The "gender of power" is a model that attempts to mediate between biological, feminist, and postmodern concepts of gender and sex in a way that is both theoretical and derived from ethnographic realities. In the exposition Power and Watts first consider several competing theoretical models of sex and gender. From there, they introduce ethnographic examples drawn from existing rock art and living ritual practices that support a more complex view of the relationship between gender, bio-sex, culture, and ritual. Therefore, gender of power is both a testable theory and a model that emerges from the data. The dynamic push and pull between the effects of biology and culture on the much-confused and debated reality of sex versus gender is at the heart of the issue. gender model of power. According to Power and Watts, sex has been defined primarily as the biological fact of male or femininity, while gender, in general, is a culturally defined package of traits rooted in the fact of bio-sex. According to Ortner, a pioneer of the debate, the feminine is considered indicative of the natural and worldly sphere marked by the home, the hearth and the raising of children; the male is confused with the imposition of culture and ritual, and therefore of order, power and prestige. This gender model fundamentally defined by bio-sex, whose ultimate expression is universal male hegemony, has been much criticized but never adequately discarded. The opposite theory, espoused by Butler, is completely non-anthropological in origin. Butler argues that there is no real distinction between sex and gender as both are defined only by culture. For Butler, gender is not a binary division of typical roles based on bio-male and female, but a constantly changing performance of tr...... middle of paper ...... the curiously ambiguous ritual of gender animal. From this and similar rituals, as well as theoretical convergence with Sex-Strike, Power and Watts postulate that each sex must have characteristics of the other added to its performance during initiation to create a single, unified 'kind of energy'. Having ritual power does not mean being male or female, as Ortner suggests, but taking on aspects of the opposite gender, a binary opposition that Butler fails to recognize, such that participants in the ritual transcend gender categories of power” is the unified totality of gender cues and powers. Finally, there is the Turnarian implication that the ability to transcend gender roles in ritual space revitalizes the existing gender binary of mundane society in much the same way. in which periodic rituals of anti-structure revitalize the mundane social structure of the society..