Cultures and Sexualities

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.

2024

In this undergraduate seminar, we will meet once a week for three hours to learn about how anthropologists have studied sex, gender, and sexuality across cultural contexts. We will attend to the varied ways that culture shapes ideas and experiences of bodies, pleasure, illness, morality, family, reproduction, and economy, among others. Our intellectual itinerary will be guided by three questions: (1) How is that seemingly most “natural” aspect of humanity—sexuality—culturally structured and personally experienced in such different ways across time and space? (2) What do diverse constructions of gender, sexuality, and identity tell us about the cultures that produce them? (3) What does thinking about sexuality at the scale of the local and the global help us understand more broadly about politics, justice, and community? To answer these questions, we will draw on scholarship in anthropology and related fields. In the first part of the course, we will explore the ways anthropologists have analyzed sexual and gendered differences from the 1920s to today. Our aim is to understand how cross-cultural differences (including culture, nation, and race) both create and destabilize social categories, like “gay,” “homosexual,” “queer,” “trans,” and “heterosexual.” The second half of the course will help students develop and complete a final research project. Students will write short critical responses to our readings, lead group presentations in-class, and complete a final project that analyzes a contemporary phenomenon using anthropological theories and methods. By the end of this course, students will gain knowledge and tools that will enable them to critically examine gender, sex, and sexuality and situate them within historical and global contexts.

2007

us with the opportunity to continue some of the debates initiated by Patricia MacFadden, Charmaine Pereira and Sylvia Tamale in an earlier issue (see Feminist Africa 2). In keeping with Feminist Africa's intellectual development agenda, the present issue also provides a platform for new research carried out by leading African feminist thinkers. The three feature articles present thoughtprovoking material drawn from the Mapping Sexualities Research Project. This is possibly the first project in the transnational field of sexuality research to have been carried out by African researchers rooted in feminist praxis. Through this new knowledge, we provide ourselves with the opportunity to deepen and further inform the ongoing debates and struggles around various aspects of sexuality. Much of the literature available on the global market addresses African sexuality by proxy – in terms of grand theorisations of race and imperialism, colonial histories of regulation and population contr...

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

Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Ed., 2020

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 the natural world or in biology but invented by humans. 2 Because culture is invented, it takes different forms in different places and changes over time in those places. 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.

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.}

Womens Studies International Forum, 1991

Synopsis-This article describes the content, approach, and preliminary results of an anthropology course on issues in sexuality and gender which incorporates contemporary global feminist concerns, examining them from cross-cultural perspectives and highlighting Third World issues as it considers the ways that women's experiences are shaped by social, economic, and political contexts. The course deals with the themes of patriarchy, incest and sexual abuse, female infanticide and the physical and mental abuse of women, gender identity and sexual orientation, the social control of women's sexuality, rape and other forms of sexual terrorism, sexual tourism and prostitution, pornography as a feminist issue, and women's reproductive rights. Its central objective is to help students gain insight into the international nature of these social problems in which human sexuality and gender play a role.

Cambridge University Press, 2020

Introduction The most significant recent development, a break with the past, in the study of sexual cultures has to do with the term ‘culture’ itself: that we think of sexuality (and sexualities) as having ‘cultures’. Historically, both in academic and popular thinking, the term ‘sexuality’ most frequently elicited responses that have to do with biology. That is, whether as an area of study or as a set of ideas people have about their intimate lives, sexuality was too easily detached from the social contexts where it belongs and presented as something of itself. There is a strong tendency to view our sexual lives as dictated by their own peculiar rules that ( a ) are biologically derived, ( b ) have been historically stable (that is, the same since the ‘dawn of time’), ( c ) are ‘essentially’ about our ‘private’ lives, and ( d ) are ‘basically’ the same across different cultures. Ironically, while, on the one hand, we think of sexuality as a world-untoitself – such that it is regard...

2016

The academic field of gender and sexuality studies is an interdisciplinary field of scholarly inquiry that explores and interrogates the operations of gender and sexual diversity across all realms of life. Gender and sexuality studies do not stop at what most people experience as their "natural" identities, but rather proceed by questioning precisely what appears to be natural, given, and self-evident about ourselves-in the world at large, within the various collective structures and institutions that constitute societies (family, school, neighborhood, city, state, nation, and so on), in our private and personal lives, and in our sense of identity and embodiment. Described as such, the reach of gender and sexuality studies appears limitless. Since gender and sexual diversity, in intersection with other categories of difference (e.g., race, class, ethnicity, able-bodiedness), pervade almost every aspect of life; there is no academic discipline that has nothing to say about gender and sexuality, even if some realms of study (the humanities, the social sciences) have traditionally played a more dominant role in the development of this interdisciplinary field. At the same time, gender and sexuality studies, even if they play out differently over time and cross-culturally, know no regional boundaries. This means that the field of gender and sexuality studies today is truly global in its outlook. This has not always been the case: as in so many other respects, the so-called West (Western Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia) has dominated, and to some extent still does, dominate the realms of knowledge and modes of knowing that are generated within academia, including university-based gender and sexuality studies. The goal we set for the Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies was to reflect the wide range of topics, debates, and approaches to this exciting interdisciplinary, and increasingly, global field, while yet being forced to work with the unequal power relations that have historically marked the relations between "the West" and "the rest." While the 719 entries included in this encyclopedia may not be able to cover the entire field of gender and sexuality studies as it continues to develop in virtually all parts of the world, we hope we have captured both its complexity and its international scope. One way in which we have sought to achieve the latter is by highlighting the contributions of scholars in gender and sexuality studies in different parts of the world. With 621 lead authors and 16 advisory and associate editors from 28 different countries, the encyclopedia reaches beyond national boundaries to comprehend theoretical questions, critical debates, and key terms that are relevant to a variety of scholars in the field across the globe-albeit often in different ways and to different effects. Jointly, the five volumes make clear how differences among and between genders and diverse sexualities are socially constructed and embedded in structures of power and of discourses that reproduce inequalities and provide the basis for distinct forms of local resistance, social movements, and political activism. The volumes, taken as a whole, further testify to the fact that the field of gender and sexuality studies has a long history that predates many twentieth-century social movements, feminist

Queer Archives By the nineteenth century a vast array of ethnographies such as racialization, class, sexuality, gender and criminology had become the cornerstone to the social sciences. The body became a site of social regulation, and the notion of truth and its manifestations on the body became culturally realized through systemic ideologies. The social body was the triumph of Bourgeois order, where the political economy of Industrialism, Capitalism and Imperialism were entwined with the individual and the state, and where sexual conduct was converted to economic and political behavior. The category of homosexuality was a device meant to control and regulate. Foucaultian analysis asserts that nineteenth century prohibitions established far reaching oppressive sexual discourses, however, through systems set out to control sexuality - homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf (Foucault 1980). The queer archive provides a site of memory that historically has been entrenched in erasure, inscribing both the archives and their users with political power. Without knowledge of the past, what can we expect of future queer subjectivities?