On several vases from the fifth century BCE, Attic painters depicted partly or entirely naked feminine characters, along with various athletic accessories. In some cases, specifically studied here, the young woman can be identified as the mythical heroine Atalanta. The article shows how these pictures are not evidence of real customs, but were intended to arouse the symposiasts who handled the vases on which they were depicted.

Atalanta, devotee of Artemis and defiant of men and marriage, was a popular figure in ancient literature and art. Although scholars have thoroughly investigated the literary evidence concerning Atalanta, the material record has received less scrutiny. This article explores the written and visual evidence, primarily vase painting, of three Atalanta myths: the Calydonian boar hunt, her wrestling match with Peleus, and Atalanta's footrace, in the context of rites of passage in ancient Greece. The three myths can be read as male (...) and female rites of passage: the hunt, athletics, and a combination of prenuptial footrace and initiatory hunt. Atalanta plays both male and female initiatory roles in each myth: Atalanta is not only a girl facing marriage, but she is also a female hunter and female ephebe. She is the embodiment of ambiguity and liminality. Atalanta's status as outsider and as paradoxical female is sometimes expressed visually by her appearance as Amazon or maenad or a combination of the two. Her blending of gender roles in myth offers insight into Greek ideas of social roles, gender constructs, and male perceptions of femininity. Erotic aspects of the myths of the Calydonian boar hunt and the footrace, and possibly also her wrestling match with Peleus, emphasize Atalanta as the object of male desire. Atalanta challenges men in a man's world and therefore presents a threat, but she is erotically charged and subject to male influence and dominance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World by Adrienne MayorAlison KeithAdrienne Mayor. The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. xiv + 519 pp. Cloth, $29.95.Adrienne Mayor is a historian of classical folklore and ancient science and the author of several books whose subjects lie at the intersection of classical myth and ancient history (...) with archaeology and the history of science: an exploration of monsters and heroes in the repertoire of classical myth as a response to the discovery of fossils in The First Fossil Hunters (Princeton 2000); a wide-ranging collection of evidence for biological and chemical warfare in the ancient world, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs (New York: Overlook Press, 2003); and a sympathetic biography of Mithradates VI Eupator of Pontus in The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton 2009); as well as an investigation of indigenous North Americans’ accounts of fossils, in Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton 2005). Like her earlier volumes, The Amazons brings together an extraordinarily wide array of evidence, uncovered through prodigious research across such diverse fields as classical mythology, ancient history, and contemporary archaeology of the central Asian steppes, and the results are presented with her trademark narrative brio. As with these earlier volumes, moreover, Mayor has an agenda in The [End Page 174] Amazons: here she seeks the historical reality that lies behind the ancient Greek myths of barbarian warrior women; and she finds it in the recent archaeological discoveries of female warriors interred on the central Asian steppes from the Caucasus to western China.Mayor sets out her premise in a prologue that takes its bearing from the myth of Atalanta, whom she dubs “the Greek Amazon” (1–13): her project is to investigate where the Greeks might have encountered real women warriors like Atalanta, capable of besting men in footraces, on the battlefield, and in the hunt. Her study falls into four parts: Part 1 (17–59) asks, “Who were the Amazons?” and identifies ancient Scythia, with its many horse-riding and horse-herding nomadic tribes, as the homeland of the Amazons. Part 2 (63–246) surveys the archaeological and scientific evidence for female warriors among the nomadic tribes of the central Asian steppes in prehistoric and historic times. In this section, Mayor considers the evidence afforded by the bones of buried nomad warriors misidentified as male (because of the weaponry and horses accompanying the burial) when they were originally excavated but recently recognized as female as a result of newer scientific techniques of examination (chap. 4); the body armor found in the steppe graves, in a discussion which has recourse to comparative ethnography, yielding a rich history of breast suppression (chap. 5); the tattooing practices of the historical nomadic tribes of the steppes in relation to the iconography of Amazons’ tunics and leggings on classical vase paintings (chap. 6); ancient accounts of Amazons’ dress (chap. 7), including their partiality for trousers (chap. 12), sexuality and reproduction (chap. 8), drugs, dance and music (chap. 9), hunting technologies (chap. 11), weapons and warfare (chap. 13), all in relation to the archaeological and historical evidence of steppe women’s practices in these arenas. She even presses into service ethnolinguistics in order to argue that the names of the Amazons can be traced back to a common origin in the Eurasian steppes (chap. 14; cf. Appendix of Names of Amazons and Warrior Women in Ancient Literature and Art from the Mediterranean to China). In Part 3 (249–353), Mayor turns back to “Amazons in Greek and Roman Myth, Legend, and History.” Here she retells the most famous Amazon myths, of Hippolyte and Heracles [sic] (chap. 15), Antiope and Theseus (chap. 16), Penthesilea and Achilles (chap. 18), and the Athenian Amazonomachy (chaps. 17, 19); and classical accounts of their historical counterparts—the dalliance of Thalestris and Alexander the Great (chap. 20) and the love of Hypsicratea and Mithradates (chap. 21). Part 4 (358–429) abandons the Hellenocentric perspective of Part 3 to investigate the evidence for Amazonian women “Beyond the Greek World... (shrink)

