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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 ethnography in four distinct periods. In 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 system-the idea that different societies organized brute biological facts into particular gender regimes. By the contemporary period (1980-1996), critiques of "gender essentialism" (the reification of "woman" as a biological or universal category) suggest that the analytical separation between sex and gender is miscast because "sex" is itself a social category.
Introduction
Although the term "feminist ethnography" has only recently emerged (AbuLughod 1990, Stacey 1988, Visweswaran 1988), and is now included in feminist research manuals as one of a variety of interdisciplinary research methods (Reinarz 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 experimented with form: Elsie Clews Parsons (Babcock 1992), Ella Deloria (1988), Zora Neale Hurston (1938), and Ruth Landes (1947) are but a few examples. Thus, the focus on form and genre has meant that a lineage from Elsie Clews Parsons to current feminist ethnographers 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 review proposes to redirect such discussion by looking specifically at what modifies these texts as "feminist" to assess the historical influence of feminist ethnography upon the discipline (see also Collier & Yanagisako 1989). It is an attempt to move away from the dominant terms that inform the history of anthropology-evolutionist or particularist, functionalist or structuralist, Marxist or symbolic (Ortner 1984)-to understand how gender...