Subscribe:
RSS feed
How can we use material traces of past lives to understand sex and gender in the past?
Browsing All posts tagged under »embodiment«
And a Little Child Shall Lead Them
I have to admit that I was a little mystified when Archaeology online recently publicized research that used errors in working a single stone tool to propose that its less-skilled maker was probably a child. Not that I think the idea is implausible. Errors in production have been a staple of the archaeology of childhood […]
Ain’t I a Woman?
March 19, 2013
Well, no, actually– not even 30% of one. But you sure are making history. That’s my gut reaction after being asked by BBC Radio to participate in a broadcast reacting to a news story published on the BBC website today. Tagline: Rocky Horror Show writer Richard O’Brien thinks of himself as 70% male and 30% […]
Really Richard
February 17, 2013
That’s the verdict of researchers at the University of Leicester who late last year, in a targeted research project, recovered skeletal remains they suspected could be those of Richard III, King of England from 1483 to 1485. I saved the link to the original story in the New York Times back in late September 2012, […]
Sex, Gender, and the Olympics
July 30, 2012
I could almost feel sorry for the International Olympics Committee. Almost. But then I think about the lives that have been damaged by their insistence on sorting out who “really” is female, and who is not. Beginning in 1968 the International Olympics Committee required individuals seeking to compete in women’s events to prove “their femininity […]
“So I could be easeful”: Celebrate and Support New Scholars
May 4, 2012
The Chronicle of Higher Education is a tabloid that few outside the academy will have heard of, and fewer insider the academy actually read than might be indicated by its ubiquity in campus administrative offices. It becomes relevant to many new or nearing completion PhDs because it contains employment ads. While the image conjured up […]
Bone deep: sex and the skeleton
August 27, 2011
I have been waiting to see how long it would take the mainstream press to make the obvious joke about news the New York Times recently reported, that a protein called osteocalcin, which is produced by bone-forming cells called osteoblasts, binds to a specific receptor on cells of the testes. Male mice that were unable […]
Body Histories: “Expressive muscles” and women’s fatigue
July 8, 2011
“Any doctor who saw how even experienced female athletes collapsed and were lying on the ground after the race could not support this kind of athletic competition for women.” Norwegian historian Kerstin Bornholdt cites this statement, by a German doctor, H. Franzmeyer, reacting to what he saw as the unsuitable participation by women in the […]
“Exploring Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeology”: Some comments
April 2, 2011
Just back from the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, where I had the pleasure of being a discussant on a session organized by Sabrina Agarwal and Julie Wesp. Since my comments run to 2200 words, no way to post them and no point either– who would read them? But here are some […]
Penis spines! (oh, and something about brains too…)
March 10, 2011
Nature‘s editors and authors tried, they really tried, titling the report published yesterday “Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits”. But from the earliest news report I can find (yesterday on Science 2.0, titled “Why Your Penis Has no Spine”) through to the raft of articles today, reporters have had their […]
British, Roman, or African? On race, ethnicity, and nationality
January 26, 2011
The past was not full of homogeneous towns. People in the past were not uniform in their cultures, their sexualities, or their subjective experiences. If I have one goal in my teaching– one goal in my writing– it would be to get that point across, so that finding difference in past populations would be expected, […]
April 21, 2013
0