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Kinship, Gender, & Relatedness · Acedra
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Kinship, Gender, & Relatedness
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0:01
One of the reasons I wanted to read the chapter on kinship and those kinship diagrams and relatedness before we did the chapters on race and ethnicity, and especially gender, is because this was an early interest of those anthropologists. They got really into kinship and charting people's kinships, making those circles and triangles and lines, and trying to figure out things. As we talked about in that section, they basically began with maybe a society that had this
0:47
idea of what we might call "heteronormativity" (241). The circles and the triangles are supposed to get together and that is the way things should be. That is a long word and here is another long word that Guest introduces, although he did not make it up himself: "cisgender."
1:06
What is that? You said you were happy I brought that up, now you are not so happy? No, I just think it was important to bring up, but I am more about how the idea of gender allows other gender identities to be situated according to that, because especially in my work, cis is usually the dominant one. If I understand correctly, it is the idea that people who are
1:53
super comfortable with being whatever gender has been assigned to them. It is a kind of term that is used to call attention to that fact in the same way that we are trying to call attention to Whiteness as this default category that gets away with being unmarked because nobody has ever called them out for it. So now I have to at least acknowledge that I am also,
2:23
if I am not mistaken, we are going to read about how Guest is going to tell us about, for example,
2:32
constructing heterosexuality. How you were taught to be heterosexual. People never thought about it that way. We just assume that is the default, we just assume this is the way things are and we do not have to worry about it. By naming it, then you are like, okay, that is an issue. It is really funny you say that because I have talked to many people online who literally think cis is a--they say, "I am not cis, I am normal." Well,
3:05
maybe it is working then, I do not know. So that is anyway, we will just use that term.
3:18
What we talked about in the kinship chapter is what anthropology found is not this at all. We found plenty of people who were heteronormative, but we also found all kinds of different ways in which people do kinship and get married and family types and all these things. I have not figured out how to put this, I do not know if I am doing it right, so do not get down on me, but a lot of times people will walk out of class and be like, "Oh, I have never seen that before. We are
4:00
so gender progressive today." They say that people are doing these weird things now, and I guarantee you, whatever you think is strange today, if you think anything is strange, people somewhere else or back in the past were doing stranger stuff. The stuff we are doing today is not that weird. There is something weirder out there and we can talk about it, but I do not want to freak anybody out.
4:31
There were some anthropologists back in the early days, we have talked about a couple in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. They were actually going against the heteronormative trends. For one thing, they both identified as, well, they probably would have been cisgender women, but they also were fighting against sexism in the academy. They were not able to rise as far as they might have. They became very popular as anthropologists,
5:07
much more popular than some of the guys who did get high positions in academic institutions, but they were not accepted necessarily within their academic rank. They also had a long-term same-sex romance between them and so they were actually very interested in different ways in which other societies could offer us social possibilities.
5:31
From pretty early on, Margaret Mead's book _Coming of Age in Samoa_ was sort of revolutionary and almost everybody had read it in its day in terms of telling us about different practices in another society. But I really want to pause here and just give a shout out to the feminist anthropologists and feminism in general from the 1970s that really started to rework some of the kinship data. Instead of just considering that people in this society are
6:08
weird because they get married differently or they have different kinds of families, what they did is they said, "Wait a second, not that we want to adopt those possibilities, but that means people can do things differently." It means different worlds are possible, means we do not have to live in this one, we can maybe do something else. And so what they drew attention to is that these kinship systems and these marriage systems and these ideas about
6:41
who should do what were actually part of systems of power, which in many cases, and of course the feminists were at that time primarily concerned with male dominance and trying to adjust that, but they found a lot of kind of support from going back into other societies or historical situations and being able to look at the data again and say, "No, this is not just some curiosity that some anthropologists dug up. This is something that we should take
7:14
seriously as a way to think about how a society could be differently configured." Again, we are not trying to copy other people, but we are trying to open ourselves up to different possibilities. So this became part of what I would call another of the biggest moments of anthropology. We had a biggest moment, but it is not, anthropologists did this, so I have to say "around anthropology," because there were anthropologists involved,
7:44
but it was probably more a product of the 1970s feminists in various disciplines getting together and figuring some stuff out, which is still super cool. Wait, who wants this one? This is what, this chapter is about the biggest thing of this chapter. Almost all of you said this was the thing that Guest did well in this chapter. . . . Oh,
8:17
he does, he does better with that than we expect him to and we will talk about that later, and I am glad. But almost nobody mentioned that, only you, and you will be called upon to do that soon. Yes, "separating sex and gender" (p. 235). That is what the feminists did.