Classical Greece is famous for its athletic art, particularly the image of the nude male athlete. But how did the Greeks understand athletic beauty? Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and others discuss athletes’ beauty, while the educational ideal of kalokagathia conceptually connects athletic beauty with the good. More questions need to be answered, however, if we are to understand ancient athletic beauty. We need to ask ourselves what the Greeks appreciated when they looked at athletic bodies. What did those qualities mean to (...) them? In what way was it erotic? How did it differ for females and males? In this paper I argue that the beautiful athletic body is framed in ancient Greek thought, not just as an aesthetically pleasing image, but as an ideal expression of a certain kind of soul. (shrink)

L’article, en prenant en compte la littérature médicale des Présocratiques à Galien, présente la façon dont les textes biologiques et médicaux grecs ont construit les corps masculin et féminin. Selon ces biologistes et médecins grecs, cette construction s’opère dès l’embryogenèse et au cours du développement du fœtus. Dans une pensée médicale où prédomine la physiologie, les corps masculin et féminin sont nettement opposés selon des critères connotés : en particulier, le corps de la femme est plus humide et moins chaud (...) que celui de l’homme ; il est, en outre, marqué par une particularité anatomique, l’existence de l’utérus pensé comme un être vivant. La différence entre corps masculin et féminin, qu’elle soit donnée pour radicale (différence de nature) ou relative (plus ou moins grand degré de perfection), est toujours présentée à partir d’un corps de référence, celui de l’homme, par rapport auquel celui de la femme est pensé en termes d’incomplétude ou d’inversion. Elle est par ailleurs porteuse de hiérarchie. (shrink)

This article treats representations of victors in the Greek athletic games in the artistic and poetic media of the early classical age, and argues that fifth-century sculptors, painters and poets similarly constructed the athlete as an object designed to arouse desire in audiences for their works. After reviewing the very scanty archaeological evidence for the original victory images, I seek to recover something of the response elicited by these monuments by looking to visualizations of athletes in contemporary vase-painting and (...) literary sources, and most particularly in the epinician odes of Pindar. Poets and painters, I suggest, both place their subjects within an erotically-charged atmosphere which replicates that surrounding actual athletes in the city gymnasia and at the games, and encourage audiences to regard the youthful bodies on display as "spectacularized" objects, sources of both aesthetic and sensual pleasure. The makers of monumental images work within the same paradigm, also prompting the viewer to transfer the sentiments aroused by the real-world athlete and victor to his re-presentation in bronze. Through an examination of the conventions used for victor images, and a close study of the so-called Motya charioteer, I propose that the sculptor deploys techniques analogous to those of artist and poet to highlight the appeal of the athlete's body, and displays the victor in a mode calculated not only to mark him as the alluring target of the gaze, but even to cast him as a potential erômenos. The concluding section of the article investigates the impetus behind this mode of representation, and seeks to place the dynamic between the viewer and the viewed within the context of the early fifth-century polis. (shrink)

