The book explores the integration of critical social theories into bioarchaeology, moving beyond traditional Darwinian and biocultural frameworks. It emphasizes concepts such as habitus, intersectionality, and necropolitics, revealing how these ideas can enhance understanding of various aspects of past societies, including health, gender, and violence. Additionally, it aims to promote ethical practices and support the decolonization of the field, ultimately enriching the study of human remains and cultural contexts.
Queering Common Sense About Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
This volume uses bioarchaeological remains to examine the complexities and diversity of past socio-sexual lives. This book does not begin with the presumption that certain aspects of sex, gender, and sexuality are universal and longstanding. Rather, the case studies within—extend from Neolithic Europe to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to the nineteenth-century United States—highlight the importance of culturally and historically contextualizing socio-sexual beliefs and practices. The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives highlights a major shortcoming in many scholarly and popular presentations of past socio-sexual lives. They reveal little about the ancient or historic group under study and much about Western society’s modern state of heteronormative affairs. To interrogate commonsensical thinking about socio-sexual identities and interactions, this volume draws from critical feminist and queer studies. Reciprocally, bioarchaeological studies extend social theorizing about sex, gender, and sexuality that emphasizes the modern, conceptual, and discursive. Ultimately, The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives invites readers to think more deeply about humanity’s diversity, the naturalization of culture, and the past’s presentation in mass-media communications.