8:39
Sadly, the feminists were famous for not being intersectional enough at the time, especially the White feminists, but you know, they were not the only feminists. Anyway, basically that gender, all those social meanings, expectations, roles, things that we expect of people when we think that they are a certain biological sex, I am just going to put it this way, I am not sure if Guest, I think he says something like this, that those in terms of how we behave and what our ideas are
9:11
about people and what kind of jobs we can get and what kind of occupations in society we can have, that our social expectations, what we call gender, are actually more important than biological sex differences. And so yes, the feminists were separating the social ideas from the biological ideas and coming up with two different words for those. We are talking about gender, we are going to talk about the social stuff. Talk about sex, talking about biological differences.
9:47
It is in some ways kind of like what anthropology was doing with, you will notice, with ethnicity and race a little bit, or certainly with culture and race, but not quite. It is all kind of, now I want you to be careful of two things. For one thing, just like we talked about with biology and race, nobody is saying that there are not biological sex differences within the human population. There are plenty of biological sex differences,
10:18
they might be big, they might be small, I do not know. But we are not, you are not, by calling attention to our social expectations, nobody is trying to say there are not differences. So people get weirded out when anybody says it is a social construct, that does not mean that people are not different biologically and it does not mean it is not real, it has very real effects in the world. The other thing we have to be careful of is everybody got very excited to say "gender" instead
10:47
of "sex." So for example, my grandmother does not want to say "sex," she says "gender." So she says "sex" and it sounds like that other thing, "sex," right? So people often will say "gender" when they might say "sex." My best example of this, never do this, the gender reveal party, right? Where you go out to somewhere, usually you have to load up a cannon for some reason, boom goes the cannon, usually, I only read about it when things burn down, people die,
11:31
so you know, I would not really recommend this. I mean, maybe you can do it in a safer way, I am not sure why, but cake. I had to do a report in high school on how people died from one. Yeah, what is with the cannons? I like the soccer ball, soccer balls are . . . . Oh, the plane, yeah, the plain ones, yeah. Anyway, I do not want to get down on these, but they should really be called "sex reveal parties," because what you are doing is you are saying,
12:14
"I saw on an ultrasound, I saw something and I am going to reveal that sex to you." You are not revealing the gender, you might decide on a whole different gender later on, right? If you called it a "sex reveal party" though, a whole different crowd would show up. It would be wild. I do not know if things would burn down or not, but certainly get hot. There you go, yep, that is why I told you I should turn on the AC, you would not love me. All right.
