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ENGENDERING ORIGINS: Theories of Gender in Sociology and Archaeology Jane Balme¹ and Chilla Bulbeck² Abstract Feminist knowledge and its impact on other academic disciplines arose in the 1970s, but it has had an uneven impact in different disciplines. We argue that gender as a theoretical concept has challenged both sociology and archaeology but analyses of gender practices and embodiment which challenge the homogenous categories of ‘women’ and ‘men’ have made much less impact in archaeology – particularly the archaeology of deep time. The paper concludes by suggesting that feminist archaeology’s exploration of the origins of gender offers critical insights concerning the ways in which feminist sociologists define their theories with and against the ‘Western folk model’ of sex and gender. Introduction Feminist knowledge and its impact on other academic disciplines is a recent phenomenon, arising in the 1970s when women’s studies courses were established in the USA, Britain, Australia and elsewhere (e.g. Magarey et al. 1994 for Australia). Although it has been claimed that feminist critical theory laid bare a ‘ubiquitously masculine bias in what counts as knowledge’ in every social sciences discipline (Ruthven 1998:107), it is also generally agreed that the impact of gender theories has been variable. Stacey and Thorne’s (1985) influential article argued that anthropology had been the most transformed by feminist theory, economics the least, with sociology in between. Thorne (2006:474), confirming this order 20 years later, suggests feminist ideas have made considerable headway in sociology. Feminist theories made more headway in disciplines with a hermeneutic or humanities orientation and effected least change in those with a positivist or natural scientific approach. Disciplines which incorporated both approaches met the challenge of feminist theory by quarantining gender issues and analyses to separate and subordinated subject matter within the discipline (see Stacey and Thorne 1985 for sociology; for studies of the impact of gender on various disciplines see Conkey 2007; Nelson 1996; Ritter and Mellow 2000; Strathern 1985). The radical transformation proposed by gender studies, and one that many theorists now take for granted, is that neither gender nor sex constitute natural or biological pre-given categories, which require no social theoretical analysis. Prior to the 1970s, the different things men and women did received no academic analysis (e.g. Wylie 1997 for archaeology) and most academics in most disciplines held four basic precepts about women in society. First, they accepted – indeed assumed – that women and men did different things. Second, they presumed that sex differences were biologically-determined and had not changed across human history; sex was not a variable that 1 Archaeology, M405, School of Social and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia [email protected] ² Gender, Work and Social Inquiry, School of Social Sciences, University of Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia chilla.bulbeck@adelaide. edu.au could explain cultural change. If any perceived sex differences were subject to comment, academics unhesitatingly ‘explained’ them by drawing on their own experiences of the society in which they lived. Third, they usually applied the idea of ‘men’ and ‘women’ as homogenous categories, which meant that white middle class experiences often stood in for all men’s and women’s experiences (e.g. Conkey 2005:27-29 for archaeology). Fourth, what women did was considered to be inferior to what men did, indeed almost negligible in contributing to whatever the discipline held to be ‘important’ activities. In sociology, this was the public world of work and politics rather than the private world of familial intimacy. In archaeology, it was hunting rather than gathering, stone tools rather than digging sticks: the processes that led to us ‘becoming human’, including language, were assumed to derive from the co-operation required to hunt rather than the co-operation required to transform babies into social members. In the above paragraph we use the term ‘sex’ where readers might anticipate the term ‘gender’ (in one definition, ‘a term used to refer to male-female relations, whether as a matter of social relationships or symbolic construction’; Strathern 1985:23). This paper explores feminist transformation of both these terms, and we generally deploy the changing meanings they have across their genealogy. The main distinction used in the social sciences is between sex as a biological given and gender as a social construct, but we will challenge this construction. Another related distinction used in this paper is between ‘sex’ as a variable, an untheorised aspect of social relations, and ‘gender’ as a concept developed by gender theorists. The first two sections of this article explore the impact of gender as a theoretical concept in sociology and archaeology in two major phases. In the first phase, female sociologists, archaeologists, historians and so on became aware that women were largely absent from their discipline, both as theorists and subjects of knowledge. Feminist researchers’ attempt to ‘add women and stir’ and find the ‘women worthies’ – to write women’s experiences into the story – soon challenged the assumptions by which disciplines operated. In short, gender, a social construct, displaced sex, a biological given, as the category of analysis. In the second phase, a mature feminist theory challenged disciplines to consider ‘gendered practices’: how masculinities and femininities are constructed and performed in opposition to each other; how