Gender has been a field of interest within archaeology for many years now, benefiting the discipline by problematizing andro- and ethnocentric knowledge production in past studies and widening the scope of future analyses. However, has the scope been widened far enough? Has the study of gender reached its limit? What is the potential of gender as an analytical tool? While some parts of gender theory have been taken up by archaeology, others have been slower to catch on. This session offers students a chance to engage with recent debates in anthropological and critical (feminist) theory, to explore how and to what extent gender can be explored in the archaeological record. We welcome papers that use gender as a relational framework, as one way among many that people form (or don’t form) connections with one another. We urge scholars to move beyond studies of men and women, and instead focus on how different bodies are understood, giving attention to signifying systems – that is, the way societies represent and articulate rules of social relationships and organization, creating meaning through hierarchies of difference based on practices of inclusion/exclusion etc. Papers may have both an empirical and/or epistemological focus.
Session chairs: Thais Rocha da Silva, Edward Scrivens, Ellen Jones (University of Oxford) and Reinert Skumsnes (University of Oslo)
The deadline for registration and submitting an abstract is July 31.