Gender & Sexuality: Review essay on teaching gender and sexualities (Part 1)

This review essay is designed to offer a broad introduction to critical concepts before exploring ‘gender and sexualities’. No section is offered as a full review, but as a profile of areas that can be taken up for integration into teaching in different ways.

Introduction

Over the past ten years, there has been an increasing emphasis in African scholarship and research on the importance of understanding sexualities. Several prominent African-based journals have dedicated issues to questions of identity, sexualities, and sexual rights (Southern African Feminist Review, Development Update, Feminist Africa, East African Journal of Peace and Human Rights), the African Regional Centre for Sexuality Research has been launched in Lagos, and many different workshops and conferences have been held, where connections between rights, gender and sexualities have been debated.

Despite this, Africa has often found herself positioned within international reporting on the Beijing +5 process at the U.N., in June 2000, as predominantly hostile to any discussion of “sexual and reproductive rights”. Fierce debate then around the wording of the declaration on women’s rights to be issued as the Beijing+5 Platform for Action polarized, in print, “developing” and “developed” countries: “sexual right activists from the West are also said to be ‘blaming’ developing countries for holding up the document”. Nigerian and Ugandan ministers were reported as being disconcerted at the thought of lesbian presence within their countries, and Africa was represented mainly as a conservative block of voices connecting dismay at the notion of women’s rights to reproductive freedom with disgusted objection to the idea that gay and lesbian people have civic and human rights.

In 2009, it is certainly true that some prominent African state leaders have denounced homosexualities in ways that seem to offer carte blanche to violent homophobia. It is also true that debates around the meaning of cultural practices concerning sexuality have been a vigorous part of African feminisms for decades. While some abjure practices such as virginity testing, female genital mutilation (FGM), widow inheritance or polygamy, others locate such practices within a cultural/post-colonial matrix too complex for simple censure. Where new state policies have made access to the termination of pregnancy easier in a country like South Africa (but not others), support for the legislation has been qualified by deep, often religious, concern about the ethics of abortion. A profile of African-based reluctance to engage with demands for changing norms of sexualities (demands that are often driven by feminist support for new cultural and legal paradigms affecting women’s reproductive and sexual health) can indeed be mapped.

It is worth examining whether such a profile is in any way distinctive to “developing countries”. In the United States, protest against the right to termination of pregnancy has been vigorous since the passage of Roe v Wade in 1973, and British legislation against the influence of gay and lesbians in education is militant. Some of the most powerful “pro-life” (anti-the-right-to-terminate-pregnancy) lobbies are from Christian fundamentalist churches in the USA and elsewhere, and many of these strongly encourage young women to take ‘virginity oaths’ as a means of protecting their spiritual and sexual health. And it was in a “developed” country that young Matthew Shepherd was beaten to death in 1998, and Tina Brandon shortly after that.

In the end, of course, simple comparisons between “developed” and “developing” countries’ (or continents’) approaches to sexual and reproductive rights are probably unhelpful. Given the intimacy with which sexual practices, norms, struggles and rebellions are woven into the material realities of life, any context (especially contexts characterized by rapidly changing political economies, multi-culturalism, and exposure to mass media systems) can be expected to engage in vigorous - even vicious - debates and dissension around the meaning of sexual bodies, and sexual citizens. Perhaps the most interesting questions for African researchers and teachers are not those framed (partially) through comparative dialogue with the West, but those which emerge from the issues facing men and women engaged in the work of strengthening continental access to material, political, and spiritual health.

There is no denying, however, that the questions raised by a focus on sexualities are often deeply controversial, and this has implications for both research and teaching in African contexts. Where teaching is concerned, the need to create environments in which students are comfortable, and thus open to learning new approaches and ideas is paramount. Where students come from backgrounds where questions of sexuality are not openly discussed, where they themselves work with beliefs that sexual matters are private and that sexual norms are prescribed within clear-cut and unchanging systems of morality, or where they are undergoing critical and often stressful experiences around the meaning of sexualities as they move into their fully adult lives, teaching about sexualities must negotiate a careful path between the introduction of important - and political – theories/activisms and the need to respect the different spaces in which students may be embedded.

This review article is divided into several different sections, taking the reader through a number of critical and interrelated concepts before embarking on debates and discussions possible through linking ‘gender’ to questions of ‘sexualities’.

‘Gender’ and ‘sex’

Before one can explore the link between gender and sexualities, it is important to take a step back and find a way of engaging with the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in English.

