2024: Shaping Ancient Gender

Gender was as dominant a social force in the ancient Mediterranean world as it is in our own, and understanding gender is a key element in deciphering the different layers of classical societies and their functions.

Our capstone seminar seeks to conceptualize the ancient gender spectrum as it existed in classical Greece and Rome, separating our modern notions about gender from those gleaned from ancient evidence. By looking at art and literature, we can piece together an idealized version of gender roles; by analyzing sources such as law codes, court cases, and archaeological evidence, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of how gender roles truly affected the day-to-day lives of ancient peoples.

In addition, we must be aware of the significant limits of our evidence: authors and artists are largely male, and in the case of literature also elite. Though ancient gender systems were not the same as our own, modern methodologies for approaching the study of gender can help us analyze this complexity of evidence. Intersectionality, which understands gender identity as always working in conjunction with other systems like class, economic status, and ethnicity, seems particularly useful for thinking about the ancient world; in Rome in particular, power and gender are hard to separate.

The idea of gender as performance or gender presentation has also proven useful in our analyses of the ancient evidence as they help us understand visual evidence and descriptions of bodily behavior. Queer theory which insists on the importance of resisting the reduction of evidence to fit a binary model has also been a recurring theme of our studies.

The presentations in this mini-seminar give a sample of possible approaches to examining the forces that shaped gender in the ancient world and the way gender shaped the ancient world's art, literature, and history.