It is overwhelming to comment on the panel of a brilliant group of women—towering figures in the field—whose work I have long admired and whose personal friendship and mentoring I have benefited from since arriving in Australia five years ago as a newly minted PhD. I of course can’t do justice to this collection of papers—either their theoretical insights or the power of their personal experiences. Hence, I’ll instead contexualize the panel in the past and future: how the panel came about and where the panel may take us. 

The inspiration for this conversation came about in good old feminist fashion—from a consciousness raising exercise. Ben, Shiori, and I were regular attendees at the anthropology node of the ANU Gender Institute, which we had styled as a reading and writing workshop, but which always included (in line with our shared feminist principles) a personal and experiential dimension of mentoring and dialogue. At one of the workshops, Kathy and Margaret discussed feminism and activism during their PhD years. This remarkable conversation eventually expanded to a broader discussion about their position as feminist scholars. We realized it was crucial to tell this story, particularly as feminist anthropology in Australia was shaped differently from the more widely discussed North American experience.

It is here that I would like to reflect on what this panel and the special collection that followed has accomplished. The provocation about the production and reproduction of theory, and its rootedness in a fieldwork discipline, has led to some poignant insights. Whether shaking our certainty about sexual violence and its universality, or fundamentally questioning “what is a woman?”, or demanding intersectional analysis of anthropological fieldwork, I would like to echo Margaret’s call to celebrate how feminism can transform anthropology. 

Building on this celebration, I would like to offer one more provocation. What comes through so strongly in the discussion is the longstanding feminist concern not just with reproduction (of theory, of sociality, of persons), but also with a sense of obligation. For many of these scholars, that sense of commitment was nurtured in the field (commitment to our long-term friends and collaborators, systematized in works like Martha’s contributions to “Gender and Fieldwork” and Francesca’s long-term work on the shifting hegemonies in indigenous/settler dynamics). In fact, this is precisely what Danilyn Rutherford stakes out as the key to our discipline’s “kinky empiricism”: in her words, “An empiricism that is ethical because its methods create obligations, obligations that compel those who seek knowledge to put themselves on the line by making truth claims that they know will intervene within the settings and among the people they describe” (Rutherford 2012, 465). I propose that this panel pushes us to take an additional step. These interventions and obligations are not limited to the settings and people of our fieldwork, but extend to our universities, teaching, collegiality, friendships, and mentorship. 

Feminism has always been obligated, and its obligations reach beyond a particular theoretical turn in our scholarship. Given the foundational place obligation occupies within our anthropological theories—from the intergenerational obligations that stitch together kinship structures and their modes of relational belonging, to the obligation to return at the heart of “gift” and theories of value, to ritual obligations that propitiate spirits or deities—obligation is at the heart of the anthropological theories of “the social.” By rooting obligation(s) within the politics and experiences of gender justice, the papers of this roundtable force us rethink feminism as the master trope of anthropology.

Read another piece in this series.

Works Cited

Rutherford, Danilyn. 2012. “Kinky Empiricism.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (3): 465–479.

In addition to the work of the guest editors, this piece was edited by Allegra Giovine.

The relationship between feminism and anthropology has never been straightforward. The launch in 2020 of Feminist Anthropology, the journal of the Association for Feminist Anthropology section at the American Anthropological Association, may be one indicator of the consolidation of the field. However, only a few decades earlier, significant political, institutional, and intellectual struggles were waged to make this possible. A relationship between feminism and anthropology was not a natural alliance but was forged through contested debates such as those over the universality of women’s oppression (Ortner 1972), the incompatibility of a relativism and feminism (Strathern 1988), and through the “sex wars” in the United States (Rubin 2011). Feminist anthropologists have also pioneered new possibilities for representation in the ethnographic genre (Visweswaran 1994). In this moment of intensifying attacks on feminist thought globally, on women’s and trans people’s reproductive rights and in universities, it is crucial for anthropology to reflect on feminist histories of the discipline and what they can tell us about reproducing knowledge in the present moment.^[1]This collection entered production in early 2025, during the period between the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2024, his inauguration for a second term, and subsequent steps taken by his administration to restrict women’s and trans people’s rights in profoundly troubling ways. The many ways that the women in our roundtable struggled against misogynistic academic institutions, and their ability to link intersectional feminist political struggles to their work in the classroom, may offer inspiration in dark times (see also hooks 1994).