Discussion Questions
What is “natural” about how you experience gender and human sexuality? What aspects are at least partially shaped by culture? How do other cultures’ beliefs and practices regarding gender and sexuality differ from those commonly found in the United States? Are there any parallels? Does it depend on which U.S. community we are talking about? What about your own beliefs and practices?
Reflect on the various ways you have “learned” about gender and sexuality throughout your life. Which influences do you think had the biggest impact?
How important is your gender to how you think about yourself, to your “identity” or self-definition, to your everyday life? Reflect on what it would be like to be a different gender.
How important is your “sexuality” and “sexual orientation” to how you think about yourself, to your identity or self-definition? Reflect on what it would be like if you altered your sexual identity or practices.
In what ways have your school settings been shaped by and around gender norms?
How are anthropologists influenced by gender norms? How has this affected the discipline of anthropology?
Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition PERSPECTIVES: AN OPEN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Nina Brown, Thomas McIlwraith, Laura Tubelle de González 2020 American Anthropological Association 2300 Clarendon Blvd, Suite 1301 Arlington, VA 22201 ISBN Print: 978-1-931303-67-5 ISBN Digital: 978-1-931303-66-8 http://perspectives.americananthro.org/ This book is a project of the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges (SACC) http://sacc.americananthro.org/ and our parent organization, the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Please refer to the website for a complete table of contents and more information about the book. SECOND EDITION Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition by Nina Brown, Thomas McIlwraith, Laura Tubelle de González is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Under this CC BY-NC 4.0 copyright license you are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material Under the following terms: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 10 10 GENDER AND SEXUALITY GENDER AND SEXUALITY Carol C. Mukhopadhyay, San Jose State University
[email protected] http://www.sjsu.edu/people/carol.mukhopadhyay Tami Blumenfield, Yunnan University
[email protected] with Susan Harper, Texas Woman’s University,
[email protected], and Abby Gondek,
[email protected] Learning Objectives Learning Objectives • Identify ways in which culture shapes sex/gender and sexuality. • Describe ways in which gender and sexuality organize and structure the societies in which we live. • Assess the range of possible ways of constructing gender and sexuality by sharing examples from different cultures, including small-scale societies. • Analyze how anthropology as a discipline is affected by gender ideology and gender norms. • Evaluate cultural “origin” stories that are not supported by anthropological data. INTRODUCTION: SEX AND GENDER ACCORDING TO ANTHROPOLOGISTS Anthropologists1 are fond of pointing out that much of what we take for granted as “natural” in our lives is actually cultural—it is not grounded in the natural world or in biology but invented by humans.2 231 http://www.sjsu.edu/people/carol.mukhopadhyay Because culture is invented, it takes different forms in different places and changes over time in those places. Living in the twenty-first century, we have witnessed how rapidly and dramatically culture can change, from ways of communicating to the emergence of same-sex marriage. Similarly, many of us live in culturally diverse settings and experience how varied human cultural inventions can be. We readily accept that clothing, language, and music are cultural—invented, created, and alter- able—but often find it difficult to accept that gender and sexuality are not natural but deeply embedded in and shaped by culture. We struggle with the idea that the division of humans into two and only two categories, “male” and “female,” is not universal, that “male” and “female” are cultural concepts that take different forms and have different meanings cross-culturally. Similarly, human sexuality, rather than being simply natural is one of the most culturally significant, shaped, regulated, and symbolic of all human capacities. The concept of humans as either “heterosexual” or “homosexual” is a culturally and historically specific invention that is increasingly being challenged in the United States and elsewhere. Part of the problem is that gender has a biological component, unlike other types of cultural inven- tions such as a sewing machine, cell phone, or poem. We do have bodies and there are some male- female differences, including in reproductive capacities and roles, albeit far fewer than we have been taught. Similarly, sexuality, sexual desires and responses, are partially rooted in human natural capaci- ties. However, in many ways, sexuality and gender are like food. We have a biologically rooted need to eat to survive and we have the capacity to enjoy eating. What constitutes “food,” what is “delicious” or “repulsive,” the contexts and meanings that surround food and human eating—those are cultural. Many potentially edible items are not “food” (rats, bumblebees, and cats in the United States, for example), and the concept of “food” itself is embedded in elaborate conventions about eating: how, when, with whom, where, “utensils,” for what purposes? A “romantic dinner” at a “gourmet restaurant” is a complex cul- tural invention. In short, gender and sexuality, like eating, have biological components. But cultures, over time, have erected complex and elaborate edifices around them, creating systems of meaning that often barely resemble what is natural and innate. We