Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality / Edition 1

by Sherry B. Ortner, Harriet Whitehead

Overview

This 1996 collection of essays deals with the ways in which sex and gender are socially organized and conceptually construed in various cultures. Its scope is not limited to a series of cross-cultural issues of sex roles and sexual status but rather encompasses a wide range of sex-related practices and beliefs. Ceremonial virginity in Polynesian ritual androgynism in New Guinea, the valorization of young African bachelors, and fantasies of male self-sufficiency in South American myth are among the subjects discussed. Taken in their totality, these essays demonstrate that cultural notions sexuality and gender are seldom straightforward extrapolations of biological facts but are the outcome of social and cultural processes. The book is not only a compendium of symbolic approaches to gender but is also an important statement of the theoretical directions in anthropological research in this field.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521283755
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/30/1981
Pages:	446
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.91(d)

Table of Contents

List of contributors; preface; Introduction: accounting for sexual meanings Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead; Part I. The Cultural Organization of Gender: 1. The gender revolution and the transition from bisexual horde to patrilocal band: the origins of gender hierarchy Salvatore Cucchiari; 2. The bow and the burden strap: a new look at institutionalized homosexuality in native North America Harriet Whitehead; 3. Transforming 'natural' woman: female ritual leaders and gender ideology among Bimin-Kuskusmin Fitz John Porter Poole; 4. Self-interest and the social good: some implications of Hagen gender imagery Maralyn Strathern; 5. Sexuality and gender in Samoa: conceptions and missed conceptions Bradd Shore; 6. Like wounded stags: male sexual ideology in an Analusian town Stanley Brandes; 7. Pigs, women, and the men's house in Amazonia: an analysis of six Mundurucú myths Leslee Nadelson; Part II. The Political Contexts of Gender: 8. Politics and gender in simple societies Jane F. Collier and Michelle Z. Rosaldo; 9. Women, warriors, and patriarchs Melissa Llewelyn-Davies; 10. Gender and sexuality in hierarchical societies: the case of Polynesia and some comparative implications Sherry B. Ortner; Index.