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Feminist Anthropology: Gender & Sexuality
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0:01
This class is about the chapter in González called gender and sexuality,
0:13
but I want to highlight the contributions of feminist anthropology to our understandings of gender and sexuality. I think I told you back a long time ago, maybe chapter one — to not be afraid of feminists. Don't be afraid of feminist anthropology. They did some great things for us, and this is where we'll find out what they did. The other thing I like about this chapter — or I like that we're reading this chapter at the end of
0:45
this unit — is because it takes us back to where we began the unit with chapter seven, the previous chapter, but we read that right after our first essay. So this unit is framed by these two chapters. In part it's because anthropologists — if you remember, but that was a long time ago — anthropologists were very interested in those studies of kinship and relatedness. Remember that person doing the kinship charts, and we had the circles and the triangles, and
1:21
we talked about how those assumptions from Lewis Henry Morgan that there was this ascending line of kinship as well as marriage and that everybody had to do things in a certain way? And we talked about how there was an assumption in some of these late 19th century studies of what we would now call heteronormativity — all the kinship charts were supposed to be either triangles or circles, and triangles and circles were supposed to marry each other and have two children,
1:52
and that should be the way it is. And so there was this assumption that that was the norm that we were going to go out and find in other societies, and if we didn't find that, then that would be an indication that they weren't up to what we wanted them to be — they weren't as civilized as us. Now in the last class and in this chapter we read about Margaret Mead and her work *Sex and Temperament* as well as other things. And Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, obviously they were also
2:32
kind of intruding into a very male-dominated space of academia, and we talked about this as well — even in anthropological circles there was a tendency to prioritize those dashing young males going out there to collect data. So what does Margaret Mead do for us, what's her deal? [A student: "The address."]
3:04
Okay, so she is one of the first to kind of talk about how when you go to different societies — even down river from each other, as we talked about in the last class — people could be very different and have very different expectations about how people should and shouldn't behave. And this could extend to different kinds of gender roles. And so what anthropologists found was that there was what I call a dizzying variety — a
3:35
whole bunch of stuff going on in terms of kinship organizations, marriage relationships, families — all those things that we associate with, or that we think of as set in stone or set by biology or set by heteronormativity, were actually done in all kinds of different ways around the world. And I would say this — I'm putting a few things in quotes because I don't want to apply the term "weird" to whatever we're doing, but the things that some people are like,
4:12
"whoa, what are you doing that for today?" and people get all freaked out about, there's probably something that we can find anthropologically speaking — and we saw some of that in this chapter — that is even stranger, either historically that we've done in our own society or cross-culturally when we look out and we're like, "whoa, what we do is hardly weird at all." So whatever people are getting freaked out about today,
4:37
we can probably look back or look across and see something that is even stranger going on. And actually, what were the anthropologists or the ethnographers — what were they one of the first to think about in terms of our personal feelings about things? [A student: "Yeah."] Yeah, so we have people like Margaret Mead and Benedict doing these things who are condemned by their society and feeling inadequate and "am I doing things that are wrong?"
5:26
and feeling this kind of distress. And as González put it, anthropologists were really some of the first people to say no, it's not necessarily something innately wrong with people — the expectations in your environment may not correspond with what people are doing. And in the 1970s especially, that's where the wave of the more explicitly feminist anthropologists came in and said, wait a second — look back at all those funny things that people were doing
6:01
with kinship and marriage and family. It's not just a curiosity, it's not just something that we study to say "oh, look at the so-and-so over there" — they were actually interested in how these things were linked to ideas about power and social relationships, and how they might tell us different ways in which society could be organized or different possibilities. What were the limits and the possibilities on human organization? How could we learn from
6:35
other societies, and how could we change things in today's world? So the feminist reinterpretation of the anthropological data was hugely important. It perhaps began with people like Mead and Benedict, but they were in some ways also imprisoned by the circumstances of their time.