The authors challenge the Cartesian emphasis on mind that characterizes much feminist theory, offering instead a perspective that conceives of mind and body as a unity. They examine the construction of terrorized female bodies, how this construction is affected by age, class, race, and sexual preference, and how women who resent the status quo are developing themselves physically. They conclude by proposing a politics of feminist embodiment in which women use collective "care-of-the-self" practices that empower both their bodies and (...) their minds. Extensive interviews with women involved in bodybuilding, self-defense training, and similar activities provide the empirical context of this original theoretical analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fitness, Fatness, and Aesthetic Judgments of the Female Body:What the AMA Decision to Medicalize Obesity means for other Non–Normal Female BodiesSara R. Jordan“I’ll be happy to refer you to our dietician to get you on a program to help you get your weight under control before it becomes a problem”.As my new physician spun around out of the examination room door, my head spun faster. I had (...) heard the phrase “get your weight under control” twice that morning, but the contexts in which the phrase was uttered could not have been more different.At 7:30 a.m., my fitness trainer was imploring me to get my weights under control as I struggled under a bar, laden with slightly less than my body weight, to do a final set of front squats. At 11:15 a.m., my new general practitioner was imploring me to get my weight under control, by which he meant to learn how to reduce my body mass index (BMI) to match the chart prominently displayed on his office wall. The exhortation to get my weight under control meant such radically different things in these two contexts that it was difficult to comprehend the meaning of the phrase.I am 5’4” and 158 pounds. This gives me a BMI of 27.3, which means that I am considered overweight; right in the middle of the category of overweight. Or, according to the definition of the BMI found on the calculator pinned to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institutes (NHLBI) webpage, I am over fat. If the BMI is, “a measure of body fat based on height and weight that applies to adult men and women” then I carry a health–threatening percentage of body fat. If my fitness trainer, with his 12 point skin–fold caliper test is correct, my body fat percentage of 17% is within the limits expected of female (non–endurance) athletes. In terms of health, then, I am a paradox: according to one standard, I am healthy and fit, according to another, I am unhealthy and fat.As this new physician picked apart my weight, suggesting I should lose between 15 and 20 pounds to bring myself to “full health”, I found myself quite annoyed. He was a small, rail thin, man with greying hair, tired eyes, unpressed khakis, and a beaten pair of black–ish grey “Crocs” on his feet. He looked disheveled and as if he had not seen the inside of a weights room in his life. As I listened to him address my history, current vitals, and how being overweight in my 30s could lead to being [End Page 101] “fat and 40”, I looked him over and made a snap judgment of “I could bench (press) you [right out this window]”. While I was angry with his delivery, I tried to remind myself that he was an overworked physician in a multi–lingual office, trying to operate under a new paradigm in healthcare policy, practice, and diagnostic categories. Specifically, prompted by the medicalization of the condition of obesity by the American Medical Association, my physician was reflecting the professional wisdom that I suffer from a condition needing preventive treatment. He was trying to be a good practitioner to recommend preventive treatment, but to me, he was being a terrible physician.The AMA Declares Obesity a DiseaseThe declaration by the American Medical Association in 2013 that the condition of being obese is one that requires medical treatment is one that I, on the face of it, support. By inviting the medicalization of the condition, the AMA opens the door for individuals who wage a deeply personal battle with their weight to find support in their physicians’ offices and from their insurance companies. Yet, the blunt tools that are used to assess these conditions raise my ire, emotionally and intellectually.Intellectually, the use of the BMI calculator for snap diagnosis of all individuals makes easy sense. It is an easily comprehended tool and, for a normally distributed population, such a simple tool is an excellent choice. But, it stands to treat outliers like me poorly. Outliers, such as particularly fit... (shrink)

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always been plagued by what queer theorist Judith Butler calls gender trouble. In 2000, the IOC discontinued their practice of sex-testing because medical experts could not agree on what defined a genetic female and so an adequate medical testing measure could not be found. In response to outside pressure, the IOC adopted a policy enabling transsexual athletes to compete in the 2004 Olympic Games. This article argues that the IOC policy on sex reassignment (...) does not operate to guard against discrimination and harassment against transsexual athletes but that it operates to maintain the popular illusion that there are two, binary gender designations. While both transsexual and Olympic bodies have unique histories and vastly different experiences in the social and political realms, using psychoanalysis we contend that the need to test gendered bodies is incited by an anxiety about bodily deterioration, aging, and, ultimately, mortality. (shrink)

