Lecture: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 11
Opening
Picture a family's holiday dinner. One relative always carves. A cousin always washes the dishes. The youngest guests get sent to set the table before anyone sits down. Nobody wrote these jobs down, yet the whole family knows them. So here's my question for you: who decided which person does which task? Was it biology, or was it the family?
You'll meet that question in many places. A business student may one day write a workplace dress code. A nursing or social-work student will meet families who divide care in their own way. A coach may have to set a youth league's coed rules. In each case it helps to know which arrangements are learned and why they differ.
Here's where we are. Week 2 taught that culture is learned, shared but never uniform, and changing, and it set cultural relativism apart as a method. Week 3 taught reflexivity, noticing how your own position shapes what you record. Week 9 gave you kinship diagrams and matrilineal descent, and Week 10 gave you residence rules. So a question has been waiting. When a couple marries, which partner moves? And who does which work?
Here's the plan. I'll start by pulling apart three words people often blur: sex, gender, and sexuality. Then we'll see gender as something a culture organizes. We'll test a famous model of who hunted and who gathered, and we'll look at a debate the course keeps open. We'll meet documented gender diversity in communities' own terms. We'll weigh one classic study and its critics. We'll keep gender apart from descent and authority. And we'll finish at the course's illustrative farmers' market, reading who does which job at the family-run stall.
1. Three ideas, kept apart
Go back to that holiday dinner. A relative's body didn't hand them the carving knife. The family did, and the family could have chosen differently. To compare families and societies, you need three separate words.
Here they are. Sex is biological traits, such as chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy, that are kept distinct from gender and from sexuality. Gender is the roles, behaviors, and identities a culture organizes around sex. What it includes differs across societies and changes over time. And sexuality is patterns of attraction and the cultural rules around them, kept distinct from both sex and gender.
The three answer different questions. Sex asks what the body's traits are. Gender asks what a culture expects of a person, and offers them, in light of those traits. Sexuality asks about attraction and the rules a culture sets around it.
Let's sort a few made-up statements. "The hormone levels differed between two groups of runners." Hormones are biological, so that's about sex. "In that family, the oldest daughter is expected to host the holiday." That's an expectation a culture assigns, so it's about gender. "The club's members agreed not to date each other." That's a rule around attraction, so it's about sexuality.
Pause and try this. A team's rule says each side must field mixed players. Is that rule about sex, gender, or sexuality?
Ask who wrote the rule, and whether they could change it.
Here's the answer. Gender. A league wrote that rule about who plays together, and a league could write it differently.
Here's the wrong turn to avoid. Students often use sex and gender as synonyms, as if gender were a polite word for the body. That's tempting, because everyday speech swaps them all the time. So before you pick the word, ask yourself: is this about the body, or about what a culture expects?
2. Gender is culturally organized
Think about a youth sports league writing its coed rules. One league lets every player try every position. Another sets how many girls and boys each team must field. A third keeps separate divisions until a certain age and mixes them after that. Each rulebook is a choice, and each league can rewrite it.
Anthropologists say gender is culturally organized. What counts as men's work or women's work differs across societies and changes over time. The term for those expectations is gender roles: the tasks, behaviors, and expectations a culture assigns to people by gender. They're learned, they differ across societies, and they change over time.
That's Week 2's culture concept, applied to gender. Culture is learned, shared but never uniform, and changing. Gender roles are learned, because children pick them up growing up. They're shared but never uniform, because people inside one culture disagree about them. And they change, because people rewrite the rules.
Here's a made-up case. A workplace once had a dress code with two lists, one headed "men" and one headed "women". Staff asked for a change, and the managers rewrote it as one list for everyone. New staff learn the code from a handbook and from coworkers, not from their bodies. Some staff wanted the change and some didn't. And the code went from two lists to one.
Pause and try this. A classmate says a rule that has lasted a long time must be natural. Using the dress code, is that reasoning sound?
Think about what happened to the two lists.
Here's the answer. No. A rule can last a long time and still be cultural, because people learned it, argued over it, and changed it.
The wrong turn here is thinking gender roles are the same everywhere, so your own society's split looks like the human default. Before you call a role natural, ask whether any society, or any decade, has arranged it differently.
