AUTHOR PREPRINT. For final text and citation purposes, refer to SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory (Eds. Evans et al) Sage, 2014. 1 Chapter 2 Natural others? On nature, culture and knowledge Astrida Neimanis What is the relation between nature and culture? How does the political grammar of these terms inform the concerns of feminist theory – namely sexual difference, gender oppression and its connections with racism, heteronormativity, coloniality and other marginalizations? And how might the nature/culture relation be relevant for feminist knowledge projects? Sherry Ortner’s essay ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’ (1974) benchmarks a lively and ongoing debate within anthropological scholarship about the limits of an affirmative answer to her question (for example, MacCormack and Strathern, 1980; Moore, 1994; Franklin, 2003). Beyond serving as a touchstone for feminist anthropology, the nature/culture debate has also proliferated throughout many strands and schools of feminist thought, arguably constituting a foundational question for feminism more generally. Charting ‘the’ genealogy of the nature/culture question within feminism would be impossible: there are many paths along which to trace this debate, and any narrative of progress would also be one of gathering, subversion, repetition, interruption and anachronism (see Colebrook, 2009; Hemmings, 2011; Bianchi, 2012; Chidgey, 2012). No linear tale will do. The objective of this chapter is instead to interrogate how ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ have been interpreted within feminist theory – as an innate givenness, as a naturalization of what is acceptable, but also as the ecological (and