Feminist Anthropology - The 'double Difference'

The 'double Difference'

Feminist anthropology, Rapp argued, is subject to a 'double difference' from mainstream academia. It is a feminist tradition, part of a branch of scholarship sometimes marginalized as an offshoot of postmodernism and deconstructionism and concerned with the experiences of women, who are marginalized by an androcentric orthodoxy. At the same time it addresses non-Western experience and concepts, areas of knowledge deemed peripheral to the knowledge created in the west. It is thus doubly marginalized.

Moore argues that some of this marginalization is self-perpetuating. By insisting on the 'female point of view', feminist anthropology constantly defines itself as 'not male' and therefore as inevitably distinct from and marginal to the mainstream. Feminist anthropology, Moore says, effectively ghettoizes itself. Strathern argues that feminist anthropology, as a tradition posing a challenge to the mainstream, can never fully integrate with that mainstream: it exists to critique, to deconstruct, and to challenge.