The tendency to essentialize the difference between sex and gender has led to overshadowing the fluidity and potential overlaps between these concepts. In more recent feminist literature, the sharp boundary between sex and gender has been questioned. On one hand, this has been done through phenomenological analyses of gender/sex experience, and on the other hand, through post-structural deconstruction of this distinction. However, anthropology offers a “third” angle or perspective. Concrete anthropological research among non-European peoples, whose gender/sex classifications do not rest on the same principles as in Western cultures where the entire philosophical discourse on gender/sex is developed, vividly and illustratively opens up this third perspective.
In pre-Hispanic cultures of the Americas, on one hand, gender is not a stable social construct but rather unstable and changeable, altering over the course of a person’s life cycle. On the other hand, the sexes of men and women were not classified based on genitalia but rather on pregnancy. Thus, individuals in post-reproductive periods were not entirely recognized as men or women. The power of marking one’s sex through genital attributes is so strong in Western societies that it is perceived as unquestionable, although it primarily expresses a social constant of a classifier applied throughout an individual’s life cycle. In certain pre-Hispanic American cultures, it was simply considered that anyone who wore a dress and adorned themselves was a “woman,” completely detached from genitalia.
Contemplating the understanding of sex in pre-Hispanic American cultures enables us to comprehend the limitations of essentializing this concept.