Perspectives on Deviance: Exploring Sex-Variance from Bioarchaeological and Contemporary Standpoints

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this talk, we discuss the visible effects of sex-variance on skeletal material and in the modern politico-ethical world, drawing on bioarchaeological, historical, and medical sources. Here, sex-variance includes the overlapping categories of castrates (such as castrati and eunuchs), transgender people, and intersex people. Contemporary political partisanship and religious moralizing have produced “regimes of truth”—in keeping with this session’s focus—that have worked to erase or denigrate such variance. Because the techniques and theories that bioarchaeologists and forensic anthropologists use to create knowledge are predicated on an assumption of a sex binary, overlooking “deviance”—a concept we will consider in greater depth—from that binary may be an understandable concession. However, drawing from queer theorizing, we argue that knowledge of such sex-variance in the past 1) eases the burden of invisibility individuals experience in the present and 2) combats the naturalization of a sex and gender binary. We also address the slippery slope—that is, the risk that discussing sex-variance can lead to the medicalization of gender-variance, reducing it to a medically determined and determinable biologically-based condition rather than a complex interplay of personal, interpersonal, cultural, social, and biological factors.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38642.0