Chapter 10 Summary

Introduction

During Liberia’s civil war (1990s), Western journalists were shocked to see male rebel soldiers proudly dressed in women’s wigs and bras. This conflicted with their sense of masculinity and warfare, so they just ignored it or dismissed it as the inexplicable expression of an African mentality.
From the soldiers’ perspective, their clothing served to contrast them from government soldiers, symbolized their ability to transcend and incorporate male and female power, and would taunt and frighten their opponents. As the war proceeded, rebel soldiers began to convey these same messages with hypermasculine Rambo-inspired outfits.
This Liberian example vividly illustrates the variability of gender symbols and norms and how flexible they can be, especially in periods of social and political upheaval.
This chapter focuses on the question, How do relations of gender and sex shape peoples’ lives? To address this focal question, the chapter is organized around the following problems:

How and why do males and females differ?
Why is there inequality between men and women?
What does it mean to be neither male nor female?
Is human sexuality just a matter of being “straight” or “queer”?

Gender, sex, and sexuality are core features of identity in contemporary Western culture. But gender—what it means to be a man, woman, or other identity—is as artificially constructed as any other aspect of culture. As explored in this chapter, many cultures do not even share our basic male/female, man/woman, and straight/queer dichotomies.

How and why do males and females differ?

To see how thoroughly American culture has naturalized gender, one need look no further than the clothing sections of most stores. The message is clear: boys are adventuresome, active, and aggressive, while girls are nurturing, domestic, and sentimental. Why do we construct gender along these lines?
One reason is the assumption that gender is equivalent to sex: the reproductive forms and functions of the body. From this perspective, people are “the way they are” because of biological hardwiring.

Some cross-cultural generalizations can be made: boys tend to engage in more rough-and-tumble play, while girls tend to be more engaged in infant contact and care. Women tend toward superior verbal skills, while men tend toward superior visual spatial skills. But these are average tendencies; our mistake is condensing these data into sensational headlines like “men have bad verbal skills.”
Anthropologists have historically distinguished between biology (sex) and culturally constructed ideas about biology with the term “gender,” which typically refers to cultural expectations of how males and females should behave.
For example, the association of pink with girls and blue with boys is an aspect of gender, and, in fact, the association was reversed a century ago.
Since the 1930s, anthropologists have made a distinction between sex and gender, but the distinction is muddied. The role of biology is most discernible among very young children. As children get older, cultural influences on behavior become much stronger and it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to isolate biological influences on what it means to be male or female.
Anthropologists are also moving away from assigning all traits to either sex or gender and toward more sophisticated biocultural understandings. This includes changing terminology like gender/sex systems: the ideas and social patterns a society uses to organize males, females, and those who do not fit either category.
Anthropologists are still interested in gender but now define it as complex and fluid intersections between biological sex, internal senses of self, outward expressions of identity, and cultural expectations about how to perform that identity in culturally appropriate ways. In this view, gender is quite fluid.

When compared to other primates, humans are moderately sexually dimorphic: a characteristic of a species, in which males and females have different sexual forms.

Further, males have testes, a penis, and various internal structures and hormones that support the delivery of urine and semen. Secondary effects of these hormones include deep voices, facial hair, and in some cases, pattern baldness.
Females have ovaries, hormones, and an internal structure such as fallopian tubes that support the movement of ova, pregnancy, and fetal development and whose secondary effects include breast development and a high voice.
Although sex is usually presented as a male/female dichotomy, there is a continuum of variation within and between these two categories. As many as 1.7 percent of live births in the United States may be intersex: individuals who exhibit sexual organs and functions somewhere between male and female elements, often including elements of both.
Different societies approach intersex individuals differently—some more accepting than others. European and North American societies have conventionally had rigid sex boundaries, considering intersex a disorder requiring surgical correction. Those “corrections” are constructed on the basis of cultural ideas about what appropriate genitalia should look like.
Sex-assignment surgeries are intended to help individuals “fit in” but sometimes do more harm than good, especially when infants grow up and do not associate with the sex that was chosen for them at birth.

What role do hormones play in behavior? Hormones are chemicals our bodies secrete to regulate many bodily functions, including those considered male or female functions. But there is too much emphasis on testosterone as a “male” hormone and estrogen and progesterone as “female” hormones.

Testosterone does play a larger role in male bodily function and estrogen, a larger role in female bodily function. But both males and females produce both of these hormones in variable quantities because they are not linked solely to sexual functions.
Behavioral characteristics like aggression, dominance, and violence are psychologically complicated and expressed in specific cultural contexts. In other words, testosterone does not cause generalized aggression in males (or females for that matter).
Everyone has the biological potential for aggression or any other psychological state. For example, to understand when, why, and how !Kung San men or women express aggression, we have to consider not just biological factors influencing behavior but also the immediate social causes of conflict, the availability of weapons, culturally approved expressions of hostility, and the role of the state and other political–economic factors in driving social conflict.

Blanket statements like “men are aggressive” or “women are nurturing” fail to account for our true complexity.

Why Is There Inequality Between Men and Women?

Men hold most leadership roles in most societies around the globe. There are some exceptions, mostly in small hunter–gatherer societies.
In the Victorian era, anthropologists began to question whether all societies treated women as unequally as Euro-American societies did. But the question never got very far until Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex spurred a new wave of feminist anthropology in 1949.

Most feminist anthropologists agreed that cultural ideologies and social relations played a greater role in gender inequality than biological differences. Beyond that, the 1970s and 1980s saw an ongoing debate over the universality and causes of inequality.
Some argued that inequality was universal owing to some basic associations: women with nature and the domestic sphere, men with culture and the public sphere.
Others argued that inequality was not so fundamental but a result of specific historical processes like capitalism and colonialism.
“Men studying other men” to make generalizations about any society has some pretty obvious limitations. The “anthropology of women” pushed the discipline to focus ethnographic attention on women’s experiences and perspectives.

