Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

From the day we walk onto a new field project until our interpretations are published and disseminated, our understandings of gender shape the way we study the past. Although questioning and destabilizing categories has long been an important tenet of feminist work in archaeology, a strict gender binary system continues to structure archaeological theory and practice. This session will include a variety of papers that seek to disrupt and complicate the gender binary in archaeological knowledge production, from the field through publication. Drawing upon Black Feminist theorizing and disabililty studies, our presenters engage with gender as intertwined within other categories of difference, including race, class, disability, and sexuality. This session seeks to develop the radical possibilities of a queer archaeology, in which the certitude of binary gender systems is destabilized, and our methods, pedagogies, and understandings of the past make space for a much broader range of genders.

Other Keywords
Gender • History Of Archaeology • Race • Clothing • Prostitution • Sexuality • Identity • Adornment • Pedagogy • Queer

Temporal Keywords
20th Century • Nineteenth Century • 19th Century • Contemporary • Late Colonial/Historic (19th century) • 1865-1920

Geographic Keywords
Coahuila (State / Territory) • New Mexico (State / Territory) • Oklahoma (State / Territory) • Arizona (State / Territory) • Texas (State / Territory) • Sonora (State / Territory) • United States of America (Country) • Chihuahua (State / Territory) • Nuevo Leon (State / Territory) • Delaware (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)

  • Documents (9)
Documents
  • Albert’s Corset? A Queer Approach to Middle-Range Theory (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer A. Porter-Lupu.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Popularized by Binford, middle-range theory works at the intersection between data and interpretation to analyze the ways social practices manifest archaeologically. In this paper, I take a queer approach to the middle-range that critically engages the often-elided barrier between social...

  • Being the Only One: An Ethnographic Study of Black Women Archaeologists (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Nala K. Williams.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The application of a Black feminist theoretical lens to the field of archaeology has produced a site to discuss how race, gender, and other identities impact how archaeological research is done. This paper is concerned with the experiences of three Black women archaeologists in the United States....

  • A Chicana Archaeology of the Northern Rio Grande, New Mexico (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Valerie E. Bondura.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper draws on theory from radical feminist Chicana philosophers, especially Gloria Anzaldúa, to interpret historical archaeological evidence of Chicana lives in the 18th-20th century Northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. I use pottery analysis, ethnoarchaeological research, ethnographic...

  • Disrupting Pedagogies: Queer Theory in the Classroom, Field School, and Mentoring (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina C. L. Eichner. Kirsten Vacca.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In this paper we discuss queer pedagogical methods. Through a review of our own experimental teaching practices, we aim to disrupt traditional pedagogical models. Over the course of our combined 16 years of teaching, we have implemented and tested a variety of exploratory techniques that embody the...

  • Diversity and Strong(er) Objectivity in Historical Archaeology (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura E. Heath-Stout.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Feminist archaeologists and philosophers of science have long argued that a person’s knowledge is shaped by their identities and their position within society; standpoint theory has specifically contended that marginalized people have an epistemic advantage over their privileged peers in...

  • Dress, Labor, and Choice: An Intersectional Analysis of Clothing and Adornment Artifacts (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ayana Omilade Flewellen.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the midst of racialized servitude, sexual exploitation, and economic disenfranchisement, that marked the post-emancipation era in the United States, African American women were styling their hair with combs, lacing glass beads around their necks, dyeing coarse-cotton fabric with indigo-berry and...

  • "Love is a Sweet Insanity": The Hidden Gender Revolutions of the 19th-Century Asylum (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeline Bourque Kearin.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the 19th century, a new impulse toward the humane treatment of the insane prompted the establishment of lunatic hospitals across the United States and Europe. Within the normalizing disciplinary regime of these asylums, expressions of gender nonconformity and “deviant sexual instinct” (i.e.,...

  • Pleasure or All Customers?: Disrupting Heteronormative Perceptions of Nineteenth-century Prostitution (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jade Luiz.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Studies of nineteenth-century prostitution have always been tied in some manner to discussions of gender. In sites of organized prostitution, the narrative has been that women commoditized their sexuality and men purchased it from them. This subversion of nineteenth-century sexual norms has led to...

  • Travel Dust and Wanderlust: The Queer Routes of Early African American Blues Traditions (2020)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Arjona.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The historical emergence of modern queer subcultures is often framed as an urban phenomenon attributed to the anonymity of metropolitan centers. Far less attention has been paid to rural queer ecologies where systems of racial and sexual surveillance coalesced in the Jim Crow Era. Foregrounding the...