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Love and Marriage?
Pseudo-Demosthenes’ Against Neaera
Against Neaera 2
Agenda
Academic Honesty Angelique Jenks-Brown, BU Libraries
Butler or Foucault? Women’s eros in Sappho fr. 31
Athenian Women A Quote Dissected…
Apollodorus’ Against Neaera Charges, Ideologies, Rhetoric, Realities
Will the Real Neaera Please Stand up?
2013-10-03
Butler or Foucault?
Women’s eros in Sappho fr. 31
The man seems to me strong as a god, the man who sits across from you and listens to your sweet talk nearby
and your lovely laughter — which, when I hear it, strikes fear in the heart in my breast. For whenever I glance at you, it seems that I can say nothing at all
but my tongue is broken in silence, and that instant a light fire rushes beneath my skin, I can no longer see anything in my eyes and my ears are thundering,
and cold sweat pours down me, and shuddering grasps me all over, and I am greener than grass, and I seem to myself to be little short of death
But all is endurable, since even a poor man ... (Sappho fr. 31)
Butler or Foucault?
“Sexual-Social Isomorphism”
male ~ femalemasculine ~ feminine
penetrator ~ penetratedactive ~ passive
dominant ~ submissivesenior (in status) ~ junior (in status)
moderate (sōphrōn) ~ immoderate (akolastos)free ~ slave
aka “asymmetry hypothesis”
Against Neaera 6
Butler on Social Construction
“To publish one’s act in language is in some sense the completion of the act” (Butler AC)
"... gender [but maybe sexuality too?] is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script … requires individual actors” (“Performative Acts,” in Performing Feminisms 1990)
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/genderandsex/modules/butlerperformativity.html
2013-10-03
Against Neaera 7
Discussion
Butler? sappho seems to be
performing feminine gender the how of her reactions
seeming performed anti-butler
s born that way
Foucault? f’s asymmetry
man and strength sappho exhibits passivity
poem a speech restricted by dichotomy laid out by fouc, thereby confining her sex etc. in the fictive reality
self-control
2013-10-03
Against Neaera 8
Biblio Note: Theory
Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life & Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Print.
---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Thinking Gender. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.
---. The Judith Butler Reader. Ed. Sara Salih. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. Print.
Felluga, Dino. Introduction to Theories of Gender and Sex. Purdue University. 2 October 2013 (2002): Web site. <http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/genderandsex/>
Foxhall, Lin. “Pandora Unbound: A Feminist Critique of Foucault’s History of Sexuality.” Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity. Eds. David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. 122–37. Print.
2013-10-03
Against Neaera 9
Biblio Note: Women, Neaera
Blundell, Sue. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.
---. Women in Classical Athens. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998.
Cohen, David. Law, Sexuality and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991
Hamel, Debra. Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan’s Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003
2013-10-03
Against Neaera 10
Biblio Note: Gender (& masculinity)
Bassi, Karen. Acting like Men: Gender, Drama, and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Print.
Foxhall, Lin. Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print.
Foxhall, Lin and J. B. Salmon, eds. When Men were Men: Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.
2013-10-03
Athenian Women
A Quote Dissected…
“We [Athenian men] have prostitutes for the sake of pleasure, concubines for
meeting our bodily needs day-to-day, but wives for having legitimate children”
(Against Neaera p. 191)
Against Neaera 13
Do They “Jive”?
1. “We [Athenian men] have prostitutes (hetairai) for the sake of pleasure, concubines (pallakai) for meeting our bodily needs day-to-day, but wives (gunaikes) for having legitimate children” (Against Neaera p. 191)
2. “This Candaules, then, fell in love with (erasthe) his own wife, so much so that he believed her to be by far the most beautiful woman in the world; and believing this, he praised her beauty beyond measure to Gyges son of Dascylus” (Herodotus 1.8)
3. “Niceratus too, so I am told, is in love with (erai) his wife and finds his love reciprocated (she anterai him)” (Xenophon Symposium 8.3)
2013-10-03
Apollodorus’ Against Neaera
Charges, Ideologies, Rhetoric, Realities
Against Neaera 15
Charges, Ideologies, Rhetoric
Fraudulent…citizen-marriagecitizen-offspring
ImpietyCheapened
enfranchisementJury shaming
Bread-making, phallus-bird, c. 500 BCE. Athenian
2013-10-03
Against Neaera 16
Realities: Athenian Wives et al.
Marriage Adultery (moikheia) Divorce Seclusion?
ideology v. actuality oikia, andronitis,
gunaikonitis
Guardianship kurios and oikos court representation
Property dowry inheritance
epikleros, ankhisteia
2013-10-03
Against Neaera 18
Realities: Prostitutes, Concubines
Hetaira (plur. hetairai)expenserelationship
Porne (plur. pornai)publicitycommodification
Pallake (plur. pallakai)“kept” slave woman
Old man & hetaira. Athenian, c.500-490(Inscription reads Panaitios kalos, “Panaetius”
[man’s name] is beautiful.”)
2013-10-03
Will the Real Neaera Please Stand up?
Whore? Courtesan? Concubine? Wife?
“We [Athenian men] have prostitutes for the sake of pleasure, concubines for
meeting our bodily needs day-to-day, but wives for having legitimate children”
(Against Neaera p. 191)
Was Neaera a…- porne? -
- hetaira? -- pallake? -
- citizen wife? -
Against Neaera 21
Discussion
2013-10-03