Changing Genders in Intercultural Perspectives

In Anthropology the catch-all concepts of gender, sex, male, female catch both too much and too little. In contrast, this collection explores the shifting differences within them, as well as the mutable differences between. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, these essays develop contextual and strategic analyses of the way sex-gender constellations can be configured as political identities, as a resource, or in response to unforeseen contingencies. These constellations of sex-gender can be used instrumentally by colonial, neo-colonial or patriarchal regimes, by global communications networks, and by local moralities; they can govern blinkered research strategies (gender ‘neutrality’; ‘objective’ discourse); they can be ambivalent mediators (in bride-wealth negotiations; as a strategy for immigrant success); or they may constitute a subversive counterstrategy (as with the appropriation of the ‘two-spirit’ notion). These examples show that there is nothing useful to be said about gender, sex, male, female outside the concrete specificity of the relations in which they are defined, produced and reproduced. Drawing on recent theorising in Anthropology and Gender Studies this collection addresses a unique and vitally challenging set of issues exploring both new kinds of gender configurations as well as their changing circumstances.

Preface

Introduction: Indeterminate ontologies
Barbara Saunders

Guardians of distinctiveness
Maurits Eycken

Family disputes involving Muslim women in contemporary Belgium: Moroccan women between Islamic family law and women’s rights
Marie-Claire Foblets

Sewing up the globe: information and communciation technologies and re/materialised gender-power relations
Marianne I. Franklin

Marrying wealth, marrying money: Repositioning Igbo women and men
Patrick Iroegbu

Dynamics of sex, gender and culture: The native American berdache or ‘two-spirit’ people’ in discourse and context
Chia Longman

Engendering Blackfoot histories
Lea Zuyderhoudt

Planting seeds, making cheese, moulding faces, feeding children … men making babies? The virgin-birth controversy revisited
G. Bambi Ceuppens

Afterword: Discussing genders in times of change
Massimiliano Carocci

Notes on contributors

Marie Claire Foblets

Marie-Claire Baroness Foblets is a Belgian lawyer and anthropologist and professor at KU Leuven. Her research interests are interculturalism, migration and minorities.

Barbara Saunders