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Week 11 · Module overview

Week 11 — Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Welcome to your Week 11 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A business student who will write a workplace dress code and a coach setting a youth league's coed rules both meet this week's question: which arrangements are learned, and why do they differ?

In plain language

Every family and every society sorts some of its work, clothing, and expectations by whether a person is a man or a woman, but the sorting differs from place to place. This week you will keep three ideas apart: sex (the body's biological traits), gender (the roles and identities a culture builds around sex), and sexuality (patterns of attraction and the rules a culture sets around them). You will test a famous model of who hunted and who gathered, meet documented cases of gender diversity in the communities' own words, and weigh one classic study and its critics. Then you will read who does which job at the market's family-run stall.

  • Already covered: Week 9 gave you kinship and descent; Week 10 gave you residence rules.
  • This week: sex, gender, and sexuality; gender roles; who does which work.
  • How they connect: a residence rule decides which partner moves.
  • Where we're going next: Week 12, Race, Ethnicity, and Human Variation.

Focus

Who decided who does what: the body, or the culture?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • [ ] keep sex, gender, and sexuality apart
  • [ ] treat the man-the-hunter model as a model with exceptions
  • [ ] describe gender diversity in a community's own terms
  • [ ] read a division of labor by gender and by generation

To-do

Plan your week

  1. Read Chapter 11 (about 35 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
  2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
  3. Do the Ethnography Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
  4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: say whether a job split is about sex or about gender.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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