Misidentification on the American Frontier: Queer Perspectives on Identity Classification in Historical Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

As archaeologists we link patterns of performance and daily practice to identity categories. Theses classifications depend on normalized understandings of idealized behaviors. However, the groupings we use to discuss past actors rarely fully encompass the extent of behaviors in which they engaged. An extremist queer argument challenges that by looking for the patterning of human behaviors as a means of discussing identity groupings, we actually miss the markers of moments of mis/dis-identification in the material record. While we must consider how identity models are unintentionally used to homogenize past experiences, it is also important that archaeologists don’t "throw out the baby with the bath water" by concurrently recognizing that identity ideals still shape the large majority of peoples’ behaviors. Using a case study focused on the 19th c. American military in the western frontier, this presentation problematizes the complexity of daily behavior and identity construction from a queer perspective.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25120