17 - The Age of Justinian

Summary

Sex and Gender in the Age of Justinian

Sex and gender are not the same. Sex is biologically determined: except in extremely unusual circumstances, humans are born male or female. Gender is historically determined and relies on social practices that change across time and geographical location: codes of behavior that are culturally specific teach women and men to act in ways “appropriate” to their sex. That is why it is sometimes said that a woman is “acting like a man” or that a man is “acting like a woman”: they are behaving in ways that are believed, at the time, to be more suitable to the opposite sex. Masculinity and femininity are not, however, universal qualities shared by all cultures but are understood in different ways by different groups, and this understanding changes over time. Procopius - a sixth-century historian closely associated with Justinian and his general Belisarius - provides a good example of how gender roles were understood in the Age of Justinian when, in his History of the Wars, he describes the “manly valor” of Amazon women on the battlefield. In Procopius’s mind, men rather than women were the appropriate warriors: women who fought well must, by definition, exhibit male traits and be described in masculine terms. This gender “transgression” troubled Procopius sufficiently that he took pains to explain it away, arguing that “there never was a race of women endowed with the qualities of men and … human nature did not depart from its established norm.”