Kinship Between Judith Butler and Anthropology? A Review Essay

This essay critically evaluates Judith Butler’s recent writings on kinship. this work, Butler challenges the universalist assumptions of psychoanalysis, hoping lay the analytical groundwork for imagining new forms of familial relationship. examines the way that anthropology and psychoanalysis have constructed incest taboo as necessitating heteronormative forms of kinship. Butler’s critique kinship, which draws on her theories of subjection, belies her own attachment to vision of social life occupied primarily by normative institutions, in particular the . I suggest that new forms of kinship must be understood on their own terms, or not they are accorded legitimacy in law or accepted by psychoanalysis. ’s ethnographic practice can emendate an account of subjection and that obsessively looks to institutions and norms even as it criticizes them.