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  • Ritual and the Performance of Identity: Women and Gender in the Ancient World
  • Bonnie MacLachlan (bio)
Kate Gilhuly. The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xii + 208 pp.; ISBN-10: 0-521-89998-2(cl).
Rosemary A. Joyce. Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008. 152 pp.; ill. ISBN-10: 0-500-28727-9(cl).
Rebecca Langlands. Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. viii + 399 pp.; ISBN-10: 0-521-859433 (cl).
Maryline Parca and Angeliki Tzanetou, eds. Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. xiv + 327 pp.; ISBN-10: 0-253-34954-0(cl).
Celia E. Schultz. Women’s Religious Activity in the Roman Republic. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xiii + 234 pp.; ill. ISBN-10: 0-8078-3018-6 (cl).
Marilyn Skinner. Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. xxvi + 343 pp.; ill. ISBN-10: 0-631-23233-8 (cl).
Bella Vivante. Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007. xxxi +230 pp.; ill. ISBN-10: 0-275-98249-1 (cl)

After many years of scholarship that focused on the “private” realm in which women conducted their lives in the ancient Greek world (and also to some degree in the Roman), a consensus is emerging that in ritual performances women exercised some agency, and that the broader community recognized this as important. And it is also now broadly understood that—unlike religious activity in the Judeo-Christian tradition—sexuality was fore-grounded in the ancient rituals. A third significant point that would be accepted by the authors in all seven volumes under review is [End Page 176] the fact that an examination of ritual and sexuality within a culture is a valuable tool for reading its social norms and tensions, including sexual identity and gender relations therein. As far as ritual is concerned, one can look for clues in performance, where factors such as class as well as gender are inscribed and demonstrated.1

From the authors under review certain differences emerge, however, particularly in the extent to which they see the construction of gender—through ritual or by other means—as based primarily upon a binary model of female and male within the dominant patriarchal social order. Another binary that provokes different responses among the writers is the well-known contention of the French philosopher Michel Foucault: sexual activity in the Classical world was governed by a power differential, by penetration of the weaker by the stronger. Some writers acknowledge that features other than sexual identity are reinforced in ritual activity—for example, class, wealth, ethnicity, skill, and age.

Most of the authors track the ways in which cultural and political values are “written on the body” of women and men, in ancient literary discussions of sexuality or in rituals that feature the performance of women’s sexuality. We can often see connections between these values and the construction of gender, whether masculine, feminine or some authorized position between the two. Ritual performances (whether correct or distorted) or the trappings of ritual such as statues or votives become sites for decoding this construction, along with other identity-formation such as class. Most discussions acknowledge the limitations of working with a binary model.

Rosemary Joyce’s Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives offers the clearest challenge to binary readings in gender analysis. This is an archaeological study of sex and gender in ancient societies generally, looking at the ways in which images such as paintings or clay models, even of the earliest human societies, can be examined as symbolic iconography that served “to create, reinforce or even cover up aspects of social relations” (15). Beginning with the Paleolithic period, Joyce notes that representations of sex and gender differed in degree, not kind, delivering a clear blow to the modern tendency to focus on the distinction between male and female. Ethnographers, she argues, grounded in a twofold understanding of sexuality, have ignored the symbolic representation of age, social group, ethnicity, status, and skill levels. Rather than focusing primarily on gender identity...

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