6:56
So from the 1970s comes — although you could probably see it in Margaret Mead's work, but in this term — the differentiation between sex and gender really comes to the fore out of that feminist movement, where people began to affix two different meanings to these terms.
7:21
What's the difference? What should we think about when we think about sex, and what should we think about when we think about gender? [A student response: "This will help — a few differences including, like, sex pronouns, hormones, reproductive structures, and external, like, genitalia. Gender is just, like,
7:48
a social meaning assigned by cultures. So it turns together — I mean, it can be interpreted as the person's role, like internal, like feelings."] Okay, so we have the biological differences — very well described — the sex differences, hormones, reproductive organs, all genetics, chromosomes, all that stuff, as different from the social meanings and expectations. So you did a good job describing the sort of individual
8:20
feelings and those kinds of things. What else happens there — in terms of gender roles, what other gender roles are coming in here? [A student response:
8:38
"Society on the last signs of sex." — somewhat unclear in audio] Okay, so part of this is — I mean when we talk about gender, part of it is, and we often think about how we are feeling and how we are feeling in relationship to our gender identity. But in terms of how we're thinking about studying this, we have to pay a lot of attention to the expectations and the role expectations that we place upon people when we believe that they have a
9:07
certain biological difference. I was just reading about one of these very depressing things, because it was talking about how student evaluations of female professors tend to go down as the women get older — and they go down, and especially the worst was at age 47. And I was wondering this because my wife is a professor, and like, it's been hard because even though she's gotten more experience,
9:38
the student evaluations tend to go down for older, middle-aged female professors. So these expectations — we may be doing exactly the same thing, but we have these expectations that, "oh, no, women should be talking like this or talking like that, or women shouldn't be criticizing my paper in the same way," so they get more grade complaints, more of these things. So just something to keep in mind — our expectations and role ideas about who should be in what role.
10:10
Now one of the problems that has happened though is that in popular use in the world out there, the term gender is just what people use because they don't want to say sex, because "sex" also has that other meaning of having sex. So they're like, oh wait, when I talk about things like sex, I'm just going to say gender instead. And so a lot of times when people could say or should say sex, they actually say gender. Example:
10:46
you may have seen those gender reveal parties where a cannon goes off and all sorts of pink ribbons fly out and then it lights the forest on fire and everybody dies — don't do these. But also it's interesting these are never called sex reveal parties, but that's actually what they are. All they're doing is saying, hey, we saw something on an ultrasound and now we're going to reveal the biological sex of our — I don't know what stage we're going to be at, maybe about
11:26
20 weeks — so we're going to reveal it. But they should be called sex reveal parties. Probably if people went to those they'd be expecting something quite different, so they call it gender reveal. But the point is it's hard in today's society to use these terms because people have such different expectations. And it made me think about — wow, you know, in some ways I think we have gotten a
11:54
little more, some of you said, more fluid, we're more aware of gender now. But it is also the case that in the last 20 or 30 years, because we have these ultrasounds and things that we can find out what we think the baby is going to be like, then we paint the nursery before the kid is even born, get all the clothes that we're expecting — all this stuff. In the old days you had to do it afterward. I mean in the very old days people didn't even know they had twins sometimes — they'd
12:29
have twins and they'd be like all surprised. Yeah, it's true. But in the new days, these days, you're looking at that and you're like peering around and you're like, "I think I see something — all right, make it blue, paint that nursery blue." So I'm not sure — I suspect that maybe people would not be so
12:52
hung up on gender if we weren't gendering people from like day zero, negative days. But yeah, so that's that's happened.
13:03
In González she talks about this episode — it was an interesting episode where she talks about giving her daughter the choice between two different toys, the dolls and the cars.
13:21
"When my daughter Maya was very little I made sure to provide her with all kinds of toys."
13:28
So [González] comes in and her daughter's playing with the cars instead of playing with the dolls, and she's all happy about that. Thank you. And I guess I wanted to just think about this because I have heard this many times even from people that should know better — they're like, "oh yeah, I gave my kid fire trucks and dolls and look, they went with the fire trucks, so that must mean that there's something innate going on."
