ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on primary sources, funerary monuments, and the Vindolanda tablets to show that the construction of gender and its correspondence with status was a complex process in the northern frontier zone of Roman Britain. Women had positions of power and decision-making abilities outside those permitted for women in Rome, while men and women adopted elements of Roman practices and used these to express different parts of their identities. All relationships were important for the construction of gender for men and women, and sexual acts may have served as one element of many in a process of masculinising or feminising an individual rather than as a separate category.