Gender Studies
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Abstract
These papers from the first three years of the Oxford seminar on Women in Antiquity appear almost a decade after it began, in 1985. The seminar continues, now renamed Gender in Antiquity. The subject continues, less embattled than in 1985; but, as the editors point out (xiv), this does not mean that women's studies are 'integrated into a curriculum that recognises the problems of gender'. It remains to be seen what difference ' gender studies' will make, and what curriculum could replace the safely segregated Women Option. The editors appear sceptical about women's history, that is, about the history of women as distinct from' woman'. Their most obvious concern is with woman as text and with the continuing authority of text. The subtitle suggests (xix) that the study of' woman' is the study of male fantasy, a nocturnal emission of desire and fear:' the woman in antiquity, in some senses, never really existed: she was always an illusion, a pleasurable but unsettling construct of male imagination. As a woman grounded in reality, she is missing from the outset.' But what would count as grounding' woman' in reality ? Is' man' more firmly grounded because men wrote the texts, and the texts are mostly about what they did and said? The editors offer (xx) a final disclaimer: their subtitle is not negative, because illusions can be challenged and 'apparently settled orders' disturbed. Perhaps gender studies, by acknowledging that 'man' is also a fantasy (whose?), will help to exorcise the surviving demonic projections.