they intersect or are co-constituted with practices of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and so on (Ray 2006:460-461; Stacey 2006:480). The first phase challenged both disciplines, but archaeology has been much less transformed by analyses of gendered practices. The explanation lies partly in the greater ease with which gender can be explored at both the material and symbolic levels in sociology as compared with archaeology. Furthermore, because gender theories have been developed by scholars whose standpoint is contemporary rather than prehistoric societies, they appear to suit sociology better than they fit archaeology. Number 67, December 2008 3 Engendering Origins: Theories of Gender in Sociology and Archaeology The other major insight offered by this paper is the comparison of sociology’s eschewal of gender origins in a fear of biological essentialism with archaeology’s preoccupation with origins, but, until recently, not the origins of gender as a social aspect of organisation. In the third section of this paper, we argue that a mature feminist theory should now return to the debate concerning the origins of gender rather than leaving the field to the biological determinists, particularly given the contemporary popularity of evolutionary psychology. Indeed, to ask questions about ‘origins’ adds to the claim that gender is not ‘essential’, even if it is apparently ‘universal’ in all known societies. As an archaeologist and a sociologist both interested in the impact of gender studies on our respective disciplines, it is not surprising that we have chosen to focus on a comparison of these two disciplines. We have been gratified by the productive insights this comparison affords, although perhaps this should not astonish us, given the research which suggests that the most radical advances are made, not within the ‘self-contained boundaries of professional elites’ (Thorne 2006:476), but at the borderlands between disciplines which are more open to the challenges from outsiders (Ray 2006:462-463 and Thorne 2006:477 for sociology; Conkey 2005 for archaeology). Sociology A curiosity of sociology, according to Raewyn Connell, is its adherence to a ‘classical tradition’ or canon of ‘master’ theorists in which ‘none of the elected fathers actually motivates the empirical activities of post-1920 sociology’ (Connell 1997:1512, 1545). The sociology of Marx, Weber and Durkheim was founded on ‘difference between the civilisation of the metropole and other cultures whose main feature was their primitiveness’ (Connell 2007:7). Thus issues of race, gender and sexuality were ‘core issues’ in describing the ‘superiority of the European races’, for example in ‘a growing fear of miscegenation’ and ‘the colonisers’ growing contempt for the sexuality or masculinity of the colonised’ (Connell 2007:1011). Between 1920 and 1950, academic sociology flourished in only one place, the United States, where an epistemological break was forged with the past. ‘The new object of knowledge was society, and especially social difference and social disorder, within the metropole’ (Connell 2007:20, original emphasis). Metropolitan sociology no longer concerned itself with the processes of colonisation and decolonisation (Connell 2007:29-44). ‘Gender, sexuality, and race relations ... were pushed to the margins in the process of canon formation’ (Connell 1997:1545), as was the work of female and minority culture male academics, who were cast as the mere ‘retailers’ of the ‘originality’ and ‘creativity’ produced by the favoured sons of the canonised founding fathers (Carroll 1990:138-147). Adding Women; Adding Gender Until feminist intervention into sociology, the public realm was not only seen to be more important, but much of what was thought to go on in the private feminine realm was considered to be trivial or ‘natural’, or both, and therefore did not require theorising. Dualisms such as public/private, mind/body, rational/emotional, divided the sociological world into two (Ray 2006:463; Thorne 2006:476). Work did not occur in the home, where housewives expressed relationships of love and emotional attachment when they washed dishes or took children to school. 4 Sex did not occur in the public domain, which rendered sexual harassment and sex work either incomprehensible or trivial, of no research interest. Men in public spaces did not have bodies, which meant there was no need for research into how men were clothed, cleaned and fed to get them back to work the next day. Men did not have emotions that got in the way of their rational actions; thoughts of sex or feelings of rage rarely overtook them, unless perhaps they were members of more disorganised social classes or ethnic groups, prone to ‘deviance’. Sociologists deployed ‘sex’ as a variable, or an attribute of the individual, rather than an explanatory category for analysis or a concept to be theorised (Stacey and Thorne 1985:307). While quantitative research sought and found sex differences, the discipline was unable to reflect on these differences from any theoretical perspective. For example Hall’s (1988:433) review of text books in the mid-1980s found that ‘gender’ was usually addressed in the chapter on social stratification. Instead, explanations for statistically discovered sex differences relied on commonsense assumptions, generally applied by men. In 1972, Ann Oakley distinguished between ‘sex’ as the biological distinction between men and women and ‘gender’ as a social construction or elaboration built on differently sexed bodies (e.g. review in Edwards 1989; Ingraham 1994:213). The distinction was seized by feminist scholars across the disciplines and applied to question the taken-for-granted