Twenty-five Years of Feminist Theory and the Classics: Now What?

by Barbara Gold

It was exciting to be at CAAS in 2017 both to look back at how far we have come in the fields of feminist scholarship and activism and to look ahead at where we might (should?) go from here, but also to celebrate two of the very important books that led the way for us: Barbara McManus’ Classics and Feminism: Gendering the Classics (1997) and the volume edited by Nancy Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin, Feminist Theory and the Classics (1993). We who presented were proud to be on a panel sponsored by the Women’s Classical Caucus, a driving force behind so many activities from its founding in 1972 until now; I thank Ted Gellar-Goad for organizing the panel. We also gathered to honor one of our founding mothers, Barbara McManus, who has been so important to our feminist endeavors over many years. Although Barbara died in June of 2015, her legacy lives on, most recently with her book on another feminist foremother, Grace Harriet Macurdy, the subject of her book (The Drunken Duchess of Vassar) that Judy Hallett, Chris Stray, and Eugene O’Connor at Ohio State University Press shepherded into print in the months after Barbara died. Through all these books and actions, we see a strain of forceful, intelligent, active women (and some men!) who keep pushing us in all the right directions. The recently published Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly (ed. Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall, Oxford UP, 2016) investigates an astounding array of female classicists who were translators, editors, authors, teachers, and who contributed in myriad ways to classical philology, scholarship and reception, often in times when it was nearly impossible for women to participate in a scholarly or academic environment; this book testifies, as a reviewer has said, “to the tenacity, determination and, sometimes, sheer bloody-mindedness of the women discussed” (Linda Grant, Royal Holloway; BMCR 2017.09.43).

So this is a journey and a narrative that has been going on for a very long time. This paper is about what has been going on not just in the past 25 years when the books by McManus and Rabinowitz/Richlin were published but since the founding of the Women’s Classical Caucus 45 years ago. I then look to the present and the future. What are we doing now and what is still missing? How and why did we get to where we are today, where we not only accept gender, sexuality, narrative theory and intertextuality as inseparable from our reading of texts but are (most of us) so informed by such approaches that we cannot conceive of a scholarly analysis or pedagogy that does not engage with one or more theoretical approaches? How did we reach a place where we no longer have to explain (to most people at least) that “sex,” “gender” and “sexuality” are socially-constructed categories, that they are performative and evolving, and that these elusive categories need to be seen in a grid intersecting with other constructed categories like class or race (an often elided or ignored category) in an approach now called intersectionality?

In the 1970’s and 80’s, the study of gender and sexuality in antiquity, already well underway in France and Britain, underwent an explosive development in the US. The Women’s Classical Caucus, founded in 1972, provided a site of intellectual and personal support for feminist work on antiquity, and it sponsored annual panels on topics connected to gender. Early work, such as the Spring 1973 issue of Arethusa devoted to Women in Antiquity and the Arethusa Papers: Women in the Ancient World, published in 1984 but containing articles mostly written in the 70’s, shows already an evolution from a strictly historicizing approach to more theoretical/post-structuralist work influenced by both theoretical and feminist work coming out of Europe (mainly France) and by other disciplines (particularly cultural anthropology, linguistics, and new criticism). Even in the period between 1973 and 1984 (dates of the 2 Arethusa volumes) there is an evolving notice of methodological practice. The editors of the 1984 volume, John Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan, remark on this, saying that some of the essays in this volume “show an awareness that the attitude toward women and even the very definition of sex itself are organic parts of an anonymous, complex, highly structured cognitive system for understanding and expressing world, society, and self” (Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers [Albany: SUNY Press] p. 5). Sarah Pomeroy’s 1975 book, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, was the first book by a female classical scholar to focus wholly on women in antiquity, and, together with the Arethusa volumes, launched and shaped the subsequent research agendas of North American classicists. Her work dared to take up the subject of sexuality, prompting JPVD Balsdon to say in his CR review of the book: “In an informative way (even on so traditionally unacademic a topic as eroticism, natural or unnatural) this is, in general, an authoritative book.” Thus work by female scholars that breached the approved boundaries of historicizing research and ventured into the uncharted territories of sexuality and gender was regarded with arch suspicion.

North American study of women/gender was in the 70’s focused on representations of Greco-Roman women. It quickly expanded to include masculinity and sexual identities, and by the 1990’s was no longer Women in Antiquity but Gender in Antiquity. This shift in focus gave rise to fears among feminists that allowing gender studies to supersede feminist studies would marginalize feminist studies and that (as Tania Modleski in her 1991 book Feminism without Women said) feminism will become “a conduit to the more comprehensive field of gender studies.”

From the 1990’s to the present gender studies have predominated. Several influential volumes from the 1990’s, including Feminist Theory and the Classics (ed. N. S. Rabinowitz and A. Richlin, 1993), Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World (ed. L. McClure; a collection of influential articles reprinted from the 80’s and 90’s), and Roman Sexualities (ed. J.P. Hallett and M. Skinner, 1997), reveal the shift from a strong focus on literary evidence used in historical context to illuminate women’s images and realities in the ancient world to a deeper engagement with discourses of power and constructions of the speaking and desiring subject, looking to material as well as literary evidence and making use of (inter alia) Marxism, film theory, ethnography, queer theory, critical race theory and intersectionality to elucidate gender issues.

