Test Bank Answers Anthropology On Sex & Gender Chapter 13

Chapter 13: What Can Anthropology Teach Us about Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

Test Bank

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 01]

1) The roles, activities, and characteristics that a culture assigns to each sex are known as

Feedback: Gender roles refer to the social tasks and activities that a culture assigns to each sex.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. sex types.

b. kin types.

c. gender roles.

d. race roles.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 02]

2) What term refers to the social tasks and activities that a culture assigns to each sex?

Feedback: Gender roles refer to the social tasks and activities that a culture assigns to each sex.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. Gender stereotypes

b. Gender roles

c. Sexually ascribed status

d. Sex roles

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 03]

3) Androgyny is a term that refers to a

Feedback: Androgyny is a condition in which an individual person possesses both male and female characteristics.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. combination of both male and female traits.

b. transvestite.

c. male transgendered person.

d. heterosexism.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 04]

4) Individuals’ own sense of themselves based on such features of culturally informed notions of “masculinity” and “femininity” is shaped by the historical, economic, political, and sociocultural settings in which they live their lives is referred to as

Feedback: Gender identity is often shaped by cultural features used to define different ethnic, religious, or national groups, and to distinguish them from one another.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Organize the Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. gender identity.

b. gender bias.

c. sexual orientation.

d. sexual attitudes.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Knowledge of Key Terms and Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 05]

5) A term used by anthropologists that best describes the position that heterosexuality is the only correct form of human sexual expression is

Feedback: Heteronormativity is the view that heterosexual intercourse is (and should be) the “normal” form that human sexual expression always takes.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Study Relations between Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. gender dysphoria.

b. queer.

c. heteronormativity.

d. gender performativity.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 06]

6) Anthropologists have used the term sex to refer to biological differences between males and females, in contrast to the term gender, defined as

Feedback: The term gender refers to the culturally constructed roles assigned to males or females, which varied considerably from society to society.
Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. biological identity.

b. a culturally shaped role for each sex in a given society.

c. sexual status.

d. race roles.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 07]

7) Anthropologists define gender as

Feedback: The term gender refers to the culturally constructed roles assigned to males or females, which varied considerably from society to society.
Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. ways in which people experience and value physical desire and pleasure.

b. the tasks and activities that a culture assigns to each sex.

c. the physical differences in male and female biology, which vary across cultures.

d. biological identity.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 08]

8) Eleanor Leacock argued that women’s subordination to men could be connected explicitly to

Feedback: Eleanor Leacock (1983) argued that cases of male dominance in contemporary societies were less likely to reflect the original human condition than they were to show forms of institutionalized gender inequality influenced by the spread of capitalism. Leacock used ethnographic and historical evidence from North America and South America, Melanesia, and Africa to show how Western capitalist colonization had transformed egalitarian precolonial indigenous gender relations into unequal, male-dominated gender relations.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. genetics.

b. the rise of private property and the emergence of the state.

c. ecological factors connected with the development of domestication and sedentism

d. a form of binary cultural thinking that opposed male to female.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 09]

9) To what does the public/private divide refer?

Feedback: Public/private divide refers to a barrier that law and custom erected between “private” domestic life in the family, conceived as “women’s place,” and public life, outside the family, conceived as the domain of men.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. The separation of elite and nonelite classes.

b. The separation of secular and sacred.

c. The separation of spheres of exchange.

d. The separation of home and the outside world.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 10]

10) According to the findings of the medical anthropologist Emily Wentzell, who worked with male urology patients in Cuernavaca, Mexico, confronting questions regarding their sexual potency, we can best understand their experience

Feedback: Men had to come to terms with whether or not erectile difficulty (and the waning of penetrative sex) was putting their manhood at risk, and they had to decide whether or not they were willing to take medication like Viagra in hopes of putting off that risk. Wentzell’s analysis offers a fine-grained examination of what she calls the “concrete mechanics of masculinity” (2013, 184), as she shows how these men tinkered with ways of reformulating and enacting new ways of being men, removing or adding elements to what she calls their composite masculinities. She defines composite masculinities as “contingent and fluid constellations of elements that men weave together into masculine selfhoods. These elements are drawn from the entire gamut of men’s life worlds: their ideas and emotions, experiences, embodiment, relationships, and context” (2013, 26).

Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Organize the Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. as a mechanical masculinity.

b. through showing how these men created new ways of being men in what she calls “composite masculinity”.

c. as a product of the gender binary.

d. all of the above are true.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 11]

11) In Haiti, gender relations are incorporated into the nature of the state, such that

Feedback: Women appear in official stories about the Haitian Revolution, and some of them are even portrayed as heroines; most, however, are usually portrayed as silent wives and mothers. Moreover, the founders of the Haitian state borrow from their former French masters “a patriarchal idea of family as well as a civil code that gave men control of family life, wealth, and property” (Schiller and Fouron 2001, 134). Women belonged to the Haitian nation, but “state officials and the literate elite envisioned women as able to reproduce the nation only in conjunction with a Haitian man” (134). Until 1987, Haitian women who married foreigners lost their Haitian citizenship. High-status Haitian women are those who are supported economically by their Haitian husbands and who stay home with their children. Schiller and Fouron argue that many Haitians “still believe that to live by these values is to uphold not only family but also national honor” (135).

Page reference: How Are Sex and Gender Affected by Other Forms of Identity?

a. it is the responsibility of women to reproduce the nation.

b. until recently, women who married foreigners lost their Haitian citizenship.

c. the state pays for prenatal care for Haitian women.

d. women must live in Haiti to pass citizenship on to their children.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 12]

12) Intersectionality is a social phenomenon understood by anthropologists as entailing

Feedback: Intersectionality refers to the notion that institutional forms of oppression organized in terms of race, class, and gender are interconnected and shape the opportunities and constraints available to individuals in any society.

Page reference: How Are Sex and Gender Affected by Other Forms of Identity?

a. forms of institutionalized oppression organized within interconnected racial, class, and gendered terms.

b. only constraints for individual persons in a given society.

c. recognition that every person has a singular identity.

d. imagined identities.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 13]

13) According to the study of gender performativity, we “do gender”

Feedback: Displays of gender identity are examples of gender performativity; that is, gender is reconceived as something we “perform” or “enact,” something we “do,” not something we “are”. Put otherwise, no single identity fully captures the inner life of any individual. From the perspective of performativity, culture can also be reconceived less as a set of imposed beliefs and behaviors and more as a set of resources—artifacts, actions, and interpretations—that can be deployed by individuals in order to enact before others the identities to which they lay claim.
Page reference: How Do Ethnographers Study Gender Performativity?

a. when we are unable to naturally express our genetic sex.

b. only when it applies to our biological sex.

c. at all times because gender is not something that we “are.”

d. when we are actively following our socially assigned gender roles.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 14]

14) Nicaraguan men whom Lancaster interviewed about the Sandinistas’ New Family Laws in the 1980s

Feedback: The Sandinistas were replaced in 1992 by an administration supported by the U.S. government, and when anthropologist Cymene Howe visited Nicaragua after this change in regime, the country had been politically transformed. Howe carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the late 1990s and early 2000s on women, sexuality, and social change (2013). Nicaraguans she knew were familiar not only with the traditional category of cochón, but also with the category of cochona, a “manly woman,” although women’s same-sex sexuality was less publicly visible than that of men. Howe learned that the partners and girlfriends of cochonas were described as feminina or muy mujer (very womanly). Not unlike the situation of manly men, feminine women could become involved in sexual relationships with cochonas without losing their status as “normal” women.

