Naturalizing Power discusses what feminist anthropologists have to offer feminist theory in the 1990s. It answers the question Where are the origins of power and difference?' by locating these concepts in cultural narratives of sexuality, gender, kinship, race, nation and religion. The essays focus on intersections among kinship, race, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and gender which make relations of social inequality appear to be logical extensions of a natural order, thereby legitimating and obscuring power. The contributors bring to cultural analysis the insight that inequality and hierarchy come already embedded in symbolic systems which can be known only through contextually specific cultural practices. After a decade in which literary theory and philosophy has come to occupy the core of feminist theory and studies of socially-contextualized gender relations have become increasingly marginal, feminist scholarship cries out for ethnographically grounded cultural analyses in which people are located in historically and culturally specific social relations.
While the volume includes a range of modes of feminist cultural analysis, all of them analyze specific cultural practices in which inequality and hierarchy appear to be logical consequences of people's identities and the order of things.