2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 409411

BOOK SYMPOSIUM

After Before and after gender

Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

Response to Hau book symposium on Strathern, Marilyn. 2016.

Before and after gender: Sexual mythologies of everyday life. Edited and
with an introduction by Sarah Franklin. Afterword by Judith Butler.
Chicago: Hau Books.

Each of these three responses recapitulates something of the hope I had for the (re)
appearance of the manuscript that, with Sarah Franklins encouragement, became
Before and after gender (2016; hereafter B&AG). I mean the hope that its odd format (the lengthy quotations from diverse works) would capture some sense of a
period in its own words. Each contributor, as it turns out, describes a horizon of
her own from which such a hope might also come. Margaret Jollys horizon in the
1970s was co-eval, if not well in advance: Australian thinking on womens liberation was considerably in the vanguard. From the mid-1980s, Annemarie Mol recalls two texts, hidden as she mischievously notes in Dutch, in order to strike up
a three-way conversation with B&AG as to how these might or might not have been
interrelated. More or less at the same time, Sarah Green talks of an activist generation in the late 1980s that had moved on from many of the kinds of issues described
in B&AG, debated as they continued to be, with new reasons for coalitions and,
dramatically, separations. Those other horizons are also positions from which each
speakswith greater or lesser emphasisof the diversity of feminist thought. I am
grateful for the collegial staging of their criticisms.
What Green brings home are the limitations of a view from literature. The separatists, who might have written and argued along lines recognizable to the explicitly
feminist writers on whose texts I drew, were not just writing and arguing. Formulations of autonomy aside, there was something much more deeply and socially
responsible, as she puts it, in their reactions to their situation than they necessarily
advocated. The intense disputes between women at this time sprang from tensions
 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Marilyn Strathern.
T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.027

Marilyn Strathern

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that were or could not be simply dissipated through articulation. They required
rearrangements of lives and living spaces. In short, these separatists indeed took
the implications of some of the discussions on which I reported far further than
B&AG imagined. More than that, although they might now seem to have been
living in between-times, perhaps separatism was one way of acting out what was
to become the question of the status of binary gender (Butler 2016: 299). At the
least, Greens recall of their self-questioning about sociality makes me ponder on
the guiding schema of the book (B&AG). I seem to have been bemused by, taken
too literally even, the recurrent dualisms and oppositionsall the rage in 1960s
70s social anthropology tooin whose terms other kinds of feminist criticism was
being written. The books schema was deep in the hetero-metaphor of debate
(two sides implied).
While Jolly discusses B&AGs address to feminist arguments, she also asks about
the fate of various concepts to which anthropological attention was drawn at the
time: nature and culture, division of labor, the arguments from biology, notions
of individuation and personhood, among others. If the books thesis about gender
really had any prescience then, what does it have to say now about these issues
and their heirs? She lays out a series of twenty-first-century questions that she sees
as overlapping with some of B&AGs concernsincluding subjects-and-objects,
gender stereotypes, and male-female relations as individuated sexual relations.
Needless to say, the present day issues have very much their own shape. Here her
observation of the enduring awkwardness of the we/they formula is well taken.
But her earlier commentaries have already been in the nature of critique, for in the
way in which she interrogates the books concerns, and in what she foregrounds
or backgrounds, Jolly draws on her own consistent engagement with feminist anthropology. Thus she remarks on how the binary alignment of (all) men and (all)
women, as though they were interest groups, suppresses differences between men
and between women. What she references at this point is my characterization of
interest groups: hers is the pithy formulation about what gets suppressed.
The texts that Mol has brought to light hold a further challenge to the we/they
formula. Basically, the demonstration that we know what or who we are has to
be made before the argument that we have a culture too can get off the ground.
Mieke Aerts was writing at a moment when the notion of equality as an activist
aim was being questioned in favor of difference. Her text points to the invention of the modern female sex that aligned the subordination of women with
inequality, and thus in terms of a debate in which the opponents invariably evoke
each other. A dialogical positioning is not the difference some may have thought
it was; what is crucial is the kind of activism it allows. The second text is on Mols
own ground. Rehearsing the observation about cultural knowledge, this time to
point to biological facts, she makes me realize how much I took for granted. The
criticism is to one side of David Schneiders (1968): it is, to put it shortly, that there
are divergent modes of biological knowledge. Of course (once it is said, that is)!
The appearance of a cultural trope (biology) is no more than that. I appreciate
how she then fans out the relations between these texts and B&AG into their diverse origins and intentions, before gathering them together. As a final comment
on internal diversity, she does it through disaggregating and reaggregating the
Dutch terms for relating.
2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 409411

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After Before and after gender

My appreciation throughout will be evident. Also evident perhaps is what a

slow learner it is possible to be, and I am struck all over again, though for different reasons than those noted in the Preface, how much one is of ones time and
place. Thinking in the third person, then, how might I have written the biographical note? Stratherns work on gender was embedded in feminist-driven questions
being asked in the 1960s and 70s, in Papua New Guinean fieldwork and in anthropological preoccupations of this time; engagement with a fast moving literature
on Melanesia took her into the 1980s, and that and teaching into the 1990s. This
obviously lacks the finesse of Greens precise (as in precision-making) location; yet
again, as Jolly observes, a linear accounting will hardly do, while its relation to
the present is already queried in Mols query about what we are doing in relating.
Regardless of time and place, one thing is sure, which is how much one owes to
colleagues.

References
Schneider, David. 1968. American kinship: A cultural account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
Strathern, Marilyn. 2016. Before and after gender: Sexual mythologies of everyday life. Edited
and with an introduction by Sarah Franklin. Afterword by Judith Butler. Chicago: Hau
Books.


Marilyn Strathern

Girton College

Cambridge CB3 0JG
UK
ms10026@cam.ac.uk

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 409411