from Foucauldians who have"argied that S6¥ is not “the ground upon which culture elaborates gender.” Geilderis ie “discursive origin of sex” (Morris 1995, p. 568-69); hence the focus on sex difference.FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHY 593 ‘The sociologistic account of gender tends to assume that a core gender iden- tity is produced as an effect of social construction, requiring that women not only see themselves as a biological sex but as a social grouping with which they must identify. Postmodern thinkers, queer theorists, and feminists of color have led the way in advancing sexuality as both counter-paradigm and critique of “gender essentialism.” As Biddy Martin (1994, p. 105) succinctly puis it: To the extent that gender is assumed to construct the ultimate ground of women’s experience, it has in much feminist work, come to colonize every aspect of experience, psychological and social, as the ultimate root and ex- planation of that experience, consigning us, once again, to the very terms that we sought to exceed, expand or redefine. When an uncritical assumption of the category ‘woman’ becomes the ‘subject of feminism,’ then gender poli- tics takes the form of...the injunction to identify with’as women, Thus, the assumption that gender comprises the core of all women’s experi- ences produces a unified subject of identification, the need to identify “with/as” women. In this review essay, 1 attempt to provide an account of how gender has come to signify "wonran,” that ea Set Of Social elarions ta proaices woman aswunlVersal category transcending difference. Texplore the linked questions oe me a ae nc one cial and class formations have at ge "that is, the emergence of “woman” as a universal cate- gory. I thus ask how a feminist ethnography that displaces gender from its cen- ter might engage strategies of disidentification rather than identification. Since anthropology was probably the discipline that contributed most to the North American (or sociologistic) account of gender, J think it is valuable to trace its operation in the feminist ethnography that produces it as an analytical object. Working from the critique of gender essentialism, I argue that feminist ethno} raphy can be defined as ethnography that foregrounds the question of vis-a-vis the lives of men, women, and children, This ap- proach to the literature widens the subject of feminist ethnography, but the looseness of definition is important. Although much feminist anthropology has presumed that women were its subjects, and this review focuses largely upon the works of women anthropologists writing about other women, I sug- gest at the close of this review that a broader conception of the relationship of feminist theory to social movements means that women should not be seen as