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http://www.jstor.org Gender-Bending Anthropological Studies of Education

AMY STAMBACH Universityof Wisconsinat Madison

Anthropologicalstudies of gender have shifted focus in the past four decades. The study of gender, anthropologists have come to realize, goes beyond analysis of women, sex roles, and sexuality. We used to look at exotic kinship and marriagemodels, in which women served as objectsof exchange (L vi-Strauss1969), and we used to talk about uni- versal sexual asymmetry as though it were a basis of social structure (Leach1977). But the focus today has shifted to examine the ethnohistor- ical roots of gender ideologies and the historical and materialcircum- stancesthat shape genderrelations in marketsand families(di Leonardo 1991;Ortner 1996). Indeed, many researchersnow focus on gender as metaphor,arguing that gender reflectsother aspects of culture:general values, relationshipsof power and authority,the creation and mainte- nance of group boundaries and identities (Lutkehaus1995; Strathem 1987). We who study education have been somewhat slow in making this analytic shift. Yes, our anthropologypredecessors took gender into ac- count, but even MargaretMead and EleanorBurke Leacockargue that gender is about more than male and female social roles. Like others in FranzBoas's circle, Mead (1928)urges anthropologiststo counterwidely held assumptions aboutmale dominanceand female subservience.And Leacock(1978) argues that gender is not simply what men and women do or what boys and girls differentlyachieve in school; rather,it is a ve- hicle throughwhich people talk aboutwider formsof inequality.Several contemporarystudies frame "gender"in broad terms of social inequali- ties (see, for example, Holland and Eisenhart1990; Levinson 1998;Lut- trell 1997).But much of the currentresearch in educationaljournals and conferencestends to focus on girls' voices, women's teaching,and patri- archalauthority, themes that typicallyreproduce North Americanread- ers' cultural views about gender and education and present gender in socially static and sex-specificways.1 The problem with defining gender in terms of sex roles and sexuality is that doing so perpetuatesWestern cultural assumptions about teach- ing, parenting,and the private-publicdichotomy. Studies that examine gendered divisions of labor often cast the home as a private space, the school as public, and women and men as normativelyinvolved in either one or the other.Sex roles and sexualitymight very well be importantin

Anthropology& Education Quarterly 30(4):441-445. Copyright ? 1999,American Anthropological Association.

