Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture

Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Sherry B. Ortner. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Making Gender is both retrospective and forwardlooking, an anthology that functions as theoretical compendium, ethnographical exploration, and intellectual autobiography. The seven essays contained in the collection span twenty-five years of scholarship by Sherry Ortner, a founder of feminist anthropology. By gathering these disparate works in one volume, Ortner chronicles her own intellectual development as well as the direction of anthropology in recent years. Ortner and her colleagues (such as Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere) have mined feminism, Marxism, and postmodern cultural theory in order to enrich the field of anthropology. The results have been imaginative and thought-provoking for many scholars of culture outside anthropology as well.

In the opening essay, "Making Gender," Ortner contextualizes her own work as part of a struggle with structuralism and universalism. She identifies her overall project as an investigation of agency: "looking at and listening to real people doing real things in a given historical moment, past or present, and trying to figure...