Anthropology of the Sister

Classical anthropological theory placed the muted sister at its core, in a theory of kinship originating in the traffic of women among men. Political theory placed the invisible sister at its core by coding democracy as fraternity. Psychoanalytic theory placed the forbidden sister at its core with the theory of incest taboo. Tragic theory placed the self-effacing sister at its core in the Sophoclean figures of Antigone and Ismene. Popular (Hollywood) cinematic production placed the absent sister at its core, with its relentless circulation of narratives in which a ‘band of brothers’ finds its moral purpose in the rescue of someone else’s sister. And yet, and within these traditions, the sister arose in the interstices as a phantasmatic figure of extraterritorial and insurrectionary possibility. If feminisms have, on occasion, attempted to both mobilize and contain this possibility in a discourse of sisterhood, much more remains to be thought. This course explores the figure of the sister in its muted, invisible, forbidden, self-effacing and absented forms—and moves to consider the radical possibilities that emerged therefrom in Social and Political Theory, Literary Fiction, Drama and Cinema.