Knowra Feminist anthropology Feminist anthropology Feminist anthropology examines how gender and power shape social life, ethnographic research, and anthropology’s institutions and theories. It treats knowledge-making and researchers’ positions as part of the inquiry.
Reflexivity : Critical examination of how a researcher’s position, assumptions, and presence shape knowledge and interpretation. Makes the anthropologist’s gender, authority, and relationships part of the evidence being examined.
Margaret Mead : An American cultural anthropologist whose studies of adolescence and gender in the Pacific shaped public debates about culture. Her work made cultural variation in gender roles central to anthropology’s public reach.
Gender : Social meanings, identities, relations, and institutions organized around perceived sex differences. Feminist anthropology studies how gender is made and contested across social settings.
Medical anthropology : The anthropological study of health, illness, healing, and medical systems in cultural and political context. Feminist analysis examines gendered authority and inequality in healthcare and medical knowledge.
Cultural feminism : A strand of feminism that emphasizes qualities or values associated with women and their cultural expression. Feminist anthropology questions claims that women share universal traits across cultures.
Standpoint theory : An approach to knowledge that examines how social position shapes what people can know and how they know it. Explains why marginalized positions can reveal power relations obscured from dominant viewpoints.
Sherry Ortner : An American anthropologist known for influential work on gender, practice, and cultural theory. Her 1972 essay asked how women’s subordination could be analyzed across cultural settings.
Sex and gender distinction : A conceptual distinction between biological characteristics classified as sex and socially organized meanings called gender. The distinction enabled analysis of gender as cultural and political rather than biologically fixed.
Reproductive justice : A movement and framework linking reproductive rights to the social conditions needed to have children, not have children, and raise them safely. Connects reproductive choices to racism, poverty, state policy, and access to care.
Postcolonial feminism : Feminist scholarship examining how colonial histories and global power shape gender and knowledge. It foregrounds colonial relations that can be underemphasized in earlier feminist anthropological accounts.
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