In the year 2009, discourses about “gender equality” have become a familiar part of political discussions, conversations within media-based popular culture, and everyday interactions between people. Attitudes towards these discourses vary greatly, but whereas 20 years ago, a distinction between the terms “sex” and “gender” would not have been part of general knowledge in many contexts, nowadays it is not unusual to find such a distinction well ingrained into “common sense“ discussion.

On the other hand, it is also possible to find many who still believe that ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are two words for the same thing. English is - in fact - the only language in the world known to have embedded these two terms so deeply into its c21st vocabulary (globalized through the way in which the legacy of colonial policies on language and education have been re-expressed in post-colonial contexts through the power of the media, the internet, and globalized economic and political communication structures). Most other languages express the body’s relationship with biology, reproduction, and culture through one word: isini (isiXhosa), ubulili (isiNdebele), boeng (seSotho), geslag (Afrikaans). Depending on the context, and the speakers, such terms may refer to the biological capacity of (for example) a dog (“male” or “female”) and/or the social role of the animal within the pack. In English, however, it’s become familiar to see the term “sex” as referring to biological capacities and “gender” referring to the culturally constructed roles, identities, and symbolic locations of people as “men” or “women” within specific geographical, social, and historical contexts.

How do we understand the development of the distinction between the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’? Is it useful? What are its historical and political roots?

One place to begin developing a response to these questions is to note the long and very powerful discourse within Northern¹ knowledges which conflates social meaning with the biology of the (individual) body. As early as the 4th century BC, Aristotle, in “Generation of Animals” (tr. A.L. Peck) writes that males and females differ both in logos (“the power of faculty possessed by the one differs from that possessed by the other) and in “bodily sense”. He theorizes that the powers of generation (reproduction) reside most powerfully with the male, whose semen and its fertility is evidence of well-regulated bodily warmth, through which blood is reconstituted as semen: “does the female discharge semen as the male does…or is there no discharge form the female? And if there is none then does the female contribute nothing whatever to generation, merely providing a place where generation can happen; or does it contribute something else, and if so, how and in what manner does it so?” Aristotle goes on to conclude that in fact menstrual fluid is the “weaker” version of semen, the product of a body whose heat is inadequate: “That which by nature has a smaller share of heat is weaker and the female answers to this description….females are weaker and colder in their nature; and we should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity, though one that occurs in the ordinary course of nature”.

An article in Indwe, the magazine of South African Airways Express (February, 2005), is called “What Women Want”, and begins, “Evolutionary psychology tells us that women choose a mate primarily based on his potential to provide for her and her offspring. This is not as superficial as it sounds. After all, the investment in reproduction involves a tremendous amount of time and effort, and hampers her ability to provide for herself during that time. If she and her offspring are then to be among the surviving fit, they will need the assistance of the best provider around”.

Over two thousand years separate these texts, but they share an underlying assumption: i.e., the best explanations for human behaviour come from analysis of the (individual) human body. This assumption underlies the work of scientists known as “sociobiologists”. These are Northern researchers whose interests are rooted in the idea that physical/biological human capacities predict, determine, and explain, social formations and human behaviours. Some of the roots of this work come with E.O. Wilson, a Harvard entomologist, whose work in the late 70s and early 80s claimed the “naturalness” of male dominance among human societies as the inevitable, and logical, outcome of genetically based systems designed to maximize the reproduction of the species.

Before exploring the ideas of sociobiologists concerning “male-ness” and “female-ness” further, it is important to note that the ideas of late c20 sociobiologists who worked with “sex” are complemented by scientific work conducted over centuries concerning the relationship between the body and class, the body and race, the body and homosexuality. From the late c17th to the mid-late c19, European scientists attempted to catalogue human beings along a hierarchical continuum towards “civilized” man, where physical attributes (height, skin colour, hair texture, physionomy, bodily shape) were used to ascertain degrees of racial “superiority”. This work had a strong relationship to simultaneous English explorations concerning the intelligence, “brutality”, and manual dexterity of poor and destitute people, in London and other cities in which the processes of urbanization under industrialization had brought wealthy and starving together within the demographics of the urban environment. The scientific legitimacy of “reading” the body through contextually credible tools (in the mid-19th century, the width of the brow; in the mid-20th century, the notion of cognitive “IQ’s”) is deeply rooted within Northern philosophy, and carries both scientific and popular power.

