| Summary: | `titreb The “third gender” `/titreb This paper describes the theoretical advances since the works of Margaret Mead (1930) in conceptualizing the categories of gender. It shows how, beginning in the 1970s, feminism targeted these categories for scientific research and social action that led, mainly in the English-speaking world, to gender studies. The present paper is based on ethnographic research that I have conducted among the Canadian Inuit since 1960 and that has aligned me with those who oppose a binary approach to the study of gender. A ternary approach is needed to integrate the too numerous exceptions that are very often ignored in conventional ethnographies. To this end, I propose a 3-level cosmological model : 1) the infra-human level of the foetus, which according to the Inuit is susceptible to changing gender 2) the human level, with the trans-gendering of a child whose gender differs from that of the ancestors that he/she reincarnates, or when the family sex-ratio is unbalanced and 3) the supra-human level, with the trans-gendering of a shaman whose helping spirit belongs to the opposite gender. The third gender thus expresses an overlapping of the gender boundary at each level. I suggest that we should allow for the existence of a third gender, which is recognized in many traditional societies, in order to reconsider gender categories in our contemporary historical societies, while also using the “family atom” concept and considering social practices, rather than religious, legal, or economic norms. Finally, I am astonished by the apparent silence of social anthropology and sociology in response to the way the California-based Queer movement has diverted the meaning of the gender concept. This meaning has been emptied of its social content and made into an expression of individual desire and sexual orientation. Such a semantic diversion is inspired, according to Butler, by “French philosophers.” Ce texte décrit les avancées théoriques réalisées depuis les travaux de Margaret Mead (1930), dans ...
|
|---|