Series | Antiquity Studies
Volume 39 | Monograph | The Necessary Anomaly
The Necessary Anomaly
Dangerous Women, Ideology of the Polis and Gynecophobia in Athens
open access | peer reviewed- Marcella Farioli - Université Paris-Est Créteil, France - email
Abstract
In Classical Athens, representations of dangerous female figures are innumerable: warriors, filicides, husband-killers, wicked stepmothers, poisoners, seductresses, sorceresses, maidens who refuse marriage, maenads and monsters with female faces pervade theatre, historiography, orations and images. Many of these figures, whose victims are almost always men, are not attested in the sources of the archaic age, or else they appear but their wickedness worsens in the transition to the classical age: a trajectory that is not activated for figures of dangerous men. In the same period, which corresponds to the birth and development of democracy in Athens, philosophy, medicine and biology trace the contours of ‘female nature’ and codify its inferiority and dangerousness on a scientific basis. This study, through a vast corpus of literary, iconographic and epigraphic sources, examines the physiognomy and evolution of around sixty figures of dangerous women drawn from myth, history and pseudo-history, in relation to the contemporary political and social context and the changing forms of marriage, inheritance and dowry. In the face of the tendency in recent studies to obscure the relations of domination between social groups, emphasising the symbolic and identity aspects and culturising the causes, this study aims to focus on the material roots underlying the relations between the sexes and the ideology that sanctions their inequality. The gynophobia aroused by representations of dangerous female figures, who escape their assigned social role, is thus analysed not as an emotion but in its function as an ideological device and naturalisation of social hierarchies in the context of the democratic polis.
Keywords Filicide • Classical Athens • Social sex relationships • Gender studies • Gynaecocracy • Ideology of the polis • Stepmothers • Female monsters • Greek women • Magic • Murderers • Materialist feminism • Virginity • Gynophobia • Greek theatre
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-806-4 | e-ISBN 978-88-6969-806-4 | ISBN (PRINT) 978-88-6969-826-2 | Number of pages 678 | Dimensions 16x23cm | Published July 18, 2024 | Accepted Jan. 22, 2024 | Submitted Nov. 23, 2023 | Language fr
Copyright © 2024 Marcella Farioli. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
