Gender Revolutions: Disrupting Heteronormative Practices and Epistemologies

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.