13:56
And I'll just say this — by the time you're giving your kids toys to choose from, there's already been so much cultural stuff that they've been thinking about. So whatever you're doing with your little toy choice there, don't pat yourself on the back. And don't be surprised if they choose something that matches up with whatever
14:19
gender you were expecting to have happen, because it's not just you, it's society, it's everything that's going on, and it happens way before people can talk and have all these kinds of things. Now I'm not saying that everything is cultural — I'm not saying you can make somebody into whatever, no way, there's obviously a lot of biological stuff going on and different people are different all over the place. But just be aware that there's a whole lot of stuff in society
14:49
that we're doing before people can ever talk to you about which toy they're going to play with. We also have to remember, what do they do with the toys? So in this example, she says that her daughter was playing with the cars and then her daughter says, "well, this is the daddy car, this is the mama car, and these are the baby cars." And [González] was like, "ah, darn it, I thought you were going to do boy stuff with the cars,
15:15
and turns out you're doing family stuff." And so again here though, I wonder about, you know, what people are doing with the toys. And in this case I am sure that González's daughter probably heard all kinds of discussions about, "all right, who's going to take the kid this time, who's got the child care?" So who knows what kind of car stuff she was playing? That has a big role in this. So don't be surprised when even three-year-olds and two-year-olds and
15:48
zero-year-olds come out with all this funny stuff, because we've loaded it up on them.
15:55
So in this chapter we learned something that is perhaps becoming more apparent to us as we go along — we learn that in many societies, and we also learned this back with Margaret Mead and the "Living Theory" chapter [King chapter 11], that there can certainly be more than simply two social genders. Our ideas of male and female — one of the best places to know about this is on our own continent, where Native Americans
16:24
across the continent in many many different groups had ideas about what were called — and I think this term applies to many places — Two-Spirit people. People that had been born or acquired different — that would fit into kind of a third or fourth gender role. So these were not people who had been necessarily had any sort of biological modification, or they were not necessarily biologically intersex, but they would be biologically
16:59
perhaps one sex but take on the gender role of another, or they might have their own special role in society. So they'd be asked to do special initiations or special spiritual things. And in some ways many of the people who would fit into this category would do what we would say would be a homosexual activity, but it wouldn't necessarily — they wouldn't necessarily identify, as we'll talk about this in a second, as a homosexual. They wouldn't take on a homosexual
17:32
identity because in part it's hard to — you don't have the same identities when you have three or four or five genders going on, right? You don't have that, because what do you do if you're one gender who has sex with someone of a third gender? What kind of sex is that? I don't know. It doesn't fit our categories. There's another very famous example of in India the hijras. In this case oftentimes there are surgical modifications, and so you can read about those.
18:09
They're another pretty famous example. But we could actually look around the world — there was a film on PBS, *Two Spirits*, and it talked about how on every continent, in what they called hundreds of societies, we see different three-plus gender societies — blessed roles for more than two genders or multiple genders in many different societies. So this happens in a lot of places. There are some famous examples, but this is not at all uncommon.
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So it leads us to, I think, one of the main points of the chapter.
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How should we think about binaries? [A student response — speaker continues:] Thank you. Yeah, I think one of the main points of the chapter for me is we should always be careful when we have binaries, because our social binaries often cause us to see the world in ways which the world may not actually be. And so I'm going to leave this as a question, sort of consideration question. We have in this society — we've grown up since about the 1950s at least with a very
19:39
firm social gender binary, and because of that gender binary, often we want to see different sets of biological sex characteristics or our sexuality fit into similar binaries. Now most people, or I mean many people, are realizing that people's biology is actually a lot messier than we once thought. So we read about on page 165 the condition of being intersex,
20:12
which — a sort of true intersex individual is rather rare, about one in every 2,000 people — but there are other conditions like having XXY chromosomes or sort of an extra chromosome or an X, which — people can live out their lives without actually even knowing that they have some kind of anomaly there.