It is, therefore, unsurprising to find so rich a body of “knowledge” concerning the relationship between “sex”, and the social meanings of living as a “man” or as a “woman”. These knowledges tend to draw on the following assumptions:

• Biological capacity determines the shape of social systems, which always involve hierarchies
• Biological capacity determines individuals’ roles within such systems
• Evolution can be plotted along a continuum, which moves towards the best possible adaptation to survival
• This continuum links primates to human hunter-gatherer communities to “contemporary” human beings, allowing “readings” of behaviour across time and place
• Universalism is a goal, and an assumption, of scientific enquiry

Many feminist writers suggest that when it comes to thinking about relationships between “men” and “women” in human societies, sociobiological perspectives should be challenged. The dominant arguments are:

• Using animal behaviour as an explanatory source for human behaviour is, overall, a flawed approach (why? (1) even among primates, widely held to be “humans’ closest relative”, there are major differences between species when it comes to “male” and “female” behaviours (2) even among primate studies, there are debates about the influence of environment and culture on behaviour (3) there is a logical flaw in the argument - if primate behaviour is understood as belonging to “earlier, less well adapted” engagement with species survival, it is illogical to locate explanations for “more sophisticated” species’ behaviour (i.e. human behaviour) there (4) sociobiologists’ interests in “sex” dominance seems political, rather than objective - forms of animal behaviour unconnected with sex differences - such as eating - are not invoked as “natural” explanations for human behaviours (5) often, aminal behaviours are described in terms already “coded” for human behaviour - baboons are described as “keeping harems”, mallard ducks are described as “raping”. This is an anthropomorphic approach - seeing the animal society through the lens of a human, patriarchal, system)
• Research not on behaviour but on brain function and differentiation has long attempted to link intelligence, emotional patternings, and cognitive abilities to brain size, brain lateralization, and neural path construction. To this day, there are powerful debates in the field. Some researchers argue that sex hormones and brain lateralization patterns do impact on “men’s” cognitive tendencies as opposed to “women’s”. Others disagree, citing evidence of vast diversities among people; still others interpret patterns of dichotomous brain functioning as indicating “women’s superior functioning”. Epstein points to the array of arguments in the field and suggest that the intensity of the debate alone means that there is no undisputed evidence for connections between the structure of the brain and human being’s “sex-based“ capacities
• Research on neuroendocrinological differentiation is similarly full of debate.
• Some anthropologists turn to exploration of hunter-gatherer societies for explanations of male-dominance in human societies. Epstein argues that (a) this involves certain assumptions about the hierarchical value of hunting, assumptions not borne out by recent research (b) new approaches to archaeology suggest that women, as much as men, shape their communities (c) like all human societies, hunter-gatherer societies may share some features but are fundamentally diverse, according to cosmological systems, environmental context , engagements with hostile or invasive forces It is possible to conclude that while the science of biology does carry enormous explanatory power when it comes to predictions about illness, genetically-based aptitudes for certain skills or abilities, and offers complex and vital information concerning human functioning, biological models are inadequate frameworks for analysis of the relationship between “sex” and “gender”. The realities of biological capacities do demand exploration, but such exploration needs to be alert to the following three principles:
  
  • The human body is, in itself, a complex, and diversified entity. It is, moreover, deeply engaged with other “human bodies” in its relationship to survival, and to human community.
  • Human societies may share features - it is, however, imperative to begin with the recognition of social diversity, moving towards statements about “universal” human traits or tendencies only with the utmost care and from a basis of deep, contextually specific, historical information
  • Theories about male and female “sex“-related behaviour are often deployed as political discourse.

This is the point at which we can return to the beginning - the distinction between “sex” and “gender” was formulated in order to challenge ideas that located male dominance in biological foundations, and which saw certain sex-roles as inevitable. Given the wide variation in “men’s” and “women’s” behaviours, roles, and power across time and place, the idea of separating “sex” from “gender” was proposed, in the 1970’s, as a way of examining societies through a focus on construction.

There is pragmatic power to this “sex”/”gender” distinction. There are also, however, some complications. The “biological” body remains enormously influential and demands exploration - some of the most urgent issues facing gender researchers involve motherhood, the politics of insemination and fertility, the meaning of adolescence, maturity, and ageing, and of course - death. The current HIV pandemic is an example of an area in which the biological body, the cultural/social body, and the community body all coalese to create desperate, gendered, dilemmas and tensions for millions of people.

The politics of ‘sex-ing’ - creating ‘males’ and ‘females’

As already discussed, “sex” is seen by sociobiologists as a way of predicting behaviour, at a number of levels, and babies get ‘sexed’ at birth, or sometimes, through amniocentesis, before birth. In order to take the term “sex” seriously, we need to acknowledge that ‘sex‘-ing the body involvs (a) chromosomes (b) hormones (c) muscle-fat ratios (d) primary and secondary reproductive capacities and organs (e) anatomical ratios (f) excretory organs (g) genetic material. This meant that far from being a simple process, ‘sex‘-ing was a very complex bio-chemical process, which took place throughout a person’s life.

It is possible to explore the meaning of ‘sexing’ by looking at debates about different element in the process of ‘sexing’. There are many debates, for example, on the influence of testosterone, or on whether on not ‘female brains’ are better at multi-tasking (or worse at mathematics). There are powerful Northern writers here (see articles by Anne Fausto-Sterling) and it could take us years to sort out the different debates, and weigh up the strengths and limitations of different research projects involved in this highly-funded area. One way forward is to note that when it comes to arguments about the influence of testosterone on masculinity, or the influence of having a womb on femininity and womanhood, there are two broad positions:

1. Socio-biologists:

Broadly, as argued earlier, sociologists believe that social behaviours and organization can be explained by biologically-based drives, especially drives towards ‘survival of the fittest’

They may use arguments about:

• Ideas about “sex” as “God-given”/”natural”
• ”Universal” models of human behaviour
• Comparisons between humans and animals
• Evolution of human beings from “primitive” to “modern” to explain why contemporary human beings behave as they do

2. Constructionists

Constructionists differ from sociologists because they believe that human behaviours and organizations are caused by environments, interactions, and contexts

They use arguments about:

• Change across time and place
• Variety and diversity
• Power as a political concept
• Multi-determinism

Ideas about ‘sex’ which generalize about men and women’s abilities, purely on the basis on their ‘sex’ may ignore important similarities between ‘men’ and ‘women’ More importantly, the human body is, in itself, a complex, and diversified entity. It is, moreover, deeply engaged with other “human bodies” in its relationship to survival, and to human community.

Human societies may share features - it is, however, imperative to begin with the recognition of social diversity, moving towards statements about “universal” human traits or tendencies only with the utmost care and from a basis of deep, contextually specific, historical information

In addition, theories about male and female “sex“-related behaviour are often used more as political statements than as biological ones. Despite the complexity of the term “sex” and the number of debates there are about the different influences of ‘sex‘-elements (hormones, reproduction organs, chromosomes, etc) most of our cultures treat ‘sex‘-ing in a very simple way. If we think of ‘sex‘-ing as a line:

then, our cultures suggest that there are only TWO “sexes” – typical ‘male’, and typical ‘female’. There is no tolerance for any other categorization - ‘sex‘-ing is dichotomous, or binary (meaning divides people into two primary groups).

It is difficult to estimate how many babies are born, not with bodies that are easily coded as “male” or “female”, but as intersexed.

Intersexed means that there is some degree of “sex“-ambiguity about the body, which can be caused by a number of medical syndromes. One of the most common is called adrenal hyperplasia, where a foetus whose development is expected along female lines receives substances similar to male hormones from over-active adrenal glands. This causes the elongation of the clitoris, but not (usually) the development of a scrotal sac. In the 80’s, it was estimated that one in two thousand births in the U.S. showed marked intersexuality, and more recent studies have suggested that as many as one in a hundred births could involve some form of “sex-ambiguity”, not necessarily visible at birth.

The response of most doctors, and parents, to an intersexed baby has usually been a primarily medical one. The baby is seen as “deformed”, and corrective surgery as early as possible (followed by hormone supplements, or replacements) has been the norm. The fact that surgery - and other medical interventions – is an option when it comes to “sex-assignment”, for adults as well as for intersexed small children/babies, means that in the late twentieth century, legal and ethical issues have been raised about the human and civil rights of people who either choose, or are forced, to undergo surgery as a route towards “becoming gendered.”

In 2003, a Bill was introduced into the South African National Assembly, the Alteration of Sex Description and Sex Status Bill (23rd July, 2003). The aim of the Bill was to offer legal routes to identity for those who had undergone surgical/medical interventions which changed their bodies from one “sex” to “another”. Someone whose birth certificate identified him as “male” needed to have a route towards identification as a “legal female” - without this s/he would face endless legal discrimination, practically blocking access to employment, citizenship, travel documents, and so on.

The first paragraph of the Bill states:

To provide for the alteration of the sex description of certain individuals in certain circumstances; and to amend the Births and Deaths Registration Act, 1992, as a consequence; and to provide for matters incidental thereto.

Application for alteration of sex description

1. (1) Any person whose sex organs have been altered by surgical or medical treatment or by evolvement through natural development resulting in a sex change may apply to the Director General of the National Department of Home Affairs for the alteration of the sex description on his or her birth register

As Sally Gross’s submission on the Bill points out , this Bill can apply only to two categories of people - those who have undergone surgical “sex-reassignment” or those with a very rare form of intersexuality, where sex organs which appear female at the time of birth become more male with puberty. Sally Gross was born and raised in a Jewish family in Wynberg, in Cape Town, as a boy, named Selwyn. He began studying to become a rabbi, but a combination of factors led him towards the Catholic Church instead – he (then) found the attitude of many Jewish communities in South Africa to be complicit with apartheid policies (which he loathed) and he was also attracted by the figure of Jesus. Political activities forced him to leave South Africa in 1977, and he became ordained as a priest in England, continuing to work as an active member of the ANC. As the political climate began to change in South Africa, he recognized that it was critical for him to face his own life-issues - the complexity of his Jewish/Catholic roots and the issue of his body and gender. Selwyn was intersexed, and had lived up until then knowing - of course - about his body, and feeling “not quite right”. He didn’t feel “like a girl in a boy’s body” - it was more complex than that. After consultation with a number of people, it became clear that as far as “sex” went, his body was as “more female” hormonally as it was “male”, and after much intense thought, prayer, and discussion, Selwyn made the choice to live life as a “woman” - without any surgical or medical “sex“-treatment, but in recognition that the gender identity of a woman probably fitted her sense of her identity and spiritual work best.

This choice had a huge impact on her life: she was stripped of her ordination, and cut off from her connections with the Church. As 1991 arrived, with the unbanning of the ANC, Sally (then) decided to return to South Africa, but needed a passport which reflected her lived gender-identity (her old passport described her as a male). It took an enormous struggle to get this, and much harassment from official bodies. In an interview with the Natal Witness, she says, “the experience of finding myself denied personality and humanity in law was the biggest challenge of my identity that I’ve ever encountered” (Feb 25, 2000).

Sally Gross is currently the director of ISOSA (Intersex People of South Africa), and a strong advocate of legal, educational and medical approaches to intersexuality which recognize the “sex“-diversity of human beings, and offer everyone a route into “becoming gendered” which is respectful of individual and cultural processes. She doesn’t advocate that intersexed people (or anyone else) try to live without gender, or within a “third gender” ( a neither male nor female space, a space not defined by “sex“-determination). She believe this would be too difficult “in a society like ours… in a gender-stereotyped society such as ours, there needs to be a best guess as to the optimal gender of rearing as male or female and a consistency about that in the early years. That said, it must be realized that even the most conscientious best guess could prove to be the wrong one and there must be an open-ness to the child’s wish to change this”.

It would be critical to explore in depth the experiences of both trans-sexed (transgendered) people and intersexed peoples, from all racial, cultural and class contexts, in order to understand more fully how the sex/gender binary (“male” or “female”) has operated. See the website www.genderdynamix.co.za, where more information about transgender and intersexed people in African contexts, is available. The reality of intersexuality, and of the enormous political, social, and emotional challenges faced by intersexed people, speaks about the power of the idea that people “come” in only two sexes, and that each sex must be “mapped” naturally into its own gendered narrative. And Sally’s life story suggests that while it is possible to live as a successful man and a successful women, within an intersexed body (neither typically ‘male’ nor typically ‘female’), this disturbs other people’s norms about ‘sex’ and ‘gender.’

Coming back to ‘sex’ and ‘gender’

This brings us back to ‘gender’. If we are saying we cannot conflate it with ‘sex’, what concepts are useful to define it? This is the point at which we can return to the fact that the distinction between “sex” and “gender” was formulated in order to challenge ideas that located male dominance in biological foundations, and which saw certain sex-roles as inevitable. Amina Mama puts it this way, “It became clear that what men and women do is not so much determined by God or by biology, as socially constructed, according to the prevailing cultures and exigencies of a given context or location. It became scientifically necessary to distinguish between biology (sexual organs and secondary sexual characteristics” and sociology (gender roles and gender relations) with the former being more predetermined, and the latter more open to change, and therefore able to vary from one culture to another, and over time”.

In order to understand gender, then, it is useful to accept that one should:

• look very carefully and deeply at the context, in order to see how and where “gendering” matters to the people in it
• explore gender as a process, both at a socio-cultural level and at an individual one

Before we move into a model which can help teaching contemporary connections between sex, gender, and sexuality, let us first address briefly the concept raised by Sally Gross, the idea of a ‘third gender’. What is a Third Gender?

