3.2: The Constructedness of Sex

One classification that most people probably consider unchallengeable is that of the two sexes, male and female. But about 2 percent of humans are born intersexed, and Anne Fausto-Sterling and others have drawn attention to the range of variability in the sexual characteristics of human bodies.^[10] Biological sex is multifaceted, potentially designated in reference to chromosomes or DNA, hormones, breasts, genitals, reproductive abilities, or in archaeology, skeletal characteristics. As Fausto-Sterling notes, “Labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision.”^[11]

These complexities have been acknowledged by bioarchaeologists, who study human remains. In a discussion of ancient Maya human remains, Pamela Geller remarks that “femaleness and maleness reside at opposite ends of a continuum with ambiguity situated in the middle. Thus, it would appear that a strict binary opposition of female and male is supplanted by a continuum of sexual difference.”^[12] Indeed, Rebecca Storey may have identified an intersex person in a royal Maya tomb at Copán, Honduras.^[13]

Some suggest approaching sex in a similar way to race, as a social construct: “The ways in which race is described as a social construct may be translatable to sex: what we understand to be a biological sex is composed of a diverse set of variables that may not invariably pattern out into what we socially comprehend as male and female.”^[14] In a 2016 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory dedicated to challenging “binary binds,” the editors heralded recent attempts “to resist predetermining the types of persons we expect to see” in the archaeological record.^[15] “Many scholars now approach sex and gender as a continuum . . . , emergent in practice. . . , and potentially variable throughout the life course.”^[16] Some archaeologists now prefer to see identity in general as fluid and changeable—that is, a phenomenon that is processual and not a taxonomy, or “a set of taxonomic specificities.”^[17]

Furthermore, we cannot assume that physical sex differences were as important to people in the past as they are to us and that they were given as much weight in identifying people. Even contemporary ideas about sex turn out to be, from the perspective of archaeology, relatively new. In his book Making Sex, Thomas Laqueur shows that perceptions of the sexed body changed radically from antiquity until the twentieth century.^[18] Up until the eighteenth century, anatomical and physiological representations of male and female bodies in Western and Eastern medicine relied on a common, androgynous body with differently positioned but homologous reproductive organs in each sex, the vagina being an inverted and internalized penis and so forth. Physiological differences were explained by relative humoral balances, heat, or measures of yin or yang.^[19]

Even when the physical differences between the sexes were recognized, they were not important until the end of the 1700s, when they became useful in arguments for or against the role of women in education and public life.^[20] It bears repeating that classifications are not neutral—they are created in specific cultural contexts in relation to specific questions.

Queering Sex and Gender Binaries

The distinction between sex as biologically determined and gender as socially learned was popularized by John Money and Anke Ehrhardt and is now a standard view in academia and beyond.^[21] But even the sex-gender binary has been problematized by queer theory. Judith Butler influentially argued that our biology is not a neutral base on which gender is culturally constructed.^[22] As shown by Laqueur and others, even our bodies are culturally constructed in that they are understood in culturally specific ways.^[23] According to Butler, “Perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”^[24]

Although some bioarchaeologists remind us that “sex has a material reality” and that the conceptual separation of sex from gender has been generally productive, others have followed Butler in arguing that our now-standard sex-gender model often reduces gender to sex and tends to create normative and nonnormative gender categories that risk being as simplistic as racial categories. ^[25]

For example, in studies of women buried with weapons, like the famous Moche Señora de Cao burial in Peru, normative approaches to sex and gender may lead to the creation of “an exotic ‘gender type’ . . . instead of simply a woman, probably taking part in war-like activities during her life.”^[26] A replica of Señora de Cao can be seen in figure 3.2. We don’t expect to find women warriors, so we are surprised when we do, and this prompts us to treat them as anomalies in need of explanation. Taken at face value, however, imagery from the past often does not present what we might consider nonnormative gender expression as nonnormative at all. One of the roles of the Aztec goddess Xochiquetzal, also known as Itzpapalotl, was as a “primordial warrior,” and she is depicted with warrior imagery.^[27] In Maya art, women warriors are depicted similarly to their male counterparts. A female warrior “occupies a position of authority on the central axis” of a prominent relief at the Maya site of Chichen Itza, Mexico, “wearing a high-status feathered headdress and snake skirt and carrying weapons typical of an Itza warrior. . . . Clearly defined bare breasts signal that she is a woman.”^[28] Like male rulers, female rulers at several other Maya sites are depicted on carved stone stelae as warriors with subjugated captives—on which they literally stand (figure 3.3).^[29]

Figure 3.2. A replica of Señora de Cao. (CC-BY-SA Manuel Gonzolez Olaechea y Franco.)

As early as 1990, some recommended we consider both sex and gender in terms of intensity or as existing on a spectrum, with some cultures allowing more freedom and flexibility in gender expression than others.^[30] Evidence for gender fluidity has been cited by archaeologists for decades and is often interpreted as symbolic of power rather than deviance.^[31] For example, mixed-gender imagery on figurines from the Gulf Coast of Mexico could be an expression of supernatural power.^[32] In one case, a female figure wearing a high belt that is atypical for women “may be assuming a certain status or role, or even a level of power, that is usually, but not exclusively, associated with men.”^[33] A study of Oaxacan figurines from the Early Formative period (1400 BC–850 BC) suggests that “the lack of attention to genitalia on figurines tracks with observations from throughout Mesoamerican groups that primary sexual characteristics often are not the focus of gender differentiation and identity.”^[34]

Figure 3.3. Maya stela from Naranjo, Guatemala. (Public domain, Thomas Joyce.)

