Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective (8^th Ed.)

This fully updated new edition of Gender in the Cross-Cultural Perspective carefully introduces and responds to changes in anthropological approaches to and perspectives on gender. With two new editors and new authors from the global south and underrepresented communities, it combines theoretically and ethnographically based essays to examine gender roles and ideology around the world.

Divided thematically into five parts, the editors open each section with a succinct introduction to the principal issues. The book retains some of the classic chapters while offering new contributions and extended discussions throughout on methodology. It also has entirely new contributions that reflect more recent developments in the discipline, including more emphasis on LGBTQ+ communities, COVID, and migration. The new edition also features additional support for teaching and learning that, including a film list and discussion questions, now offered as supplemental online materials.

The 8th edition of Gender in the Cross-Cultural Perspective continues to be an essential resource for undergraduate and graduate students encountering the anthropology of gender for the first time.

PART 1: GENDERING BODIES 1. The theory that men evolved to hunt and women evolved to gather is wrong 2. The past is a foreign country: archaeology of sex and gender 3. Animal models and gender 4. From pollution to love magic: the new anthropology of menstruation 5. Female genital cutting: moving forward on abolition? 6. Surgical transformations in the pursuit of gender 7. Revisiting the Hijras: an alternate sex/gender in South Asia 8. Natural birth at the turn of the twenty-first century: implications for gender 9. Making room for daddy: fathers and breastfeeding in the United States 10. Masculinities, muscularities, and eating disorders among young men in South Korea PART 2: GENDER, KINSHIP, and FAMILY 11. Gender, horticulture, and the division of labor on Vanatinai 12. Factory as home and family: female workers in the Moroccan garment industry 13. Marriage, modernity, and migration: changing dynamics of intimacy in a Mexican transnational community 14. Beyond romantic partnerships: Sese, gender egalitarianism, and kinship diversity in Mosuo society 15. What to do with unmarried daughters? Modern solutions to a traditional dilemma in a polyandrous Tibetan society 16. Little princesses and tiny barons: gender, microfinance, and parental priorities in urban Ecuador 17. Surrogate motherhood: rethinking biological models, kinship, and family PART 3: GENDERED SPACE and KNOWLEDGE 18. The fashioning of women 19. Gender, business, and space control: Yoruba market women and power 20. Taming internal weather, together: gendered knowledge flows during maternity under Khmer traditional and folk medicine systems 21. The domestic sphere of women and the public world of men: the strengths and limitations of an anthropological dichotomy 22. From “private” affairs to “public” scandals: the modern woman’s challenge to husband’s infidelities in Uganda 23. Possessing spirits and healing gods: female suffering and agency in North India 24. Empathetic Bhikkhuni: Navigating emotion and gender in Thailand PART 4: GENDER and THE STATE 25. Lifeboat ethics: mother love and child death in Northeast Brazil 26. Political demography: the banning of abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania 27. Women’s autonomy, Islam, and the French State 28. Gender, sexuality, and asylum assessment 29. The ‘unique blend’: reframing womanhood through Turkish drama series 30. Ethnographic empathy and the social context of rights: ‘rescuing’ Maasai girls from early marriage 31 Between a rock and a hard place: the labyrinth of working and parenting in a poor community 32. Madres, Madrinas, Mamȧs y Mȧs: trans Latina mothering in and around Chicago’s sexual economies of labor 33. Advancing an intersectional politics of belonging: LGBTQ+ Latinx activism after the Pulse shooting PART 5: MASCULINITIES 34. The cultural nexus of Aka father-infant bonding 35. Downsizing masculinity: gender, family and fatherhood in post-industrial America 36. My encounter with machismo in Spain 37. “Now I gotta watch what I say”: shifting constructions of masculinity in discourse 38. TikTok, truckers, and travel bans: digital disease surveillance and the scrutiny of masculinity in southern Africa

Adrienne E. Strong is Associate Professor of Anthropology and faculty affiliate of the Center for African Studies and Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida, USA.

Richard Powis is Assistant Professor of Maternal and Child Health in the College of Public Health and has a Faculty Affiliation in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of South Florida, USA.