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Gender and Sexuality: An Anthropological Approach
2017
1.Introduction 2. Ethnography and the Sexual Life of the Primitive 3. The Cold War and Second-Wave Feminism 4. Labor and Love: Marxism in Anthropology of Gender 5. Coloring Sex: Voices of “difference” 6. Looking At The Powerful: The Subaltern Voice 7. Identity Politics and the Emergence of the Queer Movement 8. Post-structuralism in Anthropology of Science and Feminism (1990’s) 9. Anthropology of Gender at the Present 10. A problem of Theory 11. A Political Problem: Reconstructing Racial Gender 12. Conclusion Glossary Annotated Bibliography Additional Bibliography Biographical Sketch
Chapter 10: Gender and Sexuality, 2023 updated version
Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition (Revised 2023) , 2023
Anthropologists are fond of pointing out that much of what we take for granted as “natural” in our lives is actually cultural—it is not grounded in nature or in biology but invented by humans. Because culture is invented, it takes different forms in different places and changes over time. Living in the twenty-first century, we have witnessed how rapidly and dramatically culture can change, from ways of communicating to the emergence of same-sex marriage. Similarly, many of us live in culturally diverse settings and experience how varied human cultural inventions can be. We readily accept that clothing, language, and music are cultural—invented, created, and alterable—but often find it difficult to accept that gender and sexuality are not natural but deeply embedded in culture. We struggle with the idea that the division of humans into two and only two categories, “male” and “female,” is not universal. How can male and female be cultural concepts that take different forms and have different meanings cross-culturally? This chapter, newly revised for 2023, addresses these questions as it explores the anthropology of gender and sexuality. {See https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/gender-and-sexuality/ for the online version, or download the chapter here.}
Anthropology of Gender & Sexuality
The cultural and biological categories of sex, gender, and sexuality shape our lives in profound and intimate ways, defining how we know and inhabit our bodies, how we relate to and interact with other people in our societies, even how we understand what it means to be human. Yet although all cultures studied by anthropologists distinguish between male and female and organize social relationships and symbolic systems in terms of gender and sexuality, no two societies make these distinctions in quite the same way. Furthermore, gendered and sexual norms and practices within a single culture or society are not static conceptions but rather exist in a constant state of flux, often related to or reflecting larger processes of cultural and social change and transformation. This course will introduce students to different ways of experiencing, practicing, imagining, and organizing gender and sexuality in a variety of social and cultural contexts, including Melanesia, Africa, the Middle East, and North America. Evaluating how social scientific theories and understandings of gender and sexuality have changed during the twentieth century, we will view gender and sexuality not merely as “natural” or inherent traits but instead as complex and contested fields of expression and representation that are bound up in broader relations of power including notions of race, ethnicity, religion, and class. Throughout the course we will be exploring “other” cultures and societies as a way of better understanding and critiquing “our” own.
Theory, Culture & Society, 1998
This article is intended as a critique of recent theorizations of sexuality and desire, which have led performative theorists to contend that gender is an effect of discourse, and sex an effect of gender. It results from informal discussions between the three authors on the mechanisms through which sexuality gets objectified in modernity. The ideas of influential Western thinkers (in particular Georges Bataille) are confronted with field data on sexuality - as lived and imagined - that the authors have been gathering in Amazonian societies, Trinidad, and on the Internet. Ethnographic data and Western theories about the nature of eroticism are used to argue that the utopian definition of sexuality as sexual desire and will to identity is too divorced from the mundane - love, domesticity and reproduction in a broad sense - and based on a too limited sphere of social experience. Consequently, to apply this definition to how and why humans engage in sexual activity leads to erroneous ge...
The myth of the heterosexual: Anthropology and sexuality for classicists
Arethusa, 2001
Parker, Holt N. - The myth of the heterosexual : anthropology and sexuality for classicists. Arethusa 2001 34 (3) : 313-362. • The system of sexual classification shared by the ancient Greeks and Romans divided acts and people on the axis of active versus passive. The anthropological concepts of « emic » and « etic » may help clarify our thinking. The terms « sex » and « gender » also deserve scrutiny.
SUMMARY Dialectics of Sexual Difference
This book introduces the philosophy of Luce Irigaray (1930) and sketches her position within the philosophical tradition. Luce Irigaray is a representative of the feminist critique of philosophy from the seventies and eighties. Her attention to the examination of the gender neutrality of philosophy is special for it encompasses critique on a metaphysical level. She not only questions the structures of philosophical discourse, but carefully reconstructs them, thereby developing an alternative, namely a philosophy of sexual difference. In this book I investigate Irigaray's strategy of analyzing the masculine philosophical tradition. The alliance in the eighties between poststructuralism and feminism, along with criticism within feminism of the notion of a female subject, forms the background for interpreting Irigaray's work. Because Irigaray aims at developing possibilities for female subjectivity (the early works) and gendered identity for both sexes (the later works) conflict with the poststructuralist and feminist tradition seems inevitable. The goals of her project raise questions concenring Irigaray's often supposed poststrycturalism and pave the way for my interpretation of her philosophical position. investigates Irigaray's strategy of analyzing the masculine philosophical tradition, namely mimesis, and presents an overview over her entire project. It concentrates on her later works, in which she develops a dialectics of sexual difference.