Intersectionality (Other Keyword)
1-25 (27 Records)
Archaeology in the Community (AITC) is an urban-based archaeology organization founded with the intent of providing science opportunities to marginalized youth who would have never been exposed to archaeology through their education system. This paper highlights how intersectional theory is used by AITC to expose and increase students’ knowledge of archaeology as a science. Intersectionality theory emphasizes the structural intersection of social categories and studies the concept of...
At the Intersection: Destabilizing White Creole Masculinity at the 18th-Century Little Bay Plantation, Montserrat, West Indies (2017)
Guided by contemporary humoral theory, 18th-century Europeans believed climate and bodily humors to be mutually influential and correlated in their effect on human temperament, appearance, and behavior. Resettlement to a new climate was understood to create humoral imbalances fundamentally affecting an individual’s character and even physical appearance including skin color. Subject to the effects of tropical climate British settlers to the West Indies thus transformed were viewed as...
Behind the Scenes of Hollywood: The Intersectionality of Gender, Whiteness, and Reproductive Health (2017)
In ongoing research at Hollywood Plantation, a 19th century rural plantation in southeastern Arkansas, intersectionality, with its roots in Black feminist theory, plays two roles. It is an analytical tool for uncovering intersecting power relations, such as gender, whiteness, and reproductive health, as they emerged in the late 19th century. As patent medicines were increasingly marketed to women, medicine bottles provide a lens into rural upper class white women’s healing practices and the ways...
Entangled Identities on the American Frontier: Army Laundresses as Cultural Brokers at 19th Century Fort Davis, Texas (2017)
This paper focuses on the cultural slippage that occurs in frontier zones where competing worldviews create conditions for alternative, innovative, and layered performances of intersecting identities. As spaces of translation, frontiers are the ideal location to study entangled identities. Inhabitants of these queer landscapes constantly negotiate the multiple lived realities of often conflicting ideologies. I propose the use of third-space as a framework for understanding the fragmentation and...
Exploring Intersectionality through Osteobiography: A Case Study from Early Medieval Ireland (2017)
Over the last decade, social identity has become well established as an area of bioarchaeological research. Although bioarchaeologists now examine a variety of identities in past societies (such as gender, age, and disability), it remains challenging to discuss the ways in which multiple identities intersect in the creation of individual lives. The construction of osteobiographies provides a means of investigating these intersections, in particular the interrelation of age with other aspects of...
Foodways at the Intersections of Gender, Race, and Class at Hollywood Plantation (2018)
Archaeological research uncovered the remains of an ell kitchen, a smokehouse, and a cellar at Hollywood Plantation in southeast Arkansas. These spaces provide intimate information about foodways or the shared ways that people thought about, procured, distributed, preserved, and consumed foods in the 19th and 20th century. In this paper, I will discuss the ways the archaeology of foodways is used as a tool for public engagement and a lens into the intersectionality of gender, race, class at a...
How Colonization Created Food Inequality in the United States (and Why It Matters) (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Perspectives from the Study of Early Colonial Encounter in North America: Is it time for a “revolution” in the study of colonialism?" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the contemporary landscapes of the United States, there are many social and economic inequalities tied to the production, distribution and consumption of food. When constructing solutions to overcome those food-centered inequalities, it is...
Identity Intersectionality and Gender in the Archaeological Past and the Archaeologists’ Present (2017)
Archaeologists live in a reality in which gender, sexuality, race, age, and occupational identities (to name a few) are pervasive and impactful in our professional and personal lives. Our individual experiences in the world are always being shaped by our place at the intersection of multiple perceived and/or performed identities in the multiple social landscapes we inhabit. It then must be accepted that social identities operated similarly for people in the past. Still, there remains a hesitance...
Inequality in the Academy: An Intersectional Analysis of Young College Men in 19th Century Lexington, Virginia (2017)
What can intersectionality offer to a study of an all-male antebellum dormitory? While this approach has typically been used to identify and combat race- and gender-based discrimination, this paper argues that intersectional theory can also illuminate subtle class- and age-based inequalities among historic individuals of the same gender and race. Archaeological investigation of Graham Hall, a combined dormitory/classroom space/chapel located on the campus of Washington and Lee University in...
An Intersectional Analysis of Personal Adornment at the African Meeting House in Boston (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "An Archaeology Of Freedom: Exploring 19th-Century Black Communities And Households In New England." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Built in 1806, the African Meeting House in Boston was a prominent social institution for the free Black community residing on Beacon Hill. Beyond functioning as a church, the African Meeting House was used as a school, housing for community members, as well as a meeting space...
An Intersectional Archaeology of Women's Reproductive Rights (2017)
Black feminist activists working in reproductive rights have long pointed out that access to abortion must be part of a larger project that also addresses poverty, racism, and other vectors of oppression that impact on women's ability to exercise free choice over their reproduction. Family planning decisions sit at the intersection of these power structures. This is illustrated at an early 20th-century tenement in Easton, Maryland, where gender ideals, racial segregation, slumlord renting,...
Intersectional Feminist Theory And Materializations Of Multiple, Fluid, Interacting Gender Identities, Exemplified By Immigrant Participants' Negotiations In Reform Women’s Programs Around The Turn Of The 20th Century (2018)
Feminists have theorized intersectionality in two related ways: in1970 Pauli Murray discussed the "multiple barriers of poverty, race and sex," and in 1989 Kimberlé Crenshaw named interlinked racism and sexism intersectionality, which she recently expanded to include classism, heterosexism, homophobia, ableism, etc. Another kind of intersectionality feminists have theorized are the relationships between gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion, age, etc. in people’s identities, which are the...
