Gender and the Human: An Introduction

This forum offers critical perspectives on the intersection between gender and the politics of the human. The three articles that comprise it showcase dilemmas that have produced an impasse in feminist politics, as well as the possibilities that feminist analysis offers for rethinking the politics of humanity. The introduction traces the historical intertwining of gender and the human, beginning with the paradox of Enlightenment universalism and female exclusion that launched modern western feminism. It considers both the resilience of this dominant framework of feminist analysis and the limitations it has produced. By examining both the implications of the juridical focus on women's inclusion and rights, and the significance of gender and the body for new forms of modern state power particularly in colonial and post‐colonial contexts, it seeks to sustain new feminist interrogations of the modern politics of the human.     

近代早期英国家庭中的性别关系

家庭是形成性别关系最小的基本单位,在近代早期,英国社会中的性别关系在家庭中得到明显的体现。结婚后,丈夫和妻子为了建立一个独立的新家而共同协作,劳动的性别分工基本遵循男主外、女主内的模式,各个阶层的妇女都要为家庭经济作贡献,但这并没有改变其地位卑微的状况,“男尊女卑”、“男主女从”仍然是这一时期家庭中的常态。     

Domestic Spaces as Public Places: An Ethnoarchaeological Case Study of Houses, Gender, and Politics in the Ecuadorian Amazon

In an ethnoarchaeological case study, we take a gendered perspective on the house as a locus of political life in Conambo, a village of about 200 Achuar- and Quichua-speaking peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In this small-scale society, women and men engage actively in political practice in independent yet complementary ways, and the domestic context is a place where political life is conducted on a daily basis. In this article, the house is examined as a politicized context at three scales of materiality: the organization of settlement in the community, the spatial relationships in the house, and the scale of painted designs on pottery bowls used in the house. At each scale, we identify material correlates of women's and men's participation. Our goal is to bring attention to potential archaeological correlates of women's political involvement in past societies, to question assumptions about women's political lives and domestic spaces, and to expand the ways in which anthropological archaeology may contribute to understanding cross-cultural variation in women's and men's domains of power.     

Gender,Colonialism and Citizenship in the Modern Middle East

Books reviewed in this article: Selma Botman, Engendering Citizenship in Egypt Margaret L. Meriwether and Judith E. Tucker (eds), A Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon