Session: #509

Content:

Tension is an inherent feature of (bio)archaeological studies of past bodies and identities. While sex estimation of the skeletal body is routine practice, whether it’s morphologically or biomolecularly estimated, situating the skeletal body and the individual in a gendered world has proven challenging. Increasingly, critiques of how we approach skeletal bodies and identities have emerged alongside new theoretical applications in gender archaeology. Post-modernism, intersectionality, queer theory, and insights from new materialism and posthumanism, have all demonstrated ways we can traverse the gender landscape of the past. Alongside this, recent research in bioarchaeology and forensics has problematized sex estimation by bringing to the forefront the exclusion of non-binary and transgender individuals, as well as presentist of notions of sex/gender and their application to archaeological contexts. Yet, the gulf between more-than-binary approaches to gender in the past and the practice of sex estimation in osteology remain.

In this session, we aim to bring together bioarchaeologists (who may be or more less theoretically-minded), social archaeologists, and other practitioners concerned with locating more-than-binary gender in past worlds and challenging essentialist notions of sex/gender in the past and present. We are interested in parsing the ways that osteological analyses and praxes, including methods of sex estimation, talk with and against recent and emerging discourse on gender identity and bodily difference. Papers which review the field, theoretical developments, or specific case studies from any period or region are invited. In connecting methods with theory, we aim to bridge the gap between theoretical critique and method, and in doing so find new ways of approaching gender, bodies, and bodily differences in the past.

Session: #509

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