Feminist Anthropology - 1970s

1970s

Self-consciously feminist anthropology emerged during the 1970s as a series of challenges to anthropology's male bias. Rayna Rapp's 1975 Toward an Anthropology of man represented an early contribution to the emerging school, arguing that women and men experience gender differently from one another, with reference to different sets of social markers, and that the experience of women was in itself a legitimate subject for anthropological enquiry. Rapp pointed out male bias in the theories and assumptions of contemporary anthropology, introducing a new strand in anthropological self-criticism. Rapp's contemporary Gayle Rubin had, also in 1975, coined the term "sex/gender system" to illustrate the difference between biological imperative and social behaviour, arguing that human expressions of gender and sexuality were not biological constants but politically constructed norms. Toward an Anthropology of Women was originally published with the author's name cited as Rayna Rapp Reiter, but subsequent and recent (as of 2011) scholarship by this author has appeared under the name of Rayna Rapp.