ABSTRACT
In this chapter the case is made for relational artifice in method. This is achieved through an extension of the consideration of the limitations of categorial thinking for social research in the previous chapters. Using gender as a central example, we consider the role that categorial thinking plays in the habituation of everyday life and the symbolic violence that can result from the containments it suggests. Gender essentialisms are interrogated through some of the tacit diagrams that can be seen to be at play within both everyday and academic thinking about gender and identity, some of these are reconstructed to make them explicit. The difficulty of escaping these diagrams is emphasised, as well as their instabilities. There are some useful academic diagrams of gender that, it is argued, are based on relational principles. These are used to show that, from a methodological perspective, a distinction should be made between the productivity of binary oppositions and the limitations of ontologised dualisms. The seductions of the latter are presented as the ultimate threat to research: it is argued that they demand an ethics of rupture to counter their pull.
