Content provided in partnership with

Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler

<< Page 1 Continued from page 7. Previous | Next

The author tops off her argument by showing that in recent years there has grown up a notion that the parental conversion of children's gender harms a child. That sense will soon destroy the institution, she says, "for a part of the population condemns it today," the author for instance citing a hunter who, though in need of a collaborator, decided not to gender his girl male, "since it would have been prejudicial to the child." (33) Thus under the pressure of Western expectations, these Inuits are coming to believe that a child should be allowed to attain the societally expected image of their biological sex without overt parental pressure. This amounts to a betrayal of the fundamental Inuit notion that adults actually control gendering and even the birth process, a central point of Robert Lamblin's and Rose Dufour's work that deserves particular emphasis, since it impacts directly on the general problems raised by this paper.

Most Popular Articles in Reference: The importance of understanding organizational culture; Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students; What factors attract foreign direct investment?; Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...; How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques; More »

Perhaps the easiest way to address this complicated subject in a few words is to state that the Inuit had a discrete set of rites aimed at freezing in place the sex of male infants; there was otherwise the danger of their slipping toward femininity. On the other hand, there were those male foetuses, called siqiniq, who in the act of being born decided to become a biological female, and so surrendered the penis for the vulva and, her life long, remained totally a female. Note that Inuit society did not provide rites for freezing the foetal female's sexuality, or female sexuality in general. I will avoid all the intricacies of these beliefs, except to give their general contour, which is, according to Dufour, that such beliefs and rites give the Inuits a seeming ability to intervene in a process where, in fact, free choice never had a place. These ideas and especially the procedure for fixing masculinity, says Dufour, make the Inuit think that they themselves control the distribution of population. (34)

Precisely the same emphasis on the question of free choice real and alleged informs the work of Robert-Lamblin. She gives an insightful picture on how Inuit parents raise their children, the external pressure of tribal norms being glossed so that those norms come to be self-understood, "for in reality," she paraphrases the parental attitude in approaching their child, "he knows perfectly well what he ought to do." (35) But in fact, our author determines, "there is no personal choice of the individual but rather an external intervention upon him." Family education and the social environment have a "considerable role" in the acquisition of gender identity, and the gender change takes place "even before the child's own nature has been able to manifest itself ... " (36) Thus the change is made "without the individual's temperament or his personal choice coming into play." (37)

By contrast, Roscoe, in his Changing Ones, claims that these same denizens of the Arctic in fact allowed latitude for individual preferences, and where the change in gender was forced, those regendered did not have "true berdache status." (38) He has only ideological conviction but no evidence to back him up, and we will later see whence he derives this insistence on free will. It will escape no reader of this article that the constraint levied on children by parents who knew they controlled their children's gender unmistakably links the experiences of berdaches in the whole of Latin America to those of the Inuit and, as we shall see further on, to the tribes of the present-day United States of America, the land in-between, as well. (39)

Making the American berdache: Choice or constraint?

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Richard C. Trexler

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference