Lesbian-Feminist Gender Conceptions: Separatism in Christchurch, New Zealand

Abstract

National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant BNS 781063), the Graduate School of Cornell University, and the University's Center for International Studies provided fellowship support for this project. I would like to thank Ruth Borker, Martha Gearhart, Daniel Maltz, Kathryn March, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article. All names of persons, organizations, and places (except Christchurch) have been changed to protect the privacy of those who worked with me. 1. On the former, see Michelle Z. Rosaldo, Culture and Society: A Theoretical Overview, in Woman, Culture and ed. M. Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 17-42, and The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-cultural Understanding, Signs: Journal of in Culture and Society 5, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 389-417; Sherry B. Ortner, to Male as Nature Is to Culture? in Rosaldo and Lamphere, eds., pp. 67-87; and Nancy Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). On the latter, see Susan Carol Rogers, Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance: A Model of Female/Male Interaction in Peasant Society, American Ethnologist 2, no. 4 (November 1975): 727-56; Rayna R. Reiter, Men and in the South of France: and Private Domains, in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 252-82; Cynthia Nelson, Public and Private Politics: in the Middle Eastern World, American Ethnologist 1, no. 3 (August 1974): 551-63; and Susan Harding, Women and Words in a Spanish Village, in Reiter, ed., pp. 283-308. 2. Naomi Quinn, Anthropological Studies on Women's Status, Annual Reviews of Anthropology 6 (1977): 181-225; Susan Carol Rogers, Woman's Place: A Critical Review of