Back in 1977, the gender fluidity of deities was associated with cycles, such as the maize god and the moon god.^[35] In this century, the major Aztec god Tezcatlipoca was found to have bisexual and transgender qualities (figure 3.4).^[36] In studies of the so-called great goddess imagery on the Tepantitla murals at the huge central-Mexico city-state of Teotihuacan, researchers have suggested that the murals referred to a mixed-gender deity, and this fits a broader pattern in which binary gender is not clearly represented at the site (figure 3.5).^[37] Analogies to historically known and living Indigenous two-spirit people have been used to explain cross-dressing or mixed-gender imagery in Maya art.^[38] Male bloodletting from the penis arguably “conceptually transformed the male genitalia into a doubly potent agent of fertility, capable of shedding two life-giving fluids: semen and blood.”^[39]

Figure 3.4. A drawing of Tezcatlipoca, one of the deities described in the Codex Borgia. (Public domain.)

Figure 3.5. A reproduction of one of the murals depicting the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan. (CC0 O. Mustafin, National Museum of Archaeology, Mexico City.)

Images like Stela H at the Maya site of Copán, Honduras (figure 3.6), in which a man is depicted in a net skirt, have also been interpreted as female-associated characteristics expressing power.^[40] The use of powerful feminine imagery by a man may be exemplified in the colonial United States by Edward Hyde, or Lord Cornbury (whose purported portrait is shown in figure 3.7), who as the governor of New York and New Jersey between 1701 and 1708, was Queen Anne’s representative. When he was criticized for reportedly opening the assembly dressed in women’s clothing, he is said to have answered, “You are very stupid not to see the propriety of it. In this place and particularly on this occasion I represent a woman and ought in all respects to represent her as faithfully as I can.”^[41]

Figure 3.6. Copán, Honduras, Stela H. (Public domain, Frederick Catherwood, Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas.)

Figure 3.7. The purported portrait of Lord Cornbury (1661–1723) dressed as a woman; there is no evidence about the identity of the sitter. (Public domain, Ecummenic.)

Read

Kristina Killgrove points out the mistakes that contemporary assumptions may lead to when interpreting the past in “Is That Skeleton Gay? The Problem with Projecting Modern Ideas onto the Past,” published in Forbes, April 8, 2017 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2017/04/08/is-that-skeleton-gay-the-problem-with-projecting-modern-ideas-onto-the-past).

• What does Killgrove want readers to take away from the discussion of the three examples of skeletons or burials that don’t fit within our understanding of gender and sexuality in the past?
• Killgrove highlights a remark by Geller: “Discoveries of decedents whose bodies have been identified as romantically entangled, compulsorily reproductive, or occupationally divided say more about our present state of socio-sexual affairs than they do about past interactions and intimacies.” What is said about our culture’s current views on same-sex relationships by the media coverage of the same-sex skeletons found together?

Colonial New Yorkers may have thought of Lord Cornbury as a trans person or cross-dresser, but Hyde’s own words suggest a less essentialized, more contextual identity. Many questions remain about the Lord Cornbury story, but it reminds us that trans behavior in other times and places may have symbolic resonance beyond simply deviance. Further complicating interpretation is a warning about projecting our notions of fixed, public identities—including trans identities—on ancient Mesoamerica: “Maya imaginations presented transsexuality as a strategy for understanding cosmic power. For other elements of transsexuality to fall completely outside of that context would have been unimaginable.”^[42]

Check Your Knowledge

Contributed by Has Arakelyan, Rio Hondo College

Multiple-Choice Questions

1. According to Anne Fausto-Sterling, what percentage of humans are born intersexed?
A) Less than 0.1%
B) About 2%
C) About 10%
D) About 20%

2. What does Pamela Geller suggest about the classification of femaleness and maleness in ancient Maya remains?
A) They are strictly binary
B) They are determined only by skeletal characteristics
C) They exist on a continuum with ambiguity in the middle
D) They are irrelevant to archaeology

3. What major argument does Judith Butler make about sex and gender?
A) Sex is purely biological and gender is cultural
B) Sex and gender are both culturally constructed and the distinction may not exist at all
C) Gender is more important than sex
D) Sex is always more important than gender

4. How did perceptions of the sexed body change from antiquity to the twentieth century, according to Thomas Laqueur?
A) They shifted from a common androgynous model to a strict male/female binary
B) They remained the same
C) They became less important in society
D) They focused only on external features

5. What is a risk of using normative approaches to sex and gender in archaeological studies, as seen in the example of the Señora de Cao?
A) Overlooking the presence of weapons in burials
B) Focusing only on male burials
C) Ignoring skeletal evidence
D) Creating exotic or anomalous gender types instead of recognizing diverse roles

Discussion Questions

1. How does the existence of intersex individuals challenge the traditional binary classification of sex in both contemporary society and archaeology?
2. In what ways do cultural contexts influence how physical sex differences are interpreted in the archaeological record?
3. Discuss Judith Butler’s argument that sex is as culturally constructed as gender. How does this perspective affect the way we study ancient societies?
4. Why might normative approaches to sex and gender lead to the creation of “exotic” gender types in archaeological interpretation? Use examples from the chapter.
5. How can archaeologists avoid imposing modern binary or normative frameworks when interpreting evidence of sex, gender, and sexuality in the past?

Multiple-Choice Questions - Answers

1. B) About 2%
2. C) They exist on a continuum with ambiguity in the middle
3. B) Sex and gender are both culturally constructed and the distinction may not exist at all
4. A) They shifted from a common androgynous model to a strict male/female binary
5. D) Creating exotic or anomalous gender types instead of recognizing diverse roles