Introduction to “Binary Binds”: Deconstructing Sex and Gender Dichotomies in Archaeological Practice

YesGender archaeology has made significant strides toward deconstructing the hegemony of binary categorizations. Challenging dichotomies such as man/woman, sex/gender, and biology/culture, approaches informed by poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theories have moved beyond essentialist and universalist identity constructs to more nuanced configurations. Despite the theoretical emphasis on context, multiplicity, and fluidity, binary starting points continue to streamline the spectrum of variability that is recognized, often reproducing normative assumptions in the evidence. The contributors to this special issue confront how sex, gender, and sexuality categories condition analytical visibility, aiming to develop approaches that respond to the complexity of theory in archaeological practice. The papers push the ontological and epistemological boundaries of bodies, personhood, and archaeological possibility, challenging a priori assumptions that contain how sex, gender, and sexuality categories are constituted and related to each other. Foregrounding intersectional approaches that engage with ambiguity, variability, and difference, this special issue seeks to “de-contain” categories, assumptions, and practices from “binding” our analytical gaze toward only certain kinds of persons and knowledges, in interpretations of the past and practices in the present

Negotiating normativities – ‘Odin from Lejre’ as challenger of hegemonic orders

This article focuses on some bodily features of the figurine called ‘Odin from Lejre’. Some corporal characteristics convey an ambivalent touch to the interpretation of the miniature. So, for example, shows the clothing close resemblance to the late Iron Age female dress. This, combined with facial attributes that have been interpreted as a moustache, can be seen as a negotiation of the contemporary hetero-normative gender order. Moreover, the eyes of the figure demonstrate certain irregularities, maybe signifying differences in the visual capacities of the eyes. This corporal exceptionality in relation to (today’s) notions of body-normativity may imply that the Viking Age abled body sometimes was extended to include reduced visual capacity. The processing of both gender-normativity and body-normativity in one and the same precious item, may imply that the high-ranked setting of Lejre included performative practices that were negotiating both heteronormative and body-normative hegemonic orders