Inequity Critiques: Fit, Prestige, and the Don Quixote Effect

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the last 35 years, scholars have produced an ever-increasing number of publications critiquing sexism and androcentrism in contemporary archaeological practice. Various studies have considered the relationship between intersectional gender identities and the completion of doctoral degrees, submission of external grants, and publication of peer-reviewed articles, among other activities. Such studies demonstrate that, despite women having received the majority of PhDs in anthropological archaeology in the United States for over 20 years, there still exist significant gender disparities in prestigious scholarly practices. This introductory paper to the organized session “Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice” summarizes the history and current state of archaeological equity critiques—perhaps better termed inequity critiques—and identifies potential new avenues of intersectional research. Specifically, this paper highlights the need to examine more critically concepts such as fit and prestige that may unintentionally perpetuate exclusion, and suggests that contemporary archaeological gender disparities may usefully be understood as what Pierre Bourdieu has termed the hysteresis of habitus or the Don Quixote effect—the consequence of individual habitus not changing at the same rate as social structures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35528.0