20:39
We used to — and I probably still do this — we just used to try at birth, if someone came out with anomalous genitalia, the doctors would just all huddle and then decide and say, we're going to fix them one way or another and do a surgery.
20:57
The people who are in the intersex community have asked, "hey, you just chill out for a while on the surgical stuff and just let people go for a while." I mean there are definitely conditions in which it's perhaps more obvious than others, but basically the idea is, hey, we don't know — we should be a little careful to simply assign people to the binary about these things. So there are, I believe, more people both in biology, anthropology, sociology,
21:29
thinking about sex beyond this kind of binary. Some people have postulated that sex occurs more on a kind of continuum, that there's a sort of gradual range or a spectrum, and others have said well, it's not exactly a spectrum as much as it is kind of multiple possibilities. Now I've put question marks by all of these because I think that in some ways biologically speaking there is a lot of binariness to sex — there's a lot of people who
22:04
fall into either the male or the female category biologically, but there's a lot of people that are not as clear, or overlap with others, than we once believed. So we just have to be careful that our
22:23
gender blinders don't make us believe that biology is as clear-cut as we once thought.
22:32
This also applies to the idea of sexuality. Because of our gender binary, we also got into a kind of binary about heterosexual and homosexual as an identity, and the belief that you were either one or the other and that that was something that
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defined you. And so I guess the first thing that I would say about this is that the idea that there are people who are heterosexual and people who are homosexual, and that that is your identity and that is fixed, is actually a fairly recent idea in human history — this idea that you could identify as heterosexual or homosexual. In all societies we see heterosexual and homosexual activities — things that
23:29
we could look from the outside and say, "aha, here's some heterosexual activity going on" (obviously that has to happen every so often or our society will not survive), but there's also going to be some homosexual activity going on, but that doesn't mean that people are going to carry that as an identity. So of course there's ancient Greece — ideas about sexuality which were not linked to necessarily an identity.
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And then there's another famous example, the Etoro, where the men engage in homosexual activities in order to acquire the strength to then engage in heterosexual activities,
24:12
which is different, right? It probably wouldn't — you know, it's not exactly what we'd expect.
24:25
And even today, even in our societies, if we look across places like Brazil or Latin America,
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the idea of what it means to be heterosexual or homosexual actually varies across society. So I don't know — I don't want to do too much graphic stuff here, but in many societies, kind of like ancient Greece, it's like the penetrator or the penetrated partner, and so you can be
24:55
considered completely heterosexual but also be having sex with men, but as long as you're not — you know what I'm saying. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, that's one part. And then also, just to be very clear about this, many societies have also had some form of long-term same-sex union. So this is not something that just happened
25:25
10 years ago. This is something that has happened in many societies around the world. What they will do with them is obviously variable — and some societies are very condemning of it — but this is not unusual in other societies.
25:44
So I guess that brings us to — well, is this my main point? I said be careful of binaries is the main point, but there's another. When we think about things like this whole thing about body modification in there and sex operations and sex change operations and third genders and gender bending and doing different things in your families and being complex in your sexuality, what I want to say here is we often see these things as happening in the last 10 years and
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we're like, "oh my God, the bathrooms, what are we going to do about the bathrooms?" But actually this is not something that's recent. It's been going on all over the place for a very long time, and it's not unique to the United States or to
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industrialized countries. It's been going on in many different places.
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That said, when we get all crazy excited about complexity and difference and how wonderful it is that people can express themselves in different ways, we don't want to overlook the power differentials and the power dynamics there.
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What's one way that power dynamics come out in gender roles? [A student response] Yeah, so we have to be careful — sometimes we get really excited about complexity and gender bending and we start to think about different things, but I just urge you to always keep in mind that some of these differences can result in hierarchies or often do, and inequalities. And so we have to always be paying attention to that.
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