Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, the Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of Comparative Literature, presented a paper, "Viewing Courtship Again" in a panel titled "Sex and the City" at the annual meeting of the British Classical Association in Liverpool on March 29.
There are many questions of interpretation surrounding the study of Greek vase painting, and particularly the study of women in Greek vases. Given the ideology of women's restriction to the private domain, it is easy to assume that the women on Attic vases shown in sexual contexts were not respectable Athenian women of the citizen class. But is that true? Some well-known controversies surround the question of, for instance, what is in the little sacks that people offer one another other on vases. Why do the sacks convey different meanings when given by a man to a boy, or by a man to a woman? What do we make of the similarities and differences between the heterosexual and the homoerotic representations? Or, what distinguishes a prostitute from a courtesan, a pornê from a hetaira? What is a courtship and what is a financial transaction for the purchase of sex? Her paper focused on three vases in the Havana collection. Looking at these vases raises a series of metacritical questions about the possibility of objectivity and how we know exactly what it is that we see.
There are many questions of interpretation surrounding the study of Greek vase painting, and particularly the study of women in Greek vases. Given the ideology of women's restriction to the private domain, it is easy to assume that the women on Attic vases shown in sexual contexts were not respectable Athenian women of the citizen class. But is that true? Some well-known controversies surround the question of, for instance, what is in the little sacks that people offer one another other on vases. Why do the sacks convey different meanings when given by a man to a boy, or by a man to a woman? What do we make of the similarities and differences between the heterosexual and the homoerotic representations? Or, what distinguishes a prostitute from a courtesan, a pornê from a hetaira? What is a courtship and what is a financial transaction for the purchase of sex? Her paper focused on three vases in the Havana collection. Looking at these vases raises a series of metacritical questions about the possibility of objectivity and how we know exactly what it is that we see.
