Gender on the Edge Identities, Politics, Transformations

Abstract

Gender is on the edge. Being on the edge is both a position of power and one of marginality, and it is this paradox that we address in this book. We first situate gender on the cutting edge in terms of the position it has come to occupy, in the course of the last half-century, in intellectual debates. These debates have catapulted gender to the center of the important social, political, and cultural questions that anthropologists and other social scientists address—such as kinship, the division of labor, political institutions, religion, law, and the economy. Yet gender is also on the edge, in the different sense of often being marginalized in, for example, current theoretical concerns with ..