An Intersectional Study of Authorship and Citation in American Antiquity, Latin American Antiquity, and Advances in Archaeological Practice (2017)
Over the last thirty years, archaeologists studying identity in the past have also examined archaeologists in the present. Feminist archaeologists of the 1990s examined gender inequities among archaeologists using a wide variety of metrics. Since NAGPRA passed in 1991, many have written about the roles of Native Americans and other people of color in archaeological research. Yet there are no studies of how sexism, racism, and heterosexism work together in our field. I will examine patterns of...
Intersectional Violence and Documentary Archaeology in Rosewood, Florida (2013)
The former town of Rosewood was settled in the mid-1800s and by 1900 was a successful, majority African American community. On January 1st, 1923 a white woman in the neighboring community of Sumner fabricated a black assailant to hide her extramarital affair. In less than seven days, the entire community of Rosewood was burned to the ground and its black residents fled to other parts of Florida and the country. This paper discusses a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between...
Intersectionality and Health Consumerism in Antebellum Virginia (2017)
This presentation explores intersectionality in the context of health consumerism in antebellum central Virginia. Health consumerism incorporates the modern sense of patients’ involvement in their own health care decisions and the degree of access enslaved African Americans had to resources that shaped their health and well-being experiences. To emphasize the multilayered nature of health and illness, this analysis engages Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes "three bodies model." The three...
Intersectionality and Labor Solidarity at Blair Mountain (2015)
Solidarity around labor issues is often seen as a construction of class interest and consciousness. I will examine an alternative view of the formation of solidarity through the theory of intersectionality. Using the case study of the Battle of Blair Mountain, I will explore how a potent form of solidarity was formed through a convergence of racial, class, ethnic, and regional interests. This is in contrast to a traditional view of class solidarity superseding or erasing these different...
Intersectionality, Strategic Essentialism, Third Spaces, and Charmed Circles: Using Dead Ladies’ Garbage to Explain Today’s America (2017)
Audre Lorde wrote, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." And yet, certain identities and struggles are forefronted every day. In 1903, middle-class women founded Wiawaka Holiday House in New York’s Adirondacks for "working girls" to have an affordable vacation away from unhealthy factories and cities. Using strategic essentialism and Third Space, a 1920s assemblage from Wiawaka demonstrates the deeply dependent relationships among race,...
Intertsectionality and Irish Identity in Lowell, Massachusetts, Past and Present (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Arriving in the early 19th century, Irish laborers built the first canals and mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. Recently completed excavations at the former site of the Patrick Keyes Store in Lowell – a collaborative project between the Fiske Center of the University of Massachusetts Boston, Queens University, Belfast Northern...
Invisibility and Intersectionality: Seeking Free Black Women in Antebellum Kentucky (2018)
Investigation into the lifeways of freedman George White suggest a successful businessman with the means to purchase and keep approximately 300 acres, to purchase and emancipate his family, and to build a safe community for his family and other freed slaves in eastern Kentucky. However, documentary research revealed only small fragments about the female members of his family. The women are, for the most part, invisible. This paper uses intersectionality as a theoretical lens to explore the...
"Irish Fever": How the Intersection of Ethnicity, Class, and Typhus Fever created an Epidemic of Prejudice in 19th-century NYC (2017)
During the height of the Great Hunger in Ireland in the late 1840s, epidemic typhus fever infected thousands aboard emigrant ships destined for New York City. Suddenly, a disease that had long been known as "jail-fever" or "ship-fever" became the "Irish fever." It was no longer associated with a place, but with a people. This paper will explain why (for many Americans) the intersection between typhus fever and the bodies of rural Irish laborers created a new disease, one they used to naturalize...
Leaving the Blanks Unfilled: a case study in productive ambiguity from Early Bronze Age Lebanon (2017)
An oft-heard sentiment in prehistoric archaeology, particularly for contexts without traditionally visible indicators of gender (i.e., bodies or identifiable representations of bodies), is that "the evidence just isn’t there" to productively introduce intersectional gender research. This is partly due to the trend-sensitivity of archaeology, which often draws from other disciplines to supplement its own scope. Intersectionality is used in the same way, as archaeologists attempt to reframe their...
"Monarchs of All They See": Identity and the Afterlives of the Frontier in Fort Davis, Texas (2018)
Fort Davis, a frontier fort in far west Texas tasked with protecting the Overland Trail to California and fighting Comanche, closed in 1891, leaving behind the ethnically and financially diverse town that had grown up around it. This community struggled to redefine itself economically in the years following the fort’s closure, only to find a new lease on life in the first decades of the 20th century as a tourist destination. In this paper, I examine manifestations of intersectional identity in...
The Origins of Food Inequality in the US South: Intersecting the Past, Present, and Future (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This project highlights an interdisciplinary approach to uncover the origins of food inequality as related to food production, distribution, and access across the US South. Our case study, Memphis and its surrounding rural landscape, is well known for its “Wall Street-like” slave-based economy and commodity crop...
Power and the Production of an American Landscape (2017)
Race, class, and gender have intersected throughout our nation's history. These systems of power shape the strategies and tactics available to people positioned differentially throughout society. This paper will use evidence from archaeological and landscape analyses in order to identify the ways in which these systems of power influenced the 19th century practices that produced the 20th century landscape of Orange County, Virginia.
Reconstructing Violence: A Multiscalar Approach to Cranial Trauma (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When analyzing traumatic injury in highly commingled and fragmentary collections, interpreting violence can be particularly challenging as reconstructing the full extent of fractures in an individual is not possible, and not all traumatic injuries are indicative of violence. In these cases, cranial trauma can be the most...