Such sunny days for the study of gender! After long years of feminist labour in the vineyards of women’s studies, scholars such as Joan Wallach Scott have seen their call for the use of gender as a category of historical analysis heeded (Scott 1988). The exploration of the unmarked term, masculinity, has begun and is taking the form not of self-indulgent or self-congratulatory replication of traditional scholarship with a dollop of men’s studies rhetoric, but of self-aware and consciously theorised efforts to understand the relational nature of gender. In the volumes of the Leicester-Nottingham Ancient History Seminars, we arc seeing the product of that effort in a most interesting and sophisticated collection of essays.
Getting to this point has taken some time, and not simply because men were scholarship’s unmarked term, that which could go without saying. The old and irritating conversation between the feminist and her male colleague reads as follows: he says, ‘well, if we’re going to have women’s studies, why not have men’s studies too – ha ha ha!’ She says, “isn’t everything in this university already just that?’ Such conversations may gradually be silenced for reasons that go beyond the fear of some ‘political incorrectness’. From work on women by feminists and others to the growing interest in the study of sexuality that came on the heels of Foucault to a rising consciousness of the fact that no social system can be comprehensible only through its marked terms, we now seem to have arrived at a point where gender is being talked about within the framework of a highly sophisticated set of theories of social and cultural representation. Such theories form the foundation for the chapters in this book, as in their general concern to understand the limits of their own attempts to locate and concretise an impossibly complete masculinity, an ultimately unrepresentable, complete and unified Greek or Roman male subject.
The outcome of this process of development can be seen throughout Thinking Men. Not only do we become aware of the way ancient writers take man as the measure, often speaking of masculinity only in terms of what it is not or only in terms of its enactments and not in definitional or adjectival forms; we also have the chance to see within what kinds of thought-systems masculinity operated. The emphatically visual world of the Greeks and Romans meant that masculinity was always performative, always on show, and not just in the theatre. The theatre is a focus for many of the essays in this collection in part because of the lively conversations going on in that part of the field (Winkler, Zeitlin, Foley, Konstan and others provide wonderful evidence of the vitality of the conversation) and in part too because of the way looking is implicated in all theatre. The audience does more than observe in some passive way. It is being constructed as a community by the play, by what it sees before it. At the same moment, that audience’s visual practices are at work shaping the culture’s notions about performance, about gender, and about visual desire. Drama in performance thus becomes a microcosm for our thinking about the way gender comes into being and the way vision functions along with words.
Gender operates as a psychic, intellectual and social model: the chapters in this volume demonstrate its workings in some new and exciting areas that have been little explored for the classical and late antique world. Studies of personification, of biological taxonomy and of sexual generation all reveal the way gender gave form to abstract notions and hierarchies of all kinds. The larger social structural problem of gender differentiation as a metaphor, model and maker of power relations becomes clear as well in these chapters, and it is here, perhaps, that work on masculinity is most valuable for scholarship of all kinds. When we see trees being understood according to class and gender assumptions (Foxhall, Chapter 5 in this volume), or when the conquest of land is represented in terms of rape and when rape may be understood as a ‘natural’ part of youthful masculinity (Stafford, Sommerstein and Pierce, Chapters 4, 8 and 10), then the power of masculinity and femininity as essences for a society becomes undeniable. The value of Thinking Men and other works on masculinity, to the extent that they acknowledge and clarify the concept in relation to other social categories such as femininity or foreignness, rests in revealing the nature and operations of social hierarchies in all their cultural and historical specificity.
Natalie Boymel Kampen