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Sex for Sale? Interpreting Erotica in the Havana Collection nancy sorkin rabinowitz This essay is located at the crossroads of some very thorny paths—debates about the status of women in ancient Greece, male homoeroticism, and the status of vase painting as evidence. Earlier research on women in antiquity was often framed as the question of the “status of women” and has only recently been redefined as the study of sex and gender (Katz 1992, 71). From the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, the idea that male and female spheres were separate as well as the idea that women were secluded in Athens was for the most part accepted; scholars even talked about the “oriental” seclusion of respectable Greek women.1 The much vaunted public/private dichotomy led to a related question about the status of (especially naked) women on painted pots—were the women on drinking cups by definition “in public” and therefore “not respectable ”?Elements of the “orthodox” view have been challenged—first, as to whether separation equals seclusion equals oppression (e.g., D. J. Cohen 1996) and second, as to whether the archaeological evidence supports the existence of a well-defined female space. We can see remains of an andr¯on, a male banqueting space with signs of couches, but a specified female corollary is not obvious (Nevett 1999, 4– 20; Jameson 1990, esp. 172).2 Nonetheless, the ideology of separate spheres has affected the interpretation of women on pots, and given the concern for status, that interpretation often rests on the question of what kind of women they were— were they respectable women or not?3 The question of status, of course, is only one of the many questions surrounding the study of Greek vase painting and especially the study of women on Greek 122 6 123 Sex for Sale? vases (see, for instance, D. Williams 1985, Harvey 1988, Petersen 1997, S. Lewis 2006). Who bought the pots? What were they used for? By whom were they used? Were cups used by men at the symposium, and were small pots used by women as cosmetic containers? It is customary to distinguish between scenes of myth and scenes of everyday life. That notion implies that we can simply take the latter as evidence about Greek life. But we must continue to remind ourselves that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the vases and objective reality; as with any art form, there is considerable room for interpretation of what it is that we are seeing . Vase painting is not primarily naturalistic in technique; it is a highly conventional form, and an archive of images and ideas was available to painters who were painting bodies, for instance.4 The images on vases are determined to some extent by technical and aesthetic considerations; for instance the space available for decoration may dictate how many figures are shown. Moreover, the vessels were functional objects (Neer 2002, 3–4), and that context contributes to iconography and meaning as well. There is inevitably an ideological component to vase painting’s depictions of people interacting with one another and to our response as we examine them. In the preface to A City of Images, which is to a certain extent programmatic for iconographic approaches, Jean-Pierre Vernant says: “The authors, instead, emphasize the difficulties, the obstacles, the necessary uncertainties of deciphering. In doing so, they stress a fundamental point, that no figurative system is constituted as a simple illustration of discourse, oral or written, nor the exact photographic reproduction of reality. The imagery is a construct, not a carbon copy; it is a work of culture, the creation of a language that like all other languages contains an element of arbitrariness” (1989b, 8). We can learn about antiquity from these images if we exercise caution and look more broadly at the social construction they offer—but we learn as much about what the ancients thought as we do about what actually went on in antiquity. As Sian Lewis (2002, 91) points out, women as workers in commerce are underrepresented on pots compared to literature, while prostitutes are overrepresented. Why is that? Is it a result of the selection process of history? Or were there actually more representations of prostitution? We also read them through our own ideas. Perhaps we take scenes to be erotic because of our contemporary interests. Even the objects that appear in the background of pots are not available for simple...

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