12:52
So in this class, in this text, we learn about how gender is actually culturally constructed, or how we build on these social expectations and we expect people to do things. You all have experienced these, so you know, I mean, I thought the section on the sports was really interesting (243). And you know, I think maybe you have experienced this in your life, how you get, people get challenged or channeled into different athletic expectations. And we have seen how now if
13:33
you go to the women's NCAA, they will only give them five-pound weights and will not even have a workout room. I think hopefully we are starting to get beyond this stuff. But I thought about it, I was also thinking about it in terms of in the old days, it was pretty traditional to give the boys protein in their meals and give girls more carbs and sweets, because it was thought that the boys needed to go out and do physical labor. And if you think about it, over time,
14:06
that is actually going to result in very different body formations. And so when we say things like, "Boys are usually stronger," some of that has to do with the foods that were given to them and the type of activities which they are encouraged to participate in. So actually, the cultural construction of gender, just like the cultural construction of race, can have very biological effects. And if you mellow those out, then maybe boys and girls do
14:33
not end up looking as different as they might have in the past. And in fact, if I am not mistaken,
14:41
sexual dimorphism, like weight differences between average weight differences between men and women, has actually gone down over the years as we started treating people differently. The other part that Guest talks about is something that has become a big deal in what it is called "gender studies," is how gender is something that we also perform (246-247). And so this is getting into the idea that we enact a certain gender, we are in some ways, not that you are acting it out,
15:19
but it is something that when you do, the audience, you might say, we often reward
15:29
good performances of gender and penalize what we consider bad performances of gender. I will give you an example. It is an article I sometimes like to assign, it is a little old now, but it talks about this thing that the author calls "doctor fits." So I do not know if you have seen those shows like _ER_, right? So you know, you come into the emergency room and all of a sudden the doctor comes in, he is like, "I need a scalpel now, and I need this, and I need that," and it
16:02
is throwing instruments around and people are rushing around. These are called by the nurses, they are called "doctor fits." The funny thing about them is, if it is a male doctor, they will move on it and they will zip around and they might get mad, but they respect it. They are like, "Yeah, good job." But if it was a female doctor doing the exact same thing, the exact same performance, you might say, "Slow it down," would not give them the scalpel, get all mad,
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say bad words about that doctor their backs, right? And so this happens a lot in society. It actually happens with professors all the time. Same professor, not no different professor, same style maybe, but gets rewarded differently based on what is the expectation of that. So,
16:56
way too many bad words get passed around about certain professors, right? Whereas if I act the same way, I do not know, I might not get rewarded, but you are not going to penalize me as much.
17:14
I know it is a long day for you. Really, is it? Yeah, and next Tuesday is going to be long too. It is already long. What do you learn about this? I learned that "machismo" is defined person to person. So it is a male, masculine type thing, but it varies from person to person (247). Yeah, this is a really interesting study by Matthew Gutmann. He took this picture of a man carrying, holding a baby, and he went around to all kinds
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of people and asked, "What do you think this is?" And people interpreted this differently, but nobody thought it was weird. And so what he was saying is, from the outside, we often have this idea that machismo or being macho means bravado, drunkenness, having affairs, all this stuff. And what he was saying is, it actually has a lot of different meanings, and it can mean simply providing or being a good father, it can mean not drinking as much. And so it can
18:32
have a variety of meanings, and often from the outside, we see one and we get all latched onto it because we like stereotyping people, but we should not. And it was good fieldwork, did a good job. So I guess I would say, in some ways, and going back to the beginning, is that when we look at gender expectations and what people are expected to do, we can see, if we look across different societies, all kinds of things. And we can also see differences within
19:03
society. So that is what the machismo example is about, is even within the same society, there might be different expectations of what it means to be masculine or what it means to be feminine. And also, these expectations change over time, they are historically variable. A student told me once, and I think I believe it, I looked it up, that in the old days, boys wore pink in this country and girls wore light blue. And
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the reason for that is that red was seen as a masculine color, red, fiery, hot, so boys were to wear pink. And blue is seen as calming and feminine, and so little girls should wear light blue. Now we reversed it all, but it goes with this idea that, historically, even in our own society, we have seen changes over time. And this happens in other societies as well. Now, now that we know about all this wide range of gender expectations, I want to talk about the
20:07
social categories of gender. Now, like I said, in the next class, we are going to talk about sex and biological sex. But the question becomes, wait a second, if gendered expectations are given to us by society, does it have to be only two? No, I guess I have answered that in the negative, right? That is the positive, yes, there can be more than two social genders (252). In fact, there is a very famous, perhaps the most famous of all, in India, yeah. What do you know
20:48
