Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life
Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern’s Before and After Gender was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But when the series for which it was written unexpectedly folded, the manuscript went into storage, where it remained for more than four decades. This book finally brings it to light, giving the long-lost feminist work—accompanied here by an afterword from Judith Butler—an overdue spot in feminist history.
             
Strathern incisively engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley, and Kate Millett. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold conclusion in which she argues that we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our own peril, she offers a powerful challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex that still plague contemporary society. The result is a sweeping display of Strathern’s vivid critical thought and an important contribution to feminist studies that has gone unpublished for far too long.
 
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Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life
Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern’s Before and After Gender was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But when the series for which it was written unexpectedly folded, the manuscript went into storage, where it remained for more than four decades. This book finally brings it to light, giving the long-lost feminist work—accompanied here by an afterword from Judith Butler—an overdue spot in feminist history.
             
Strathern incisively engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley, and Kate Millett. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold conclusion in which she argues that we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our own peril, she offers a powerful challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex that still plague contemporary society. The result is a sweeping display of Strathern’s vivid critical thought and an important contribution to feminist studies that has gone unpublished for far too long.
 
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Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life

Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life

Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life

Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life

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Overview

Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern’s Before and After Gender was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But when the series for which it was written unexpectedly folded, the manuscript went into storage, where it remained for more than four decades. This book finally brings it to light, giving the long-lost feminist work—accompanied here by an afterword from Judith Butler—an overdue spot in feminist history.
             
Strathern incisively engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley, and Kate Millett. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold conclusion in which she argues that we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our own peril, she offers a powerful challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex that still plague contemporary society. The result is a sweeping display of Strathern’s vivid critical thought and an important contribution to feminist studies that has gone unpublished for far too long.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781912808007
Publisher: HAU
Publication date: 05/15/2016
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 362
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Marilyn Strathern is emeritus professor of social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of many books, including Women in Between, The Gender of the Gift, and Kinship, Law, and the Unexpected. Sarah Franklin is Director of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group, a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator, and University Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of many books, including Embodied Progress, Dolly Mixtures, and Biological Relatives.  

What People are Saying About This

Annemarie Mol

"This book is more than one. It mobilizes anthropological tales to shake nineteen seventies Euro-American feminism out of provincial fantasies of universality. It presents contrasting cases of sexual binarism to demonstrate the relevance of concepts for anthropology, not just those in use in the societies it writes about but also those it uses in writing. And it tells about genders that are variously relational. How truly Strathernian to allow this intellectual ancestor to appear—outdated!—magically fresh!—so long after its prodigious offspring."

Anna Tsing

"Marilyn Strathern’s 'lost manuscript' juggles ethnography, novels, and social criticism as it conjures a moment when the intersection of feminism and anthropology exploded with excitement. In a world in which 'theory' too often refers to almost theological dogma, here we watch a master immerse herself in the maelstrom of her material—spinning threads, casting reflections, posing comparisons—to show us how relations matter."

Donna Haraway

"In Before and After Gender, Strathern writes that she 'brings writing to bear on other writing in order to shift the viewpoint.' From the beginning, she has not so much shifted viewpoints as entirely retooled their optics, making viewpoints undo other viewpoints, and here she does it for gender and all its bumptious ethnographic and conceptual kin. Relationality has always been her subject; she studies relations with relations in order to understand how doing relations works, or in a more utopian vein, might yet work to make us ask better questions. No wonder her extraordinary early manuscript on gender as model and tool for doing relations does late work needed now, when social life everywhere is in theoretical and practical trouble."

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