ABSTRACT
The role that anthropologists have accorded to gender, sex, and sexuality has varied considerably in the course of the discipline’s development. The themes emerged timidly in the context of the culture-and-personality school of the 1930s and began to take central place in anthropology from the 1970s, on the heels of the major transformations that the world experienced in the 1960s. Originally tied to feminist political concerns and focused on women’s lives, the anthropological study of gender and sexuality gradually shifted toward a broad, interdisciplinary engagement with power differences, wherever they may occur. Although the term “gender” appears nowhere within it, the first anthropological treatment of gender is commonly considered to be Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, which argued that a person’s “temperament” was not biologically determined by his or her sex. While colonial power is not always gendered in the same way everywhere and at all times, colonialism always genders the colonized in strategic ways.
