Female Submissiveness vs. Male Power .pdf (original) (raw)
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The Quintessence of Monstrosity: The Power of Female Desire
The present paper will try to outline the path taken by female erotic desire and the power that derives from it, exploring how it moved its first steps, hence how it has been conceived in Greek mythology. The essay will focus especially on the notion of power linked to desire. Power in a magical sense, too. I argue that a fragment of positive and empowering force can be found also in the 'fatal and negative' magical power wielded by mythological femmes fatales. Thus, the Homeric Siren's song will be explored as the prime example of this power of seduction in its deepest sense. Because of its disruptive and alienating nature, feminine desire has always been chained and repressed over the centuries. The abstraction of the unsettling and misunderstood women's sexual power was shaped in the form of seductive female figures of death. The irreducible otherness of the erotic, hidden and forbidden by society, is expressed in figures of the collective imagination that are still present today in the narration of desirenot necessarily conceived in sexual terms. Terrifying power is reflected in physical appearance, so it will be interesting to investigate how the monstrosity of some of these figures, such as the Sirens, half birds and half women, is a mirror reflection of the monstrosity and voracity classically attributed to the vulva.
Power, Authority and Phallic Representations in Ancient Roman Society
The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Political Culture in Europe
Beginning relatively late in international terms, the intellectual revolution represented by gender studies is now well established as a legitimate area of historical study in the French-speaking world. 1 The analysis of gender and of social mores has opened up new forms of interdisciplinary research which, among other fields of historical enquiry, takes the intimate world of Roman society as their focus. This enterprise aims to understand the processes, the dynamics and the social changes which structured the underlying logics of thought and of morality. The emergence of questions concerning the role of sexuality has made it possible to understand better the political factors which contributed to the shape of that society. 2 For a long time, Roman society was stigmatised in scholarship for its dissolute social mores, in which the Roman male citizen imposed his pleasure and his dominance on both sexes. 3 Inversely and reciprocally, in a classic expression of the double standard, his wife remained subordinate as she passed from the authority of a father to that of a husband. She respected the rules of legitimate marriage by restricting herself to a passive role of procreation and the management of the household. The couple regularly honoured Priapus, whose image was often reduced simply to his erect phallus. 4 Political authority was thus introduced into the intimate world of the couple, intensifying the sense of strength and power exercised by the man's virility. Nonetheless, hegemonic masculinity in ancient Rome also relied on a delicate balance, based as it was on the virtue of the Roman matron. Simply by their presence, women constituted the honour of
Female body politics: “The Powerful Female Body” in mythological stories
RumeliDE Journal of Language and Literature Studies, 2019
R u m e l i D E D i l v e E d e b i y a t A r a ş t ı r m a l a r ı D e r g i s i 2 0 1 9. Ö 5 (A ğ u s t o s) / 2 0 9 Kadın bedeni politikası: Mitolojik hikayelerde "Güçlü Kadın Bedeni" / Ç Ekmekçi Abstract In this study, mythological aspects of the female body will be presented in relation to the powerful female body image. It is well-known that in ancient Greek culture, mythology was considered a source of power for male and female characters who were parts of mythological stories. However, the female power, or the power of being a woman, are considered significant for mythological female creativity, though its essence has always been neglected by the male oriented world. This man-made obstacle over female creativity has also been clarified in mythology, especially in mythological representations of goddesses or witches. On this basis, this paper aims to bring a close look to "the powerful women" as the mythological female heroines, witches and representatives in ancient Greece, namely Demeter & Persephone, The Amazons, Hecate, Medea and Medusa.
Corporeal Archetypes and Power, Preliminary Clarifications and Considerations of Sex.pdf
This article was published in the journal Hypatia in 1992 and included as Chapter 3 in my book The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies, published in 1994. Abstract: An examination of animate form reveals corporeal archetypes that underlie both human sexual behavior and the reigning Western biological paradigm of human sexuality that reworks the archetypes to enforce female oppression. Viewed within the framework of present-day social constructionist theory and Western biology, I show how both social constructionist feminists who disavow biology and biologists who reduce human biology to anatomy forget evolution and thereby forego understandings essential to the political liberation of women. Note: another paper, an invited one, delivered at a conference and published six years later in the conference volume, is seemingly equally topical in today's 21st century socio-political world and will be uploaded shortly.
Virtue, Masculinity, and Hierarchies of Domination in Plutarch's Antony and De Iside
Akroterion, 2019
Plutarch's Antony and De Iside et Osiride together tackle the manly woman and the effeminate man. I suggest that De Iside is the theoretical exposition of the metaphysics underlying this problem of gender, resolved by gendering the parts of the tripartite soul. In the Antony, these expressions of gender in the body are examined in practice. Female masculinity is defined as a manifestation of virtue without contradicting the natural fact of the female body, while manliness is an unvirtuous expression of a desire to dominate. Plutarch refines the hierarchy of domination that affirms women's claim to virtue and preserves traditional social order by examining the relation between embodied sex and ensouled gender and assigning an ethical value to its expressions.
Symbolism, 2021
Ernst Cassirer's definition of man as an animal symbolicum conventionally inaugurates the study of the role of symbolization in the human construction of reality. The imaginary truths about reality and identity expressed through complex systems of symbolization, from ritual, myth and religion to art and literature, are fundamental for social cohesion as they reflect the dominant paradigms of the group. The article traces the evolution of the symbolization of the female body from ancient Greece until the present according to the successive paradigm shifts. Parmenides's division of the cosmos into paired opposites, with woman as the necessary other for the definition of male subjectivity, initiates the symbolization of the female body as monstrous. Prefigured by the nurturing/devouring duality of Mother Earth and mythical women/goddesses like the Medusa, this symbolization expresses the male fear of female sexuality and agency. The resymbolization of Mother Earth as the Virgin Mary and of woman as a domestic angel are expressions of this fear. Transmitted to children by cautionary tales like 'Sleeping Beauty', 'Snow White' and 'Cinderella', it condemns women to pay for social integration with submission, purity, and objectification. In the Enlightenment, the conflation of the male desire to subdue woman/Mother Earth with the project of the Empire reactivated the myth of Zeus's rape of Europe as the raping of the woman/land motif. In the postmodernist era, feminist writers contested Freud's and Lacan's endorsements of female monstrosity by creating grotesque angelic monsters, bisexual triangles, incestuous theatre troupes, and music-hall transvestites. The recent emergence of the transmodern paradigm has brought about a new generation of writers seeking to redefine subjectivity from a holistic and empathetic transpersonal perspective, thus providing a humane and ethical alternative to the oppositional system of privileging and bonding transmitted to us from our ancient Greek ancestors.
2021
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