Benjamin Hegarty, "Bureaucracy and Sex", The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 1-7, 2024.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2542

Presentation

Attention to the role of bureaucracy in classifying and governing sex in anthropology has been a topic of diverse interest. The historical role of anthropological theories of kinship and genealogy in establishing systems of classification highlights the lasting influence of racial and colonial legacies on binary sex. In the 1990s, interest in gender as performative resulted in a shift in focus from what sex is to what sex does. Ethnographic studies of sex classification have provided robust concepts for understanding the social, political, and technological processes invested in sex as a bureaucratic object. Anthropologists have investigated these material and semiotic processes, attending to how some jurisdictions expand possibilities for changing legal gender even as others further entrench essentialist definitions of biological sex. Ethnographic investigation of the primacy granted to sex/gender located in the body/mind allows for a fuller evaluation of state efforts to assert a monopoly over powers of recognition.

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