A further development in gender studies in the 21st century has been the emphasis on sexuality, erotic discourses, and the cultural production of sexuality, a topic long covered by European scholars (especially focused on pederasty on 5th-4th century BCE Athens and influenced heavily by Foucault’s work from the 70’s and 80’s). “Sexuality” is now a well-defined category of the discipline, a proper field of analysis, as evidenced by Skinner’s 2005 volume, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (Blackwell) and Kirk Ormand’s Controlling desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (Praeger 2008; revised edition, University of Texas Press 2018). As with previous cultural categories in quest of a definition (“Gender,” “Sex”), the process of defining “sexuality” has proved troublesome (see on this Skinner, Sexuality, p. 3 who quotes one such definition from Halperin et al., Before Sexuality: “the cultural interpretation of the human body’s erogenous zones and sexual capacities”).

As is illustrated by the recently published collection on Sex in Antiquity, co-edited by 3 editors from 3 different continents (James Robson, Nancy Rabinowitz and Mark Masterson), American and European scholars working on sex and gender in antiquity now engage in similar projects, sharing both theory and practice. They treat an increasingly wide array of topics, texts, genres, types of evidence and historical periods; they use theory as a hermeneutic for examining sexuality and gender issues rather than as a main focus of study. And an American scholar (male) brings French feminist theory into conjunction with Greek philosophy in his new book Diotima among the Amazons: French Feminists Read Plato (P. Allen Miller, OUP).

A look at the APA/SCS program for 2014 reveals the progress the APA (now SCS) Program Committee has made in recognizing feminist and other recent work on the intersections of theories, practices and disciplines. The 2014 meeting included the following: a session (#3) sponsored by the CSWMG on two new books on race and gender (Race: Antiquity and its Legacy, by D. McCoy, and Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy, by B. Holmes) along with author responses (both consider the production of knowledge, terms and categories and employ critical theory); a panel (#8) on the relationship among Classics, feminist theory and political theory (focused on Honig’s book, Antigone, Interrupted); the WCC panel (#37) on “Provincial Women in the Roman Imagination” (which deals with race and nationality); a panel (# 44) on “Afro-Latin and Afro-Hispanic Literature and the Classics” (dealing with race and cultural identity); an ACL panel (#47) on “Women of the Roman Empire”; and an LCC panel (#67) on “Stifling Sexuality.” Such panels and sessions would not have existed in the imagination, or, if they had, would not have been accepted until quite recently.

I find my own work and teaching increasingly focused on bringing out into the open both women authors/activists and the neglect and reproach of them: so my book on the Roman/Carthaginian martyr Perpetua and other female martyrs (Oxford University Press 2018) and my recent work on the French writer Simone Weil — her activism, her work on Homer, and the male world which she inhabited (this article is in the volume cited earlier edited by Rosie Wyles and Edith Hall, Unsealing the Fountain, which arose from a conference in London on “Women as Classicists”; it opens up the lives of many women who did Classics in a variety of ways and who remain often largely unknown). My interests also of course influence what and how I teach: in Medieval Latin, I choose to read as many female authors as I can find (Perpetua, Egeria, Duodha, Hrotsvitha, Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen); their Latin is almost universally described in disparaging terms (“female Latin”). I find myself drawn to women who both wrote and were active participants in their own society and culture; here I can find ways both to justify my own involvement with them and to interest my students in them.

So where do we go from here? What is missing? What collaborations among feminist classicists in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South America and elsewhere lie ahead? Thanks to the work of EuGeStA and its founder, Jacqueline Fabre-Serris (along with Judy Hallett, who helped to found its journal), collaborations have started among colleges and universities in at least seven countries with conferences, journal issues and other venues for interactions. The triennial meetings of Feminism and Classics (we had our 7th one, in Seattle in 2016 and the 8th will be held in 2020 at Wake Forest University) continue to attract classicists (mostly, but not entirely, women) from many countries, both young and older. In a piece I wrote on FCII (Princeton 1997), I described the conference as a “laboratory for working feminist/classicists, not only in the topics it covered but in the way that the participants, speakers, and audience interacted” (“Feminism and Classics: Framing the Research Agenda,” Brief Mention, American Journal of Philology 118.2 [Summer 1997] 328–32); this continues to be the case.

What could we be doing more of and better? More collaborations among feminist classicists in many countries; more work on race (still very far behind); more intense discussion of what categories like “feminist theory,” “sexuality,” “queer theory” mean and do; more young scholars involved in this work; more courses on these topics, especially in the major PhD-granting/post-graduate departments; greater awareness of activism outside our classrooms and research (and this work is happening in exciting ways, led partly by my colleague Nancy Rabinowitz who founded the Classics and Social Justice group); papers focused on gender and sexuality spread beyond the obvious silos at meetings. As a recent reviewer of the 4th edition of the Lefkowitz and Fant volume Women’s Life in Greece and Rome (Elizabeth Manwell, CJ Online 2017.09.09) points out, we need more wide-ranging work and teaching tools focused on intersectionality, new research in non-binary and transgendered sexuality, research on race, ethnicity, environment, class and the body (including differently abled bodies). We need, she says, textbooks that “speak to readers we have, not the readers we wish we had or used to have.” This reviewer also wonders why most women have so far avoided writing what she calls “the big book,” a sweeping historical survey.