Gender and Sexuality in Culture

1045 Words3 Pages

Diversity or rather, the lack of understanding diversity may be one of the most prevalent issues in the world today. Though the World Wide Web has bridged the cultural gap some, it will never fully or accurately reveal the truth simply because it is difficult to fully understand cultural meanings from an outsider’s perspective. Before the internet, careers in anthropology and similar fields made information available through ethnographic readings and studies. A key inquiry anthropologists seek to answer is the distinction between and role of sex, gender, and sexuality within each separate culture. Y The Last Man and other ethnographic texts connect culture, its language, and the formation of gender, sex, and sexuality roles in any given society.

Y The Last Man begins with Yorick, a young man who lives and works at home talking to his girlfriend, Beth. Yorick is working out while Beth is shown wearing short shorts and a bikini top in Australia (Vaughan, 6). Right away we learn some differentiation between sexes in the culture. Y The Last Man is a unique graphic text filled with examples of what might happen during an extreme gender imbalance. It is interesting what can be learned from a culture when normal elements and frameworks are manipulated. In the case of Y The Last Man, Yorick is the last male sex on earth (not counting his pet monkey Ampersand). Gender roles change as women attempt to take on the men’s deserted roles in desperation to hang on to something of normalcy (Vaughan, 68-75). Food and resources become scarce and women resort to selling the dead men’s bodies for food (Vaughan, 47). Conflict arises in the government as the secretary of agriculture, Margaret Valentine, becomes the new president since so ma...

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...rations in Cultural Anthropology. Colleen E. Boyd and Luke Eric Lassiter, eds. Pp. 243-250. Plymouth, UK: AltaMira Press.

Luke Eric Lassiter

2009 Invitation to Anthropology. Plymouth, UK: AltaMira Press.

Nanda, Serena

2011 Hijra and Sadhin Neither Man Nor Woman in India In Explorations in Cultural Anthropology. Colleen E. Boyd and Luke Eric Lassiter, eds. Pp. 259-273. Plymouth, UK: AltaMira Press.

Vaughan, Brian K., with Pia Guerra and Jose Marzan, Jr.

2002 Y The Last Man. New York, NY: DC Comics.

Young, Antonia

2011 The Sworn Virgins of Albania In Explorations in Cultural Anthropology. Colleen E. Boyd and Luke Eric Lassiter, eds. Pp. 253-257. Plymouth, UK: AltaMira Press.

Tannen, Deborah

2011 Different Words, Different Worlds In Explorations in Cultural Anthropology. Colleen E. Boyd and Luke Eric Lassiter, eds. Pp. 223-241. Plymouth, UK: AltaMira Press.

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