Page reference: How Do Ethnographers Study Gender Performativity?

a. rejected these laws as communist inspired.

b. rejected these laws because they required men to behave in ways that were viewed as “unmanly.”

c. embraced the new laws as an expression of resistance to the Contras.

d. embraced the laws as an important step in undermining machismo.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 15]

15) What term describes the process in which humans would surrender some of their individual liberty in order to create a shared government that would protect the weak from the strong?

Feedback: The stress on individualism in Euro-American culture is justified by the taken-for-granted endorsement of the Enlightenment notion of the social contract. This view, developed in the writings of political thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, argued that in the distant past, there was no human society, and individuals lived in a “state of nature,” engaged in an ongoing war of “all against all.” According to this account, independent human individuals eventually agreed to a social contract in which they would surrender some of their individual liberty in order to create a shared government that would protect the weak from the strong.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Study Connections among Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and the Body?

a. Heteronormativity

b. Social contract

c. Biopolitics

d. Affect

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 16]

16) What does Foucault call modern states that depend on statistical information about their populations in order to devise ways of regulating those populations?

Feedback: Modern states depend on statistical information about their populations in order to devise ways of regulating those populations, engaging in what Foucault calls biopolitics.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Study Connections among Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and the Body?

a. Heteronormativity

b. Social contract

c. Biopolitics

d. Affect

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 17]

17) The berdache of many indigenous North American societies is an example

Feedback: Until the last decades of the twentieth century, the term “berdache” had been used by anthropologists as a technical term to refer to indigenous (especially Native American) social roles in which men (and sometimes women) were allowed to take on the activities and sometimes the dress of members of the other sex. Sometimes “berdache” has been defined as “male transvestite,” but this definition is inadequate because it ignores the fact that a man who took on other aspects of a woman’s role might also, as women did, establish sexual relationships with men.
Page reference: How Does Ethnography Document Variable Culture Understandings Concerning Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. based on the presence of ambiguous genitals at birth.

b. that was deliberately created by destroying or removing a male’s testicles before puberty.

c. based on the surgical removal of genitalia on adult males.

d. that is a role that apparently had nothing to do with morphological sex anomalies.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 18]

18) According to Gill Shepherd, for Mombasa Swahili women,

Feedback: Shepherd suggested that the reason sexual relationships between men or between women were generally not heavily stigmatized in Mombasa was because social rank took precedence over all other measures of status. Rank was a combination of wealth, the ability to claim Arab ancestry, and the degree of Muslim learning and piety. Rank determined marriage partners as well as relations of loyalty and subservience, and both men and women expected to rise in rank over a lifetime. Although lesbian couples might violate the prototype for sexual relations, they did not violate relations of rank. Shepherd suggested that a marriage between a poor husband and a rich wife might be more shocking than a lesbian relationship between a dominant rich woman and a dependent poor one. It was less important that a woman’s lover be a male than it was for her to be a good Arab, a good Muslim, and a person of wealth and influence.
Page reference: How Does Ethnography Document Variable Culture Understandings Concerning Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. social rank takes precedence over all other measures of status.

b. a marriage between a poor husband and a rich wife might be more shocking than a lesbian relationship between a rich woman and a poor one.

c. being involved in a lesbian relationship diminishes a woman’s social rank.

d. they would never consider pairing or marrying another woman.

Type: true-false

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 19]

19) Anthropologists agree that male dominance is a historical and contemporary feature of all human societies.

Feedback: Margaret Mead’s demonstration in the 1930s of the lack of correlation between biological sex and culturally expected behaviors of males and females in society was a well-known exception to this pattern. Building on Mead’s work, it became commonplace for cultural anthropologists to use the term sex to refer to the physical characteristics that distinguish males from females (for example, body shape, distribution of body hair, reproductive organs, sex chromosomes).
Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 20]

20) Comparative information on human sexual practices worldwide suggests that expectations of an active and satisfying sexual life are found everywhere.

Feedback: The chapter illustrates the variety of sexual practices are varied around the world.

