Over the past several decades, theory-building on sex, gender, and sexuality has flourished within anthropology, especially within archaeology and sociocultural anthropology. However, biological anthropology, including bioarchaeology, has greatly lagged. Within bioarchaeology, this lag is partially due to material concerns. It is true that biological sex has long been estimated from morphological characteristics of human skeletal material. But sex, gender, and sexuality are being increasingly recognized as plastic and highly culturally and historically contingent, with material traces that can therefore be complex to identify and reconstruct within skeletal material without substantial contextual information. The lag is also attributable to bioarchaeology's still limited engagement with contemporary, third- and fourth-wave gender and feminist theory from within the broader discipline of anthropology, the larger social sciences, and the humanities. Viewed from this perspective, Pamela Geller's The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives: Queering Common Sense About Sex, Gender, and Sexuality represents a major advance for building, using, and applying contemporary gender and feminist theory in bioarchaeology, and I highlight three major aspects of its contributions here.

First, Geller comprehensively reviews third- and fourth-wave theory at the beginning of the book, surveying the diversity of these concepts while keeping her explanations and examples grounded in bioarchaeology. (Third-wave theory mainly focuses on intersectionality, social constructivist approaches, gender performativity, queer theory, and new materialism, whereas fourth-wave theory is anchored in the digital world and intersectionality, particularly related to systems of power that reinforce the stratification of traditionally marginalized groups [e.g., women of color, LGBTQIA+ communities]). For example, Geller provides case studies in each chapter, tethering theoretical perspectives to examples from the bioarchaeological record. Importantly, this aspect of the book provides valuable guidance to bioarchaeologists who are less well versed in social theory about how these ideas—mostly developed to better understand current cultures and living bodies—might apply to the human past and human skeletal material.

Second, Geller convincingly rejects the utility of the traditional idea, rooted in second-wave theory, that sex and gender are rigidly binary systems, with exclusive meanings that are consistent across all temporal and cultural contexts. Instead, Geller advocates for integrating ideas from both concepts and exploring evidence of “socio-sexual” lives in the bioarchaeological record. This original concept encompasses the interrelated but distinct and intersecting social identities represented by sex, gender, and sexuality and their effects on human lived experiences. Analyses of socio-sexual lives within bioarchaeology, Geller argues, should be focused on relational aspects of identity and experience, and thoroughly contextualized culturally, historically, and/or ethnographically. Given bioarchaeology's time depth and emphasis on the material body, such analyses could create an unprecedently wide range of opportunities to uncover the diversity of sex, gender, sexuality—socio-sexual lives—in the past. Applying this approach in bioarchaeology would involve doing new research as well as rethinking old research. The opportunities are broad because much of the evidence so far uncovered on sex, gender, and sexuality in the past has been obfuscated by presentist approaches, which are overwhelmingly heteronormative. It is helpful that Geller accompanies these recommendations with numerous proposals for future research questions and topics, giving other bioarchaeologists a clear path forward rather than leaving them confused about how to apply the concept of socio-sexual lives to the past.

Finally, Geller's text represents a major advance because it constructively demonstrates that bioarchaeological work on sex, gender, and sexuality that is anchored in contemporary gender and feminist theory can change not only how we understand social identities and the lived realities people in the past but how we do so in the present as well. Specifically, when bioarchaeologists find evidence of the diversity of socio-sexual lives in the past, it demonstrates that the idea that systems of sex, gender, and sexuality are static, universal, and therefore “natural” for humans is a fallacy. Consequently, this work can contribute to broader ongoing efforts in anthropology—and in the social sciences and the humanities more generally—to denaturalize contemporary societal understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality and other aspects of social identity, such as race. Denaturalizing these systems can help to undermine contemporary societal expectations that these systems should be rigid and binary. It can also contribute to eroding the prescriptiveness of social norms for femininity and masculinity. Altogether, therefore, bioarchaeological work on the diversity of socio-sexual lives in the past can make meaningful inroads into undermining justifications for gendered prejudice, heteronormativity, and other forms of intolerance, discrimination, and violence based on sex, gender, and sexuality; these forms of intolerance are all built on the aforementioned fallacy. Geller provides bioarchaeology with a powerful path forward as bioarchaeologists work to produce engaging research that is both attentive to diversity and change in the past as well as relevant and helpful for contemporary societies.