Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures [Paperback]

Sabine Lang (Author), John L. Vantine (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1998

As contemporary Native and non-Native Americans explore various forms of "gender bending" and gay and lesbian identities, interest has grown in "berdaches," the womanly men and manly women who existed in many Native American tribal cultures. Yet attempts to find current role models in these historical figures sometimes distort and oversimplify the historical realities. This book provides an objective, comprehensive study of Native American women-men and men-women across many tribal cultures and an extended time span.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a major and significant contribution to the studies of gender diversity, sexuality, and cultural constructions of gender and sex roles. In addition...it is the only source that empirically and theoretically focuses on female sex and gender options in Native North America. (Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Professor of Women Studies and Anthropology )

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: University of Texas Press (1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0292747012
• ISBN-13: 978-0292747012
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #980,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's about time, September 9, 2010

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This review is from: Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures (Paperback)

Sabine Lang's book is a very welcome and long overdue addition to the literature in a field that has been too long characterized by fragmentary data, historical bias, "hijacked" social use, and blatant homophobia. Lang's lengthy effort to compile the extant data on "two spirits" from the disparate disciplines of cultural history, sociology, anthropology, and Native American studies represents a formidable achievement. The sheer volume of data would dissuade many scholars from attempting the task.

One of the most successful aspects of the work is Lang's refusal to editorialize the data. In a field of study where it seems everyone wants to support a personal agenda with research findings or historical incident, Lang maintains distance, confining her comments to pointing out historical inconsistencies, poor fieldwork, or obvious bias on the parts of observer/recorders.

Lang's demographic distribution tables are particularly helpful for those of us who study this and other aspects of North American Native social life. Equally useful is her sorting out, demystifying, and de-biasing the vocabulary applied, historically, to the two-spirit phenomenon. Lang "repatriates" the language of the two-spirit. She removes it from the white observers' always vague and often denigrating terminology and restores it to its Native language - which is different from group to group and deserves to be respected,not replaced, by white words and concepts (none of which arise from the socio-spiritual context of Native society.)

I have many favorite parts of MEN AS WOMEN, WOMEN AS MEN, but Lang's descriptions of how Christianization of Native communities has all but obliterated the reverence for and "necessary-ness" of two-spirit individuals to Native communities and their spiritual life is, I think, one of the book's most delicately handled and poignant aspects. Anyone who says a scholarly text cannot be moving emotionally has not read MEN AS WOMEN, WOMEN AS MEN.