For centuries, the existence of people who did not fit the sex/gender categories male and female have been known but typically dismissed from reports of certain non-Western societies, while in the Western European tradition they have been marginalized, stignatized and persecuted…. (very little) attention has been devoted to the deeper question of whether two sexes or genders are in the nature of beings, be they defined as biological or social… with humans in particular, as one looks across time and space, in history and in culture, we should perhaps ask: Is sexual dimorphism inevitable in human affairs ^{(from Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, edited by Gilbert Herdt, Zone Books, New York, 1996, p 11)}

The Gilbert Herdt collection of essays explores a wide diversity of experiences, in different countries, and contexts, in which people have lived in ways that challenge binary sex/gender systems. One of these essays is called, “How to become a berdache: toward a unified analysis of gender diversity”, by Will Roscoe.

This essay is dense, and well worth reading carefully. It begins with a discussion of the colonial sources on the diverse people encountered by Europeans in the c17th and c18th centuries in the country now known as the United States of America. These sources include writings by the Spanish, the French, and the English and - despite the complexity of drawing upon these sources as “factually reliable” - bear witness to the presence of people called berdaches by Spanish explorers and traders, among many different First Nation Peoples. The essay is very careful to position the colonial writing as a mirror reflecting more about the writers than about the people “written-about”, and is also careful to note that there was a vast diversity (in terms of political systems, economic systems, and cosmological frameworks) among the different First Nation Peoples encountered, and “described”. The recurring phenomenon of the “berdache” however signals the fact that among these Nations, there were arrangements of “sex“/gender liaisons unfamiliar to the European mind, and inexplicable except as “effeminate boys”, “hermaphrodites,” “boys that abandon themselves … and are employed in all the diverse handiworks of women”.

The essay describes some of these arrangements. Within the Navaho nation, Roscoe explains that, for centuries, society encompassed three gender possibilities. The third “category” was described, in Navaho, as nadleehe - a human being defined by a term that means “one who changes continuously” - the suggestion is not that the person “crossed genders” but that they lived in fluidity between “outer and inner dimensions of male and female form - a third process rather than a third category” (Roscoe, p 356). The biological form of the person was irrelevant; what mattered was their role within Navajo society, predominantly determined by their spiritual power and status, and their engagement with areas of work considered to be the province of both Navajo “men” and Navaho “women” (such as becoming medical experts within Navaho cosmology and practices - a role assigned to “men” and supervision of agricultural and domestic work - a role assigned to “women”). Roscoe draws on 1930’s quotations from Navajo elders to illustrate the status of the nadleehe:

If there were no nadle, the country would change. They are responsible for all the wealth in the country. If there were no more left, the horses, sheep and Navaho would all go. They are leaders like President Roosevelt _{(Roscoe, p 355)}.

In terms of dress, nadleehe are described as wearing “men’s” clothing, “women’s” clothing, or clothing associated with neither form of gendering. Most information about them seems to concentrate on biologically male people, but Roscoe suggests that there is evidence that there were as many nadleehe with biologically female forms as there were with male forms. The key issue is, however, the fundamental irrelevance of biology to determination of gender identities These were perceived more as spiritual categories, linked to particular cosmological meanings and the labour associated with those meanings, than as “performances” or “roles” determined by biology. Reproduction, for example, certainly held a central space within Navajo society, but the “work” of reproduction was understood much more as a connection to spiritual and cosmological realities than as a way of organizing biological bodies into a hierarchical “man”/”woman” system of signification.

Roscoe is careful to introduce history into the picture - pointing out that the long history of the Navaho nation (from their arrival within what are now the South-Eastern areas of the United States in late prehistoric times to their defeat, as a nation, in 1863 by the American military and the beginning of the “reservation period”) needs studying in order to understand how people, economic opportunities, gender and cosmologies interacted to create and maintain space for “third gender” processes. The article goes on to look at berdache figures within other First Nation societies, raising questions about the way in which gender assignments occurred at a child’s birth, the status and power of such people (a status which declined as military colonialism destroyed First Nation peoples and autonomies in the c19th), connections between berdache figures and men and women within each Nation, sexual and reproductive practices, and the difficulty of “reading” gender-ing through the mix of colonial accounts, myth and cosmology, and the oral histories of early twentieth century (diverse) First Nation peoples. Roscoe concludes that “berdache status was not a niche for occasional…variation in sexuality and gender, nor was it an accidental by-product of unresolved social contradictions… in the …view (of the people), berdaches occupied a distinct and autonomous social status on a par with men and women. Like male and female genders, the berdache gender entailed a pattern of differences encompassing behaviour, temperament, social and economic roles and religious specialization - all the dimensions of a gender category, with the exception of the attribution of physical differences” ^{(p 370)}

