Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz (PDF)

Description

Women’s and men’s worlds were largely separate in ancient Mediterranean societies, and, in consequence, many women’s deepest personal relationships were with other women. Yet relatively little scholarly or popular attention has focused on women’s relationships in antiquity, in contrast to recent interest in the relationships between men in ancient Greece and Rome. The essays in this book seek to close this gap by exploring a wide variety of textual and archaeological evidence for women’s homosocial and homoerotic relationships from prehistoric Greece to fifth-century CE Egypt.Drawing on developments in feminist theory, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory, as well as traditional textual and art historical methods, the contributors to this volume examine representations of women’s lives with other women, their friendships, and sexual subjectivity. They present new interpretations of the evidence offered by the literary works of Sappho, Ovid, and Lucian; Bronze Age frescoes and Greek vase painting, funerary reliefs, and other artistic representations; and Egyptian legal documents.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐¬These essays assemble and evaluate the existing evidence, meager as it is, for same sex relations between women in the ancient world. The authors are scrupulously clear about what we know and don’t know, and often one feels that we are trying to recover the lost contents of an now empty box by studying the construction of the box itself along with a few remnants of packing materials. My own conclusions are that we know as little as we do because our sources are almost entirely male and this is not a subject that interested Greco-Roman men. Really our only truly meaningful female voice from the ancient world is Sappho, and I cannot help but think it significant that she is so associated, even in antiquity, with same-sex love between women that her native city has given us the word lesbian.One word of warning. Avoid the kindle edition which does not include the illustrations. How one could be expected to follow a discussion of murals or vase paintings without them is simply beyond me.

⭐Most of the articles in this book are highly differentiated in their argumentation. It becomes apparent how difficult it is to reconstruct issues such as sexuality or eroticism or certain emotional forms of bonding on the basis of archaeological material or ancient written sources. Particularly creditableable is that the authors don’t cover the uncertainties in the possible interpretations of the material with the great gesture of “we are sure” etc. Very intersting reading for specialists in the field.

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