Anthropology is uniquely situated to look into concepts and theories of gender, sex and sexuality through its concern with the culturally-specific character of human categories and practices. This course explores gender, sex and sexuality across a range of cultural settings seeking, in the process, to question most of what we - including most theorists of sex/gender - take for granted about the gendered and sexed character of human identity and difference. Topics explored include: the saliency of the categories man and woman; the relationships between race and gender; the role of colonialism and neocolonialism in the representation of gender, sex and sexuality; the usefulness of the notion of oppression; the relationship between cultural conceptions of personhood and cultural conceptions of gender; and the ethnocentricity of the concepts of gender, sex and sexuality themselves. To assist these explorations we will make use of cross-cultural case studies in a number of areas including rape, prostitution, work and domesticity, the third sex and homosexuality.

On completion of this course, students will have gained the following:

• 1) An understanding of the diversity of knowledges and practices pertaining to sex/gender found throughout the world;
• 2) The analytic and critical skills necessary to interrogate and deconstruct assumptions about sex/gender found in contemporary western societies (including Australia);
• 3) A grasp of key issues in the anthropology of gender, including the relationship between race and gender, the role of colonialism and neo-colonialism in the creation of gender categories, the ethnocentricity of the concept of ‘oppression', and the problems associated with the categories of ‘man' and ‘woman';
• 4) The ability to analyse, from different cultural perspectives, a range of gendered practices including rape, prostitution, veiling, clitoridectomy and the third sex;
• 5) The skills required to write a lengthy research essay in the field of the anthropology of gender.

By negotiation: 6,000 words

Two hours of lectures and one hour of tutorial per week