Gender
Hosteen Klah is most commonly believed to be intersexed. Klah was important to the development of Navajo weaving. Among the Navajo, weavers are typically women, and chanters (hataałii) are normally male. Hosteen Klah was both a weaver and a chanter. This was possible because of his particular gender status. Klah was a nádleeh (meaning "one who is transformed" or "one who changes"). A nádleeh could be born male, female, or intersexed.
Read more about this topic: Hosteen Klah
Famous quotes containing the word gender:
“But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“... lynching was ... a woman’s issue: it had as much to do with ideas of gender as it had with race.”
—Paula Giddings (b. 1948)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)