The Sexed and Gendered Body

Comments on the Bioarchaeology of Sex and Gender

While sex and gender have acted as critical variables in anthropological inquiry for several decades, bioarchaeologists have only embraced them as major analytical foci within the past ten years. Here, we comment briefly on contemporary bioarchaeological research on sex and gender and discuss a few areas where recent advances have enabled researchers to contribute to larger anthropological discourses in new ways. In particular, we highlight two examples from our own work in which bioarchaeology uniquely illuminates the links between sex, gender, social identity and community-level patterns of health and disease in antiquity.

Having moved past using sex and gender in a one-dimensional manner, contemporary bioarchaeological research increasingly incorporates current social theory on these and other related constructs. For instance, Agarwal (2012, American Anthropologist) recently compared bone density changes between two medieval European communities using a life-course perspective, revealing that women’s post-menopausal bone loss is not a biological universal but is instead a culturally-mediated process. This study integrates sex, gender and bone loss data with historical data and demonstrates how an integrative approach, which considers aging, gendered activity, sex, and nutrition, can reveal more about the impact of social identity on health than a uni-dimensional one.

Many researchers have also taken advantage of the temporal sensitivity unique to archaeologically derived skeletal material to gain insight into how social identities were constructed and experienced in the past. According to Knudson and Stojanowski (2008, Journal of Archaeological Research) bioarchaeology’s combination of skeletal material—and the evidence of adaptive plasticity that it represents—with archaeological data can be used to generate processual, not just historical insights into social identity in the past. Because humans biologically embody their circumstances, skeletons also provide direct records of such experiences, including those obscured or invisible in archaeological or historical evidence. For instance, Grauer and colleagues’ (1998, “A History of Their Own” in Sex and Gender in Paleopathological Perspective) analysis of skeletal stress indicators in a 19th century Chicago poorhouse skeletal sample revealed no significant sex-based differences, which contradicted historical literature suggesting strongly gendered experiences of poverty, with women bearing most of its costs. Meaningful patterns only emerged when demographic data was integrated and historically contextualized, revealing intersecting gendered and life course-based differences that mapped directly onto sex and age; young women were the healthiest group entering the poorhouse, but unlike other groups, seemed unable to leave, and tended to die in old age, diseased and still resident.

Importantly, bioarchaeological findings can also be used to deconstruct ideas of the historical stability of sex and gender, thereby denaturalizing associated inequities as products of human action and interests rather than inevitable stresses. Two studies, one on 19th and 20th century acquired syphilis, and another on women’s leadership roles in the Pre-Hispanic Southwest, demonstrate this.

Many 19th and early 20th century medical studies state that the manifestations of syphilis varied greatly by sex, with women expressing much milder symptoms. Specifically, reproductive age women were often completely asymptomatic, despite giving birth to infected children, and became symptomatic only at menopause. Few explanations for these observations were given. However, because variation in the manifestations of syphilis still interferes with diagnosis and because sex is now recognized as a modulator of pathophysiology, Zuckerman and Armelagos (2012, “Translating between biology and society: sex, gender, syphilis, and immunology” SAA paper) investigated relationships between sex and syphilitic manifestations, focusing on 18th to 19th century English skeletal samples and reanalysis of clinical studies of untreated syphilis. Results revealed no clear-cut differences, directly contradicting the medical narrative. Beyond methodological issues in the clinical studies, this incongruity may be attributable to gendered medical perceptions of disease. Throughout the period, women were increasingly blamed for transmission of syphilis in popular and medical discourses, and a medical narrative of hidden infection may have aligned well with entrenched beliefs about women’s culpability in infecting unsuspecting men.

Recent re-examinations of skeletal remains from Black Mesa, a marginal, isolated community in present-day northeastern Arizona from AD 850 to 1150, have investigated women’s roles, particularly their involvement in community survival in unpredictable environments (Crandall et al, 2012, “We Didn’t Know We Were Poor” 2012 SAA paper). Analyses of patterns of anemia, infection, mortality and non-fatal trauma demonstrate that stress and injuries were shared across the community, rather than specific to one sex or age cohort. This is consistent with the picture of egalitarianism proposed by archaeologists. The results also confirmed that elderly women comprised a large portion of the community, which is atypical for the region. By incorporating multiple indicators, this study revealed the existence of numerous cohorts of women, each at different points in the life course, who experienced unequal health risks. Elderly women, consistent with ethnohistorical finds, likely ensured adequate resource distribution throughout the community which buffered against seasonal food shortages. Overall, this study shows that it was a diversity of women’s roles and experiences that provided the “womanpower” critical for survival in this environment.

Both studies highlight how bioarchaeological approaches can uncover complex connections between social identity and other variables, such as disease experience, subsistence, and community politics. In each case, the biological and social experiences recorded in the skeleton are interpreted as the result of complex interactions between environments, social structures, and individual agents. Because of their attention to process and temporal sensitivity, and their ability to uncover otherwise obscured narratives directly from the body, these approaches have great potential for contributing to broader anthropological discourses on sex, gender and other aspects of social identity. In particular, such approaches can generate connections between current lived experiences of sex and gender and those of the past, while enlivening our understanding of sex and gender as complex and necessary variables in the social and natural sciences and the humanities.

John Crandall is a PhD student in the department of anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Molly Zuckerman is an assistant professor in the department of anthropology and Middle Eastern cultures, Mississippi State University.

AFA Contributing Editors Damla Isik (disik@regis.edu) and Jessica Smith Rolston (jrolston@mines.edu) welcome your contributions to the column.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/04/09/the-sexed-and-gendered-body/