Who decides what bodies meant in the past? When it comes to how archaeologists determine the gender, status, or identity of a person, heteronormative assumptions have long guided their hands. Such perspectives have led to graves being identified as male because they contain weapons, or burials labeled as female because of jewelry as funerary gifts, revealing how easily contemporary expectations can be projected onto ancient lives. In recent decades, scholars have challenged these assumptions, asking how gender performance and sexuality were actually constructed and whether the categories we take for granted today even existed in the distant past. Transcending gender also unveils new sets of data regarding identity formation in antiquity. How can we recover voices and bodies that earlier scholarship ignored, misidentified, or rendered invisible?
This course explores new approaches to gender through archaeological, iconographic, and bioarchaeological evidence from the ancient Mediterranean and Western Asia, from the goddess myth ascribed to the Neolithic figurines to the graves of Neo-Assyrian queens, and the representations of historical figures such as Hatshepsut and Nefertiti. Course materials will help students transcend stereotypical images of prehistoric societies composed of male hunters and female gatherers, replacing this portrait of stable (and familiar) gender roles with the multiplicity of practices attested to in the ancient world. We will examine mortuary practices, funerary assemblages, representations of the body, and the division of labor. In addition to archaeological methods, this course draws on queer, feminist, and post-colonial theories to establish an alternate framework for studying gender and sexuality in the human past. Readings include works by Judith Butler, Barbara Voss, Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, Margaret W. Conkey, Joan M. Gero, Roberta Gilchrist, and Rosemary A. Joyce.
