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Chapter Four The Construction of Gendered Identities in Myth and Ritual

       Darlene M. Juschka

Introduction

      This chapter investigates how gender ideology and gendered identities are given materiality in ritual and myth. I use “myth” and “mythology” to mean meaningful narratives for those who adhere to the myth, rather than untruth or superstition. I also do not take myth to be the opposite of history, as both are narratives by which truth is seen to be disseminated. In this I follow Hayden White (1987). Gender ideology and its performance mark the boundaries for, and of, imagined communities (Anderson, 2006), while imagined flesh made material in genitals comprises the somatic canvas upon which gender ideology is marked, defined, and performed. The matter of flesh within the imaginary system of human knowing “stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface” (Butler, 1993: 9). The marking, defining, and performing of gender ideology and gendering are deployed through and enacted in the media of ritual and myth. I use the term “media” in the sense of sites for the public dissemination and circulation of information, knowledge, and truths. In critical theory, from within which I work, media are the means and ways that meaning is inscribed and messages sent. Ritual and myth are the ordering systems, the media, through which signals and signs are sent (Morley, 2005: 214).

Deployment and enactment in these kinds of media give biological, social, and metaphysical credence to gender ideologies and their performance. Equally, flesh marked by gender can also be further marked by any one or more of: indigeneity, race, age, geopolitical location, ablebodiedness, and sexuality. Such multiple markings play out in terms of what black and poststructural feminists refer to as intersectionality (Collins and Bilge, 2016; May, 2015; Lutz, Vivar, and Supik, 2011; Crenshaw, 1991; see also Chapter 6 by Keenan in this volume). By examining the imaginative development of gender ideology and its performance as acquired, maintained, and idealized through these media, critical theorists are better able to comprehend, chart, weigh, and interrupt gender ideology.

      To critically engage gender ideology in this chapter, I discuss rites and myths of circumcision to make visible how the media of ritual and myth are central to the construction and maintenance of gender ideology. Both female and male circumcision are highly contested practices (Ahmadu, 2000; Gollaher, 2000; Knight 2001; Shear, Hart, and Diekema, 2012; Theisen, 2012; Wambura, 2018; Wyatt, 2009; see also Chapter 33 by Redding in this volume). For the purposes of this chapter, however, examining the construction of gender in ritual and myth, I have not taken up the arguments for or against ritual circumcision. The rites and myths chosen for analysis in this chapter are derived from the Mende folk of Sierra Leone who continue to practice circumcision as a rite of passage for youth into adulthood. The ritual of circumcision is explicit in its effort to construct a new identity, making it an excellent rite by which to think about gender. The rite of circumcision is an ancient rite and among some of the earliest organized rituals. In my work in ritual, myth, and semiotics, I draw on the systems of belief and practice of indigenous folks in Africa, Cuba, and North and South America (along with ancient near Eastern and Mediterranean myths, rituals, and symbols) as their worlds and world constructions are too often absent in the study of religion, not fitting the normative model of “religion” represented by the so‐called world religions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism (Paden, 1994). Examining indigenous systems to think about ritual, myth, and symbol gives credence to their world constructions.

The Terrain and What is at Stake

      Ritual and myth are central to the construction of identity, in particular gendered identity, in most if not all social and historical contexts. Although often cloaked as traditional, unchanging and unchanged, this is decidedly not the case, as ritual and myth are subject to the same vicissitudes of time and place as the system of belief and practice with which they are associated or in which they occur (Bell, 1992: 118–24). Instead, we might better engage ritual and myth as media that invent, shore‐up, and/or challenge the why, who, how, and what of being human in the world. As discursive practices, ritual and myth relate and reaffirm gender ideologies and their performances as “dense transfer point[s] for relations of power” (Foucault, 1978). Different kinds of myth circulate through social bodies, including cosmogonic myths that center on the creation of a world, demogonic myths that center on the creation of social bodies, and anthropogonic myths that center on the creation of human animals. All these kinds of myths are central to the formation and structuring of human social systems.

Gender is an aspect of identity that is represented, under the sway of Euro‐Western gender ideological systems, as all encompassing. The bodily locating and locking of gender is enacted through the making, and then the marking, of genitals. Once created, the genitals are that by which we know ourselves and that by which we are dominated (Fausto‐Sterling, 2012). In the scientific narrative of gender ideology, this domination is achieved through chemical and cognitive processes, the latter of which are said to appear properly at the time of human pubescence (Schiebinger, 2004; Tuana, 2004; Martin, 1992). The fleshy bits named genitals, both the origin and target site of these processes, are seen to be of two kinds only, and these two kinds are taken to be opposites in all ways: that is bodily, socially, and cognitively (Laqueur, 1992). Opposite is taken to mean that something is completely and utterly different from another thing; as night is to day, the earth to the sky, yin to yang, and the moon to the sun. Opposition is a construct, and not a natural fact coming to meaning within a context. There are other sources besides science for this kind of thinking, such as the ancient Greeks, whose oppositional thinking directly influenced Christianity, Judaism, and Islam through the texts attributed to such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle and the physicians Hippocrates and Galen, among others.

      Operating in an oppositional framework means that the notion of opposition dominates how any subject is thought. Also, an oppositional framework insists that two opposites cannot and do not share of each other. And finally, the framework imbues one of the opposites with positive value and the other with negative value. For example, in many masculine hegemonies, the female, girls/women, and the feminine carry negative value (–) and male, boys/men, and the masculine carry positive value (+). Equally, gender ideologies framed within and by opposition, construct and enforce their own versions of heteronormativity (Butler, 2004: 79–80). As the majority of gender ideologies around the globe have been impinged upon by Euro‐Western colonialism, they evince in lesser or greater degrees the framework of opposition.

For example, as a concept, reproduction is equally shaped by oppositional thinking so only two are imagined as part of the process of reproduction rather than one or more than two. We know, however, that reproduction takes multiple forms and can involve only one actor or multiple actors and yet we persist with imagining only dyads.¹

      The naturalization and mystification of gendering is called gender ideology. Drawing on the Althusserian‐Marxian understanding of ideology, ideology is the outcome and process of mystifying social relations so that these relations appear as if they are naturally–biologically and/or psychically–metaphysically СКАЧАТЬ