Theory as Reproduction: Histories of Doing Feminist Anthropology in Australia

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).

The relevance of feminist anthropology to anthropology is often understood in its gendered reflexivity, its commitment to intersectional feminist politics, and the subjects identified as proper objects of its accounts. Yet rarely are the historical foundations that underpin current understandings of the relationship between anthropology and feminism questioned. This ahistoricity is reflected in the minimal number of citations of Black women’s published work, for whom, as Christen Smith and Dominque Garrett-Scott observe, “citational erasure is the evidence of our lack of assigned value” (Smith and Garrett-Scott 2021, 23). Even where feminist anthropology has been canonized (see e.g., Yanagisako and Delaney 1995), the lives of women, and in particular the queer, Black, and Indigenous women who played a role in producing knowledge through foundational fieldwork, are rarely described (Bruchac 2018). This is also reflected in patterns in regional engagement, particularly in relation to anthropology written in languages other than English, one effect of which is to flatten “feminist anthropology,” placing its coordinates firmly towards or within the United States.

This Special Focus Section (SFS) engages with the question of the relationship between feminism and anthropology, with a perspective on a tradition of Australian feminist anthropology produced since the 1970s. Australia is a settler colonial nation with a history of anthropology where, like the United States and Canada, the production of knowledge occurs within the colonial project (Nakata 2007). Feminist anthropologists too have had a specific investment in the knowledge that shapes Australia’s settler colonial governance (Bell and Nelson 1989). Sara Ahmed (2000), for example, has criticized the “strangerness” generated by ethnographic accounts by white women of Indigenous cultures in Australia and by anthropologists in general. Ahmed analyzed the “Bell debate,” which took place when Diane Bell, a white anthropologist, critiqued sexual violence in Indigenous communities in a 1989 article she co-wrote with Topsy Napurrula Nelson, an Indigenous female scholar (Bell and Nelson 1989). The debate centered around the issue of who has the right to speak about whom (see Huggins et al. 1991). Focusing on one account of the controversy and response that occurred, Ahmed wrote:

While it might be assumed that the anthropologist is the stranger who enters the “home” of “the natives,” I would argue the opposite. The “home” is the very discipline of anthropology itself; the anthropologists are the natives (who are at home in their field), and the objects of anthropology itself are the strangers (those who have a place as the out of place in this home). (Ahmed 2000, 50)

This introduction, and our original prompt to the authors in this section, draws inspiration from Sarah Ahmed’s reflection concerning the intersection of race and gender in the history of anthropology in Australia. We consider how the institutional “home” provided by the discipline of anthropology was gendered, asking: how did departmental life in universities shape feminist theoretical questions asked by anthropologists? What public secrets conditioned the possibilities for women to conduct fieldwork, and what were its implications for ethnographic theory? From what political commitments and concerns, both internal and external to university life, did they emerge from?

Drawing on papers originally presented at a roundtable held at the Australian Anthropological Society meetings at the Australian National University in Canberra in 2019,^[2]The contributions were recorded and made available as a podcast by The Familiar Strange (The Familiar Strange 2020). this Special Focus Section (SFS) includes six articles written by women who engaged with a “feminist” tradition in Australian anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. While scholars including Sarah Ahmed have attended to controversies such as the Bell debate, mainly in cultural studies and gender studies, they have not often contextualized the intellectual currents and scholarly infrastructure that made possible a predominantly white feminist engagement with anthropology in Australia since the 1970s. The result is that a vibrant engagement with race, gender, and sexuality by Australian feminist anthropologists (e.g., Bottomley, De Lepervanche, and Martin 1991), as well as the political aspirations that influenced them, remains largely unexamined. In doing so, racial and gendered reproduction of knowledge production and the scholarly infrastructures that support it, or what Raewyn Connell calls the “global economy of knowledge” (Connell et al. 2018, 43) remains naturalized.

The reflections presented at the roundtable and conversations that followed provided a mostly unrecorded history of Australian anthropology and university life. Central to the concerns in the articles in this SFS is the meaning of “theory” as a form of anthropological value and the labour involved in its reproduction. The perceptive Australian anthropologist Marie Reay reflected on this dynamic when she wrote about her experiences as a PhD student after fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, at the Australian National University in the 1950s: “‘Nadel [her supervisor] insists,’ I cried, ‘that we go into the field with a theory. But what is a theory? What is a theory?’ I demanded rhetorically” (Reay 1992, 139).^[3]Marie Reay was a remarkable Australian anthropologist who conducted groundbreaking fieldwork in the 1950s in Papua New Guinea as part of her PhD at the Australian National University. Her manuscript, Wives and Wanderers (Reay 2014), was finalized and published posthumously in 2014 after being discovered by Francesca Merlan in the university archives. Erin Gates has provided a fascinating account of Marie Reay’s life, including her uneasy relationship with feminism and with Euro-American concepts of gender and sexuality, while enduring departmental misogyny and exclusion (Gates 2022). Building on this feminist engagement with anthropological knowledge, this SFS responds to the question: what does “theory” as a collection of voices and experiences include and exclude?  Each of the accounts in this SFS does not shy away from the ambiguities and paradoxes of meaning in mapping the meanings of “theory” and “the field,” in the finest tradition of both feminism and anthropology.

