1981: Transgender, To Transcend Gender

Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality Publication date: 1981 In Polynesia, sexuality is not merely an idiom for gender relations but of transgender rank as well: Chiefliness and aristocracy are associated with active sexuality and with the stimulation of the fertility of nature (Ortner). – Page 17 Whitehead suggests that the identification of gender with occupational specialization in most of the relatively unstratified native North American may have arisen from the fact that, in the absence of strong gender-linked surplus appropriation that tend to be associated with highly ritualized and symbolically “loaded” definitions of the sexes, and in the absence as well of transgender prestige hierarchies (cast, class, rank), occupation rose to the surface as simply the most salient (and prestige-relevant) sex marker. – Page 18 As a reflex of persons inhabiting a certain social order, and as their way of understanding it, the various gender-crossovers, recategorizations,

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