Gender in the Prehistory of the Eastern United States

Fear the Native woman: Femininity, food, and power in the sixteenth‐century North Carolina Piedmont

“…First, we critically explore the chiefly, or political, power that Indigenous women could (and did) hold, as recorded in the Spanish documentary evidence, and informed with a critical understanding of Indigenous gender roles. Building on Ruth Trocolli's work, and employing Cheryl Claassen's (1992, 2001, 13) and Rosemary Joyce's (1994) theory of gender roles, we question why, if the chiefly office was gender‐neutral (Trocolli, 2002, 2006), did Native women seemingly attain chiefly status less often than Native men? Through this exploration, we consider the relative construction of political power within Native societies and propose that Native gender roles, and particularly the relationship between Native women and food, contributed to this imbalance by constructing a more appealing avenue for the attainment of power for Native women.…”

“…Historically, this resulted in naturalized ideas of gender rooted in Western ideologies. This view has been heavily critiqued, and decolonization efforts in archaeology and anthropology have explicitly targeted essentialized gendered approaches (e.g., Claassen, 1992; Joyce, 1994; Trocolli, 2006), resulting in the recognition of diverse gender ideologies. In the most extreme cases, researchers argue that the category of gender and in turn the idea of gender roles are entirely Western constructs, and that “gender” has no application in studies of non‐Western societies (e.g., Trocolli, 2006).…”

“…In the most extreme cases, researchers argue that the category of gender and in turn the idea of gender roles are entirely Western constructs, and that “gender” has no application in studies of non‐Western societies (e.g., Trocolli, 2006). Others, such as Cheryl Claassen (1992) and Rosemary Joyce (1994), maintain gender is a universal institution that varies socially, culturally, and historically but is informed by the biological investment placed in offspring. In the case of the latter, researchers are arguing not for essential gendered behaviors that result from biological sex but instead that over the course of a person's social lifetime, different biological investments into offspring, particularly on the part of females, result in historically patterned social constructions of gender.…”