ABSTRACT
This chapter invokes some threads in Strathern’s thinking to reframe some of the key questions that animate trans and queer studies today: How did gender, as a category, become a productive threshold capable of attuning abstract sensibilities towards sets of relations and associations not hitherto understood to be attuned? The chapter reviews Strathern’s engagement with gender as a heuristic that enables thinking with relations across different types of environments. As gender became normalised as a key analytic in anthropological analysis, however, it opened up a way of thinking through and across natural categories that ultimately challenged its own existence. This chapter reflects on how, despite differences in context, Strathern’s thinking around natural categories is particularly relevant to think through trans embodiment and what trans studies after gender might look like.