Page reference: How Do Ethnographers Study Gender Performativity?

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 21]

21) Anthropologists perceive human bodies as massive, inert matter that is malleable and shaped by sociocultural conditions.

Feedback: Anthropologists have traditionally understood that human beings are plastic organisms who are open to the molding processes of socialization and enculturation.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Study Connections among Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and the Body?

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 22]

22) Donna Haraway has supported human alliances with machines in the contemporary world.

Feedback: While cyborgs have long been portrayed as monsters in science fiction, Haraway argued persuasively that all humans—women and men alike—were being increasingly drawn into alliances with machines in the contemporary world, for good and for ill. Haraway recognized the negative side of human–machine connections in cybernetically managed forms of economic production, but she refused to condemn technology as contrary to all the needs and goals of feminists. On the contrary, she argued that thinking in terms of cyborgs could be productive for progressive feminist purposes, particularly as a way of dealing with the conflicts generated by the politics of identity among differently located groups of women.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Study Connections between Bodies and Technologies?

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 23]

23) According to the textbook author’s discussion of the term, transgender may be described as dissatisfaction with the sex and gender assignments they had received at birth need to wear clothing of the opposite sex.

Feedback: Transgender is a term proposed in the 1960s by medical researchers to classify individuals who, in one way or another, seemed dissatisfied with the sex and gender assignments they had received at birth.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Study Relations between Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: [Comprehension of Fundamental Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 24]

24) According to Gill Shepherd, Swahili women in Mombasa may only choose other women as sexual partners after they have been married.

Feedback: Shepherd suggested that the reason sexual relationships between men or between women were generally not heavily stigmatized in Mombasa was because social rank took precedence over all other measures of status. Rank was a combination of wealth, the ability to claim Arab ancestry, and the degree of Muslim learning and piety. Rank determined marriage partners as well as relations of loyalty and subservience, and both men and women expected to rise in rank over a lifetime. Although lesbian couples might violate the prototype for sexual relations, they did not violate relations of rank. Shepherd suggested that a marriage between a poor husband and a rich wife might be more shocking than a lesbian relationship between a dominant rich woman and a dependent poor one. It was less important that a woman’s lover be a male than it was for her to be a good Arab, a good Muslim, and a person of wealth and influence.
Page reference: How Does Ethnography Document Variable Culture Understandings Concerning Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. True

b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 25]

25) Marilyn Strathern argues that

Feedback: British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern encountered further complexities when, as a second-wave feminist, she first went to Mount Hagen, in New Guinea (EthnoProfile 13.1). In the 1970s and 1980s, some ethnographers working in New Guinea were suggesting that in New Guinea, as elsewhere, males dominated females in order to control the reproductive powers of women. This interpretation was supported by the views of influential French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who claimed that linguistic communication, marriage negotiations, and economic transactions were all forms of exchange controlled by men. Indeed, he argued, women were the most valuable exchange good of all.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. male dominance is universally present because everywhere, women are perceived as closer to nature than men are.

b. the particular relations between males and females in society are just one example of gender symbolism.

c. no societies use gender categories to structure relations between hierarchically ranked groups of all kinds.

d. a form of binary cultural thinking that opposes male to female.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 26]

26) According to Roy Richard Grinker, Lese men

Feedback: Roy Richard Grinker found that male village-dwelling Lese householders in the Democratic Republic of Congo distinguished themselves from their forest-dwelling Ewe pygmy trading partners using the same unequal gender categories that they used to distinguish themselves from their wives.

Page reference: How Are Sex and Gender Affected by Other Forms of Identity?

a. used one gender category for themselves, another for women, and a third for Efe trading partners.

b. and their Efe trading partners considered women unequal.

c. moved women into separate households to keep them unequal.

d. used the same unequal gender categories for their wives and their Efe trading partners.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 27]

27) If we follow the approach suggested by Donna Haraway’s “cyborg anthropology,” which of the following statements is the most true for our likely point of view?

