The (im)possibilities of transgression, or, reflections on the awkward relation between Strathern and queer politics

Marilyn Strathern’s body of work is here analysed in its ‘partial connections’ to queer thinking, from an inescapably political dimension. The chapter engages in a work of reassemblage, making Strathern’s reflections compatible with those of Judith Butler and therefore also pointing to, and working through, their incomparabilities and limits. It is an exercise in cyborg-making, which draws on Strathern’s engagement with the work of Donna Haraway, operated by assembling two of Strathern’s terrains of inquiry in dialogue to queer thinking: institutional and disciplinary practices, on the one hand, and the awkward relations between feminist/Marxist theories and anthropological description, on the other. Here, issues of transgression and its aporias, and the necessarily relational character of identification, are interrogated for how they can guide the development of an insurgent mode of knowledge production which is founded on risk, vulnerability and the conscious search for a future that is already present in abject form. This, it is argued, cannot but mean dealing with politics in the ruins of university disciplines and institutions.