Ungendering Sex in Moche Ceramics

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.

Moche ceramic art (Peru, first millenium) is a corpus of veristic images including explicit depictions of sex acts and human genitalia. Because anatomical sex is so visible in these artifacts, the temptation to collapse sex and gender is strong – but what if we begin, instead, by resisting this impulse? In my work with the Moche ‘sex pots’, I have tried to resist relying on ‘common sense facts’ including the sex/gender binary and heterosexual definitions of reproduction, looking instead for meaning that emerges from the corpus itself. This approach requires a high tolerance for ambiguity, and can be disappointing for those hoping for a clear-cut feminist, queer or trans political message. The results, however, include deeper insights into indigenous notions of embodiment, individuality and collectivity, which, I will argue, may include a collective ‘interior’ self and an individualized surface appearance, in contrast to the typical modern Western notion of a hidden interior ‘true’ individual self and a ‘false’ surface presented to others. Another result, of course, is a much richer appreciation for the deliberate deployment of gender ambiguity in the ancient Americas.

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): 24776