Feedback: Haraway contrasted the isolating relations promoted by politics based on identity (i.e., promoting political solidarity among those who shared the “same” identity) with what she saw as a potentially more promising politics based on affinity (i.e., promoting political alliances among those who might claim different identities, but who nonetheless shared some partial connections regarding some issues that might allow them to bridge their differences).
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Study Connections between Bodies and Technologies?

a. Intersexed individuals suggest the future of human cybernetics.

b. Blurred boundaries between what have been taken as “natural” organisms and “cultural”technologies.

c. Composite masculinities and femininities will become the norm for most societies within the next generation.

d. The gender binary is unimportant.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 28]

28) Which of the following statements about same-sex practices of people with female bodies is inaccurate, according to research conducted by Saskia Wieringa and Evelyn Blackwood?

Feedback: Anthropologists working in Africa have described a range of relations between females (woman marriage, for example) that have been likened to European or American models of lesbian relationships, but disputes have arisen about whether such relationships always include an erotic involvement between the female partners. In a survey of this evidence, Wieringa and Blackwood noted that woman marriage could take many forms, some of which were more likely than others to include sexuality between the female partners. Among those where such sexual relations appear more likely are cases like that described by Shepherd “in which a woman of some means, either married (to a man) or unmarried, pays bride-wealth for a wife and establishes her own compound”.
Page reference: How Does Ethnography Document Variable Culture Understandings Concerning Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. Woman marriage can take many forms, some of which are more likely than others to have included sexuality.

b. As a result of globalization, Western and non-Western same-sex practices are becoming increasingly entangled in many parts of the world.

c. Homosexuality is “un-African.”

d. Woman marriage manifests as a singular form across the continent of Africa.

Type: true-false

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 29]

29) Beginning in the 1970s, anthropologists began to examine closely the ethnographic record to determine whether male dominance is a feature of all human societies.

Feedback: By the 1970s, some feminist anthropologists were concerned that both the gender binary and male domination of females might be universal. For example, many human societies trace descent through women (see Chapter 14), but no persuasive evidence has ever been found to suggest that there have ever been societies organized as matriarchies—that is, societies where women as a group dominated men as a group.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 30]

30) Marcia Inhorn’s work among Egyptian men challenges what she describes as an “essentializing and deeply vilifying” stereotype of Middle Eastern men by describing how men in her study remained in childless marriages with wives whom they loved and who loved them.

Feedback: Large patriarchal families are supposed to contribute to “tribalism”—primary loyalty to the tribe over other political entities, such as the state. Tribal conflicts are said to promote violence and militarism, which is said to be reinforced by Islam, a religion that is regularly portrayed as promoting gender inequality and encouraging fanaticism to the point of waging jihad, or “holy war,” against non-Muslims. Inhorn forcefully rejects this “extremely essentializing and deeply vilifying” composite stereotype of Middle Eastern men (2012, 50). Even if some features of this caricature “may, at times and in certain places, be ‘true’ to the lives of some men,” Inhorn points out that data she has gathered over the past twenty years demonstrate, on the contrary, that “masculinities in the Middle East, as elsewhere, are plural, diverse, locally situated, historically contingent, socially constructed, and performed in ways that require careful empirical inspection” (2012, 50–51).

Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Organize the Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 31]

31) Intersectionality suggests that gender may become intertwined with forms of identity such as race.

Feedback: Intersectionality refers to the notion that institutional forms of oppression organized in terms of race, class, and gender are interconnected and shape the opportunities and constraints available to individuals in any society.

Page reference: How Are Sex and Gender Affected by Other Forms of Identity?

a. True

b. False

Type: true-false

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 32]

32) In Nicaragua, Roger Lancaster discovered that “manly men” are expected to be aroused by the idea of sex with a cochón.

