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IN THIS PAPER, THE CORPUS OF ANTHROPOMORPHIC TERRACOTTA FIGURINES FROM HARAPPA, a major urban center of the Indus civilization, is used to explore Indus conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality as they are expressed in representations of the body. The Indus (or Harappan) civilization, the earliest urban civilization of South Asia (c. 2600-1900 B.c.), at its peak extended over much of what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. Representing something of a cultural "veneer" (Meadow and Kenoyer 1997:139), it was characterized by large cities with extensive water and sanitation systems, a writing system that still awaits decipherment, an emphasis on small, elegant art and sophisticated craft technology, and a conspicuous absence of monumental art (Kenoyer 1998; Possehl 199H). In this "faceless civilization" (Possehl 1998:279), three-dimensional anthropomorphic representations include a few stone and bronze statues, along with other small objects, and a large corpus of terracotta figurines. The terracotta figurines from Harappa and other Indus civilization sites are one of the most abundant and elaborate classes of representational artifacts of this vast civilization, particularly in the western regions. Without deciphered texts, the figurines are one of the richest sources of information regarding Indus concepts of sex, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of Indus social identity.
While acknowledging the inherent difficulties in "dis-integrating" these concepts and other forms of social difference, sexual difference, understood in terms of more fluid, graded, or "nuanced" (see Meskell 1999:73-76) but distinct notions of sex and gender, can be used to frame a meaningful inquiry into ancient social systems. Using sex and gender in a more flexible and informed way also means acknowledging that sexual difference may not have been a primary or an independent concern of ancient societies (Joyce 2000:182-183). While rigid Cartesian frameworks derived from modern Western notions may not be completely applicable to ancient societies (e.g., Meskell 1999, 2001), the ability to consider sex and gender separately in archaeological interpretation is still an important option, and the fact that societies react differently to biological differences between men and women argues for some separation of sex and gender (see Serensen 2000:55fT).
Such an approach to the complex interrelationship of sex, gender, and sexuality requires explicit definitions of these ternis. In this paper, sex (or sexual identity) is defined as the...