This SFS offers insights into the history of gendered knowledge production in Western academia, joining several accounts in feminist theory. The work of generating knowledge about topics deemed “political” (queer, feminist, Black, Indigenous) usually fall to women and other minority subjects. For example, Sara Ahmed refers to these figures as the “feminist killjoy,” which she defines as a person who is seen to be a problem because she makes complaints (Ahmed 2023). However, the “feminist killjoy” has a long history, as the contributions to this SFS make clear. Margaret Jolly draws attention to the history of her struggle to teach a subject called “feminist anthropology” in the 1970s at the University of Sydney, but which was renamed “the anthropology of women.” Jolly recounts her fury over the bland name, and that the final weeks were to be taught by another senior male anthropologist. Whatever its professional costs, she refused to teach it again. Kathryn Robinson recalls delightful experiences and engagement with Marxist feminist consciousness raising groups and activism for a rape crisis centre, as essential to her anthropological training. Kalpana Ram reflects on the fact that philosophy did not allow for a theory building from the South. After founding an Immigrant and Third World Women’s Group in Sydney, she sought to incorporate these perspectives through the study of anthropology. She continues to reflect on her theoretical and teaching practices after working with participants from different class backgrounds in rural India. Francesca Merlan tracks the shifting history of gender relations in Indigenous Australian northern communities to reflexively consider how her positionality and questions of what was open for her to observe have changed over the years.

Together, the articles in this SFS section provide gendered histories of knowledge production in Western academia, joining other influential feminist accounts. Ahmed observes the many ways that patriarchal, white institution reproduces itself over time, where theory is a “citational relational” (Ahmed 2023). Taking place behind closed doors—indeed, the very presence of a closed door—serves as a means for an institution to hide or obscure problems that have become too hard to deal with (Ahmed 2021). The accounts of sexual harassment that took place in universities recounted by some of the SFS contributors illuminate this point in greater historical detail. Read alongside Christine Helliwell’s account of senior male anthropologists’ negative responses to her PhD fieldwork as a “lone woman in Borneo,” the racist basis for sexual threats as gatekeeping mechanisms with sinister overtones becomes apparent. In a touching account of her PhD at the University of Cambridge, Martha MacIntyre recalls in her article being told that the study of women would be considered “unserious” (see also Moore 1988). Yet she shows also how women were not just passive pawns of male domination; writing of her supervisor’s insistence that she remove a touching account of the death of a close friend during fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, she says: “I left it in.”

If the SFS contributions together provide an anthropological view on this history, interrogating the gendered cultures, symbols, and rituals of institutional life, it also offers an opportunity to rethink the stories anthropologists tell themselves about their discipline’s history. Derek Freeman is a figure who hovered over many of the accounts in these contributions and the discussion that followed during the roundtable. Of course it was widely known that Freeman could be unpleasant; this is a “public secret” (Taussig 1999) that anthropologists use to hail others as in the know, as belonging to their discipline. Martha MacIntyre has elsewhere described how—almost ignored in popular understandings of a public battle staged between Mead and Freeman—Freeman’s abusive behavior towards women was widely known and understood, including by senior male departmental figures (MacIntyre 2018).^[4] This institutional history helps to supplement the US-focused attention and overall neglect of what it was actually like for junior women PhD students to work in such a department. Sapiens has produced a podcast about Margaret Mead, “The Problems With Coming of Age,” that includes one episode that addresses the controversy that touches on but does not fully elaborate Freeman’s abusive behavior towards the women he worked with (Colwell, n.d.). Yet Freeman, not unlike Mead, is often held up to be something of an exceptional figure. What is not identified, and what this SFS reveals, is how academia and its economic and political organization reproduced gendered violence as critical to the scholarly process. The real scandal is perhaps the naturalization of a certain ideal of masculinity, one that persists in university departments, and that sustains practices which are held up to be characteristic of academic work.

The roundtable held in 2019 initially emerged from the hope that attending to specific histories of gendered dynamics in anthropology may offer both new theoretical vantage points and a more inclusive discipline. Our attempt to consolidate and historicize the history of feminist anthropology in Australia is a work in progress, with an obvious lacuna in the absence of Indigenous perspectives in this first collection. Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s influential work, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (2000), highlights the whiteness of Australian feminism and challenges its representation of Indigenous women. Although it may be that the forms of reflexivity generated by feminist anthropology since the 1970s laid the grounds for a greater range of voices in the discipline, the transformative potential of queer, Black, and Indigenous women’s theoretical insights remains limited where a gendered and racial system of global academic labor remains intact. The accounts presented in this SFS therefore serve as a reminder of the enduring gendered form of the production of knowledge in the discipline of anthropology and across the university.

This SFS places important efforts to call out and analyze sexual abuse towards women in the academy such as #metooanthro (King et al. 2020) and #Hautalk (Gershon 2018)^[5]#metooanthro was a collective active between 2017-2021, which collectively mobilized to address sexual assault and harassment in academic institutions and in the fieldsites where anthropologists work. #Hautalk was an online mobilization that took place in 2018 that called out bullying and misogyny by the then editor-in-chief of an open access anthropology journal called Hau, which had enjoyed considerable support as a reinvigorated form of anthropology capable of reaching a wider audience. as part of a broader history of feminist anthropology. It provides historical context for the ways that scholarly infrastructures and institutional forms give rise to the gendered production of knowledge through the assertion of masculinist power. In the case of #Hautalk, Ilana Gershon astutely described the software platform used, “It is designed to be a pyramid of labor, based on the assumption that many people will be willing to give a tiny bit of free labor, and other people will be willing to devote larger chunks of time, but may only be willing to do so sporadically” (Gershon 2018). It is within such an infrastructure that winks become threats under specific conditions, shaping in turn the theoretical insights generated by scholarly knowledge. Yet the historical accounts provided by the women in this SFS also suggest how the reproduction of knowledge might be otherwise. Histories of institutional life in anthropology, and the possibilities of engaging with it reflexively in relation to fieldwork, offer many clues for bringing a feminist ethos to scholarly life, that resonates within the gendered form of the technologized and bureaucratized present of university life.

Read another piece in this series.

Works Cited

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———. 2021. Complaint! Durham NC: Duke University Press.

———. 2023. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way. First edition. New York: Seal Press, Hachette Book Group.

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