Considering Gender

Last night the UAB Gay/Straight Student Alliance hosted a showing of the Groundspark film "Straightlaced: How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up" on campus.  The film is an amalgam of Southern California high school students of diverse backgrounds, gender identities, and sexual orientations speaking to their experience with and perceptions of the concept of gender.  The students consider gender as it is expressed in the media, as society or western culture instructs us to perform gender, and their own identities as they struggle with fitting in to the categories provided to us by our culture.  The students' voices are the only bearer of information in this film - with the exception of the documentary's narrative structure derived from the editor's understanding of the interview content - and their articulate young voices are a welcome grabbag of fresh perspectives on a binary that our culture is only recently attempting to move beyond.

Until I saw the film, I was unaware of the label "genderqueer" and its definition.  According to the biological female that identified herself as genderqueer in the film, the category encompasses individuals who do not identify as either male or female but rather a kind of third gender space.  Genderqueer is not analogous to the sexual orientation of bisexual in the context of the homo-hetero spectrum of sexuality because it is not a combination of male and female gender roles; instead, genderqueer individuals consider themselves as neither male nor female, but something else entirely.  This concept is difficult to grasp in a culture whose cognitive framework is so often founded on binary oppositions and language is equally dependent on these contrasts.  Much anthropological research exists on gender as it is culturally mandated and performed in other parts of the world, and a glance at this information can sharpen our understanding of gender in our own culture.

Anthropology is useful because it is the attempted scientific study of humans.  I emphasize the word attempted because the field's founders and practitioners - though they have certainly strived to proceed ethically - have for the most part failed to be both an objective voice on the reality of human existence and also an advocate for applying that knowledge to real world social and environmental justice problems; in other words, good anthropology is done with and for the people it studies, and it is my understanding that this is a relatively new idea in the discipline.  Despite the mistakes of the past, it is because of the diligent research of all previous anthropologists that we have so much data on the diversity of the human experience.

Most anthropologists recognize that gender is a performance because culturally proscribed gender roles are not dependent on biology.  In other words,  the behavior and mental categories associated with gender roles are arbitrarily determined by culture, not governed by material differences in men and women.  The fact that certain gender roles just happen to pertain to biological females and others to biological males is completely socially determined.  For example, in traditional Fiji, the female gender role is associated with inshore marine fishing while all gardening activities are associated with men.  This division of activities has nothing to do with the physical inability of Fijian women and men to carry out the gendered behavior of the opposite sex, but rather stems from 3,000 year old traditional cultural values.  It is important to note that even though gender is considered a performance of cultural standards of behavior and categories of thought that govern that behavior, gender roles are often strident in a way that the term "performance" does not convey.  Individuals who express gender in unique ways can be socially punished and in some cases are even considered "deviant" for violating their culture's gender rules.

Margaret Mead and her Samoan collaborators, dressed in traditional barkcloth skirts.

Early work done by Margaret Mead is considered to be the first research in Anthropology to challenge the idea that gender roles are biologically based.  In her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Mead compares gender roles among “the gentle mountain-dwelling Arapesh, the fierce cannibalistic Mundugumor, and the graceful head-hunters of Tchambuli,” and finds that each society expresses female and male gender roles in a different way (1935).  Most importantly, the genders and gendered behavior recognized by the societies she studied were different from - and in one case, quite the opposite of - genders and gender roles as they are expressed in American culture.  Though this book has since received criticism because of Mead's tendency to generalize data to fit her theory and her sometimes romantic prose, it was nonetheless groundbreaking in its assertion that gender is not innate.


A slightly more recent work by Serena Nanda discusses the third gender class of the Hijras in India.  In Neither Man nor Woman, Nanda explores the lives of Hijras, religious groups of men that dress and behave as women, but neither identify nor are identified as women or men (1999).  Hijras perform a specific religious role in certain ceremonies in India (mostly weddings and births), and because of their status as individuals of a third gender, are believed to have the power to bless or curse ceremony attendants.  However, also because of their status as individuals of a third gender, many Hijras must beg to survive.

18 year old Sonia in Armritsar, India
Photo Credit: Antonio Di Vico, Nazca Pictures

Photo Credit:  ASC Queer Theory Blog

Another frequently cited work by Nanda on the anthropology of gender explores the lives and cultural roles of third genders in indigenous America.  Titled "Multiple Genders among North American Indians," the essay discusses how early historical accounts of Native American gender variants referred to them as the Berdache, but that this term stems from the bias of historians because it is derived from the Arabic translation of the phrase "male prostitute."  Early misunderstandings of third genders by white anthropologists who could not see beyond their own culture's values have tainted what little evidence we have on the origins and past expressions of these third genders, but studying with existing North American Indians that identify as these genders has improved this.  Nanda notes that across American Indian societies, gender variants had these features in common:  "transvestism, cross-gender occupation, same sex (but different gender) sexuality, some culturally normative and acknowledged process for recruitment to the role, special language and ritual roles, and associations with spiritual power" (2000:14).  More information on Native American gender variants are available here.  [shameful plug: Nanda's essay appears in this introduction to cultural anthropology reader].

"Two-Spirit" people of the Crow Indians.
Photo credit: AllyAction

While these are just a few examples of gender roles as they occur cross-culturally, they illustrate that just like sexuality, religion, and table manners, gender is not limited to just our culture's categories of expression, but is more like a spectrum of human diversity and possibility.  

Graphic Credit: I'm in Flux

I recently read the fantastic book Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman's 2010 update to their 1993 book about members of our culture who bend America's gender rules into something new.  Both volumes are composed of original contributions from untraditionally gendered individuals and provide insight to the struggles and triumphs faced by those that choose to create their own gender reality.  Like the film "Straightlaced," these books - along with the emergence of Queer Theory as a social science and the increasing portrayal of untraditional genders in the media - demonstrate that the movement to go beyond a dual-gendered cultural system is well underway in America.  I think an anthropological perspective remains as salient to our culture's understanding of gender today as it has been in the past and can only lend more context to this movement; I hope to use the perspective provided by the cross-cultural lens to ignite social change through my own activism, teaching, and research.

The glitter rainbow - an appropriate symbol for the gender spectrum?