ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how archaeologists began developing more complex approaches to gender and identity, often drawing on relational theories. It also examines how gender archaeology developed in the 1980s and 1990s as a challenge to sexist assumptions about the roles of men and women in the past. The chapter focuses on how this initial movement changed, especially through its engagement with the work of feminist theorist Judith Butler, to question even whether notions of biological sex can be seen as 'natural'. It discusses how anthropologists question whether western ideas of the 'individual' can be applied to other groups around the world today, and in turn how archaeologists have used these ideas to think about identity in the past. The notion that identity, including gender, is not limited to the historical categories that currently recognise has also opened up wider questions for philosophers, anthropologists and more latterly archaeologists.
