Each essay should be approximately three pages long, double spaced (12-point font).
Please don’t include the actual question in your essay; just write the number of the question that you are answering.
Thoughtful essays that cite specific examples from the texts and videos will receive more credit than those that do not (but please don’t include long quotations, or too many shorter quotations). If you are using specific examples, please cite the page numbers in the readings from which they are drawn.
2) We have seen in this course that a strict two-sex/two-gender-model (i.e., the assumption that there are always two, and only two, sexes and genders based on the anatomical differences between males and females) is inadequate for understanding the different ways that gender and sexuality are understood and experienced in many societies.
Drawing on any two of the assigned readings by Anna Meigs, Sabine Lang, Megan Sinnott, or Don Kulick, (I CHOOSE Anna Meigs “Male Pregnancy and the reduction of sexual opposition in a new guinea highlands”, and Sabine Lang “Lesbians, men-women and two spirits”) what are some of the ways that gender is assigned to or taken up by people that are not based solely on the anatomical differences between males and females? In other words,
if people are choosing or being assigned to gender roles/categories that are not based strictly on their being born with male or female anatomy, how are they choosing or being assigned to that alternative gender identity? How are people “re-gendered” in that context? (I.e., what are the ways that they signify their alternative gender to themselves and others – e.g., through
behavior, dress, etc.? Be specific.)
Explain some of the cultural factors or logics that shape the gender system in the setting that you are writing about. In other words, how is assuming an alternative gender justified or legitimized within the cultural or subcultural system within which they are operating? Do you see any ways in which the people who are taking up alternative gender or sexual roles/behaviors are nevertheless reinforcing a heteronormative, binary understanding of
gender?
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