Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations

by Serena Nanda

Book Overview

How can we gain new understandings about sex, gender, and sexuality? What are the relationships between culture and gender diversity? How has the diffusion of Euro-American culture affected the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1577660749
• ISBN13: 9781577660743
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Waveland Press
• Length: 127 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Effective Introductory to the Gender Territories

I read the original 2000 edition. It is an introductory booklet on gender studies and quite a good one at that. Even though or maybe exactly because it features just 108 regular text pages, including 14 monochrome pictures. Intended for mainly college students (but readable for anyone), it features seven additional reference pages for more in-depth material + 11 documentary references. The booklet itself introduces gender concepts in Native North America, India, Brazil, Polynesia, Thailand, the Philippines and in Euro-American cultures. The last of which include the sworn virgins of Albania, which I personally had never heard of before. For an entire book on the latter read the very recommendable Women Who Become Men: Albanian Sworn Virgins (Dress, Body, Culture). Like many anthropological books, "Gender Diversity" is written with a Western mindset. Which might be important in setting the standard against which other societies' gender concepts are measured. However, the author invites the reader to question those Western constructs. It provides for a fast, easy, informative and thoughtprovoking reading. Not intended to stop with it, but instead to open further doors. Some of these doors may be the following books: Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Mismeasure of Women: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex, Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men, Revised Edition, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine) and Nature's Body: Gender In The Making Of Modern Science for Western concepts. Other perspectives include When Men Are Women: Manhood Among The Gabra Nomads Of East Africa, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society, the remarkable The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses and (related) Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (Studies in Melanesian Anthropology) to get you started.

The forest and the trees

Serena Nanda's short book (only about 100 pages) is an excellent introduction to the subject of "gender diversity". We get to know "berdaches" among North American Indians, a caste of emasculated transvestites in India, effeminate male transvestites and macho gay men in Thailand, and celibate women living like men in Albania. There are also chapters on the Philippines, Polynesia and the contemporary West. The section on the Western world is the shortest one, presumably to emphasize that "gender variants" aren't uniquely Western or modern. There are a few illustrations, including a photo of a transvestite Crow Indian warrior named Finds Them And Kills Them. The book ends with a bibliography and a list of movies about gender variants. I suspect Serena Nanda's intended audience are freshmen anthropology students, but "Gender Diversity" could be read by the general reader as well. However, I also have some criticism of this book. Nanda claims that gender diversity proves that binary thinking (male/female) isn't universal. I beg to disagree. Most of the gender variants described in her book presuppose an already established binary opposition between "male" and "female". Why else would the most common gender variant be a male wearing women's clothing? Why are such persons expected to do traditional women's work? Why do they establish sexual relations with other men, who don't cross-dress and hence act as typical males? Obviously because the whole point of the gender variants is to reinforce the dichotomy between "male" and "female" identities. Indeed, the transvestites described in the book don't look like a "third" sex or gender, despite Nanda's analysis. Rather, they simply look like a combination of the two main genders, men and women. The group that comes closest to being an actual third sex are the male Hijras in India, who emasculate themselves and are supposed to live a celibate lifestyle. They are even organized as a special caste within Hindu society. But even the Hijras mimic and parody the mannerisms of women, showing that their status as a third category is relative. My guess is that gender variants emerge precisely because most societies think of "male" and "female" as opposites. Of course, such a rigid distinction is unnatural, due to individual human variation. There will always be men who act more "womanly" according to the cultural standards of their society, and women who act more "manly". The equally rigid categories of "male acting like a female" and "female acting like a male" are presumably established by society as a way of accommodating the deviants, and in more oppressive societies, to control them as well. Nanda is probably right on another point, however. She believes that there is no direct connection between transvestite gender variants and homosexuality. True, the overt sexuality of the gender variants *is* homosexual, since a cross-dressing male is supposed to have a "normal" male partner. While this might tempt actua

break down the barriers in your mind

this was a very readable book about the idea of gender and how it's not as black and white as some would love to make it. it basically take a look at different cultures and documents how they view gender. when we think gender, in the society we live in (that i am sometimes not that happy about being a part of) we think of only two possibilities, male and female. homosexuals are still men or women if they like someone of the same gender, they're just weird (dripping with sarcasm). however, what we fail to realize (when i say we i mean main stream society, the mob, the collective) its that the concept of gender is a mental construction. what we see as fact and set in stone, is about as whimsically held together as a kite made out of feathers, it can fall apart at any time. as nature doesn't provide only two types of human beings, society must come to see that more than two types of human beings exist. some cultures take this better than others and that is the point of this book. in some cultures there are three or four genders, in some cultures other manifestations of sexual preference are revered. this book looks at various cultures around the world and how they deal with the issue of gender. it's a short read, but a fun one.

A breakthrough study - accessible, too!

A masterful, highly readable survey of an important and fascinating subject. This indispensable, seminal work is concise, but far-reaching. It describes the varied manifestations of gender diversity in a way that permits the reader to perceive the patterns and deeper meanings that underlie cultural differences. This may be the first cross-cultural survey of gender diversity to describe "the trees" in such a balanced and objective way that the reader may see and understand "the forest." Anyone interested in the deeper, changeable nature of human sexuality will find this book to be both provocative and illuminating. A wonderful expansion of the author's classic study of the hijras of India, Neither Man Nor Woman.

Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations

In this lean book, Serena Nanda uses ethnographic accounts to illustrate how diverse cultures construct their sex/gender systems. By doing so, she reveals that these systems are not always binary; male and female, man and woman. Her descriptions of masculinity and femininity in India, Brazil, Polynesia, Thailand, the Philippines, within some Native American tribes and in contemporary Euro-American cultures challenge what some believe is "natural" about gender and, by extension, sexuality. By presenting gender variations historically and as they are currently understood and displayed, Nanda reveals the social, historical and cultural forces that have created changes in these sex/gender systems.This engaging book has eight short chapters. The introductory chapter lays the foundation for Nanda's argument by defining key terms (e.g., gender diversity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, transgendered, sex/gender identity, etc.) with which readers must be familiar to understand gender variation. Chapters 1 through 5 provide ethnographic accounts of multiple genders among North American Indians, the hijra and sadhin of India, the travestís, bichas, and viados of Brazil, the mahu in Polynesia, the kathoey of Thailand and the bayot/bantut/bakla in the Philippines. What some readers will find most interesting and provocative are accounts of how contact with Western cultures influenced existing gender constructs in these cultures. For example, North American Indian men who dressed like women, did "women's work" and were sexually intimate with other men were called "berdache" (an Arabic term for a male prostitute) and demeaned by early Spanish explorers on religious grounds. Chapter 6 focuses on sex and gender diversity in Euro-American cultures. While the present-day view is that there are only two sexes and two genders, Nanda reveals other models of sex/gender that are part of the Euro-American heritage. In the final chapter, Nanda summarizes important ideas from the preceding chapters and compares sex/gender variations. This further exposes the extent to which sex/gender variants challenge the binary concepts of sex, gender and sexuality in Western cultures. She rightly concludes that "the evidence argues against any one-way, cause-and-effect relationship between homosexuality and sex/gender diversity, and a specific sexuality may well emerge from a sex/gender variant role, rather than the reverse...the association between sexuality and sex/gender diversity cannot be assumed, but rather must be examined within specific cultural/historical contexts" (Nanda 2000, 101-02). For those who want to learn more, Nanda includes a reference section that highlights materials that should be of particular interest to "students" of gender. She also provides a list of selected films, explains how each complements materials presented in a particular chapter and where to obtain the film.Some readers may be disappointed that there is lit