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 highlights. Thinking of it as a reading list… and I hope, a hint at a book that might be coming from these researchers.
The archaeology of sex and gender has at times had an uneasy relationship with biological anthropology– one we might characterize as co-dependency. The universal biological identification of two sexes might be considered the ultimate in universalisms that should block our ability to recognize the multiple ways that people in past societies experienced being embodied, sexual, persons. Yet for archaeology of sex and gender, the ability to begin with a group of people whose bodies indicate a possible common sexual identity has been critical to many analyses.
It has been bioarchaeologists, like Sandra Holliman, who have given us the tools to identify genders beyond the normative assumed male and female in burial populations, and bioarchaeologists like Rebecca Storey who have had the guts to propose that a particular skeleton might be that of an intersexed person.
Bioarchaeologists are witness to the actual existence of less certainty and less dualism than the “folk model” that grounds the western dichotomous gender system in two natural sexes. The papers presented show where a commitment to empirical examination of what biological variability really is like leads: rich studies that call for implementation of intersectionality and development models in place of assumptions about generic male and female experience.
Sabrina Agarwal’s discussion of the intersection of sex and age in bone health and aging illustrates the transformative effect of taking intersectionality seriously. She argues that if gendering is understood as fluid, then the first step of separating males and females in analysis may mislead us or obscure more salient aspects of shared embodied experience. Illustrating her argument with osteoporosis– assumed in the modern imagination to be an inevitable disease of women’s aging– vividly illustrates why studies like these matter: the way we think about embodied experience, about what is natural, normal, or given, affects our understanding of the physical experiences of people today.
Lori Hager’s discussion of the influence of sex on determination of age and age on determination of sex, and in particular, her discussion of the “sexism of sexing”, brings us the challenge of older women, like an individual from Çatal Hüyuk she discussed, who experience skeletal remodeling that changes their bodily form away from the European model of normative female.
Following Joanna Sofaer, Julie Wesp speaks of “incorporation”, literally the corporealization of experience. The developmental history of each living being is a product of a complex interplay of biological potential and environmental and historical experiences. Occupational stress markers illustrate the way that repetitive practices– gender performance, in Judith Butler’s terms, or bodily hexis, in Pierre Bourdieu’s– leave their distinctive traces, creating bodies that are not only shaped differently but lived distinctly.
Wesp also argues that we need to include in analyses skeletal remains that might otherwise be excluded as ambiguous in terms of a two sex model. Sandra Holliman reminds us that the recognition of genders that are less common in ethnographic populations can only take place archaeologically if we allow for the possibility of diverse performances of gender within what we have always treated biologically as a single sex.
Pamela Geller argues that using ancient DNA to assign gender needs to be considered as an ethical challenge. We know that chromosomal sex is no single binary– but will we resist the urge to lump variability into two categories, as abnormal or deviant variants, rather than consider the reality that some of the ancient remains we study come from societies that did not impose a binary grid on sex? Because we have the power to naturalize overly simplistic accounts of bodily difference that affect people’s lives today, we must take responsibility by resisting the desire to over-simplify.
Joanna Sofaer rethinks the procedures of bioarchaeology as a kind of performance, through which by physically following scripts, the analyst learns to reproduce a tactile tracery of identification. If, as she has demonstrated, we do not as modern analysts visually inspect and come to disengaged judgments of bodily sex, age, or pathology, how much more might we want to consider that the people whose bodies we are engaged with might not have based their understanding of embodied lives strictly, solely, or primarily on the visual display of difference?
I want to insist that embodied sexuality be seen in terms of, among other things, the way bodies fit together, what I have elsewhere called performances of identification and disidentification, mediated by sexual encounters. If there is one thing I still see missing in bioarchaeology of sex and gender it is consideration of the body as an instrument of desire and pleasure, experiences that are not inconsequential for physicality as humans shape crania, modify teeth, feet, or rib cage, and manipulate body weight for ideals of beauty.
Still, we are witnessing the consolidation of a new bioarchaeology at the beginning of the 21st century, with a combination of mature research that results from decades of robust empirical studies, informed by new research questions about difference and how it is registered in the human body, and the perspectives of second- and even third-generation students encouraged to view human skeletal remains as points of connection to irreducible differences.
L. Sky
June 12, 2011
I am so glad that this subject is becoming part of the dialogue about human anatomy and physiology. (I’m just starting my master’s in arch, so this is of especial interest to me.) In fact, I’m just now reading several pieces by Boas, and again and again, he states that trying to classify the data before collecting it is not the best exercise of the scientific method. How much simpler this research would be if people left their prejudices at the door, and just accepted that what they were seeing was real. Being interested in cultural anthropology, it comes as no surprise that other societies did not see sex, gender, family, and kinship differently than we here in the west do. Thanks for posting this review!
Maria O. Smith
March 15, 2012
Wow, what an inherently value-laden (‘sexism of sexing’), biased (bioarchaeologists are clearly clueless about sex and gender definitions of non-western societies), burdoned by jargon (‘bodily hexis,’ corporeality, physicality, binary grid) assessment of current bioarchaeological enquiry. I certainly hope we have not moved to an era where we overreach the interpretive ability of skeletally derived information. Worse, I am not happy with this REVISIONIST HISTORYof bioarchaeology. Since when is identifiying a transgendered individual perceived as an exercize in guts and not deductive argument? Since when are European females viewed as ‘biological norms’ and not scientific controls? Since when is our fundamental (and universally acknowledged) inability to accurately sex a skeleton an exercize in sex-ism? Since when is assigning gender needs an ‘ethical challenge’ (!!) ????
It is one thing to argue for gender neutral bioarchaeolocial assessment or for objectively testing the validity of role duality (which we should do), but to engage in negative paradim spin to premise a bioarchaeology of gender is un-professional.
Enjargoned* (see I catch on to vocabularization*) gender should not premise bioarchaeological inquiry, it should be part of the discussion/interpretation.
I look forward to this proposed edited volume……
* my proud contributions to jargon
Rosemary Joyce
March 16, 2012
I assume you are the same Maria O. Smith listed as a faculty member in Forensic Science at Loyola University. I am amazed at the strength of your reaction to comments on a well-received session at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It is almost as if you feel like the session was aimed at you. The bizarre thing is that the entire session was composed of practicing bioarchaeologists, and as others with somewhat less defensive attitudes could see, my comments were supportive of the exciting work being done by these scholars.
The specialist language that you reject as jargon is not anything that I have to defend. It is an anti-intellectual staple these days to try to refute arguments made by scholars by objecting to linguistic precision and ridiculing it. I am simply amazed, truly, that anyone who is a scholar today does not understand the utility of specialist language. I am sure you use terms in your disciplinary practice that you think of as necessary that others would not immediately recognize. The scholarly response is to undertake some reading and learn what the terms you do not recognize mean.
The weirdest thing about your angry words– which I am used to have submitted by certain members of the general public, but must say have never encountered considered acceptable discourse by another academic– is that you object to quoted terms from the papers I review as if they were mine. “Sexism of sexing” is a term used by bioanthropologist Lori Hager. You don’t like it? Try reading her edited book “Women in Human Evolution”. You might learn some things– or maybe not, if your over-reaction here is typical of how you react when you encounter unfamiliar language and new ideas.
Your core argument– that the participants in this session are “unprofessional” because you think there is no need to think about assumptions, ethics, and the way bioarchaeological practice has changed– literally is incoherent.
Try reading a few books, or even a few articles, before you attack others because you find thinking beyond your definitions of the field uncomfortable.