The title of the essay, “How to Become a Berdache” shows us some of Roscoe’s key interests in third genders. He is not simply interested in working with complex colonial anthropologies, or “recovering” linguistic and social information about First Nation societies. He wants to know about the processes of gendering, in and of themselves. The answer to “how to become a berdache” he begins to suggest is a complicated one: at a personal level, an individual “becomes” a berdache through multiple routes: the dreaming processes of the Mohave (predicting the meaning of a coming child), the encouragement of a community should a child show signs of “berdache” identity (Navajo), individual choice through the lifespan. Fundamentally, though, what makes becoming a berdache possible is a way for thinking about gendering - the society has to work through a “division of labour and prestige systems organized through gender systems” in which both men and women have prestigious access to trade, food production, and the essential labour of sustaining a community. Secondly, the society has to believe that anatomical sex is not the be-all and end-all of human destiny, let alone a signifier of prestige or authority. Thirdly, the society has to see anatomical sex itself as unstable - not capable of predicting much about a human being’s life journey. Fourthly, the society has to be philosophically and practically deeply tolerant of individual diversity, and recognize in such diversity the potential for strengthening that society, both economically and critically - spiritually.

Perhaps the most powerful insight of Roscoe’s article lies in his stress on gendering as a process. This is something explored by many other writers, and it is linked to another key question: if gendering is a process, is there variation in the way different societies have valued that process?

In Roscoe’s exploration of First Nation societies, he does not question the relevance of gendering to social organization. Oyeronke Oyewumi, however, in her book The Invention of Women suggests that precolonial Yoruba societies did not, in fact, gender people in a way that carried social signification. She draws on language, cosmological systems, oral histories, and contemporary experiences, to suggest that anatomical sex-assignation just did not translate into the kinds of “gender” meanings assumed to be universal by some Northern theorists of gender. She says that in Western thought, “gender has been a fundamental organizing principle. Intrinsic to the conceptualization of gender is a dichotomy in which male and female, man and woman, are constantly and binarily ranked, both in relationship to and against each other… it is a duality based on a perception of human sexual dimorphism in which the male implies privilege and the female subordination….the biological determinism in much of Western thought stems from the application of biological explanations in accounting for social hierarchies. This is turn has led to the construction of the social world with biological building blocks” ^{(Oyewumi, Chapter 2, p33/35)}

Her chapter denies that such a way of thinking was part and parcel of “pre-colonial” Yoruba society. She looks at the way prestige and status are coded within Yoruba, and concludes that the most important forces within Yoruba society were seniority (age) and rank (lineage/royalty). While gender systems were powerful mythologically, the anatomical sex of a person did not automatically translate into clear-cut locations of labour, authority, or performance for that person — “women” and “men” were distinct beings, in their relationship to reproduction and labour, but were in no way hierarchically constructed in relation to one another. Political power, she suggests, did not revolve around the notion of a “male” superiority or a “female” inferiority: these notions, she said, impacted only on Yoruba society through colonial beliefs about the meaning of gender, and its place as a primary way of allocating power.

Some African writers have critiqued Oyewumi, suggesting that she is overstating the irrelevance of “man-hood” and “woman-hood” to the organization of power in Yoruba history (see Mary Kolawole, on this, if you are interested). But many African writers agree on three of Oyewumi’s ideas:

• It is not useful to simply assume that “sex” translates into “gender” meanings in the same way, all over the globe.
• Deeply rooted Northern paradigms in which the male “sex” is automatically accorded a gender role of privilege are not, historically-speaking, adequate starting points for the historical study of gender-ing all over the world. In many contexts, it will be possible to witness the idea that a “male-child” is more socially valuable than a “female-one” - but the roots of this idea need exploring
• The process of gender-ing is one of multiple socializing forces, all of which can confer power and privilege on select members of a society. So, for Oyewumi, lineage and seniority were more important vectors of political power than gender; understanding gender therefore requires understanding a society holistically

Modeling a relationship between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’

One sex/gender theory could be diagrammed like this:

Reading The Circle: Understanding Gender

Because the processes of becoming gendered are so naturalized and deeply embedded within our cultures, it requires an act of conscious analysis to begin to understand the impact of “being a man” or “being a women” on our individual lives, and on broad dynamics within society.

To put it simply, within the cultures into which most of us are born, gender is a critical force. Bodies are often “sexed” as they arrive into the world; on the basis on physical detail, as “male” or “female”. In the model, this is depicted on the left-hand side under “SEX”. “SEX” here refers to the multiple, and complicated, biological processes which energize bodies into (usually - but not always) two distinctive types of body. These processes are not simple, and involve many different, intersecting layers of biochemistry, organic potential, and structure - the story of “SEX” is not as straightforward as it sometimes appears to those without medical training.