assumptions concerning natural sex differences. Concepts such as ‘housework’, ‘body politic’, ‘sex work’ and ‘volunteer work’ challenged former understandings of the public/private divide. Where Oakley’s (1975) thesis supervisor had discouraged her from pursuing her path-breaking analysis of housework as work, deeming the topic too trivial, housework is now understood to be work. Indeed, the contribution of housework and childcare to gross domestic product is substantial, even if almost never measured and included in the national accounts (Waring 1988). Calculating the monetary value of housework and childcare supported arguments that primary carers of children, usually women, should receive government assistance, and resulted in a transfer of social security payments from the wallet (taxation deductions) to the purse (direct payments to primary care-givers). The intimate interconnections of housework and childcare with paid work and public life became increasingly obvious as sociologists studied the ‘triple burden’ and ‘work-family balance’ (for a discussion of the impact of gender research on public policy, see Bulbeck 2005). To limit the contagion of gender, many disciplines, including sociology, responded with internal hierarchies, fortifications and barricades which sought to quarantine the impact of gender issues into particular, usually less-valued, areas of enquiry. Research on the public domain (economics, politics, the nation) is privileged over research on the private domain (family, community, private life); the national and international over the domestic; the activities and worth of men over those of women (e.g. Beasley 1994; Farganis 1989; Nelson 1996; Olsen 1985; Thornton 1991; Waring 1988). In sociology, women and feministinformed research were consigned to areas closer to ‘nature’ and ‘the body’: family, community and demography. A focus on ‘malestream’ approaches was retained in the public realm: formal organisations, social change and politics (Stacey and Thorne 1985), these reaches largely unaffected by the ‘feminist revolution’ to this day (Stacey 2006:480; see also Acker 2006:445). Number 67, December 2008 Jane Balme and Chilla Bulbeck Feminist Sociological Theory? Meanwhile, those working in the discipline of gender or women’s studies had moved on from the sex/gender distinction, which had spawned terms like ‘gender order’, ‘structure of gender’ (Connell 2000:24-26) and ‘gender regime’ (Walby 2004). These concepts were increasingly criticised as implying that gender relations are immutable: that ‘social determinism’ had replaced ‘biological determinism’ in sociological analysis. West and Zimmerman’s (1987) concept of ‘doing gender’ pointed to the need to explore how individuals resist as well as reproduce the ‘gender order’, in other words how being a male or female changes over time. Sexuality is an embodied performance that, while not arbitrary, is not foreordained. ‘Masculinity and femininity must be understood as gender projects’ in that they are ‘dynamic processes ... which transform their starting points in gender structures’ (Connell 2000:28, original emphasis). Judith Butler’s (1990) notion of the ‘performance of gender’ applied these ideas within a post-structuralist framework and seized the imagination of feminist scholars across the disciplines. Furthermore, the very distinction between sex and gender was challenged, as early as 1975. Gayle Rubin (1975:178-179) argued that both sex and gender were socially constructed through kinship systems and associated taboos which divided the sexes into two mutually exclusive social categories connected via obligatory heterosexuality. Laqueur’s (1990) analysis of the historically changing understandings of male and female bodies also fuelled growing awareness that the sex-gender dualism derived from uncritical application of the ‘Western folk model’ of sex-gender differences (Moore 1993:194). Feminist philosophers, such as Gatens (1989) and Grosz (1987), argued that the role of the body in doing gender also has to be theorised. For example, men possess on the whole a greater quantity of masculinity than women and vice versa, but masculinity is rewarded when performed by male bodies and not generally when performed by female bodies (Gatens 1989:34). Thus, our understanding of sex is as much a social artefact as is our performance of gender (see contributors to MacCormack and Strathern 1980; Oyĕwùmí 1997; Strathern 1985:221 on different notions of male/female differences in non-Western societies). Not only was the sex-gender distinction interrogated and found wanting, but deconstruction, or a critical eye, was also applied to the ‘heterosexual imaginary’ (the ‘imaginary relations of individuals to their real conditions of existence’; Ingraham 1994:203). As Henrietta Moore (1994:200-201) suggests, in Western societies ‘sex/gender is at the core of personhood’, both the sex-gender and heterosexual-homosexual binary are simplistic Western folk dualisms. Hermaphrodites are surgically corrected at birth to be one sex or another and those trapped in the ‘wrong’ body have access to transsexual surgery. In some other cultures, gender ambiguity is tolerated and can be expressed in the performance of third genders, neither male nor female (e.g. Bhaiya et al. 2007 for Asia; Nanda 1990 for India; Roscoe 1998 for the plains Native Americans). In this post-structural turn, feminist theory subjects its foundational terms, ‘women, gender, liberation’, to ongoing interrogation and thus maintains its ‘critical edge’ and inspiration for ‘scholarship and social movements’ (Ray 2006:461; see also Ahmed 2004:174-187). Post-structuralist feminist theory challenged a further dualism – that