The Contribution of Gender to Personal Identity in the Southern Scandinavian Mesolithic

In the western world, gender has long been seen as a fundamental structuring principle of identity formation, if not the most important defining characteristic of personhood. This view of the centrality of gender to personal identity has become increasingly widespread over recent centuries. Western folk notions of the overweening importance of gender influenced the development of nineteenth and twentieth century scholarly, medical and scientific discourses about gender. During the same period, western conceptions of gender were projected onto non-western societies as well. Thus the belief that gender—narrowly conceived as a set of precisely two non-overlapping categories of bodies—must be inherently central to identity has achieved remarkable scope and influence throughout the world in recent times. Marginalization has been the fate of alternative definitions of gender that utilize non-physiological criteria (e.g., occupation, dress, religious/spiritual factors, personal temperament, interventions by adults during development) as well as physiological criteria.