Gender and Status Competition in Premodern Societies

Interarchaeologia 4

This paper discusses small personal items, buttons, buckles, and pins as a part of gender performance in early modern Oulu. The appearance of a costume is full of meanings; individuals and groups communicate via clothes and personal adornments. One of the divisions of identity, which we can examine through material remains, is gender. Our aim is to examine how costume both represents and produces gender identity. Our theoretical baseline is Judith Butler’s performance theory, where she argues that gender is a performatively constructed act. We will discuss how it is possible to study this act via archaeological material, concentrating on interpretation. The archaeological material examined here has been discovered from urban excavations at the NMKY plot in Oulu, northern Finland. It comprises 19 buttons, 5 buckles, and 22 pins mainly from the seventeenth century. While the early modern period can be defined in many ways, here it covers the early years of Oulu town, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The main focus is not to present completed results, but to show the multiple possibilities of interpretation and the various connections between gender identity and clothing.

Why women's clothes have buttons on the left? Why men's clothes aren't so dressy as women's?

Preface 1. Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder: An Introduction to Gender and Corporeal Aesthetics in the Past Uroš Matić 2. The Queen’s Beauty: Leadership as an Aesthetic and Embodied Practice in Ancient Mesopotamia Helga Vogel 3. Beauty Treatments and Gender in Pharaonic Egypt: Masculinities and Femininities in Public and Private Spaces Uroš Matić 4. An unknown ancient Egyptian tool (for wig maintenance?) Kira Zumkley 5. Fresco, Fresco on the Wall... Changes in Ideals of Beauty in the Late Bronze Age Aegean Filip Franković 6. Gender, perfume and society in ancient Athens Isabelle Algrain 7. Mirrors in the funerary contexts of Moesia Superior: Roman hegemony, beauty and gender Vladimir D. Mihajlović 8. Looking for trouble. Beautiful bodies in Viking Age Scandinavia, c. 750 to 1050 A.D. Bo Jensen 9. From Moon-faced amrads to Farangi-looking Women: Beauty Transformations from the 19th to early 20th century in Iran Mariam Dezamkhooy 10. Afterword

In the Concise Oxford Dictionary, image is described as "the character or reputation of a person or thing as generally perceived". A first impression based on non-verbal communication goes a long way in influencing this perception and within seconds of meeting someone for the first time, your appearance, body language and non-verbal communication will create a lasting first impression, and that person will assume to know everything about you. Like it or not, it's true and the work world demands making a great first impression and keeping it. This paper looks at how communication of gender is manifested through personal grooming and adornment in different cultures and in fact different times in the world. It goes further to delve on whether really women -a times ―dress to kill‖ as well as youth and the popular culture today. All this in an effort to check on whether - indeed people dress to communicate, entertain or just cover their nakedness. Specifically, the people looks at how a person’s gender determines how they dress as well as how cultures determine the way we dress.

Hypatia, 1992

This article was first published in Hypatia, Vol. 7/No. 3, 1992 and was later included as Chapter 3 of Maxine Sheet-Johnstone's 1994 book The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies.

KASKAL, 2022

Gender Transformations in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies, 2019

Southern Italy from the 8th to 4th centuries BCE was an area of intensive cultural contact and exchange. Even prior to the Roman conquest, local communities experienced significant social and cultural change. It will be argued here that these changes also had a considerable impact on gender roles. The paper furthermore addresses the impact of time and space on the development of social roles connected to gender, both on the subjective, personal and on the objective, absolute scale. It will be demonstrated that there seems to be a remarkable shift in gender conceptions in pre-Roman southern Italy. The study discusses the role that the new, eastern Mediterranean influences and people may have played in this process, looking at possible forms of interaction, disposition, and agency, both on the indigenous and on the immigrant side. Finally, these observations and suggestions will be compared with an apparently analogous and better documented situation in the colonial past and its long-term consequences. While one should exercise caution in drawing parallels between the protohistoric and recent pasts, it seems that strikingly similar processes, especially regarding the development of gender conceptions and inequalities, can be observed – in both cases leading to the empowerment of the male side and a de-powerment of the female side within the indigenous communities.

Clothes are often considered mundane, but they play a crucial role in people’s lives beyond only providing protection from the heat and cold. The meaning of a piece of clothing changes the moment it is worn, as it becomes associated with its wearer. Attire can demonstrate affiliation to a particular group, be it religious, political, ethnic, social, etc., serving as an important means to construct the self-identity of a person. In terms of social impact, attire can include, as well as exclude, an individual from a certain group, playing a part in acculturation or assimilation. In order to understand what clothes can reveal about the ethnicity, beliefs, social rank, profession and gender or age of the wearer, it is necessary to reconstruct its particular socio-cultural context and understand the non-verbal language the dress conveys. The conference creates a venue for a multidisciplinary and comparative approach to dress studies in the ancient world. It brings together scholars working inside broad geographical and chronological frameworks but pursuing common themes in their research. It gathers specialists studying ancient attire from different perspectives and applying different methodologies. Non-verbally, attire conveys important meaning that must be decoded through various methodological approaches, be it an artifact, visual- or text-oriented approach. The fragmentary corpus of evidence available to assist in the study of ancient costume in different geographic areas justifies searching for cross-cultural patterns in dress behavior. The goal of the proposed conference is to construct (a) definition(s) of the clothed self and investigate multiple trajectories of the dress’ role in the construction of various identities in the ancient world. https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/symposia/2018.html