Feedback: The Sandinistas were replaced in 1992 by an administration supported by the U.S. government, and when anthropologist Cymene Howe visited Nicaragua after this change in regime, the country had been politically transformed. Howe carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the late 1990s and early 2000s on women, sexuality, and social change (2013). Nicaraguans she knew were familiar not only with the traditional category of cochón, but also with the category of cochona, a “manly woman,” although women’s same-sex sexuality was less publicly visible than that of men. Howe learned that the partners and girlfriends of cochonas were described as feminina or muy mujer (very womanly). Not unlike the situation of manly men, feminine women could become involved in sexual relationships with cochonas without losing their status as “normal” women.

Page reference: How Do Ethnographers Study Gender Performativity?

a. True

b. False

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 33]

33) Define the concepts of sex and gender. Why do anthropologists find it useful to differentiate between the categories of sex and gender? What importance might this distinction have in modern society?

Feedback: Sex refers to the physical characteristics that traditionally distinguish males from females (for example, body shape, distribution of body hair, reproductive organs, sex chromosomes. Gender is the culturally constructed roles assigned to males or females, which vary considerably from society to society.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 34]

34) Based on the discussion in the textbook, does it appear that there any universals about gender roles across all societies? Use examples from your reading to support your position.

Feedback: Gender roles refer to the social tasks and activities that a culture assigns to each sex.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: [Application of Concepts: Chapter 13 Question 35]

35) Identify several examples of how American society may be characterized as heteronormative. How is heteronormativity challenged by changing social sentiments regarding sexuality?

Feedback: Heteronormativity is the view that heterosexual intercourse is (and should be) the “normal” form that human sexual expression always takes. Sexuality refers to the ways in which people experience and value physical desire and pleasure in the context of sexual intercourse.
Page reference: How Do Anthropologists Study Relations between Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 13 Question 36]

36) Analyze how sex, gender, and sexuality related to each other. What are the differences among these three analytical concepts? How are they operationalized in anthropological research (identify examples from the text).

Sex refers to the physical characteristics that traditionally distinguish males from females (for example, body shape, distribution of body hair, reproductive organs, sex chromosomes. Gender is the culturally constructed roles assigned to males or females, which vary considerably from society to society. Sexuality refers to the ways in which people experience and value physical desire and pleasure in the context of sexual intercourse.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 13 Question 37]

37) Starting with the concept of the public/private dichotomy, describe the correlation between women’s roles in the public sphere of life and patterns of patriarchy and male dominance. Identify examples to support your discussion. How are patterns of public versus private roles inscribed in policies and cultural practices? What variables would be necessary for there to be equality between women and men?

Feedback: Public/private divide refers to a barrier that law and custom erected between “private” domestic life in the family, conceived as “women’s place,” and public life, outside the family, conceived as the domain of men.

Page reference: How Did Twentieth-Century Feminism Shape the Anthropological Study of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: [Analysis and Synthesis: Chapter 13 Question 38]

38) Based on the ethnographic accounts of sexuality in Nicaragua provided through Lancaster’s and Howe’s research, compare forms of sexuality in that society with forms of sexuality in the United States. What explains these similarities and/or differences? What are the implications of these different cultural explanations?

Feedback: Anthropologist Roger Lancaster explored the performativity of gender and sexual identity in the course of his fieldwork in Managua, Nicaragua, in the 1980s, as he studied the effects of the Sandinista Revolution on the lives of working people. While he was there, Lancaster learned about cochones. Cochón could be translated into English as “homosexual,” but that would be highly misleading. Howe carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the late 1990s and early 2000s on women, sexuality, and social change (2013). Nicaraguans she knew were familiar not only with the traditional category of cochón, but also with the category of cochona, a “manly woman,” although women’s same-sex sexuality was less publicly visible than that of men. Howe learned that the partners and girlfriends of cochonas were described as feminina or muy mujer (very womanly).

Page reference: How Do Ethnographers Study Gender Performativity?