Interview with Barbara Voss Gender Issues (original) (raw)
Related papers
Voss, B. L. 2008. Sexuality studies in archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 37(1):317-336.
Does sexuality have a past? A growing body of archaeological research on sexuality demonstrates that the sexual politics of the past were as richly varied and complex as those of the present. Furthermore, investigations of past sexualities have much to say about conventional archaeological topics such as state formation, subsistence and settlement systems, and the emergence and elaboration of symbolic systems, and they have made methodological and theoretical contributions to the archaeology of social identities and visual representations. To date, most research has clustered into five groupings: reproduction management, sexual representations, sexual identities, prostitution, and the sexual politics of institutions. The most intriguing new development is the growing application of queer theory as an archaeological methodology for investigating nonsexual as well as sexual matters. In particular, queer theory provides a methodological bridge between archaeological research on sexuality and research on other aspects of social identity.
The archaeology of sex and gender
The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology, ed. B. Cunliffe, C. Gosden and R. Joyce, OUP, 1029-47, 2009
Over the past twenty years, the themes of sex and gender have emerged as central concerns to archaeology internationally. The interrogation of gendered concepts and terminology began with the feminist critique of archaeology in the 1980s, and has continued in the more pluralistic archaeologies of gender that have characterized the past decade. Increasingly, archaeological considerations of gender address intersections with other aspects of social identity, such as age, class, sexuality and ethnicity, or are integrated in studies of embodiment. The key definitions and positions of earlier feminist archaeology have been challenged and reshaped, as the reflexive tradition of feminist research regularly remakes itself. Running in parallel with the development of gender archaeology, this period has also seen more critical attention to the definition of sex. The fields of bioarchaeology and burial archaeology have been concerned with achieving more rigorous identifications of sex in ancient human remains, while the study of human evolution has addressed the role of sexual selection in the origins of gendered behaviour.
Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, 2024
Tracking back to the eighteenth century, antiquarians cultivated an interest in the materiality of sexuality, though one that bordered on fetishization, a focus on objects, images, and spaces presumed erotic or pornographic in function. Finds at Pompeii and Herculaneum (Italy)—mosaics, frescoes, vases, sculptures, bronze artifacts—hinted at culturally distinctive takes on pleasure, procreation, power, and same-sex and inter-species relations. But, come the nineteenth century, religious moralizing deemed such material culture decadent, repugnant, and shocking. Pots from Peru (Chimu, Moche, and Recuay cultures) with sexually explicit depictions garnered similar reactions. “Erotica” were then relegated to secret cabinets or rooms with restricted access...
Declaration on Behalf of an Archaeology of Sexe
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 2014
This article is an attempt to demonstrate the basic weakness of gender as a theoretical concept when studying prehistoric embodiment. 'Gender 'is theoretically linked to 'sex', known as the 'sex-gender system'. The study of past genders, in the sense of prehistoric normative roles and symbols, has decreased in interest among archaeologists, in favor of studying sex, i.e., sexual practice and orientation. This switch to sex is part of archaeologists' endeavors to understand prehistoric bodily subjects. I will here recapitulate on the concept of gender and its serious limitations. I will furthermore try to shed light on how the turn to sex involves an encounter with almost exactly the same fallacies as did the focus on gender. As an alternative for the future, I suggest social identity and embodiment be studied under the theoretical label of 'sexe'.
Reconsideration of some previous archaeological interpretations of gender may offer much more variability and freedom to our current understanding of gender identity. The perception of gender in archaeological interpretations commonly reflects our current social reality. In our Christian Western worldview, the traditional gender categories of men and women are based on biology and presume the primacy of the reproduction in human societies. Alternative social roles were judged as deviations by the biased majority. The extremely difficult position of homosexuals in 20th Century Western society was caused mainly by the lack of an appropriate and commonly recognised gender category. No surprisingly, the concept of transsexualism developed in cultures that only recognized and valued two gender categories based on biological sex while the tribes in North America and Siberia had gender categories ready for such cases. In Western society, Christian norms instigated a social neglect of homosexuals mainly due to the absence of appropriate gender categories. As archaeologists, we should change our approach to the interpretation of past societies because our current gender categories do not always correspond to those of a former reality.
Anthropology/Women's and Gender Studies 349: Archaeology of Gender
This course is a survey of the archaeology of gender; that is how cultural norms, ideals, rules, and expectations about gender shaped personal identity, experience, and relationships in the past. People in the past and present configure gender roles and relations in a multitude of ways, which has led to great diversity in cultures around the world and throughout time. Students will be introduced to the development of the archaeology of gender such as the theories and methods applied to studies of gender in the past. In this course we will also address thematic topics including gender performance, masculinity, femininity, and non-binary identities, gendered labor, status and power, as well as sexuality and reproduction.