ABSTRACT
Recent archaeological work on gender and sexuality has drawn on Judith Butler's (1990, 1993) discussions of such concepts as gender performance and abjection. Butler's focus on the social mechanisms through which gender is produced, performed, and regulated shift attention from presumptions of innate biological difference towards an emphasis on the fluidity of gender constructions. For archaeology, a materialist discipline that treats residues of human behavior as the basis for representations of cultural identities, the confrontation with issues concerning the stability of identity and its relationships to materiality that Butler's work requires is critical. Without such a critique, archaeological materialism could represent biological residues as somehow prior and natural bases for the social categories of gender. While Butler's work is as yet used only by a small number of archaeologists, these contributions represent an important direction within the archaeology of gender. Such archeological studies promise to contribute to explicating the more general applicability of Butler's concepts of performance and abjection through attention to their relationships to practice, regulatory regimes, and materiality. In this paper we provide an overview of this recent archaeological writing, with an emphasis on the ways it draws on, critiques, and extends Butler's work. At the same time, we offer an analysis of the importance of Butler's work to redirecting research on gender within archaeology.
