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Gendered archaeology: a further clarific
Read, Dwight ANTHRO (Read@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU)
Wed, 20 Apr 1994 10:37:00 PDT
FOrstadt writes;
"Gender is sex-linked social categorization."
OK--an operational definition.
Forstadt continues:
"I believe that gender categories are wholly social
constructions based on *perceived* linkages to biological sex. "Doctor",
"lawyer", "Democrat", "Republican", "homeowner", "Jew", and "black", are
all social categories with perceived archetypes and expectations attached
to them. The are not sex-linked and so are not gender categories.
"Bachelor" and "spinster" are also social categories with perceived
archetypes and expectations attached to them. But these are cognitively
sex-linked. They are gender categories."
This comment raises the question of what is meant by "sex-linked". For
Forstadt a category to be sex-linked apparently must be linguistically
marked as such. I take it that Forstadt is not claiming that the category
Doctor, for example, is a sex free categorization in the sense of a
categorization for which males and females may equally be members, but that
the word "Doctor" is not, itself, sex marked, hence the category "Doctor" is
not sex-linked. Clearly the categories "Doctor", "lawyer", "homeowner"
were, until recently, categorizations that presumbably were only applied to
males and so were sex-linked from the view of the content of the category.
For archaeology, it would appear that the second notion of sex-linked (i.e.
sex-linked if the persons making up the category were only of one sex) is
more useful than the implicit notion that Forstadt seems to be using.
D. Read
READ@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU
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