Denaturalizzare il sesso. Nicole-Claude Mathieu e l’analisi antropologica delle classi di sesso

This essay presents some of the main contributions of Nicole-Claude Mathieu’s work to anthropology and feminist theory. The first section is devoted to framing Mathieu’s production within French materialist feminism. The ethnologist repeatedly recalls how the forms of oppression experienced by women as a minority group in social relations of sex and the struggles that ensue underlie the epistemological transformations that invest disciplinary knowledge from a feminist perspective. Next, the article addresses the three different ways of conceptualising the relationship between sex and gender and the introduction of the category of social sex to denaturalize sex, understood as a political category. Its analysis is thus compared with some of the contributions of decolonial feminism regarding the category of gender. Just as in her study of the category of sex, we also find in the analysis of androcentrism in anthropology her ability to question the dominant frameworks of ethnological thought. In particular, Mathieu delves into the relationship between androcentrism, ethnocentrism, and naturalism to understand not only how they operate distortions in the production of ethnographic and ethnological knowledge, but also how they define the framework within which to define the relationship between Western “us” and non-Western “others” in reference to social relations of sex.