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The Graphy in Ethnography: Reconsidering the Gender of and in the Genre

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Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the collection by discussing how the figure of Elsie Masson, Bronislaw Malinowski’s first wife, inspired the editors to reconsider gender as it variously connects to the practice and product of ethnographic writing. Decades after Writing Culture and Women Writing Culture, they look at how gender plays into new genre boundaries in a post- and neo-colonial context. The gender of the genre has to do with the significant, still under-recognized stylistic contributions of women and people of colour. In relation to changes in the conditions of research and academics since the 1990s, the authors review questions of disciplinary boundary work, academic canons, audience and collaboration that feature a gendered dimension. Gender in ethnographic writing no longer means ‘women’, as clearly demonstrated through work on masculinity, queerness and affect.

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Tauber, E., Zinn, D.L. (2021). The Graphy in Ethnography: Reconsidering the Gender of and in the Genre. In: Tauber, E., Zinn, D.L. (eds) Gender and Genre in Ethnographic Writing. Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71726-1_2

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