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Translated by Florence Bois-Villeneuve. 

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This is the second in a series of three articles entitled Queering the Present, Queering the Past? Sex and Gender of Skeletons in (Queer) (Bio)Archaeology 

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While the previous article focused on the debates in archaeology surrounding sex and gender, this one takes a closer look at the introduction of feminist and queer theories in this field of expertise, how they have been received, and the resistance they trigger. It will discuss the potentially unjustified distinction between the concepts of sex and gender, the sex of skeletons, and what queer archaeology really means. 

Contributions of feminist and queer archaeology

Queer archaeology certainly does not mean the theoretical study of gay men or women in the past. The use of the word “queer” takes on its full meaning when opposed to that which is taken as normal or for granted.

“[...] It is for anyone who feels that they are being marginalised for who they are. In its essence, it is a heuristic exercise for the academics in the ivory tower who have populated the past with nuclear families and white picket fences [...]. [...] The people of the past should be given the possibility to have expressed a rainbow of different sexual and gender identities as well [...]” (Crystal, 2018, para. 11-12)

The equation embodied by gender essentialism that sex => gender betrays a point of view that these two concepts are distinct from one another, allowing sex to be considered as factual. But this distinction is disputed. Some people claim that sex and gender are synonymous and that both are socially constructed. This is the idea behind the constructivist paradigm of sex and gender. This paradigm presents sex as “always still arising from gender (social)”: “gender is the social cause, sex is its effect” (Baril, 2015, p. 140). It is a perspective that emerged gradually, advanced by materialist feminists such as Colette Guillaumin and Monique Wittig, poststructuralist, postmodern and queer feminists such as Judith Butler and Paul B. Preciado, and trans theorists such as Emi Koyama and Kate Bornstein (Baril, 2015).

In this vein, recent decades have seen feminist theories contribute to the restructuring of archaeological practices, issues, questions and methods (Blackmore, 2011; Ghisleni et al., 2016). Many of these approaches imply that archaeological knowledge (and epistemology) fails to adequately consider the nuances, multiplicity, and interactions between oppressions related to race, class, sex, sexuality, gender, physical condition, ethnocultural origin, colonization, etc. (Blackmore, 2011; Ghisleni et al., 2016). Yet such a consideration would lead to a greater understanding of the historical fluidity and subjectivity of sex and gender, without denying the power structures and practices present across time (Blackmore, 2011; Ghisleni et al., 2016).

For their part, over the past 20 years queer theories have (notably) encouraged a de-essentialization of sex, gender, and sexuality in archaeological studies, opening the door to the deconstruction of preconceived, normative ideas rooted in a contemporary system of thought (Blackmore, 2011; Ghisleni et al., 2016). This de-essentialization allows archaeologists to expand their ability to interpret the past by accepting the complex and contextual nature of discussions about sex, gender and sexuality (Blackmore, 2011), as well as deconstructing gender dichotomies (Ghisleni et al., 2016).

Scientific research is beginning to promote queer approaches as tools for practicing, reflecting on and challenging received ideas about gender, sex and sexuality in archaeology (Blackmore, 2011; Ghisleni et al., 2016).

However, since these approaches are rooted in contemporaneity, it appears their use has been discouraged in archaeology, where practice consists in bestowing meaning on artifacts and the remnants of ancient civilizations (Blackmore, 2011; Ghisleni et al., 2016). According to Ghisleni et al. (2016), essentialist approaches to masculinity and femininity are not easily challenged. In fact, the foundations of these approaches would appear to dominate the principles of past identity configurations in archaeology, to the point that the very notion of challenging the relevance and accuracy of the essentialist equation “sex => gender” remains controversial (Ghisleni et al., 2016). However, queer approaches appear appropriate when it comes to criticizing binary and dichotomous systems of sexuality, including those related to sex, gender and history. 

By challenging the dominant conventions and assumptions in archaeology, queer theories have the potential not only to help move it closer to the past reality it seeks to unveil, but also to drive the promotion of contemporary social justice.

