The island of menstruating men: queerying leacock’s introduction to engel’s “Origin of the Family, The Private Property and the State”

• Autor(a) principal: Benavides, Oswald Hugo
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Revista de Arqueologia Pública
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/rap/article/view/8654888
• topic: Queer; Engels; Eleanor Leacock; Queer; Engels; Eleanor Leacock; Queer; Engels; Eleanor Leacock

My initial reading, almost three decades ago (as a graduate student), of Leacock’s introduction was quite profound.  It was the first time I read a succinct outline of how gender inequality might have developed and was equally offered a viable hypothesis of what might have also led to patriarchy.  This is particularly significant since, most probably, for the majority of our species’ history, that is, for almost two hundred thousands years, a greater form of gender (and social) equality had existed.  It was Engel’s work through Leacock’s introduction that enabled me to appreciate how when capital accumulation appeared, particularly under state formation, women faired worse than men and seem to have become second class citizens.However, the questions still remained: How did this shift occur?  What were the mechanism that made normalized one gender over another, and made this a lasting legacy until our days?  And what were the roles of child-birth, and perhaps warring itself, in this process, since both activity seemed to be the most gender-specific ones in the literature? Meanwhile, no actual hypothesis was proposed in Leacock’s introduction of how same-sex desire might have entered the picture.  Although it was clear from the analysis that monogamous heterosexual arrangements were complicit with capital accumulation, as well as, with gender hierarchy, patriarchy and sexual discrimination.