ABSTRACT
Gender identity is a private experience: the intensity with which one inhabits one’s own gendered body, feels desire, and expresses oneself physically and materially. In the modern West, gender identity and self-perception are deeply enmeshed with sexuality and the inherently public constructs of binary masculinity and femininity. The dominant cultural view is one of fixed categories of biological sex and orthodox sexualities. From the perspectives of history and anthropology, however, the categories of sex, gender and sexuality appear unstable. This chapter probes sex and gender categories, and challenges the social constructionist view that gender is socially created, while sex is fixed and biologically determined. The relationship between gender and sexuality is questioned, an issue which is very recent to archaeological dialogues, and in which the focus of study has been on sexed or sexualised bodies: burial evidence and visual representations. The potential of multiple gender categories is explored through cross-gender types which possess social, physical and archaeological presences. The nature of gender identity is considered through the prism of masculinity, and archaeological approaches to the gendered body are reviewed.