In fact, lifting the veil on subversive gender/sex relations in past civilizations can be useful in countering determinist and defeatist arguments, particularly about gender-based inequalities and injustices (e.g., sexism or transphobia), and in questioning of the male hegemony that nurtures them (Connell, 2014; Lazzari, 2003). This will be the subject of the third and final article in this series.

Confrontation: essential sex versus constructed sex of the skeleton

It is possible to consider the usefulness of queer approaches to bioarchaeology based on this question: Does a skeleton have a sex?

From a traditional archaeological point of view, a skeleton does indeed have a sex. From an essentialist point of view, identifying the sex of a skeleton would not only be possible, but also desirable to understand the individual’s “lived experience” prior to their death. An individual’s sex informs us about their gender and their social position during their lifetime. 

From a constructivist point of view, however, somewhat different questions apply: What is the basis for identifying the sex or gender of human remains? Why? And above all, what is the point of identifying them, and whom does this serve? These questions encourage us to think about what queer perspectives can bring to bioarchaeology.

Sex, gender and sexuality are understood in a given sociohistorical context

Authors have demonstrated that the way in which gender, sex, sexuality and their interrelationships are understood and used changes over time and according to context. Examples include Rubin (1984) and Weeks (2014), as well as Kessler and McKenna (1978).

In a book published in 1984, Gayle Rubin advocated for the development and promotion of a radical theory of sexuality that would enable researchers to identify, describe, explain and call out sexual oppression. In her opinion, such a theory should focus on describing not only society’s current relationship with sexuality, but also the historical evolution of this relationship. She explains that sexual essentialism, rooted in what she calls “the scholarly study of sex” (p. 151), is the main obstacle to the development of this radical theory of sexuality. The fact that sexual essentialism views sexuality as an entity independent of social and institutional life—an eternal, immutable, ahistorical and biologically driven force—hinders political, social and historically situated analyses, as well as the possibility of a more realistic analysis of gender and sexuality (Rubin, 1984).

In a similar vein, Jeffrey Weeks (2014) demonstrated that the concept of homosexuality, or rather the way in which this concept has come to be understood and used, is historically and culturally situated, thought to have emerged as recently as the 19th century. He emphasized that sexuality and gender are interdependent, “with sexuality not merely reflecting but being fundamental to the construction and maintenance of the power relations between women and men” (p. 67). For him, the social organization of sexuality is complex, constructed, and inseparable from gender. He also highlights the human tendency to view the world through one’s own spatiotemporal lens, even when the elements to be analyzed point in a different direction. For this reason, critically examining this sex, gender and sexuality lens—and questioning it, as queer theories propose—could help avoid the pitfalls of anachronistic bioarchaeological interpretations of these objects of study.

Kessler and McKenna (1978) also demonstrated that sex and gender are historically and geographically situated concepts. In their book Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, they posit that there is in fact no single trait—or groups of traits, for that matter—that can be used to differentiate men from women, always and without exception. According to them, we attribute, not identify, the gender of individuals. In other words, since no one can claim to have a foolproof algorithm for knowing a person’s gender, it is first necessary to decide in which category to classify an individual. It is only through this classification (which they call “attribution”) that gendered traits begin to take on their full meaning and can be understood. This is precisely what archaeologists do when identifying the sex of skeletons: They attribute a gender to the skeleton, then they interpret the person’s lived experience and life context based on that gender (De Leiuen, 2015). The problem with this approach is that it is top-down: from prior knowledge to the object of analysis; from the hegemonic, contemporary thought system to that of the past. 

In short, archaeology risks imposing its vision and understanding of sex, gender and sexuality on the past reality that it seeks to unveil, a reality that is perhaps drastically different from its own.

In this context, and in the absence of any possibility of negotiating the attribution of gender—the object of study being deceased and stripped of its agency—the analysis cannot be described as fair.

