Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality
Summary
Anthropology of gender and sexuality examines how social groups construct, negotiate and contest gender identities, sexual norms and power relations across time and space. It addresses the ways in which gender permeates kinship, ritual, performance, political mobilisation and material culture, drawing on interdisciplinary theories from feminist studies, queer theory, posthumanism and intersectionality. This field has traced the emergence, crisis and renewal of gender archaeology; the colonial and postcolonial production of gender-variant subjects; the impact of global health and rights movements on sexual minorities; and the diverse religious, economic and legal formations that shape gendered lives. Current scholarship emphasises situated, transregional approaches that attend to local genealogies, multi-scalar identities and lived practices rather than universalising models.
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Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in anthropology of gender and sexuality across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Gender archaeology: The sub-discipline that studies how past societies structured social identities and power through notions of sex, gender and sexuality.
Intersectionality: Analytical framework recognising that gender intersects with race, class, caste, sexuality and other axes of difference to shape lived experiences.
Third gender: Culturally specific category, neither strictly male nor female, often institutionalised in South Asian contexts to describe hijras and related gender-variant groups.
Posthumanism: Theoretical orientation that decentring the human subject, emphasising entanglements of humans with non-human agencies in identity formation.
Transregional: Approach that explores cultural flows, identities and practices across multiple regions rather than limiting analysis to national or local scales.
References
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