3.3: Abjection and Normativity

How does the reevaluation of gender and sex relate to sexuality? The historian Michel Foucault influentially argues that sex and sexuality are embedded in discourses shaped by power.^[43] More recently, the historian David Halperin’s book How to Do the History of Homosexuality describes the problems inherent in applying our contemporary concept of sexuality to other places and times.^[44] This attention to categorizations and binaries is a hallmark of queer theory because categorizations of people and their actions depend on ideas about what is normal and what is deviant.^[45] In other words, culturally varied meanings of abjection and who is abject help define and maintain the normative. Yet there is good evidence that what we define as abject sexualities (e.g., homosexuality, transsexuality) would not have been considered so deviant in many places and times in prehistory.

For Mesoamerica, the “domain of the abject” involved concerns about being incompletely human or physically unusual (e.g., human-animal hybrids, dwarfs).^[46] Intersex people (known as hermaphrodites in earlier times) fall in this context.^[47] But the ancient Maya may not have been concerned so much with homosexual sex as with sex—or anything else—taken to excess.^[48] The “sexuality of young men in Postclassic and Classic Maya society may itself have been more fluid than any normative heterosexual model would allow. In art, young men were routinely represented as the objects of the gaze of older men and adult women.”^[49] Carved stone reliefs at a possible public building for young men at the Maya site of San Diego depict “enema insertion, erratic (probably drunken) dances, disheveled hair, and what may be autoerotic asphyxiation,”^[50] and many depictions are “with a decided undertone of homoeroticism.”^[51] Dichotomies like normal or deviant and man or woman implicitly define heterosexual sexuality as normal and same-sex desire as deviant. This often occurs without adequate consideration of how people in other times and places have framed sexuality differently. Our contemporary social norms lead us to believe that homosexuality and same-sex desire are deviant. However, people in other times and places may have framed sexuality differently, and in fact the contemporary Western focus on sexual practice as a fundamental aspect of social identity is itself historically unusual. Ingrid Fuglestvedt concludes that “there is nothing wrong with studying sexuality when this is relevant; what is argued is rather that the sex/gender paradigm insists on the enduring and absolute relevance of sexuality.”^[52]

Intersectionality, Performance, and Performativity

The diversity of gender in the ancient world has drawn attention to our assumptions about gender hierarchy—that is, the ranking of men above women. Gender complementarity (sometimes called gender parallelism) is an alternative to gender hierarchy in Mesoamerica.^[53] However, both gender hierarchy and gender complementarity have been critiqued as binary oppositions that downplay variability and difference. “While these models have most certainly been useful in structuring our analyses, . . . they rely on binary understandings of the relationship between biological sex and gender and tend to obscure variability in ways we should not ignore.”^[54] This variability is captured by the concepts of intersectionality and positionality that are characteristic of third-wave feminism and queer approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality.^[55] Both are related to the idea that people have multiple aspects to their identity (e.g., race, ethnicity, class) that they emphasize or downplay in different contexts and that take on different importance in different contexts.^[56] Many societies take pains to gender individuals with objects, tasks, and food, yet we repeatedly see that gender is not as important in the very young and the very old and that gender is often most strongly marked when people are of reproductive age.^[57] Similar criticisms can be made about the (often implicit) assumption that sexuality was as important in the creation of identity in the past as it is now. Fuglestvedt suggests that we consider a scale of intensity for societal interest in sex, gender, and sexuality.^[58] In these terms, many contemporary people live in societies with unusually high-intensity attitudes to gender, sex, and sexuality.

For the Maya, “the data suggest not only that Maya gender ideologies may not have been founded on a belief that binary biological sexes translate into binary gendered identities, but also that other aspects of social identity such as age or class may have played a more prominent part in determining gender roles.”^[59] Ethnographic and colonial sources suggest that the aging moon may have changed gender over the course of the month—did a similar model apply to aging people? Lunar and related deities (e.g., the pulque god^[60]) are typically bisexual and multigendered.^[61] Likewise, Maya and Aztec carnivalesque gender blending occurred near the ends of temporal cycles.^[62]

