Masculinist approaches to a gendered archaeology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
How ‘progressive’ have archaeologists been in the progress made on gender studies during the 1990s? All archaeologists, male and female, must accept the need to theorize gender, and to rethink accordingly their traditional research priorities. Feminist theory is essential for the study of gender in archaeology because it has paid closer attention to gender as an analytical category than any other body of theory, and at the same time made important links within and between disciplines. Most male archaeologists have been recalcitrant if not loathe to focus on gender as a key concept in archaeological theory, even though writers treating ‘masculinity’ in the social sciences and literary theory have been active in this field for over a decade. This study discusses masculinist reactions to feminism and suggests that ‘masculinist’ approaches are derivative of feminist scholarship. Perhaps the most important contribution of masculinist scholarship has been to insist upon the existence of divergent, multiple masculinities, and by extension femininities, as opposed to binary oppositions or ideal types. The study of men and masculinities, of women and femininities, involves consideration of social and gender issues that should not become the exclusive domain of either women or men – the goal is an archaeology informed by feminism, one that looks critically at theories of human action and allows archaeological data to challenge existing social theory.