For Butler (1993), sexual and gender identities are socially constructed and regulated by social norms. In the field of archaeology, this means that sex and gender are not objective realities to be discovered by archaeologists, but rather phenomena that are produced—and reproduced, in an ongoing process—by hegemonic discourses and reified by practices of repetition (Ghisleni et al., 2016). From this point of view, we do not discover the sex—or gender—of a skeleton. We create it. We perform it. We make it perform.

For sex or gender to exist, a group of people must recognize and share the norms that are the conditions for the existence of these two concepts (Butler, 1993).

These norms are also invested in institutions, laws, social structures, traditions, public spaces, and so on (Butler, 2001; Petit, 2015). In the case of sex, these norms, while completely cultural, would nevertheless be naturalized (Ghisleni et al., 2016). In other words, they would be performed and reified to the extent that they would appear and be presented as natural, in the sense of innate, indubitable, indisputable. 

Gender, on the other hand, would be recognized as more cultural. According to Butler (2001), gender is performed through the repetition of acts, gestures, postures, ways of dressing, moving and working, interacting with objects, manipulating and investing space, etc. A Butlerian reading of the activity of identifying the sex of skeletons would thus see archaeologists in a position involving documenting the performativity of gender in the past, an activity itself arising from the performativity of gender in the present.

By using a binary analytical framework, a dimorphic perspective on sex and gender, and an essentialist paradigm, archaeologists limit the possible interpretations of gender and sex.

On this subject, Perry and Joyce (2001, p. 66) cite Joyce’s question (2001), to frame the issues gender performativity in archaeology: “A critical question in the archaeological examination of gender performance is ‘how and why certain kinds of action came to be representative of certain kinds of gender.’”

As such, queer archaeology is not so much interested in identifying or attributing the sex or gender of skeletons as it is in questioning the importance and very relevance of the practice of identifying the sex of the bodies.

It appears that queer theories encourage epistemological research and a serious analysis of the construction of knowledge in the archaeology of gender. In this vein, Blackmore (2011) suggests that if sex, gender and sexuality are constructed, they can no longer be considered as constant, stable and irreducible truths. They are not ahistorical (Ghisleni et al., 2016).

Since archaeology involves interpreting and describing past social systems based on the material remains of human activity, Perry and Joyce (2001) argue that Butler’s work is of great value. Her work makes it possible to consider the socially produced, performed and regulated part of gender, while avoiding relying on presuppositions that naturalize and universalize gendered categories and roles (e.g., sex as a determinant of gender, or sex => gender). Using ahistorical models of gender, i.e., models that assume that gender as it is perceived today has always been perceived the same way in the past, prevents us from recognizing the historical variability of the concept (Perry and Joyce, 2001).

This calls to mind the observations by Ghisleni et al. (2016), who also acknowledge Butler’s work and highlight its influence on contemporary archaeological thought. For example, by claiming that gender can be deduced from the sex of skeletons, some risk limiting themselves to reifying a conception of gender that is their own, rather than addressing a potentially different reality or experience of gender. Not to mention that by applying the essentialist equation to the study of ancient civilizations, archaeology risks imposing binarism as inescapable, sabotaging and denying subversive activities¹ (Perry and Joyce, 2001).

Towards a nuanced (bio)archaeology focused on social justice

The debate surrounding the theoretical separation between the concepts of sex and gender is ongoing, and there is still no consensus on the idea that a skeleton can have a sex, nor on what it would mean if it did have one. Essentially, this is the first lesson to be learned from feminist and queer theories of bioarchaeology. What is clear is that, when it comes to interpreting the sex or gender of a skeleton, matters of place and time cannot be overlooked. That said, the two other arguments for the existence and usefulness of queer practices in bioarchaeology, briefly mentioned in the introduction, have so far remained in the shadows. The third and final article in this series will therefore focus on this argument.

¹ Those that existed in the past, those that exist today and, above all, the validity of their existence.