distinguishing material relations between men and women from the symbolic representations of these relations, arguing that constructions of gender differences in biology, psychology, literature, the mass media and so on are all representations of gender relations. Instead of the homogenous category of ‘women’ (often rendered as white and middle class), feminist theorists particularised and contextualised women’s experiences and explored the ‘co-constitution of gender, race, sexuality and class’ which ‘take their meaning and form as they interact with each other’ in different contexts (Ray 2006:460-461). The quest for gender performance in sociology led to small-scale research on how people negotiate the material and symbolic realms as they ‘do gender’ in both an acceptance of and resistance to the messages and opportunities around them (Acker 2006:446). By the late 1990s, ‘feminist theory and gender studies’ were described as ‘areas of special strength’ in Australian sociology, which then had seven feminist researchers in sociology chairs (Western 1998:226). The largest research concentration among the Australian Sociological Association’s members was the cluster defined as ‘gender/medical/family’, accounting for almost a quarter of the Association’s members (Alexander 1999). Similarly, the ‘section on sex and gender has become the largest research division of the American Sociological Association’ (Thorne 2006:475). There is general agreement that the ‘subdiscipline’ of the ‘sociology of gender’ (Acker 2006:446; Thorne 2006:475) now thrives in sociology, gender being ‘mainstreamed’ (Ingraham 1994:203) or ‘canonised’ (Ray 2006:460) to a considerable extent. Nonetheless, there is continuing resistance by ‘general’ sociological theory to acknowledging the input of feminist theorising (Acker 2006:446; Ray 2006:459; Roseneil 1995:199; Stacey 2006:480; Thorne 2006:474). Furthermore, supposedly ‘objective’, rational and value-free (quantitative) research methods are still hailed in some sociological quarters as more ‘scientific’ than qualitative methods or politically-engaged analysis (e.g. Thorne 2006:477 and Wagenaar 2004:9 for US sociology). Pioneered by Donna Haraway (1988) and Sandra Harding (1991), feminist epistemologists claim that all knowledge is situated and partial and is accumulated into better versions of reality (Alway 1995:224-225) through dialogue – with those within and beyond the academy (e.g. Thorne 2006:475, 477). This feminist critique of ‘objective’ knowledge challenges social scientists’ belief that they undertake impartial research in the same manner as their colleagues in the more prestigious natural sciences. This challenge undercuts the social ‘sciences’ in more profound ways than seeking to include women, gender or even sexualities does. In archaeology, also, arguments that all knowledge is positional and partial, not objectively arising from the material traces (Conkey 2005:14, 32; Conkey and Gero 1997:424), challenges archaeology’s claim to scientific status, academic rigour and professional inclusion. It is to the story of archaeology we now turn. Archaeology The long time depth that is the subject of archaeological studies has meant that there has been much concern with how we can know the past and the limitations of what information can be recovered from archaeological materials, particularly for deep time before text-recorded experience. Whether or not symbolic behaviour in these early periods could be identified from Number 67, December 2008 5 Engendering Origins: Theories of Gender in Sociology and Archaeology material evidence (perhaps most famously explicated by Hawkes 1954) and then how they might be identified (e.g. Hodder 1982) has been a much debated topic. It is little wonder then that archaeologists in the discipline, particularly before the postprocessual movement, drew on their own experience to explain sex-differentiated behaviours as ‘natural’, associated with biology and requiring no explanation. The many sources on the history of the archaeology of gender or of feminist scholarship in archaeology (e.g. Gilchrist 1999; Hays-Gilpin 2000; various papers in Nelson 2006) all record that there was very little archaeology explicitly on the topic of gender before the 1980s. Archaeologists simply assumed that there was always a rigid division of labour organised along sex lines (Conkey and Spector 1984) and they attributed activities to each sex according to commonsense assumptions or observations of sex roles in present-day societies. Thus, for example, animal bones found on early east African hominin sites represented food hunted by males who had developed suitable stone tools (Laughlin 1968; Washburn and Lancaster 1968). Hunting meat was important because males could then become provisioners leading to the development of human families (e.g. Lovejoy 1981) which set our ancestors on their course to modern humans. The androcentric bias of such interpretations has been extensively reviewed (Balme and Beck 1993; Conkey and Spector 1984; Fedigan 1986), but undoubtedly it is linked to the preponderance of males in the discipline (Claassen 1992; Gero 1993) and reliance on ethnographic anthropology recorded by male researchers who observed, for example, men making stone tools, but not women (despite the fact that women do make stone tools) (e.g. Bird 1993). Adding Women; Adding Gender As in most disciplines, feminism’s first intervention was to ‘add women’ – notice what women did and add it to the story as being just as valuable as what men did. Not surprisingly this was a reaction to the origin stories of human evolution and was introduced by experts in primatology such as Zihlman. Early articles such as Linton (1971), Tanner and Zihlman (1976) and Zihlman (1978) put women into the story of human evolution in which, instead of hunting tools driving the course to modern humans, it was women’s gathering activities. Women’s equipment such as digging sticks and bags associated with gathering, and not stone hunting tools, were the first material culture. Using the same ethnographies that earlier archaeologists had used to suggest the importance of hunting (particularly the influential Man the Hunter volume (Lee 1979; Lee and De Vore 1968), feminist-inspired researchers pointed out the greater contribution to the diet resulting from women’s activities. While these revisionist articles drew attention to male bias of previous work, conceptually there was no change, the assumption remaining that women and men did different things. Often the things they did were based on what women and men did in gender-differentiated societies of the present, presumably linked to biological reproductive function. Despite this, human origins research, and some work on early state societies (Nash 1978) in the 1970s, there was little other work on gender archaeology. The exception was Scandinavia, especially Norway (see Dommasnes 1992; Engelstad 2007), but this work had little impact on the discipline outside Europe, probably 6 because few archaeologists beyond Scandinavia understood the Nordic languages (Sørensen 2000). It was in this time period that Bowdler produced her germinal piece ‘Hook, line and dilly bag’ (Bowdler 1976). This paper is important because it not only made women visible but also suggested a new explanation for a dramatic change in shell and fish species represented in middens on the Australian New South Wales coast through the social practices of agentive people. Whereas previous explanations for this change had mainly relied on changing environmental conditions, Bowdler linked the changes to the introduction of shell fish hooks. She used early European observations that recorded a division of labour in Aboriginal groups living in the area whereby men fished with spears and women with hooks and lines to suggest that when this new technology began to be used in the region, women’s economic role changed and they contributed more fish. They then spent less time collecting shellfish, confining themselves to species that could be collected in the upper tidal zone. In summary then, the 1970s work on gender archaeology improved the location of women in the story by making them visible, identifying their contribution to the main food supply, and demonstrating that they also ‘invent’. Bowdler’s paper showed that archaeologists were more ready to resort to environmental change as an explanation for change in the archaeological record than to imagine women’s agency or even that of men (see also Brumfiel 1992). Gender archaeology took off in the mid-1980s. In Scandinavia a conference held in 1985 initiated the birth of ‘Kvinner I arkeologi I Norge’ (Women in Archaeology in Norway) and a journal by the same name (Engelstad et al. 1994). In North America the inception of gender archaeology is often attributed to Conkey and Spector’s (1984) feminist critique of androcentrism in archaeology, thereby suggesting the study of gender in archaeology using an approach that builds on ethnarchaeological and ethnohistorical observations about women’s and men’s task differences. Their paper certainly instigated a flurry of activity with a great many edited volumes, usually associated with conferences, following quickly (Claassen 1992; du Cros and Smith 1993; Gero and Conkey 1991; Walde and Willows 1991) as well as the production of monographs such as Gilchrist (1999) and Sørensen (2000). Once at least some areas of the discipline accepted that women also made a contribution, more attention could be paid to asking the question about ‘gender difference’. Was it universal in societies? What explained it? How did it both persist and change? Since the 1990s, although making women visible continues to be a major theme in gender archaeology, there has been a greater interest in gender differences between men and women (Gilchrist 1999) than in differences within each group (see Moore 1993). Feminist Archaeological Theory? Despite the reluctance to associate the term ‘feminism’ with archaeology of gender (see Hanen and Kelly 1992; Sørensen 2000; Wylie 1997), there is no doubt that feminism and feminist theory have greatly influenced the archaeology of gender. The 1970s feminist concerns with equity and raising consciousness about the contribution of women are clearly present in archaeology of that period whether or not the writers were overt Number 67, December 2008 Jane Balme and Chilla Bulbeck about their sources. However, although much work on gender in archaeology since that time has made women visible in the past, there has been little engagement in what it means to make women visible – gender as a concept. This may be a result of the overall lack of theory, particularly feminist theory (e.g. Conkey 2003; Conkey and Gero 1997; Englestad 2007; Hanen and Kelly 1992), in gender archaeology. In part the marginality of feminist theory results from a tendency still to exclude women from ‘theory’ writing, so that ‘gender’ remains an add-on, quarantined away from contamination of mainstream archaeological theory. Conkey’s (2007) review of four readers in archaeological theory published between 1996 and 2001 found that the work of female archaeologists is represented in proportions well below that of women’s archaeological publication. As is the case in sociology, when women authors are included, their chapters are often about gender and separated from other aspects of theory; the work of