3. The gendered division of labor
Think about a shared apartment or a family business you know. Someone shops, someone pays the bills, someone fixes things. When those jobs follow gender, anthropologists call the pattern the gendered division of labor: the way a society assigns tasks to people by gender.
The most famous model of it comes from studies of foraging societies, where people live by hunting, gathering, and fishing. You met foraging in Week 5. The man-the-hunter model is the classic foraging model. It holds that big-game hunting was done mainly by men and gathering mainly by women. It's a model with many documented exceptions, not a description of every foraging society.
Now here's a debate the course keeps open: how often did women hunt in foraging societies? Let me give you each side's strongest case.
The first side says many recorded foraging societies did divide labor this way. Men did most big-game hunting and women most gathering. So the model sums up a real, widely recorded pattern, and a model that fits many cases is a useful tool for comparison.
The second side points to the documented exceptions, in which women hunted. It also points to reflexivity. An observer's own position, including gender, shapes what they record. So older accounts may have missed women's hunting because of who did the observing and whom they talked with.
Notice what each side does well. One keeps a pattern many accounts recorded. The other asks whether the records were complete. Like the "original affluent society" debate in Week 5, you can state both cases without choosing, and the course keys no verdict.
Pause and try this. A friend says, "In every foraging society, only men hunted." Which wrong turn is that?
Think about the word "every".
Here's the answer. It reads the man-the-hunter model as a description of every foraging society. The model has many documented exceptions, and how often women hunted is debated.
4. Gender diversity in communities' own terms
Imagine you joined a new club and found a word for one kind of member that has no match in your vocabulary. You could force the word into a category you already know. Or you could learn what it means to the people who use it. Week 2 named the second choice: cultural relativism as a method.
Anthropologists have documented many ways that societies recognize and organize gender. The course calls this cross-cultural gender diversity: the documented range of ways societies recognize and organize gender beyond one fixed pattern, described in each community's own terms.
The course meets three cases. Two-Spirit is an English umbrella term. Indigenous people adopted it at a gathering near Winnipeg in the summer of 1990. It describes a range of gender and sexual identities within their own nations' traditions. It's not an ancient word from one Indigenous language. Hijra is a Hindi and Urdu term for documented communities in South Asia. And fa'afafine is a Samoan term for a documented case in Samoa. Each one is described in the community's own terms.
These are living communities who speak for themselves. So you describe each case as its own sources do, and you add no detail a source hasn't given. The course describes these cases plainly, and it argues no policy question about gender. That's relativism as a method, not "anything goes". You describe before you judge, and you let each community speak in its own terms.
Pause and try this. Two-Spirit: is it an ancient word from one Indigenous language, or something else?
Think about its language and its year.
Here's the answer. Something else. It's an English umbrella term that Indigenous people chose for themselves at a gathering near Winnipeg in 1990.
That's the wrong turn to avoid. The term refers to traditions, and it can sound like a translation. So give its language, its year, and who chose it before you say what it describes.
5. A classic study and its critics
Think of two families that expect different things of a son. In one, a son is expected to be loud and competitive. In the other, a son is expected to be calm and caring. If you saw only one family, you might think one temperament came with being a boy.
Mead made that kind of comparison across three societies she studied, in a book from 1935, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. That title is quoted as published, in the period's wording, which the course never uses in its own voice. Mead argued that temperament linked to sex differs across societies. So much of what a society calls a masculine or feminine temperament is learned.
Later critics argued that her contrasts among the three societies were drawn too sharply. The course teaches both sides at full strength and keys no verdict.
Mead's strongest case goes like this. If three societies paired temperament and sex in different ways, then sex alone can't fix temperament. Comparison is the anthropologist's tool for showing that something thought to be natural is learned.
The critics' strongest case goes like this. Neat contrasts flatten the variety inside each society. Remember Week 2: culture is shared but never uniform. A society described as having one temperament for men and one for women may hide many people who didn't fit.
Pause and try this. Which idea from Week 2 do the critics lean on?
Think about what neat contrasts leave out.
Here's the answer. That culture is shared but never uniform. A sharp contrast can hide the variety inside each society.
The wrong turn here is treating a famous study as settled, fully right or fully wrong. State each side's strongest case in one sentence, and leave the verdict open.
