Variant masculinities, variant virginities Rethinking ‘honour and shame’

Abstract

Anthropological descriptions have often emphasized idealized, hegemonic versions of gendered identities and ignored the shifting reality of people’s experience as gendered beings. Such an emphasis is particularly evident in the literature on honour and shame. An ideal of female virginity and versions of hegemonic masculinity have been much discussed: the radical differentiation of men and women has been taken for granted and there has been a focus on local idioms which naturalize the privileges of socially dominant men. I suggest that it is now time to move on: that it is more instructive, and less circular, to treat gender as a contested discourse. When gender is problematized, it becomes possible to ask how people make gender known to themselves and how gendered identities may be reified to express apparently absolute differences between men and women while simultaneously defining inequalities within these categories.

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