This ascription, “SEX”, predicts the relationship a newborn person will have with labour, authority, performance and sexuality. LABOUR (1) includes all aspects of work: reproductive, productive, community-building, and so on. AUTHORITY (2) is a way of referring to given power: the rights to be valued as a “knower” in (say) a kitchen, a religious space, a governmental zone, a military environment,. PERFORMANCE (3) is a shorthand term for all those aspects of life in which human beings act out their identity amongst others: their clothing, their movement, their habits of leisure and pleasure, rituals of identity, behaviour around speech, and representation, patterns of engagement with food, housing design, and so on. SEXUALITY (4) involves the social construction of a biological drive - the way in which a person is expected to live out their desire for reproduction and sexual pleasure. In most contemporary contexts, people are strongly predicted to be, for example, heterosexual, living out their desire in relation to someone differently “sexed”. The four zones, labour, authority, performance, and sexuality, interact with one another, creating relations of power, status, and value for individuals within their context.

All the predictions can be referred to as GENDERING someone, so that BECOMING GENDERED operates deep within the values and practices of a cultural tradition and context. A baby identified as “male” in one context may be impacted differently to a baby, also identified as “male”, in another context. To give an example, a “male” baby born today within a Jewish cultural tradition would be vulnerable to circumcision rituals at an early age while a baby born within amaXhosa traditions could expect these rituals at a much later age, and with different meanings. These rituals belong to the area of performance, which involves the body and its presentation - dress, physical movement, speech, access to food (which parts of which animals may be eaten), location within cultural rites of passage. Because labour, authority, sexuality, and performance are such all-encompassing areas of human activity, becoming gendered has a very powerful impact on an individual’s location within society and his/her options, opportunities, and potential. The impact is both external (e.g., roles and responsibilities are assigned and expected) and internal (self-esteem is derived from engagement with maculinization/becoming a “woman”).

The process of becoming gendered is historical, and contextual. Thus, a c18 Nama woman, in a particular context, may have had very different access to spiritual or community authority than her current girl-child does; GENDERING as a process is vulnerable to the influence of political forces. British colonialism, for example, radically shifted notions of “being a good woman” in the c18, and c19, especially through the influence of missionaries, who disapproved of some of the sexual norms they encountered as settlers and actively sought to change indigenous citizens’ self-concepts about gendered authority, performance, and labour. BEING GENDERED never occurs outside a context of other routes to social categorizations. Critical variables of categorization change according to history and place; those most dominant currently are ethnicity, ‘race,’ class, sexual orientation, age, religion, and location within the global binaries (“South/North”; “third world/first world”; “developed/developing”; etc). At different points in time and place, variables such as lineage, age, spiritual authority, or land ‘ownership‘/use would have had much more influence than they do in many current contexts. Analysis of the impact of GENDER therefore has to take into account individuals’ multiple sources of identity in order to understand the political dynamics with which any one person negotiates.

For people gendered as women, in most contemporary African contexts, the relation to sexuality is probably the most influential in the way they are seen as ‘women’ and in what options are available to them. Being gendered as a “woman” usually means that a person’s sexual options are expected to include prioritisation of fertility, reproductive labour, and heterosexual desire. This has implications for all other aspects of a person’s labour, her performance, and her arenas of authority. Constructions of woman-hood and man-hood, specific to a particular context, may get called “cultural”. Here, “culture” probably refers to a nexus of behaviours, practices, beliefs, norms, and values that “make sense” - through understandings of history/experience – to a group. Relations between one group and another may cause debate about who accepts these “sense-making” behaviours and who wants to change them. If you unpack the differences, within a specific context, between being gendered as a ‘man’ and being gendered as a ‘woman’ (something that is a process), the analysis usually reveals differences in power between the two identities, especially when it comes to sexuality (including reproduction).

The model is useful as a start to describing current theories which stress that ‘sex’ can be usefully separated from ‘gender’, when talking about social, political, and cultural dynamics. It also creates a way of discussing the interactions between context, culture, political and economic environments and the processes of ‘becoming gendered’ as ‘men’ and ‘women’. These are processes of constructing masculinities and femininities/relations-to-womanhood that not only organize power between men and men, women and women, and women and men, but also engage human beings in life-long processes of self-identification through a gendered lens of expectations, ideologies, and experiences. It is never possible to construct masculinities and femininities OUTSIDE a context in which other social forces (such as race, class, ethnicity, or religion) are also shaping power, lives and identities.

Section Navigation

• Gender & Sexuality: Review essay on teaching gender and sexualities (Part 2)
• Sexuality Bibliography -- Part 1
• Syllabus On Gender And Sexualities In African Contexts

Gender & Sexuality: Review essay on teaching gender and sexualities (Part 2)