I am no great authority on Igbo music, but I think it’s safe to say that Area Scatter was one of the genre’s very few transvestite thumb pianists. The gender-bending was integral to his rock-star mythology, as detailed in Beats of the Heart: His home was filled with bones and skulls and paintings of the […]
Tags:Area Scatter·gender·Igbo·music·Nigeria
This memoir by the former bassist for Barbara Allen and the Tennessee Hot Pants includes a great vignette about playing Greenland’s Thule Air Force Base, where young men once scanned the skies for incoming Soviet ICBMs. Deprived of female companionship for months at a time, and surrounded by little but shiny white nothingness for most […]
Tags:Barbara Allen and the Tennessee Hot Pants·gender·Greenland·music
Interesting little tidbit in this excellent profile of Lady Carol Kidu, Papua New Guinea’s only female legislator, who is pushing a controversial bill to allocate a set percentage of parliamentary seats for women: Kidu knows that if the bill fails then when she retires next year PNG will likely become the 10th nation in the […]
In the course of researching the controversial career of Filipino basketball star Asi Taulava, I decided to look into the hoops scene in his native Tonga. That line of inquiry led me to this account of the sport that Tongans describe as “basketball,” but really resembles something else entirely: Basketball in Tonga is not like […]
Do women make for better deminers? That could be the case in Sudan, in part because of the culture’s traditional division of labor: In these war-torn communities it is typically women who are involved in gathering wood and water for their families in more remote locations. Due to their knowledge of these lesser-known areas, women […]
The financial crunch caused by Microkhan Jr.’s increasing appetite for food and Cookie Monster paraphernalia forced us to drop our Economist subscription this year, so we’re late to the mag’s report on the drop in female births throughout much of the world. But it’s essential reading—a disturbing look at a trend that could lead to […]
In response to our post on athletic gender testing earlier this week, one of our most treasured commenters posed this stumper: Are there no sports where being a woman might be a competitive advantage over being a man? Equestrian events maybe, or long distance swimming? Tough one! We’ve long been familiar with some research vouching […]
Tags:gender·Olympics·ski jumping·sports
In reading this quickie AP bit about a female runner whose gender is in question, we were left wondering about the shades of sexual grey that the International Association of Athletic Federations must contend with in the age of hormones. A quick peek in the pants, alas, is no longer sufficient to determine whether a […]
Tags:Caster Semenya·gender·Olympics·sports·Stanisława Walasiewicz
As we walked across Little Senegal this morning, a throng of devout Muslim men got us thinking about Bangladesh. That may sound like a non sequitur, but our internal logic went something like this: Though most Islamic societies obviously feature male-dominated governments (note, for example, that all of Iran’s mullahs are male), Bangladesh’s two leading […]
