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The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives

Queering Common Sense About Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

  • Book
  • © 2017

Overview

Authors:
  1. Pamela L. Geller

    1. Department of Anthropology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, USA

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  • Uses innovative social theorizing from feminist and queer studies to draw inferences from bioarchaeological data
  • Exposes and interrogates commonsensical ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality put forth in scholarly studies or popular presentations of ancient remains
  • Examines what and how notions about sex, gender, and sexuality in the past are disseminated to varied publics
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Part of the book series: Bioarchaeology and Social Theory (BST)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxi
    Download chapter PDF

  2. An Introduction

    • Pamela L. Geller
    Pages 1-19

  3. The Corpus

    • Pamela L. Geller
    Pages 21-56

  4. Common Sense and Queer Matter

    • Pamela L. Geller
    Pages 57-87

  5. “Grave News, Romance Is Dead”

    • Pamela L. Geller
    Pages 89-123

  6. Labor Codes

    • Pamela L. Geller
    Pages 125-163

  7. “She Gives Birth”

    • Pamela L. Geller
    Pages 165-198

  8. Brave Old World

    • Pamela L. Geller
    Pages 199-228

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 229-232
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Keywords

About this book

This volume uses bioarchaeological remains to examine the complexities and diversity of past socio-sexual lives. This book does not begin with the presumption that certain aspects of sex, gender, and sexuality are universal and longstanding. Rather, the case studies within—extend from Neolithic Europe to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to the nineteenth-century United States—highlight the importance of culturally and historically contextualizing socio-sexual beliefs and practices.



The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives highlights a major shortcoming in many scholarly and popular presentations of past socio-sexual lives. They reveal little about the ancient or historic group under study and much about Western society’s modern state of heteronormative affairs. To interrogate commonsensical thinking about socio-sexual identities and interactions, this volume draws from critical feminist and queer studies. Reciprocally, bioarchaeological studies extend social theorizing about sex, gender, and sexuality that emphasizes the modern, conceptual, and discursive. Ultimately, The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives invites readers to think more deeply about humanity’s diversity, the naturalization of culture, and the past’s presentation in mass-media communications.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Anthropology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, USA

    Pamela L. Geller

About the author

Pamela Geller is an assistant professor at the University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL) where she teaches in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Women's and Gender Studies. She is also co-convener of the Queer Studies Research Group, an interdisciplinary research group supported by UM’s Center for the Humanities. She is strongly committed to a study of the past that is inter- and intra-disciplinary. Her research interests include anthropological bioarchaeology and biohistory, feminist and queer studies, the materiality of identity, and thesocio-politics of archaeology. In bringing these areas of interest together, she investigates the role of bodily change in identity formation, focusing on markers resultant from intention (e.g,. cranial shaping, violent trauma) or habitual physical activities. She also examines modifications in conjunction with biological data (e.g., age, sex, health) and social information culled from burials, iconography, ethnohistory, and ethnography. Contextualized biocultural data indicate how past peoples literally embodied social identities that were culturally contingent, mutable, and complex.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives

  • Book Subtitle: Queering Common Sense About Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

  • Authors: Pamela L. Geller

  • Series Title: Bioarchaeology and Social Theory

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40995-5

  • Publisher: Springer Cham

  • eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-40993-1Published: 09 August 2016

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-82236-5Published: 12 June 2018

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-40995-5Published: 28 July 2016

  • Series ISSN: 2567-6776

  • Series E-ISSN: 2567-6814

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XXI, 232

  • Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations, 6 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Archaeology, Anthropology, Gender Studies

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