Gender and Kinship

Why can’t gender and kinship be studied separately

• Moore (1999) - Kinship positions are already gendered e.g mother/father daughter/son carry different meanings

• 'Woman' is not a self-evident category: not all societies have a two-gender system.

Ortner (1974)

• Women's association with nature vs men's with culture explains universal female subordination.

• In kinship: women provide natural substance (blood, milk, flesh), men provide cultural elements (names, social identity).

• Women's reproductive capacity becomes raw material that male-controlled systems transform into social persons.

Main criticism of Ortner

• Risks reproducing Western Dualism

• Not all socitites map the nature/culture divide in this way → It imposes ethnocentric logic

Martin (1991)

• Gender stereotypes are embodied in biological language of reproductive gametes

• Shared bodily substance is never gender-neutral — how we imagine blood, food, semen is locally specific and ideologically loaded.

Schneider and Gender

I- f the genealogical grid naturalises biological kinship, it simultaneously naturalises gender hierarchy

• Women's reproductive capacity becomes the 'natural' foundation of social life that male-controlled systems organise.

• Denaturalising kinship therefore also denaturalises gender inequality.

Womens reproductive status

• If kinship is made through food-sharing, co-residence, and practice rather than biology, women's reproductive capacity loses its privileged/subordinating status

• Relatedness can elevate women by decentring reproduction

Clarke (2008)

• Shows gender is constitutive of kinship as in Lebanon the sexual morality of women is not external to kinship, but is kinship itself

• Reveals a western blind-spot on what makes kin