Don't Assume My Gender, Please.

This is what I imagine human skeletal remains silently curse under their breath as archaeologists debate over the potential gendered performance of a skull.

I do understand the anthropological interest in finding out the various ways gender is enacted and experienced by cultures of the distant past. All the ways gender as a social category organized the life of an individual. The different performative roles a person occupied during their daily interactions with others. The social rules guiding a person to correctly perceive another's visible gendered cues. "Hi, this is what I am _______".

But what if gender wasn't always an important social category? What if gender simply just didn't exist within a past culture?

This is possible once you accept that sex and gender are both socially constructed identity categories (at least in my opinion) that come in a plethora of options. Now despite the current structure of Canadian society, sex and gender are not the same thing and by no means do sex and gender exist only within a binary of male/man vs. female/woman.

Modernist identity politics aside, gender has always seemed to me like it should have no place within archaeological interpretations of cultures that have no written record or living descendants. Even after all of the gendered evidence is presented with the correct archaeological theories in place to back it up, we will still never know for sure if we are right! And as much as we try to be mindful of our current cultural worldview and the ways in which our different social locations impact and shift the lens through which we interpret the archaeological data, we still won't know diddily squat about a extinct culture's gender roles. Or if a culture even had gender roles. Or roles based on sex (outside of reproduction). It's all socially constructed!

So why even try to make out gender performance in the archaeological record?

We just can't be sure. And who really cares anyway?