Identity Intersectionality and Gender in the Archaeological Past and the Archaeologists’ Present

Summary

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 among many archaeologists to investigate the full intersection of social identities in their own work. Further, some refuse to acknowledge that some gender can be studied at all in archaeological research. At one level, this paper will review prior literature on gender and identity to propose the incorporation of previously successful methods and interpretive frameworks that may allow identity intersectionality to be incorporated into more archaeological studies. At another level, this paper will critically examine how the intellectual and social landscape amongst academic archaeologists has been constructed to uphold social and intellectual divisions that, in effect, enabled in the push of gender archaeology to the periphery of the field.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Constructing Archaeology: Moving Sex/Gender and Sexuality Research from the Periphery to the Center

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16309