Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World (review)

Among Women is a welcome addition to the burst of scholarship now examining gender and sexuality in the ancient world. Unlike many recent collections of essays, Among Women takes as its mandate the difficult task of investigating exclusively ancient female sexuality; further, it seeks to explore only those situations in which ancient women may have had same-sex encounters ranging from the patently homoerotic to the more nebulously homosocial. The results are speculative—as every contributor would agree—and, at times, frustrating; what wouldn't a researcher give for a webcam in an ancient kitchen (or, as we discover in Terry Wilfong's provocative essay, a monastery)! Still, the collection will serve as a useful starting point for analyzing the ways in which women's (homo)sexuality in the ancient world may be fruitfully reconstructed.

Any collection that begins in prehistoric Crete and ends in fifth-century C.E. Egypt is bound to have its gaps, but Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz's introductory essay plugs those gaps with flair and a truly staggering running bibliography of work on ancient sexuality. (Those teaching courses on ancient sexuality might consider using this dense essay as a primer.) Rabinowitz understands the term homosocial "to refer to the various social relationships between women and to underline the idea that ancient societies were to a great extent sex-segregated" (2). It may come as a surprise that Rabinowitz considered homosocial to be an easy choice for the title compared to its titular companion, homoerotic; if there is a weakness to the collection, it is that the boundaries between the social and the homosocial shift from essay to essay and, more obviously, from archaic Greece to imperial Rome.

Two essays are concerned primarily with archaeological research. Paul Rehak surveys the evidence for Cretan homosociality in his appropriately imaginative contribution, "Imag(in)ing a Women's World in Bronze Age Greece." Focusing on a Minoan palace at Akrotiri (at Thera), Rehak here reexamines and reinterprets an enigmatic fresco from Xeste 3 that features the rather postmodernly named figures Wounded Woman, Necklace Swinger, and Veiled Girl. Rehak places this fresco within the larger artistic context of the Xeste 3 murals and argues that they represent various (possible) stages in the maturation of a Cretan girl; more startling (and more speculative) is the assertion that the abundant allusions to crocuses and saffron throughout Xeste place the women in a complex homosocial matrix in which women gain sole control over a valuable nutritional property to the exclusion of the vitamin-deprived men (50). It is debatable whether high levels of saffron intake can indeed "lower the incidence of coronary disease," "reduce the risk of some cancers," and perform other medical wonders and even more uncertain whether the Cretan women understood these properties. Still, Rehak's contribution demonstrates how the notion of homosociality may be refracted through the seemingly disparate spheres of nutrition and art. John G. Younger's "Women in Relief" examines the depictions of women on the grave stelai at Kerameikos, the main cemetery of Athens. Younger argues convincingly for the cemetery as an escape from the otherwise patriarchal world of classical Athens, a meditative space in which women may commune and reflect on their deceased female ancestors and relatives. In this way, women become agents of subjectivity, controlling rather than avoiding the gaze, and Younger outlines the ways in which a variety of grave stelai depict unusual constellations of female gazing, including some possibly homoerotic glances.

The authors Ovid and Lucian feature the two most important—and problematic—classical narratives of female homoeroticism, and it is welcome and appropriate that both passages receive extended treatment here. In what amounts to a New Critical close reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Diane T. Pintabone analyzes the curious myth...