about them? Well, they are sort of a subculture that has existed in India for thousands of years at this point. And they are based off of, they kind of have their own representative deity, I forgot how to say their name. But anyways, they have sort of had their own communities and lived on sort of the fringes of Indian society for thousands of years and have their own culture. And they sort of have a place in Indian society where, if you do not give money to a hijra, they will
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curse you, for example. Or if your baby is born, you might have it blessed by a hijra or stuff like that. And they are not really considered, well, it kind of depends. Most of them take up the cultural role of women, for example, but many of them are considered neither male nor female. Some of them are actually intersex, but that is more a minority than what is thought (252). Yeah, I mean, if I am not mistaken, I think most are born biologically male,
22:00
but take on a social role that might be women or might be a third category. The other example that Guest gives is in Native North America. The Indigenous societies of the Americas are actually fairly famous for having both third and fourth gender categories (252-253). And so people who would be biologically born male but would take on the roles of women, or be in their own special category, might have a ritual role that would be outside of that. Or
22:40
sometimes biologically born female, take on the roles of men or have their own special category. This actually passed into the, let us put it this way, the colonizers did not like this very much. They were very interested in stamping this out. This was not a good thing for the imposition of European colonialism. So the way in which this was described by the French, some of the descriptions of this come to us from French colonialism,
23:20
and especially what is now Canada, they described it using a word called "berdache," which was actually a derogatory word for a male French prostitute. And unfortunately, that is the word that was used in the anthropological literature about this. And in recent years, a number of Indigenous communities have tried to, in some ways, reclaim this identity by calling it a "two-spirit" identity, those that who are blessed with both spirits (252-253).
23:50
Now, as Guest says, we have to be careful about romanticizing that, because there is some pretty serious homophobia, transphobia. So you do not want to romanticize that. But at the same time, I think a lot of that was imposed, because people wanted to stamp this out and get rid of it for such a long time. There was a film that PBS put out, which was actually titled _Two Spirits_, and they said that a lot of these ideas, there are actually societies that have three or more genders
24:28
on every continent, and there are probably hundreds of examples (p. 253). There are a few that are very well known, but there are many different examples of this. Now, again, we do not want to too romanticize it, but I just want to point out that it is possible. Now I want to get back a little bit to what the feminists were after, which was what gender had to do with power (253-260). And like I said,
24:56
when oftentimes anthropology, when we talk just about cultural differences and the ways, all the crazy things that different people do, and we get excited about difference and third genders and all that stuff, we sometimes might lose sight of the power element. But that is what the feminists want us to keep track of, because remember, they are trying to address society. So in this chapter, Guest goes back and revisits an assumption or an assertion that was made, first
25:27
formulated by the anthropologist Sherry Ortner. And here I am using some logical symbols. I think I have seen these since the SAT. She proposed the existence of a pervasive symbolic association of women with nature and men with culture, which was more highly valued (p. 258). So the idea, as symbolically represented here, is that man or men are associated with the cultural world, just as in the same way that women are associated with the natural world, the earthy world of
26:11
babies and breastfeeding and stuff like that, whereas men get to be more cultural and making laws and in public. And what she was saying is that this underlay the cultural logic of many different societies, and it was an explanation for why in many places there was male dominance. I think this was a super interesting idea. I mean, it is worth thinking about for sure. But it really, once people sort of got out of
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the logical stuff and started looking at this more closely in the field, it became much more complicated. And it does not seem to work in many societies. And there was something missing here, that was very important in this chapter that we would have to take into account whenever we are talking about man and woman and all these things. What else might we want to know about? Yeah, so we might want to know about, I mean, this is too abstract, it is too simple. So they needed
27:09
more intersectionality. And some of the early, by the way, some of the early Black feminists did have, they are the ones who invented the term. They did have intersectionality, but they kind of got sidelined in our myth about feminism. And but it would have helped. So it was good, yeah. Sure, why not? When I was in college, it was becoming a bad word, but I am told that the youth are re-embracing this word. So there you go, join. I did say that all anthropologists
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should be feminists. I mean, they should be, everybody should be, right? Yeah, there you go. Along the lines of how we think about gender and our stereotypes and how things are stratified, Guest gives us a couple interesting other examples, one of which is a great article by Emily Martin, published back in 1991, which, a long time ago, but it is still great. If you ever get a chance to read it, you should. It was called "The Egg
28:33
and the Sperm" (Emily Martin 1991, in Guest 261). What did you get out of that? I should have assigned it. I should have assigned the whole article. But what did you get out of it? Oh, so with this article and the other example of, okay, for this one, the idea of the wording, especially in anatomy textbooks, and how it describes the eggs as more, masculine traits. Sperm, yeah, exactly. Switch those up, exactly, there you go. Yeah, waiting for the sperm. And
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then also the other example is, the way we see history, as the men were the hunters (265).
