Domesticated? Female Animals and Animalized Women in the Greek and Roman Worlds
or, La Belle et la Bête? Female Beasts and Bestial Women
Keynote Speaker:
Sian Lewis, School of Classics, University of St. Andrews
Proposers:
Karen Klaiber Hersch, Department of Greek and Roman Classics, Temple University (khersch@temple.edu)
Kathryn Simonsen, Department of Classics, Memorial University (kathryns@mun.ca)
The Department of Greek and Roman Classics, Temple University, and the Department of Classics, Memorial University invite paper proposals for a conference to be held at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, June 12-14, 2025.
The ancient Greek and Roman worlds abounded in (primarily male) authors who sought to explain the vagaries of human gender by appealing to the world of wild and domesticated animals, from Semonides' depiction of evil women as the animals they resemble in his Iambos, to Aristotle's sociobiological romp arguing for the superiority of men in his Natural History, to Vergil's likening the great queen Dido to a wounded deer. All too often, in these literary configurations, women lose autonomy and become something less than human, perhaps even threatening and bestial. Indeed, the ancient motif of the wild, untamed woman who must be tamed by marriage and childbirth has been well studied in recent decades.
In this conference, we seek to re-evaluate understudied aspects of both female animals and animalized women, creatures that appear in ancient texts as the definition of the other, as "foreign bodies." We ask, for example, these related questions: Can we go beyond the well-studied concepts of agency and oppression and find a more nuanced view? Can we do more than discover power in domestication, and find new ways to dissect what domestication comprises? Is the animal the key to unraveling gender? Can we find autonomy in the beast? Can beastly women be free of gender chains? Are both men and women necessarily diminished by animalization, however seemingly positive the depiction?
Abstract submission: We envision text in the broadest sense and invite submissions from philologists as well as historians and archaeologists, including doctoral candidates. Interested parties may submit abstracts of 300 words for 20-minute presentations to khersch@temple.edu and kathryns@mun.ca by Feb 21, 2025.
Papers may be presented in French or English.