experience gender and sexuality largely through the prism of the culture or cultures to which we have been exposed and in which we have been raised. In this chapter, we are asking you to reflect deeply on the ways in which what we have been taught to think of as natural, that is, our sex, gender, and our sexuality, is, in fact, deeply embedded in and shaped by our culture. We challenge you to explore exactly which, if any, aspects of our gender and our sexual- ity are totally natural. One powerful aspect of culture, and a reason cultural norms feel so natural, is that we learn culture the way we learn our native language: without formal instruction, in social contexts, picking it up from others around us, without thinking. Soon, it becomes deeply embedded in our brains. We no longer think consciously about what the sounds we hear when someone says “hello” mean unless we do not speak English. Nor is it difficult to “tell the time” on a “clock” even though “time” and “clocks” are com- plex cultural inventions. The same principles apply to gender and sexuality. We learn very early (by at least age three) about the categories of gender in our culture—that individuals are either “male” or “female” and that elaborate beliefs, behaviors, and meanings are associated with each gender. We can think of this complex set of ideas as a gender ideology or a cultural model of gender. All societies have gender ideologies, just as they have belief systems about other significant areas of life, such as health and disease, the natural world, and social relationships, including family. For an activity related to this section, see Activity 1 in the Teaching Resources of the Perspectives website. 232 PERSPECTIVES: AN OPEN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY FOUNDATIONS OF THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER Gender Ideologies, Biology, and Culture Gender vs. Sex Words can reveal cultural beliefs. A good example is the term “sex.” In the past, sex referred both to sexuality and to someone’s biologic sex: male or female. Today, although sex still refers to sexuality, “gender” now means the categories male, female, or increasingly, other gender possibilities. Why has this occurred? The change in terminology reflects profound alterations in gender ideology in the United States (and elsewhere). In the past, influenced by Judeo-Christian religion and nineteenth and twentieth century scientific beliefs, biology (and reproductive capacity) was literally considered to be destiny. Males and females, at least “normal” males and females, were thought to be born with different intellectual, physi- cal, and moral capacities, preferences, tastes, personalities, and predispositions for violence and suffer- ing.3 Ironically, many cultures, including European Christianity in the Middle Ages, viewed women as having a strong, often “insatiable” sexual “drive” and capacity. But by the nineteenth century, women and their sexuality were largely defined in reproductive terms, as in their capacity to “carry a man’s child.” Even late-twentieth-century human sexuality texts often referred only to “reproductive systems,” to genitals as “reproductive” organs, and excluded the “clitoris” and other female organs of sexual plea- sure that had no reproductive function. For women, the primary, if not sole, legitimate purpose of sex- uality was reproduction.4 Nineteenth and mid-twentieth century European and U.S. gender ideologies linked sexuality and gender in other ways.5 Sexual preference—the sex to whom one was attracted—was “naturally” hetero- sexual, at least among “normal” humans, and “normal,” according to mid-twentieth century Freudian- influenced psychology, was defined largely by whether one adhered to conventional gender roles for males and females. So, appropriately, “masculine” men were “naturally” attracted to “feminine” women and vice versa. Homosexuality, too, was depicted not just as a sexual preference but as gender-inappro- priate role behavior, down to gestures and color of clothing.6 This is apparent in old stereotypes of gay men as “effeminate” (acting like a female, wearing “female” fabrics such as silk or colors such as pink, and participating in “feminine” professions like ballet) and of lesbian women as “butch” (cropped hair, riding motorcycles, wearing leather—prototypical masculinity). Once again, separate phenomena—sex- ual preference and gender role performance—were conflated because of beliefs that rooted both in biol- ogy. “Abnormality” in one sphere (sexual preference) was linked to “abnormality” in the other sphere (gendered capacities and preferences). In short, the gender and sexual ideologies were based on biological determinism. According to this theory, males and females were supposedly born fundamentally different reproductively and in other major capacities and preferences and were “naturally” (biologically) sexually attracted to each other, although women’s sexual “drive” was not very well developed relative to men’s and was reproductively oriented. Rejecting Biological Determinism Decades of research on gender and sexuality, including by feminist anthropologists, has challenged these old theories, particularly biological determinism. We now understand that cultures, not nature, 233 create the gender ideologies that go along with being born male or female and the ideologies vary widely, cross-culturally. What is considered “man’s work” in some societies, such as carrying heavy loads, or farming, can be “woman’s work” in others. What is “masculine” and “feminine” varies: pink and blue, for example, are culturally invented gender-color linkages, and skirts and “make-up” can be worn by men, indeed by “warriors.” Hindu deities, male and female, are highly decorated and difficult to distinguish, at least by conventional masculinist U.S. stereotypes (see examples