Childhood and the Construction of Gender Identities through Material Culture

Abstract

Societies need to reproduce themselves both in a biological and in an ideological and social way. Through this paper, the author tries to understand how the process of social reproduction affects children's lives regarding gender identity. Through the material culture that can be found in archaeological records, one can try to understand how age and gender identities are interconnected and how they manifested themselves in the creation of childhood identities. Materiality is employed in the creation and experience of age and gender categories through speci fic costumes, ornaments and practices of body modi fication. From a phenomenological perspective, the author analyses the material culture from the funerary record of Bronze Age societies of the south of Spain taking into account the links between bodies and objects, and using micro-history to extrapolate local experiences to a broader picture in order to understand how societies deal with the phenomenon of childhood.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.