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Chapter Summary
This chapter reviews how anthropological approaches to sex, gender and sexuality have changed over time, as feminist perspectives have served to challenge traditional male-centred interpretations, carrying out new fieldwork in ‘classic’ communities and reinterpreting long-held views of human gender and social roles. This work has also served to pull out the work of understanding women and men’s roles, including the undermining effect of patriarchal stereotypes on lived reality of gender, as well as the impact of intersectionality that weaves gender, social and racial oppression together in the structure of inequality.
To counteract these approaches, anthropologists study gender performativity, to better understand how people express who they are, and how they incorporate social normative modes into their daily lives. By studying the relations between sex, gender, and sexuality, anthropologists have revealed the great diversity in human sexuality and gender expression, and that categories are not unambiguous, but rather a reflection of deeper cultural assumptions and ways of knowing. Putting these issues into the centre stage of fieldwork practice promises to reveal better ways of understanding the impacts of globalization, religion and political influence on equity and equality.
Finally, the work of anthropology in science, technology and medicine, has drawn attention to how humans are dependent on technology for health and reproduction, but that these alone will not explain conceptions of humanity, gender or identity. Moving beyond simple binary conceptions of sexuality shows the greater variability that exists world-wide and that approaches to assisting communities must take that diversity and local forms of knowing into account to avoid perpetuating further violence.
Learning Objectives
In this chapter, the student should learn to do the following:
- understand the ways in which feminist thought has shaped how we understand sex, gender and sexuality;
- understand how intersectionality is a critical perspective in developing equity in development and social practice;
- discuss how sexual practices vary cross-culturally and how they change over time;
- explore the spaces for individual agency in human conceptions of identity and redefine what it means to be a person in a society.