female archaeologists on topics apart from gender is rarely represented (Conkey 2007:295). This quarantining of female academics’ work means that they are less frequently used by other scholars (e.g. Hutson’s 2002 analysis of the lack of citations to women’s research). A second reason for the lack of engagement with feminist theory may be the apparent lack of compatibility between current feminist theory and the kinds of materials available for archaeologists to study, particularly archaeologists researching periods deeper in time. The most recent feminist concerns with difference have produced two main theoretical lines: (1) understanding the way in which gender identities are created through performance and repetition of cultural acts associated with gender and (2) embodiment written on the body and lived through the body. Both Gilchrist (1999:6) and Conkey (2003, 2007) have suggested that these theoretical influences, at least until the early twenty-first century, have been much stronger in European than North American archaeology. In North America, they suggest, researchers have retained the early focus of gender studies on the sexual division of labour, gender roles, women’s agency and their contributions to change and innovation; there was more commonly an integration of a wider range of evidence such as environmental and osteological. In Europe, on the other hand, gender archaeology has engaged with more ‘post-structural’ feminist concerns, the symbolic and cultural manifestations of gender, a concern for the individual manifested through the study of gender identity, sexuality and the body and with the representations of gender through forms such as art, space and grave goods. According to Gilchrist (1999), the distinctions between European and American archaeology resulted from several factors, including the longer legacy of second wave feminism in America. She attributes the difference also to the more selfcontained teaching and research networks in North America, Scandinavia and Australia as opposed to the greater diversity of political objectives among European archaeologists and their greater receptivity to structuralist, contextual and postprocessual archaeology, including recent feminist contributions to these theories. Conkey (2003, 2007) adds to these explanations the greater influence of the scientific legacy in North America. We suggest that the difference identified by Gilchrist and Conkey may be more about the archaeological context of the material being studied than the geographical context of the archaeologists doing the work, and that this has become clearer in recent years. While the archaeologists engaging with recent feminist theory on gender performance and embodiment come from a variety of professional backgrounds, they generally share a research engagement with the archaeology of economically and socially stratified societies (Joyce 2005:142), study embodiment through the application of archaeological interest in symbolic communication of identity through ornaments and costume (Joyce 2005:140), and study periods for which literature is available – such as the medieval period. Thus the marginal impact of recent feminist theorising in North American and Australian hunter-gatherer archaeology may result, not from the professional structure of the discipline, but from the lack of material traces in ornaments, costume, rock art and figurines as well as literature of the kind which is available to historical archaeologists studying ‘gender performance’. The deeper in time the more difficult it is to trace the relationship between the material and the symbolic: to assume the position of people who inhabited areas. On the other hand, gender archaeology had its first major impact in origins research – and this is a key question for archaeologists studying huntergatherer behaviour. Feminist Archaeology’s Contribution to Feminist Theory: Origins Research Feminists rejected the search for the origins of gender because the answer they found in anthropology, archaeology and psychology was that gender differences are natural and non-transmutable: they lie in our genes, or our muscles, or our reproductive strategies, or our left versus right brains – in other words in our biology. Early feminists rejected women’s different biology because it spelled women’s subordination, instead arguing for women to overcome their biology, their reproductive capacities, and join the intellectual world of men. Early feminists like de Beauvoir and Firestone reproduced the same denigration of the body and elevation of the mind that characterised Western philosophy (e.g. analysis by O’Brien 1981, who retrieves reproduction as a social activity). From the 1970s, sociobiology responded to second wave feminism’s claim that gender was mutable by affirming biological explanations for human gendered behaviour. Pierre van den Berghe, for example, stated in 1979 that he set out to ‘disprove’ feminism’s challenges to ‘the biological bedrock of asymmetrical parental investment’ (in Sperling 1991:17). Sociobiology claimed that men are prone to philandering because their sperm are multitudinous and cheap to produce vis-à-vis women’s costly ova and investment in nursing their offspring (Wilson 1975). Today HBE (human behaviour and evolution) scholars argue that ‘men’s modern sexual misbehavior can be explained in terms of evolutionary adaptation to our ancestral environment’ (Wade 2008:263, reviewing McCaughey’s 2007 analysis of the debate). Feminist biologists retort by identifying the complex interaction of physiology and environment (e.g. Rogers 1999) and the engagement of female animals in changing male caring behaviour, for example with the bribe of female