Gender and modernity revisited: Dialogues with Joel Kahn

Abstract

This article revisits theorising about the relationships between concepts of gender and modernity, drawing on long-term anthropological research on Southeast Asia. From the 1990s on, now well-known feminist critiques pointed to the profound androcentrism of much theorising about modernity, the many lacunae in such work, and the ways in which masculinity has operated as a core constitutive category of the social. Most theorising about modernity, feminists argued, was gendered both by the exclusion of women and a neglect of gender in explorations of the modern. In their turn, feminists have argued strongly for the centrality of genders and sexualities in the making of modern social and cultura..