Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T11:57:39.445Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Greek lyric and gender

from Part I: - Contexts and topics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2010

Felix Budelmann
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

Introduction

'Gender' is pervasive and polymorphous. I take gender to be a socially constructed matrix of identity, based on a rigid division of people into two biological categories. It covers social roles assigned on the basis of that biology, including sexual roles, but also ideological constructions, which prescribe the values to be attached to bodies. In Greek culture gender norms were both powerfully coercive and unstable in fantasy. They were enforced by a habit of public scrutiny and gossip, with men vulnerable to political attack through mockery of their sexual behaviour or association with women who violated decorum. Yet Greek literature and art are populated by transgressive figures like satyrs, maenads, men dressed in 'women's' clothes, Amazons, Paris and Adonis, Helen and Atalante, Athena and an androgynous Dionysus. In lyric poetry (broadly defined), a largely first-person form, 'gender' representation of self and others veers between the ideologically normative and fantasy, which seeks delight in imagining an alien sexual body. And, as always, sexual language can be used to negotiate other kinds of relationships.

A modern scholarly consensus has formed concerning classical Greek gender ideology, founded on the work of K. J. Dover, Michel Foucault, Froma Zeitlin and others. It represents the male body as solid, the female as porous and therefore more prone to possession, madness, desire, pollution. The virgin woman, who has an intact body like a man's, is the ideal, but most women were perforce married.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×