Feminist theory

Abstract

Feminism has tempered disciplinary protocols, breaking down hierarchy by encouraging collaborative professional activities and by advocating the practice of anonymous peer review. The chapter offers the definitive overview of a given field of feminist inquiry, in this case scholarship on ancient sexuality, might appear to be complicit in a Foucauldian “regime of truth.” The mid-1980s mark another turning point for intersections between feminism and work on ancient sexuality, because it was just then that gender began to be widely deployed as a category of analysis. As they delved into the ideological functions of gender, researchers noted that its deployment in Greek cultural poetics was at odds with the part it played in Roman social and political communication. As scholarship on ancient sexuality enters its third full decade, a sophisticated fusion of psychoanalytic, discursive, and gender-oriented approaches is shedding light on aspects of antiquity previously uncharted, with intriguing and often disquieting results.