As noted previously, in Butler’s writing even the sexed body is performed rather than existing as a pregiven: in a performative approach, “the body . . . gains legibility through cultural interaction rather than as an ontologically prior reality.”^[63] Gender and sexuality can be compared to style in that they are ways of doing as much as ways of being, an ongoing performance rather than inborn, static states. “The repeated stylizations of the body—everyday acts and gestures—are themselves performatives, producing the gendered identity of which they are thought to be the expressions.”^[64]

Examples of Intersectional Approaches to Ancient Identity

The deconstruction of received (often binary) categorizations, a focus on individuals and variation over groups and norms, and Butler’s concept of performativity have led to more contextual, localized, diachronic (changing over time) approaches. Some have called for more contextual, intersectional, from-the-ground-up studies in some cases focused on individuals, not groups, thus “effectively deconstructing gender as an ontological category.”^[65] In this view, prehistoric identities do not rely on the notion of a core, stable self that remains unchanged throughout the life-course. . . . Instead, identity is context-dependent and enacted or “embodied” in ways that capture the “lived experiences” of past peoples.^[66]

Because “we enact exclusionary practices on our data through the analytical categories we deploy to make the past known to us,” many scholars now advocate intersectional approaches that allow variation along more than one or two axes.^[67] The following are some New World examples.

Gender, Sexuality, Age, and Occupation

A study of the early historical Chumash of California argues that undertakers were either men who engaged in homosexual acts or postmenopausal women. They were categorized together because their sexual activity did “not result in conception and birth.”^[68] In this case, occupation, age, and reproductive potential intersected with gender and sexual behavior in a classification system that differs greatly from familiar contemporary ones.

Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Status

Like gender, “sexuality may be thought about, experienced and acted on differently according to age, class, ethnicity, physical ability, sexual orientation and preference, religion, and region.”^[69] Recognition of this is apparent in the concept of “ethnosexual conflict” used in a study of Spanish colonialism “to refer to the clash between incompatible cultural beliefs and practices related to sexuality.”^[70] Pete Sigal cites evidence for an institutionalized availability of “passives” (the xochihuas mentioned later) for elite men in precontact Aztec society. Sigal has also drawn broad comparisons between Greek and Maya pederasty in the training of elite boys.^[71] “The discourse [‘language of Zuyua’] showed that nobles were allowed to engage in intergenerational erotic games that stressed the power of the elder noble over the younger.”^[72]

Religion, Status, and Sexuality

The Moche of Peru (ca. AD 100–700) produced a huge number of sexually explicit pottery vessels that were often placed in high-status burials (figures 3.8 and 3.9). Researchers linked the sexual imagery not to sexual identity but to politics and power, including dependent relationships with dead ancestors.^[73] One researcher has described “the religious use of male same-sex sexuality” in the Andes, and others have done the same for Mesoamerica.^[74] For example, among the Aztecs, the effeminate xochihuas “provided warriors with a variety of services, including sex. At other times, the xochihuas, some of whom were housed in the temples, were available for sexual favors and other chores to priests and other members of the high nobility.”^[75] Sigal asserts that “sodomy in the period immediately preceding the [Aztec] conquest was related to the gods, sacrifice, and ritual, and closely associated with disease and woe,”^[76] and he notes that the ancient Maya “forcibly sodomized their gods in order to masculinize themselves and gain power from the gods.”^[77] Indeed, Sigal concludes that concepts like the “transsexual penis” and “floating phallus” are “almost incomprehensible to a Western imagination. For the Maya, sexual desire and fantasy went beyond the field delineated by Freud and the sexologists. Sexual behavior did not exist as a discernible category of sexuality but rather as an element of ritual.”^[78]

Figure 3.8. Phallic pottery vessel. (CC-BY-NC-SA Richard Mortel.)

Figure 3.9. Two Lovers pottery vessel. (CC-BY-NC-SA Richard Mortel.)

Read

Read the article “Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America,” by Mary Weismantel in the September 2004 issue of American Anthropologist (http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/dcr...weismantel.pdf).

• When you look at the Moche phallic pottery vessel in figure 3.8, what do you see, and what do you think it means?
• How does factoring in general knowledge about Moche religion and politics alter our interpretation of the pottery vessel?
• What is an example of an object or imagery from the present time and culture that shows the intersection of religion, status, and sexuality?