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I was just talking about how the way that we describe it, it is how our language also helps to inform how we gender. And how, yeah, so many other things are gendered we do not really realize that.
29:44
This was a fantastic article. Because yeah, she went into those biological textbooks, which are just supposed to be describing the biology. They are not supposed to be putting all these metaphors in. But they would always be talking about these fast swimming sperm swimming up there and fighting it out. And the egg would just be sitting there all passive until the sperm who wins conquers the egg and fights its way in. Which turns out to actually be a total misrepresentation
30:13
of the process of procreation, as I understand it. A lot of those sperm are just going off in different directions and they do not know what they are doing, okay? And then they get around, and then apparently the egg just seals them all off for a while and then chooses one of them. Now I am putting in different metaphors, which obviously is not happening either. But you know, and then picks one and pulls it in. So the egg is actually much more active in this thing.
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But what she was saying is, there are all these metaphors. And these apply to
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how people would talk about menstruation. I got to have a class with Emily Martin, and she talks about how during certain epochs of our history, we talk about menstruation like it is no big deal. So for example, in World War II, when we wanted women to be working in the factories, all these textbooks came out that they are like, "Do not worry, you can still go to work if you are menstruating. You can keep on working, you can go there." And then it comes to be the 1950s,
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when everybody wanted, the guys were coming back from the war and they wanted to all settle down in suburban households, all of a sudden, these textbooks came out, it is like, "Oh, man, when you are menstruating, you are going to be laid up in bed for days. You cannot work, you cannot do anything." And then the cookbooks got longer and longer, was like, making a meal got harder. Because, you know, it is society. Yes, and the gatherers and the hunters.
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Which we learn about in anthropology now. I have tried in my world to talk about the importance of gathering and how that often provided 70% of the calories in many of these groups. And I sometimes like to put gathering before hunting. But I will also admit that I was not as up to date as I should be on how much hunting has been done equally by women. And Guest addresses that (265). But it is even better now. This just
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came out in September of 2023 in a great set of articles called "Woman the Hunter: The Archaeological Evidence." And Christopher Lynn, anthropologist, said, "I predicted when I saw these talks that the papers will break the internet. Let us do this." So it is great. We have great evidence that in fact, women were certainly hunting, did endurance trekking, all these things that made stone tools, all these things are normally imagined as being male.
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How do you think we did? Did we break the internet? Broken. I mean, did we, were we a success? Did we go viral? Obviously not. I mean, the 18 likes, I tried, look at me, I retweeted that, reposted it, could not get it, more like 17 likes, because you like your own post. Oh, no, I liked his, and then I reposted it. So he has got 18. The original one had maybe 60 likes. We did not break the internet. And actually, Guest kind of talks about this on page 266. Kind of sad.
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"Despite the archaeological, physical, and cultural evidence that anthropologists have accumulated to debunk the 'man the hunter, woman the gatherer' myth, it is still a daunting task to shake free of the popular idea in US culture that men and women have some essential and essentially different nature that was shaped in our deep past" (Guest, 266). And I think that is true. We did not break the internet in the sense that
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we did not go viral. And I am sure, even though I have been trying for 20 years and reposting things, it has not shaken free these stereotypes. Maybe next year.
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