Athenian Pederasty and the Construction of Masculinity

Abstract

Due to its origins in feminist critiques of patriarchal social structures, the field of Masculinity Studies has been inspired by a presentist agenda to deconstruct the essentialist assumptions justifying male hegemony and reconstruct masculinity in a gentler and kinder version, more friendly to egalitarian ideals.1 Although on a theoretical level acknowledging the multiplicity, contingency and social constructedness of masculinities, historically oriented scholars have nevertheless focused their gaze upon favoured themes of male sexual domination, violence, militarism, imperialism and oppression of minorities, which are treated as so historically pervasive that they almost re-essentialise the concept of masculinity.2 Within the field of ancient studies, there has evolved an unfortunate and usually unstated tendency to assimilate Greek, Roman and Near Eastern men of both antiquity and the modern era to a common stereotype of ‘Mediterranean masculinity’ that obliterates a range of important differences.3