Short Abstract

What mirror can lived experiences provide to reflect on conflicts and intersections between feminist and queer thinking, as well as on epistemological foundations of feminist (queer) theory? How to overcome feminist tensions among ourselves through a deeper understanding of these tensions?

Long Abstract

Where do feminist anthropology and queer anthropology either converge or diverge? This may sound like an unnecessary question, as the two join in queer feminist theory, a well-established field of inquiry. Yet, there are tensions. We outline two here. One is the hesitation or refusal by feminists to engage in queer matters. TERFs are the most prominent group, but there are also politicised, moralistic or other subtle forms of avoidance. The second concerns the product of queer feminism, where questions of legitimacy are often central, that is, who is legitimate to speak on queer matters. We believe that both tensions arise from how feminist thinking is invested in, and the product of, liberal emancipatory politics, which is itself a product of modernity. As such, it articulates values of individualism, egalitarianism, the belief in progress, and universalism, whose goal is undoing power: undoing heterosexist patriarchal structures a la Foucault and Butler. While undoing power is crucial, it does not always uncover, or perhaps it sometimes actually covers, other ways of understanding how gender, desire and body relate. Anthropology has the tools to study how this particular Euro-American cultural history endorses notions of liberal subjecthood wherein the notion of identity is enfolded (see Wekker 1999, 2006), as well as to illustrate the epistemological conundrum of feminist theory, and particularly its ethnocentric character (see Mahmood 2001, 2016). We are interested in papers that engage with the tensions outlined here, based on empirical realities on the ground.

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