Gender, Sexuality, and Colonialism

Gender and status were intimately linked in both Indigenous and colonial Latin America. Some Indigenous cultures (e.g., the Maya and Aztec) shared with the Spanish the idea that people conquered in war were gendered feminine, and sodomy was a metaphor for conquest: “Elites among the Maya considered passivity in males feminine and viewed the vanquished warrior as symbolically if not actually passive.”^[79] Nevertheless, many authors have argued that the intersection of gender, sexuality, and status intensified during the Spanish invasion and subsequent colonial period, leading to the increased oppression of women and Others of all sorts.

Figure 3.10. Indians being attacked by dogs; illustration from Les Grandes Voyages (1596) by Theodor de Bry (1528–1598). (CC-BY-SA Theodor de Bry.)

Europeans in the New World sought to eliminate—often brutally—expressions of gender and sexuality that did not correspond with their Inquisition-era ideas. An infamous print (figure 3.10) depicts Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer, conquistador, and governor, as he “throws some Indians, who had committed the terrible sin of sodomy, to the dogs to be torn apart.”^[80] Indeed, one of the insidious legacies of colonialism is the widespread idea that Indigenous cultures have always been conservative and restrictive around issues of gender, sex, and sexuality when in many cases that conservatism was imposed on them during colonization. Archaeologists and our colleagues in cultural anthropology and history are showing instead that the many pre-Columbian cultures of the New World held diverse ideas about these issues and that this evidence must be understood on its own terms, not on ours.

Conclusion

Academics in many fields now challenge normative classifications of people and behavior. Just as anthropologists long ago abandoned terms like savage and the application of racial classifications, so in archaeology we are gradually abandoning the uncritical use of terms like heterosexual and homosexual and ethnocentric assumptions about gender, sexuality, and their centrality to identity.

Foucault wrote about the role of experts in medicine and science in the creation of normative categories.^[81] Archaeologists are some of those experts, and we have become more self-critical about our interpretations of issues around sex, gender, and sexuality. The heteronormativity of museum dioramas that present a timeless view of the nuclear family has been criticized.^[82] Even as recently as 2013 a study of seventy years of reconstructions of ancient life in National Geographic concluded that “women and women’s work are significantly underrepresented and undervalued” and that a “vigorous archaeology of gender has had little impact on the magazine’s imagined past.”^[83] Clearly, we have more to do. Archaeologists who engage with these issues are not just trying to dig up LGBTQ+ people; we are trying to challenge normativity in all its forms.

Check Your Knowledge

Contributed by Has Arakelyan, Rio Hondo College

Multiple-Choice Questions

1. According to Michel Foucault, how are sex and sexuality embedded in society?
A) As purely biological facts
B) As universal categories across all cultures
C) In discourses shaped by power
D) As unchanging, static identities

2. What does the concept of intersectionality emphasize in the study of ancient identities?
A) That gender is the only important aspect of identity
B) That people have multiple, context-dependent aspects to their identity
C) That only age and occupation matter
D) That sexuality is always the most important factor

3. What is a key critique of applying contemporary concepts of sexuality to ancient societies, according to David Halperin?
A) It can lead to misunderstandings and misrepresentations
B) It helps clarify ancient practices
C) It is necessary for all historical analysis
D) It is always accurate

4. In Mesoamerican societies, what was often more important than binary gender or sexuality in determining social roles?
A) Only biological sex
B) Written laws
C) Modern sexual orientation
D) Age, class, and occupation

5. What does Judith Butler’s concept of performativity suggest about gender and sexuality?
A) They are performed and produced through repeated acts and cultural interaction
B) They are fixed and inborn
C) They are determined solely by biology
D) They do not change over time

Discussion Questions

1. How does the concept of intersectionality help us better understand the diversity of gender and sexuality in ancient societies?
2. In what ways do power and cultural context shape what is considered “normal” or “deviant” sexuality, both in the past and today?
3. Discuss the challenges and risks of applying modern Western categories of sexuality and gender to ancient or non-Western societies.
4. How does the idea of performativity, as described by Judith Butler, change the way we interpret gender roles and identities in archaeological contexts?
5. What can the study of ritual, religion, and status in ancient societies teach us about the relationship between sexuality, power, and social structure?

Multiple-Choice Questions - Answers

1. C) In discourses shaped by power
2. B) That people have multiple, context-dependent aspects to their identity
3. A) It can lead to misunderstandings and misrepresentations
4. D) Age, class, and occupation
5. A) They are performed and produced through repeated acts and cultural interaction