6. Gender, authority, and who moves
In Week 9 you met a wrong turn that comes back now. A society that traces descent through women isn't, for that reason, a society that women rule. Gender, authority, and descent are three separate questions.
Remember two documented matrilineal cases. The Haudenosaunee are one: clan membership passed through women, and clan mothers held recognized roles, including in choosing chiefs. And in the 1910s, Trobriand Islanders traced descent matrilineally, and a man's heir was his sister's son. Membership passed through women, yet you still have to ask a separate question about who held which role.
Now let's ask a gender question of Week 10's residence rules: which partner moves? Under patrilocal residence the couple lives near the husband's father's kin, so the wife moves. Under matrilocal residence the couple lives near the wife's mother's kin, so the husband moves.
Let's try it on the course's illustrative kinship set of 21 positions. The parents' generation has 10 positions: 5 drawn as triangles, for men, and 5 drawn as circles, for women. That's 5 married couples. Four of the people are in-married spouses: father's brother's wife, father's sister's husband, mother's brother's wife, and mother's sister's husband. Two are women and two are men. Under patrilocal residence, the wife moves in each of the 5 couples, so 5 women move. Ego's mother would live near ego's father's parents. Under matrilocal residence, the husband moves, so 5 men move.
Pause and try this. Under matrilocal residence, which partner moves in each of the kinship set's 5 couples?
Ask whose mother's kin the couple lives near.
Here's the answer. The husband. The couple lives near the wife's mother's kin, so 5 men move, and the rule, not the body, decides it.
Here's the wrong turn. Students read matrilineal as matriarchal, and they often assume the woman is always the one who moves. So ask three separate questions: how does membership pass, who holds authority, and who moves?
7. The family stall's division of labor
Now walk back into the course's illustrative farmers' market of 24 stalls. Field-note entry 6, at 8:50 in the morning, records an older woman at the family-run stall directing a man and a teenager who restock the bins, while a younger woman runs the card reader. Week 9 drew this family with roles, not names. This week, ask who does which job.
Here are the working roles. In the first generation, the founding grower directs the stall. In the second, her son drives the truck and restocks, his wife runs the card reader, and her daughter keeps the books. In the third, her granddaughter, a teenager, restocks and weighs produce, and her grandson, a college student, handles online orders. That's 1 plus 3 plus 2, so 6 working roles. The stall family has 8 roles in all, and 2 of them do no stall work: the founding grower's late husband, and the daughter's husband. So 6 do stall work.
Now count by gender. Four women: the founding grower, the son's wife, the daughter, and the granddaughter. Two men: the son and the grandson. That's 2 more women than men. And 3 of the 6 working roles sit in the second generation, which is 50 percent.
Pause and try this. Who restocks at the stall, and what does that tell you about the gender line?
Think about the son and the granddaughter.
Here's the answer. The son and the granddaughter both restock, one man and one woman. So restocking crosses the gender line, and it crosses two generations too.
Here's the reading in plain words. At the family-run stall, work is divided by generation as much as by gender, and restocking crosses the gender line. In the kinship set, the residence rule, not sex itself, decides which partner moves. So who does what is a cultural arrangement that a family or a society organizes around sex.
And here's the limitation. The notes record who does each job, not why. The family might say the grandson handles online orders because he's in college, not because he's a man. A fieldworker would need the family's own account, gathered with consent.
Closing
Let me pull it together. Sex is the body's biological traits, gender is the roles and identities a culture organizes around sex, and sexuality is attraction and the rules around it. Gender roles are learned, differ across societies, and change over time. The man-the-hunter model is a model with many exceptions, and how often women hunted stays an open debate. Two-Spirit, hijra, and fa'afafine are documented cases, each described in the community's own terms. Mead argued that temperament linked to sex is learned, and her critics said her contrasts were too sharp. Matrilineal isn't matriarchal, and a residence rule decides who moves. And at the market's family stall, work divides by generation as much as by gender.
Next in this module, read Chapter 11 if you haven't yet, then open the slide deck and the Readings & Resources page, work through the lecture tutorial and the practice set, and take the quiz. Next week, Week 12, Race, Ethnicity, and Human Variation, studies another category that a culture organizes around a biological starting point.
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