Queering knowledge: analytics, devices and investments after Marilyn Strathern

Marilyn Strathern’s ethnographic contributions to studies of personhood, kinship, gender relations and reproduction have achieved wide recognition in the field of anthropology. Her analytic devices, including her model of merographic connection, have had profound effects on anthropologists’ responses to the crisis of representation, especially for those who have drawn on the transformative and subversive capacities of her analytic thinking to conjure up the ethnographic present. However, to date there has been no volume that explicitly brings Strathern and queer analytics together over questions of knowledge and ontology. This collection of original essays draws on the significance of Strathern’s work in respect of its potential for queer anthropological analysis. Utilising a range of ontological imaginings and subversions, the book explores how people might relate to queer object categories partially, merographically, or in terms of a sense of dissonance from signifier and self. The chapters examine the ways in which Strathern’s varied analytic devices facilitate the creation of alternative forms of anthropological thinking, as well as a greater understanding of how knowledge practices of queer objects, subjects and relations operate and take effect. Queering Knowledge offers an innovative collection of writings, bringing about queer and anthropological syntheses through Strathern’s oeuvre. The ontological and epistemological questions that the book addresses will make it especially relevant to anthropologists engaged in queer theory, as well as scholars of gender studies, social and cultural anthropology, science and technology studies, social theory and cultural theory, research epistemology and methodology, and ethnography.