arousal and its promise of sex (e.g. Hrdy 1999). Animal mothers can bias sex ratios prior to conception, selectively abort foetuses, and Number 67, December 2008 7 Engendering Origins: Theories of Gender in Sociology and Archaeology differentially nurture sons and daughters – strategies which respond to environmental changes which make male or female infants more likely to thrive (Hrdy 1999:326-345). Famously, female primatologists rewrote male primatologists’ scripts which focused on male aggression and control of females. Evidence accumulated that there was little association between dominance rank and reproductive success for males (Sperling 1991:18-21). Women primatologists discovered co-operative primate troops or noticed baboon mothers ‘juggling time’ just when (white) human mothers were increasingly required to combine work and home duties (Haraway 1992:313). As this example suggests, it was not so much that female primatologists told more accurate stories than had male primatologists, but that all primate stories were really about human social issues. ‘Facts are theory-laden; theories are value-laden; values are historyladen’ (Haraway 1991:77) and non-white non-Western female primatologists might draw quite different lessons from their studies (Haraway 1992:248-251; Sperling 1991:24). One retort to feminist biologists’ revision of the book of nature was the claim that female dominance or shared parenting is more common among the ‘lower’ species and that evolution produces sexual dimorphism and differential investment in reproduction (e.g. Elia 1988). Another origins debate, that concerning the origins of patriarchy, also locates female dominance in a primitive past. Scholars such as Engels (1972[1884]) in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, following anthropologists of his time, consigned matriarchy to the time before social development and technological change. Patriarchy is necessary for social evolution, as Paglia (1990) flamboyantly claimed to the great rage of feminists. In this narrative of origins, not only are gender differences immutable because of physiology, but also they justify the subordination and devaluation of women and the activities they perform. One feminist response has been that women are no longer prisoners of either their biology or ‘primitive’ social structures. Rubin (1975) argued that ‘cultural evolution’ means women can now seize control of the means of sexuality, reproduction and so on. Inglehart and Norris (2003:149, 154) link capitalist and democratic expansion with women’s rights, claiming that secularism, individualism and ‘modernization bring systematic, predictable improvements in women’s position’. However, these models return us to the imperialism and evolutionism with which pioneer sociologists discussed sex, an approach which most feminist sociologists reject (see critiques of the parochialism of ‘northern’ sociological theory by Connell 2007 and Ray 2006:462-463). There has also been opposition to research on the origins of the sexual division of labour in archaeology as ‘essentialising’ gender roles (e.g. Dobres 1988). Conkey and Williams (1991:113), for example, warn that ‘there is nothing essentialist about gender or women’s experience’ so there is no origin to be found. ‘Essentialism’ is a hex word in women’s studies, apparently disallowing exploration of perhaps the most obvious historically-recorded human universal: all human societies have gender categories. As feminist anthropologists, archaeologists and historians have made patently clear, the organisation of gender difference varies widely across time and space. Surely it will contribute to understanding both the prevalence and variety of gendered social behaviour to ask, not only when but also why did gender begin, and to ask this from a feminist rather than 8 a masculinist sociobiological or evolutionary psychological perspective. To reject an origin of gendered behaviour seems to be the ultimate in ‘essentialism’ because it continues to feed the assumption that gender has always been and is unchanging. Thus, rather than suppressing imagination about the way things might have been (Conkey and Williams 1991:122), origins research requires us to imagine a time in human society before gender and the circumstances in which gender might be created. This project emphasises how much we continue to take gender for granted as an organising category and how difficult we find it to think of gender differences outside those operating in our own society. One feminist archaeological approach to the origins of the gender puzzle works with a second universal, that is, the division of labour in modern hunter-gatherer societies. Although there is some small variation, a general pattern has been observed in which men hunt large game and women hunt small animals and provide most of the plant foods (Balme and Bowdler 2006). To recognise such universals neither implies that they have a biological basis as some people have suggested (e.g. Hayden 1992), nor that the behaviour has always been so. Although there is always a danger of a search for origins producing a single evolutionary narrative (Conkey and Williams 1991; Moore 1995), it does not have to be written as such. Origins can occur in different places in different ways, but if we are to understand the concept of gender we need to think about how gender organisation might have come into being and to understand the circumstances in which such a division might arise. What then does a search in the archaeological record for the origins of gender, indeed possibly even gender inequality, tell us about the non-essential albeit universal nature of gender difference? First, despite patterns