'Gendered space in Republican Rome: limits and assumptions'
Sophie Chavarria
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Abstract
Throughout the 20th century, scholars have initiated a process aiming to overcome social biases, especially from scholarly studies of the Roman Republic (509–27 BC) where women remain silent. In this paper, I reassess women’s experiences as publicly active agents in their community. To do so, I examine how women’s image was shaped by public opinion. Their use of space is revealed not only by evidence ‘left’ by women themselves, but also by members of their inner and outer social circles. Thus, I argue that to fully understand women’s spatial experience, we should not limit ourselves to analyse the messages sent by their environment, but to consider their own use of space itself. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate how women behaved around these spaces. And when writing about the Roman society, we need to refuse to do as some of our predecessors: to systematically ignore women from our narratives.
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‘On gender and spatial experience in public: the case of ancient Rome’, in ed. M. Mandich et al., TRAC 2015: Proceedings of the 25th Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Oxbow 2016: 164-76.
A note from me, 2021: In the first few pages of this article I make an argument that the shift from women's history to gender history in the twenty years or so leading up to its publication risked leaving behind some important unfinished work on women's lives. I was mostly worried about what I saw as a trend in the late 1990s and early 2000s towards masculinity studies, which in the wrong hands meant using the terminology of gender studies to recentre men and masculinity: I got a sense in some venues that 'just' researching women was seen as passé. When I read this article now, I am horrified at how close my argument gets to the kind of rhetoric used in recent years by TERFs or 'gender-critical' writers to deny trans women's rights and position their existence as some kind of attack on cis women. I hadn't come across that rhetoric at the time; now that I have, I think that if I were reading the piece for the first time I would suspect that the author was making an anti-trans dogwhistle. And I worry that trans scholars and others who love and support them may have read it and been hurt, or felt less welcome in the research community. I believed then and believe now that trans women are women, and that all women's (all people's!) liberation is bound together. I am sorry. Abstract Feminist approaches to gendered space, including the second wave theories of the 70s (Ardener, Pateman), the Marxist-inflected geographies (Soja and Hooper) and urban theories of the 90s (Spain, Wilson), and more recent work (Puwar), often rest on assumptions situated in their own time and place which are not easy to apply to the ancient world. For example, some such models claim that gender stratification is often reinforced by spatial segregation, that women are not given access to places where power is exercised or knowledge is kept, and that ‘the greater the distance between women and sources of valued knowledge, the greater the gender stratification in the society’ (Spain, 27). In Republican Rome, sources of valued knowledge were spatially located in places like the elite house – seen at least in part as women’s domain – while the topography and archaeology of the political space of the Forum suggests an open and accessible multipurpose square which was not defined by architectural barriers and was available to all. Other contemporary theoretical work considers the relationship between the public/private divide and gender: in this model, while women are not physically confined to ‘private’ space or men to ‘public’ space, the public/private divide is a tool used to police gender. Women are conceptually tied to the private sphere, and when they are in public space they are either constrained and marked or smothered and denied. Our imperfect understanding of Roman concepts analogous to ‘public’ and ‘private’ make it hard to apply this model directly, but by heeding Soja and Hooper’s call to look not for ‘the difference that space makes’ but ‘the spaces that difference makes’, we can in fact turn the question on its head and use Roman gender policing to understand the public/private divide itself. By asking how women’s spatial experience may have been different from that of the (male) ideal user we usually envisage we can identify previously invisible categories and spatial boundaries. Many of Republican Rome’s civic buildings and monuments sent a clear message to that same ideal viewer: they testified to a patron’s glory, military success, and the unbroken tradition of Roman virtus – ‘manliness’ – stretching down the centuries. But what of those who could not vote for the patron or serve in the army, and were biologically incapable of ‘manliness’? In a world where the elite house was hardly less ‘public’ than the Forum and elite patrons used architectural style and decoration to construct the buildings they donated as civic benefactions almost as an extension of their own private property, we cannot unthinkingly rely on the unstated equivalences between the dichotomies public/private and masculine/feminine which characterize much work on gendered space in our own culture. Tracing the evidence from Cato’s disgust at the presence of women in the Forum in 215 BCE to the sculptural decoration of Pompey’s portico, I find evidence for a discourse which did use the public/private divide to police gender (and status), and both marked and erased the presence of women in public. Thinking about how these processes might have worked and how women experienced them can help us understand better how the house was and was not different from the basilica, or the forum from the portico: the spaces difference makes.
论性别与公共空间体验
以 古 代 罗 马 为 例
On gender and spatial experience in public: the case of Ancient Rome (Chinese version).pdf
Historical Studies of Women and Gender (Shanghai) 2 (2018) 115-30. Translation of TRAC 2015 164-76. In the ancient Republican city of Rome, there were few spaces segregated by gender. Nor were women always conceptually tied to ‘private’ space. Yet the public/private divide was still used to police gender. This paper considers feminist approaches to spatial analysis, and uses gender as a lens to help us understand Roman urban space. By asking how women’s spatial experience may have been different from that of the (male) ideal user we usually envisage we can identify previously invisible categories and spatial boundaries. Tracing the evidence from Cato’s disgust at the presence of women in the Forum in 215 BCE to the sculptural decoration of Pompey’s portico, I find evidence for a discourse which did use the public/private divide to police gender (and status), and both marked and erased the presence of women in public. Thinking about how these processes might have worked and how women experienced them can help us understand better how the house was and was not different from the basilica, or the forum from the portico: the spaces difference makes.
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L. Foubert, 'Crowded and emptied houses as status markers of aristocratic women in Rome: the literary commonplace of the domus frequentata', in Eugesta 6 (2016).
In Republican and imperial Rome, the house was seen as a locus of public life and a symbol of the status of its male residents. The influential position of elite women turned the houses that they owned, or the residential space with which they were associated the most, into appealing elements of literary discourse. Central to all the anecdotes discussed in this contribution is the idea that a woman who gathers people around her might, at some point, become a political force to be reckoned with. Modern scholarship has often characterized the Julio-Claudian period as a period of trial and error. The portrayals of Julio-Claudian women illustrate this most clearly: whereas state-regulated media, such as imperial coins or senatorial decrees, show that these women were given a visible role in public life and were consequently considered as influential members of society, they were never recognized as formal players in the struggle for power. Describing their residence and its visitors enabled ancient writers to point this out. The women whose domus frequentata is discussed in this contribution are: Verres’ mistress Chelidon, Clodia Metelli, Cornelia, Octavia, Livia, Agrippina the Elder, Messalina, and Agrippina the Younger. http://eugesta.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/revue/eng/issues/issue-6-2016/
Review of 'BRENDA LONGFELLOW and MOLLY SWETNAM-BURLAND (EDS), WOMEN’S LIVES, WOMEN’S VOICES: ROMAN MATERIAL CULTURE AND FEMALE AGENCY IN THE BAY OF NAPLES. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 408, illus. isbn 9781477323588. $55.00.'
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