The debate over the roots of gender inequality has never been completely resolved and even added new dimensions as feminist anthropologists were accused of ethnocentrism; critics argued that using Western models of female inequality to understand gender/sex relations in other cultures was inappropriate.

Still others argued the necessity of studying dynamics between women and men (instead of just women) to understand gender inequality not as a thing but as a process. As discussed in Chapter 4, the everyday use of language can reveal the gender norms and expectations of a culture.

Anthropologists have also sought to move beyond studying males and females to studying how gender/sex inequalities are reproduced. This has generated anthropological interest in cultural ideals of masculinity: the ideas and practices of manhood. Importantly, ideas of masculinity do not inherently promote sexism or male dominance.

That masculinity is something to be attained is pervasive in many cultures. The notion that women are “born” (nature) and men are “created” (culture) helps explain the importance of male initiation rites in so many societies.
The relationship between masculinity and male dominance changes through time. For example, Matthew Gutmann’s (1996) research in Mexico City showed Mexican masculinity to be more dynamic than stereotypes of inflexible, domineering machos suggest. Specific factors include more women work outside the home for money, boys and girls have equal status in schools, and the global feminist movement.

What Does It Mean to Be Neither Male Nor Female?

In some societies, individuals live their lives as neither male nor female without social stigma and, in some cases, it is even a prestigious status. Thus, anthropologists study the following:

Gender variance: expressions of sex and gender that diverge from the male and female norms that dominate in most societies.
Third genders: situation found in many societies that acknowledges three or more categories of gender/sex.
Sexual preferences intersect in complex ways with gender variance. In other words, gender variance does not necessarily imply variation in sexuality: sexual preferences, desires, and practices.
The dynamism of gender variance can be illustrated with three examples: the Navajo, India, and the contemporary urban United States.

In Navajo society, nádleehé individuals combine male and female roles and characteristics and are highly respected, participating in religious ceremonies and acting as spiritual healers and go-betweens in arranging marriages and mediating conflicts. Nádleehé are still a part of Navajo society, but many young Navajos are beginning to be labeled “gay” or “lesbian,” adopting Western forms of identification in place of traditional Navajo genders.
In India, hijras are defined as males who are sexually impotent, either because they were born intersex or because they were castrated. They wear traditionally female clothes, have women’s occupations, and behave like women in an exaggerated, comic, and burlesque fashion. The primary social role of hijras is to provide blessings when a boy is born or, at a wedding, to bless the couple’s fertility. Since the days of British colonialism, there have been attempts to outlaw hijras, but the Indian gender/sex system still considers the combination of male and female as valid and meaningful.
In the 1990s, political activists in the United States began pressuring government and society to formally recognize the rights of gender variants in this country, namely, transgender (or simply “trans”) people: someone to whom society assigns one gender who does not perform as that gender but has taken either permanent or temporary steps to identify as another gender. “Trans” is a general term describing transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, drag kings, and intersex—many of the people who occupy this category do not necessarily identify themselves as “transgender.”

See “Thinking Like an Anthropologist: Anthropological Perspectives on American (Non)Acceptance of Trans People”

Is Human Sexuality Just a Matter of Being Straight or Queer?

Today, anthropologists emphasize that human sexuality is not a straight/queer dichotomy. Rather, individual sexuality is flexible, occurring along a continuum. They reject the notion that sexuality is completely genetically determined or just a matter of personal preference or choice. Sexuality has biological and psychological dimensions, but it is also learned, patterned, and shaped by the cultural context in which one lives.
Cultural anthropologists have always had an interest in same-sex sexuality as it occurs in many different societies. In the 1960s and 1970s, the gay rights movement and openly gay and lesbian celebrities motivated sustained scholarly attention to this expression of human sexuality.

A difficulty faced by anthropologists studying same-sex sexuality is adequately naming what they are studying.
Most North Americans view sexuality as a fixed, either/or attribute of personal identity. In some cultures, same-sex behaviors exist side by side with heterosexual behaviors, suggesting that our assumptions about sexuality are not universally applicable.
For example, Gilbert Herdt (1981) documented “ritualized homosexuality” among the Sambia people. One problem with his phrasing is that it highlights the “sexual pleasure” aspect of the act when its emic purpose is more tied to symbolically developing masculine strength.
In countries like Mexico, Nicaragua, and Brazil, not all men who practice same-sex acts are perceived as “homosexual.” In these contexts, passivity and activity are critical distinctions: a man who penetrates another man would not consider himself—or be considered by others—as homosexual, yet the man being penetrated would be considered homosexual.
Locally variable terms to describe sexuality are more than an academic concern. For example, HIV/AIDS education campaigns in Latin America failed to account for the previously noted active/passive distinction. As a result, many men who did not self-identify as “homosexual” (but were identified as homosexual by foreign medical agencies) did not take the necessary precautions to prevent the spread of HIV.

Some of the most divisive political issues in the United States (abortion, gays in the military, same-sex marriage, sex education) involve questions over whether and how the government should control the sexuality of its citizens.

China’s “one child policy” has successfully reduced fertility rates and unemployment. But it has also created strict government control over sexuality, including draconian measures like (until 2002, when it was outlawed) forced abortions and sterilizations of women who exceeded their quota or were deemed unfit to reproduce.

Conclusion

All societies make a distinction between male and female, but the actual meanings and roles they assign to each, as well as their abilities to recognize people who do not fit either category, differ.
Matters of sex, gender, and sexuality are not as stable and fixed as we may think they are.