About

Mary Weismantel is a Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University and serves as the Co-Director of SPAN (the Sexualities Project at Northwestern). She has previously held positions as Director of the Latin American Studies Program, Director of the Gender and Sexualities Studies Program, and Chair of the Department of Anthropology. Her research and teaching interests focus on the cultures of the Indigenous Americas, particularly the Andes, with an emphasis on sex, gender, and material life in the region. She explores these themes through a combination of ethnographic research, archaeology, and art history, employing methods that bridge auto-ethnography and material culture analysis. Dr. Weismantel has made significant contributions to understanding ancient and contemporary indigenous cultures, with notable publications including her award-winning book 'Playing with Things: The Moche Sex Pots' (2021), which examines material culture and sexuality in ancient South America. Her earlier works, such as 'Cholas and Pishtacos' and 'Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes,' reflect her ethnographic research in South America and her focus on issues of race, gender, and inequality. Her scholarship has been recognized with awards such as the Association for Latin American Art-Arvey Foundation Book Award. Her work consistently addresses themes of ontologies, decoloniality, kinship, and the intersections of gender, race, and materiality in Latin American contexts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Anthropology
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• Art history
• Psychoanalysis
• Art
• History

Selected publications

• Towards a Transgender Archaeology

  2022-05-18 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The first step in creating a transgender archaeology is a destructive one: tearing off the layers of unsupported assumptions about sex and gender that encrust the archaeological record, and freeing the queerly formed bodies trapped underneath. This chapter summarizes the challenges currently facing archaeologists who study sex and gender. It surveys some of the work of archaeologists who have moved beyond the gender binary, and shows what an “ungendering” of the archaeological record can do. The goal of a transgender archaeology is not to re-populate the ancient past with modern trans men and trans women—that would be a blatant distortion of the archaeological record and of the goals of transgender studies. In Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender and Archaeology, Rosemary Joyce advocates an archaeology free from “the normative two-sex/two-gender model”. Archaeology can certainly contribute to transgender studies’ mission of “crosscultural and historical investigations of human gender diversity”.

  PublisherDOI

• Enemy – Stranger – Neighbor: The Image of the Other in Moche Culture by Janusz Z.WołoszynOxford: Archaeopress, 2021. 200 pp.

  American Anthropologist · 2022-11-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cities of Women

  2020-11-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 35. Slippery and Slow: Chavín’s Great Stones and Kinaesthetic Perception

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Ethnopornography

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 14 citations

  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • History

  Ethnopornography collects essays that both develop and critique the concept that gives the book its name. Ethnopornography, a term first coined by British anthropologist Walter Roth in the late nineteenth century, refers to the often eroticized observation—for supposedly scientific or academic purposes—of those deemed “other” by the observer. In Roth’s case, he was concerned that the descriptions and images he recorded of the bodily and sexual practices of the Aboriginal people he studied were inappropriate for lay readers who might find them vulgar—or worse, titillating. The editors of this collection focus on what it is that creates the slippage between the pornographic and the scientific. In particular, they attend to the importance of race within the colonially created and maintained worlds of both research—ethnography in particular—and pornography.

  DOI

• Kinship in the Andes

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019-04-30 · 6 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Ontologies of water: intensities and magnitudes

  The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology · 2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Ontologies of Water on Peru's North Coast

  The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology · 2016-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Moche Sex Pots

  The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality · 2015-04-17

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Peruvian Moche ceramic vessels produced between 200 and 800 C.E. captured the imagination of scholars due to their variety of sexual themes including fellatio, masturbation, and anal sex, with anal sex the most predominant. Various perspectives and theories on these ceramics in historical context are discussed including relativistic interpretations, structural, symbolic anthropology, feminism, queer studies, and comparative ethnology. Androcentrism influenced archaeological interpretations of artifacts in South America as well as in the classical world. Feminist theory and feminist archaeology present an alternative interpretation of the Moche sex pots of South America.

  PublisherDOI

• Many Heads are Better than One: Mortuary Practice and Ceramic Heads in Ancient Moche Society

  2015-05-14

  article1st authorCorresponding

Frequent coauthors

• Marc Schachter

  9 shared

• Helen Pringle

  UNSW Sydney

  9 shared

• Carina Ray

  9 shared

• Rebecca Parker Brienen

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  9 shared

• Robyn Wiegman

  9 shared

• Rachel O'toole

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  9 shared

• Martha Few

  9 shared

• Gisela Fosado

  Duke University

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Association for Latin American Art-Arvey Foundation Book Awa…