441 442 Anthropology& EducationQuarterly Volume 30, 1999

some of our ethnographicstudies, but focusing on them runs the risk of freezing women in particularlife stages and of overlooking how boys and men are defined as age-gradedand gendered persons. Countering this literaturewith specifically"masculine-oriented" research, as is the currentturn in some areas of gender studies, reinforcesthe notions that sex is naturally dimorphic and that gender correspondswith biology, two presumptionsthat are crediblychallenged by recentanthropologi- cal researchon intersexuality(see Herdt 1994). What has happened?Are we suffering from academicamnesia? Are we forgettingthat anthropologistswho wrote about gender and educa- tion in the 1970s-and earlier-were themselves wary of conceptualiz- ing gender narrowly as "whatmen and women do"?Are we forgetting that feminist anthropologistssince the 1970shave worked hard to illus- trate how gender stands for inequalities throughout society as a whole-even for economic delocalization, as when we speak of the feminizationof poverty?Perhaps we are. But our own parochialismhas also driven us into an old-fashionedparadigm. Our narrow focus on the school has returned us to think basically of gender as what girls and boys, men and women, do. "Sexrole selection"is often the way U.S. edu- catorsand students thinkabout gender, but it may not be the best way to approachour subjectanthropologically. As a framework,sex role selec- tion may be appropriatefor sociological gender studies. I am thinking here of work that has been done on the differentialacademic opportuni- ties and outcomes for girls and boys (see Grantet al. 1994).But for an an- thropology that seeks to understandhow gender is intertwinedwith all aspects of social life, it is possibly too narrow. As BarrieThorne (1993) notes, the fact that schooling structuressocial life along sex dimorphic lines is a phenomenon for us to explain, not a startingpoint for anthro- pological research. In a 1984 special issue of Anthropologyand EducationQuarterly, the in- spirationfor this currentissue, GeorgeD. Spindlernotes thatthe focus of "currenteducational anthropology has been so exclusively on the class- room, or at least on the school, thatthe culturalcontextualization, as well as the immediate community contextualization,is not developed in most published works"(1984:7). His point might be extended to anthro- pological writing on gender/education in the interveningyears, though it need not speak for all of it, nor for all of what is to come. It is not too late to carry Spindler'spoint even furtherinto gender/education stud- ies. Doing so would connectour works to anthropologists'work in other cornersof our field. In light of changes going on aroundus, it seems timely and excitingto contemplatehow we might link gender and education to more general values embedded in social organization.We might, for instance, con- sider how the teacher-studentrelationship reflects gendered relations of authority, discipline, and knowledge that operate in other social do- mains-the neighborhood,government, and home, for example. What Stambach Gender-BendingStudies 443 are the workings of power at local, state,and nationallevels, and how do they link to gender inequalitiesin schools?What are the competing gen- der arrangementsin North American families, and how do they inter- twine with conceptualizationsof students' roles?Answers requirelook- ing at social life beyond the classroom. They may even involve consideringthat culturaltendencies to emphasize gender differencesin schools conceal other inequalities;material inequalities between social groups may be hidden by a culturalemphasis on inequalitybetween the sexes. We might also ask how the past 30 years of strugglefor gender equity in U.S. educationreveals changing culturalideas about personhood and identity-a theme that moves us out of classroom ethnography yet keeps us firmly rooted in issues of education.Why, for instance,has the subjectof sexual orientationrecently eclipsed questions of educational equity? Why are campuses and the media churningwith LGBTQissues but comparatively quiet on education and affirmative action for women?2Answers, I suspect, have to do with demographicshifts and with the representationof women in higher education,yet they also re- flect culturaltendencies to identify genderedpersons in termsof sexual- ity and to think about sexuality in terms of power. This could be ex- plored in connectionwith universitycampus culture. Finally, we might extend gender and education to the international scene and ask, How does gender provide a category by which we de- fine-and defend-international human rights?How does the law pro- tect women's rights,and how are universalgender rights understood lo- cally? How do schools contribute to these understandings?Looking abroadwould furtherthe comparativeapproach that Mead and Leacock so effectivelydeveloped. Genderdoes not go away with these questions, but neitherdoes it stop with what men and women do. All of this is anotherway of saying that anthropologistsof education are well poised at the excitingcrossroads of genderand educationtoday. We are in positions to look at the ways gender links to conceptualiza- tions of the educated citizen, the formationof human rights, and local discourses of power and authority.If we are to continue the anthropo- logical project that Spindler envisioned-of connecting classrooms to communities and social worlds-we might push ourselves to reflecton how people use gender to speak about many aspects of social life. Even though people around the world are talking increasinglyabout gender as though it was a thing, gender remains,like cultureitself, largely invis- ible to "fish"who are swimming in it.3And even though some anthropo- logical studies of girls' voices and teachers'maternalism effectively re- veal culture's hidden dimensions, the fact that we focus sometimes exclusively on them prevents us from seeing gender as a culturalheuris- tic for understandingsocial organization.The time seems ripe,and excit- ing, to broadenour approach. 444 Anthropology& EducationQuarterly Volume 30, 1999

Amy Stambachis an assistantprofessor in the Departmentof EducationalPol- icy Studiesat the Universityof Wisconsinat Madison,where she holds appoint- ments in Women'sStudies and AfricanStudies.

Notes

1. Thereare exceptions,including Fine 1991,Fordham 1996, and Lee 1997. 2. "LGBTQ"stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered,and question- ing. 3. HereI am paraphrasingClyde Kluckhohn,who writes, "Itwould hardlybe fish who discoveredthe existenceof water"(1949:11). This quote was provided and shared by Mary Bushnellon the Council on Anthropologyand Education memberlistserv, February 19,1998.

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