Abstract
Numerous publications on gender archaeology present case studies that incorporate gender in their analyses, but make little use of feminist theory and critique, and are ambivalent or negative to feminism. Aspects of Norwegian, British and American gender archaeology are discussed in relation to a desire for the ‘mainstream.’ The reasons for, and consequences of, a lack of feminist theorizing and engagement are related to Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges.
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Notes
For those interested in learning more about Nordic feminism in general I recommend the web page of the Nordic Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies (NIKK) at: http://www.nikk.uio.no/index.html.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alison Wylie for inviting me to participate in this volume. I would also like to thank Liv Helga Dommasnes, Ingrid Fuglestvedt, Knut Helskog, and Bryan Hood for comments on an earlier version of this paper; and the participants of seminars at Uppsala University, where I presented some of the ideas in this paper, especially Anne-Sofie Gräslund, Bo Gräslund, Fredrik Hallgren, Cia Lidström Holmberg, and Åsa Larsson. I thank Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh, Charlotte Damm and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen for last minute conversations on aspects of Nordic feminism and feminist archaeology. I also want to thank Roberta Gilchrist, Madonna L. Moss and three anonymous referees for insightful comments. Finally, I especially want to thank Alison Wylie for comments and constant support while working on this article. Needless to say, the final version is my responsibility. Some of the text is reworked from an earlier article and papers given at the Gender and Material Culture Conference in Sydney in 1999 and at the SAA meetings in Montreal in 2004 (Engelstad 1999, 2004a, b). All translations from Norwegian are my own.
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Engelstad, E. Much More than Gender. J Archaeol Method Theory 14, 217–234 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-007-9035-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-007-9035-3