Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica (review)

Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica. By Rosemary A. Joyce. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. xvi + 269 pp., map, figures, tables, notes, references, index. $40.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.)

Rosemary Joyce has written a fascinating, challenging study that is a significant contribution to gender studies of prehispanic Mesoamerican societies, especially the complex cultural configurations that arose and flourished during the Classic and Postclassic periods. She concentrates on the Maya, her area of particular expertise, but adds insightful chapters on the gender implications of the emergence of more fixed and hierarchical social groupings during the Formative as well as a chapter on how the Aztec inscribed both gender and age classifications on the bodies of nobles and commoners, doing so in ways that simultaneously reinforced gender hierarchy and complementarity.

Joyce's goal is to explain the complex, dynamic Mesoamerican patterns but to do so in culturally specific ways without assuming that gender consists only of two fixed, unchanging, essential, and universal sets of identities. Relying heavily on Judith Butler's ideas about gender as performative, Joyce argues, in the first and most theoretically oriented chapter, that

as performance, gender is a way of being in the world, a way of dressing, of using the body, of revealing, concealing, modifying, and presenting the physical self. Gendered performances are learned and practiced, and they gain their intelligibility through social acts of interpretation, that is, when others understand a performing body's gender. Gendered performance, in Butler's analysis, is particularly centered on sexuality, and the readings of bodies that are interpretations of gender are always concerned with sexual possibility. (7)

Joyce uses these ideas to raise a long list of intriguing questions about gender images in the Mesoamerican archaeological record, images that are often sexually ambiguous. What can that ambiguity mean? Yet sometimes images were more fixed than their corresponding social roles and activities were in everyday life. Why the fixity? What is it telling us?

These features, ambiguity and fixity, can be found in the material evidence dating from Formative Mesoamerica, especially the figurines, the main subject of the second chapter. Using the concept of the "house" as the primary unit of social organization of the small, but increasingly complex, villages across Mesoamerica (rather than trying to read the material evidence for kinship structures), Joyce argues that a house-based nobility emerged late in the Early Formative. That nobility, at least in some places, then underwrote large-scale stone images associating males with power in contrast to the more sexually ambiguous and/or female small-scale images, which show both forms of beautification and the importance placed on age in combination with gender, as if the performance and inscription of identity unfolded over time rather than being wholly set at birth, as Western cultures commonly assume.

The next chapters analyze gender depictions among the Classic and Postclassic Maya. Again Joyce contrasts ambiguity and fixity, finding some indeterminacy even in monumental images (such that even the sexing of images seems a good deal more complicated than previous scholars, especially Tatiana Proskouriakoff [e.g., 1961], may have thought). Classic Maya small- and large-scale gender representations suggest a complex gender ideology in which both hierarchy and complementarity existed, with noblewomen—especially mothers—carrying a status that influenced the status of their houses (65). Small-scale representations, particularly figurines, often illustrate a wider array of female productive activities than monumental depictions. The latter, usually more concerned with male power and sexuality, were sometimes associated with female symbols, revealing the probable existence of what Joyce calls a "primordial encompassing gender" (83).

In the increasingly centralized political economy of the Postclassic Maya world, the subject of Joyce's fourth chapter, as gender hierarchy grew more fixed as shown particularly in the monumental images of Chichen Itzá, other evidence demonstrates the persistence of female roles in both household and community rituals and the wide array of work women performed. Here the author relies heavily on a close reading of Landa's problematic sixteenth...