Theme:
4. People of the Present – Peopling the Past
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
“Warriors” and “Weavers”: Challenging gender stereotypes in Antiquity [AGE]
Content:
Two years ago, an EAA session, ‘To gender or not to gender’ organised by B. Gaydarska, K.Rebay-Salisbury, P. Ramirez-Valiente and J. E. Friez, challenged the then dominating view of gender development and symbolism in Euro-Mediterranean Antiquity, as elaborated by Robb and Harris. According to the latter, Neolithic gender representation is ambiguous and blurred, with a transition occurring in the Copper-Bronze Age towards greater distinction in the Iron Age-Archaic Period, of an emerging binary ideology which related men to the ‘martial warrior’ and female to the ‘beautiful weaver’.
The 2020 EAA session and other studies instead turned our focus to the association between gender and biological sex, revealing that the interplay between indicators of different personhood and identity aspects, such as age, status, class and even ethnicity, is much more complex than the old binary suggests, including now the emergence of different genders in the prehistoric data.
Building upon these foundations, it is also important to reconsider who has produced knowledge in this field, understanding if andro-centric narratives and/or, on the contrary, new perspectives have been proposed. Moreover, it is important to know how much these new analyses have and continue to contribute to a new narrative that will be expressed in different media, and types of dissemination, among which museums especially need to be analysed, to the most diverse territories and communities, contributing to the fulfilment of at least one of the SDGs, that of gender equality.
In this session, with an Introduction by M. Seifert and a Key-note paper by R. Whitehouse, we welcome papers challenging the current gender stereotypes in European and the Mediterranean antiquity and addressing the scholars who work in these fields. We also invite papers from the New World or anthropological field for comparative perspectives. In this way we aim to achieve more nuanced and balanced interpretations to face modern challenges.
Keywords:
Gender, Stereotypes, Historiography, Media, Museums, Antiquity
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
AGE
Main organiser:
Francesca Fulminante (United Kingdom) 1,2,3
Co-organisers:
Enrico Benelli (Italy) 3
Christian Heitz (Austria) 4
Ana Cristina Martins (Portugal) 5
Rachel Pope (United Kingdom) 6
Affiliations:
1. Bristol and Oxford University (UK)
2. Hanse-WissenschaftsKolleg 2022-23 (Delmenhorst, Germany)
3. University Roma Tre (Italy)
4. University of Innsbruck (Austria)
5. Universidade de Évora | IN2PAST (Portugal)
6. University of Liverpool (UK)
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