in hunter-gatherer subsistence roles, ethnographic observations show that there is no biological reason for such divisions. Females and males are both capable of hunting different sized animals (Balme and Bowdler 2006:382; Owen 2005). In addition, if strength was the most important criterion to explain hunting being done by men (as was argued, for example, in many papers in Lee and DeVore 1968), then it would make more sense to form social categories based on strength rather than genitalia. Second, if there is no biological basis for a gender division of labour at some time in our past, the time in which gender does emerge, when our ancestors decided to concentrate on a particular aspect of biology, genitalia, to create a major social division, might have been different in different places. This means that, before gender divisions can be created, biological divisions (man and woman) have to be recognised. Thus, gender categories may be an adaptation to biology but, if they are, they are a social adaptation. Gender is then a social human construct and not an inevitable biological given. While gender categories may not have been the first social categories, they have persisted in human societies, suggesting that they are an adaptive success. For example Kuhn and Stiner (2006:462-463) apply Wright’s (1932) concept of ‘fitness landscapes’ to argue that the division of labour along the lines of sex, age and aptitude forms a peak, or rather a mountain range arising from varying local conditions, towards which populations adaptively move as they operationalise sexual difference as gendered organisation. Before the construction of social categories, our ancestors’ work was constrained simply by individual capabilities, as Number 67, December 2008 Jane Balme and Chilla Bulbeck primatologists have also consistently found (although male primatologists give this scant attention). There is ‘little or no sexual division of subsistence labor among nonhuman primates’: they forage for themselves and there is little sharing of food (Sperling 1991:20). The creation of social categories implies cooperation and sharing between the categories. This does not have to be along male/female lines. It could well be that old shared with young or tall with short. Older, post-reproductive females, for example, could have been the first gender, marked by their specific childcare role, while the ‘other’ category consisted of everyone else who was out gathering food. These questions concerning the origins of gender are about much more than finding women or men: as Conkey (2008:49) notes, archaeology has been ‘saturated’ with gender but it now needs to be regendered by questioning the notions of gender which have been applied. Archaeology’s contribution to gender studies in this respect poses anew the familiar question, ‘What are ‘women’ and ‘men’ and how have these categories and the relations between them arisen and changed over time?’, by applying the query to human sociality prior to the historical record. This question is as useful for challenging our continuing gender presumptions within feminist theory as it is in archaeology. Conclusion Across the social sciences feminist theories have exposed the male bias male researchers brought to their theorising. Male scholars generally focused on what men did and applied an understanding of gender that reflected gender assumptions in their own society. Second wave feminism challenged the Western understanding that women belonged in the domestic sphere and displaced sex as a natural pre-given variable with gender as a social construct under constant revision. In sociology, more than anthropology, feminist theorists took a post-structural turn, exploring the dazzling array of gender performances and their meanings which upturned both the sex-gender and heterosexualhomosexual divides. That feminist archaeologists could not proceed so far down this path can be explained in terms of the evidence with which they work: material traces more than textual or visual representations. However, our exploration of feminist sociology’s leeriness of the origins debate points to feminist sociology’s trenchant failure to interrogate its own standpoint: grounded in a sex-gender dualism expressing a nature-culture dichotomy. Many feminist scholars have, perhaps unwittingly, rejected the devalued term (nature/ biology) in their desire to join the male-dominated academy. More recently some, like Stacey (2006:481), ‘dare to reconsider’ many feminists’ ‘antipathy’ to the suggestion that ‘there might be biological contributions to social differences’, instead claiming feminists should expose how sexual difference becomes gender inequality. While male archaeologists have always been interested in origins, it has been the origins of human culture or society but not of sex or gender, this being taken for granted as an ‘essential’ ‘universal’. A feminist archaeological lens which asks ‘when did gender begin’, suggests, amazingly, that there may have been a time in human history when we did not recognise sex differences as a social category of organisation, when we did not value males above females (or vice versa), when we did not link certain activities with male bodies and others (often less valued) with female bodies. Clearly these human societies contained biological males and females and the conjunction of this with the absence of gendered organisation reveals how truly embedded is our Western folk model of sex-gender differences. As Haraway puts it, ‘gender’ as ‘sexual identity ... a dichotomous natural difference biologically conceived’ ‘might not be global identity after all’ (in Strathern 1988:40). 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