Description: 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sweeping display of Strathern's vivid critical thought and an important contribution to feminist studies that has gone unpublished for far too long.Brief description: Sarah Franklin is Director of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group, a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator, and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.
Review Quotes: "Before and After Gender prefigures at least four major concerns that Strathern has continued to develop in later work: relationality, personhood, law, and naturalization. Together, these encompass much of what has been innovative in studies of gender and kinship over the last several decades. Rather than a single focus on relationality, personhood, law, or naturalization, it is the intertwining of these themes that is intellectually productive."--Janet Carston "Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute"