ABSTRACT
One purpose of theoretical critique is to rearticulate norms, and to shift positions, to create new forms of relationality and positionality. This both Marilyn Strathern and queer theorists have done with elan. Strathern once famously claimed that there was no such thing as society. Analogy and metaphor – and their internal workings – are Strathernian devices, since what her own thinking shares with the Melanesian context in which it developed is an insistence on the fact that both are acts, operations on the world. Strathern from her own starting point makes a similar kind of claim: ‘Certainty itself appears partial, information intermittent. Analogies, as Strathern argues, are constructions or reference points that create a revelation, they make things appear in the imagination. Strathern’s interest in the post-plural reprises a world where parts and wholes have no purchase, and where the severance of one form of relationship founds a further relationship.