This paper seeks to explore the attraction and the beauty of the contemporary athletic body. It will be suggested that a body shaped through muscular bulk and definition has come to be seen as aesthetically normative. This body differs from the body of athletes from the early and mid-twentieth century. It will be argued that the contemporary body is not merely the result of advances in sports science, but rather that it is expressive of certain meanings and values. The visual (...) similarity of the contemporary athletic body and that of the comic book superhero suggests that both bodies carry a similar potential for narrative story-telling, and that their attraction is bound up with this narrative potential. The superhero and athlete live meaningful lives, pursuing clear and morally unambiguous goals. The aesthetic attraction of the body lies in its capacity to facilitate the articulation of a story of a meaningful life, and to do so in the face of the growing anomie and thus meaninglessness of life as experienced in contemporary society. Athleticism offers an illusion of meaning, serving to reproduce dominant justificatory narratives and social stereotypes. Yet, as an illusion of meaning, it may be challenged and negotiated, not least with respect to its bias towards a certain form of the male body. The female athletic body disrupts the illusion, opening up new existential possibilities, new ways of living and being, and thus new, and potentially disruptive, narratives. (shrink)

This study presents scientific theories about the female body in Greece of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. It demonstrates the influence of cultural preconceptions on such theories, and of scientific theories on cultural attitudes.

Certain Greek texts depict Helen in a manner that connects her elusive body with the elusive maneuvers of the persuasive story. Her too-mobile body signals in these texts the obscurity of agency in the seduction scene and serves as a device for tracking the dynamics of desire. In so doing this body propels poetic narrative and gives structure to persuasive argumentation. Although the female figure in traditional texts is always the object of male representation, in this study I (...) examine a set of images of a female body whose representation ultimately seems to frustrate the narrative strategies for which its depiction was created. What emerges in the fifth century as a rhetorical technique begins in Book 3 of the Iliad as a narrative strategy that uses Helen's cloaked and disappearing body to catalyze plot, and develops in Sappho's fr. 16 into a logic of desire shaped by the movement of Helen's and other bodies in the visual field. Gorgias, in the Encomium of Helen, transforms these depictions of Helen into an argument that is structured by Helen's body, an argument that Helen herself employs in Euripides' Troades, where her own body serves as the anatomy of her argument. These texts all associate Helen's body with a type of persuasive narrative that repeatedly invokes the field of vision, describing physical presence in terms that aim at attracting the eye. At the same time this verbal portraiture disrupts the audience's perspective by depicting bodies as cloaked, mobile, and/or half seen, and by obscuring distinctions between desirer and desired, viewer and viewed. As both subject and object in this viewing process, Helen's body comes to be associated with the double vision of seduction and the distracting power of persuasive images, which seduce the mind's eye while eluding the mind's grasp. (shrink)

Martínková et al provide an overview of a tendency to use gender terms in key sports contexts, including eligibility criteria and testing, where gender is unintended. They argue that to avoid conceptual confusion and aid clarity, we should disentangle gender and sex, acknowledging that often gender talk should be interpreted as talk of sex. One of their recommendations is that the labels of competitive categories ‘women’s’/’men’s’ should change to ‘female’/’male’. I first make their argument against gendered labelling more precise (...) by showing that important yet neglected moral and practical reasons support their abandonment. I then argue that in the case of WA regulations, those moral reasons also cut against Martínková et al.’s relabelling proposal ‘female’/’male’. I sketch a testosterone-based proposal which circumvents the problem and which WA itself should accept. More generally, I argue we should be more mindful of the risk that competitive category labels unnecessarily harm athletes. (shrink)

Closely based on the dramatist’s personal experience, Christina Reid’s The Belle of the Belfast City offers a commentary on the life of the Protestant working class in the capital of Northern Ireland in the 1980s from a woman’s perspective. It shows the way eroticism is successfully used by the female characters as a source of emancipation as well as a means not only to secure their strong position in the private domain of the household, but also to challenge the (...) patriarchal structures that prevail in the Irish public sphere. The analysis of the play proposed in this essay focuses on the contrast between the presentation of its male and female characters. I will demonstrate that, while the former group desperately cling to the idea of preserving the social status quo, the latter display a more progressive outlook on the social and sexual politics of the country. In particular, I will investigate how the tensions between the representatives of the two sexes reveal themselves in the corporal sphere. I will argue that, as opposed to the erotically-inhibited and physically-inarticulate male characters, the female dramatis personae take advantage of being more connected to their bodies and use their physicality in an erotic fashion to subvert the rules of the patriarchal system and its strict moral code that limits their social roles to those of respectful mothers, obedient sisters or virtuous wives. (shrink)

Most athletes are subject to intense mental and physical pressure not only during competition but also during practice. An important variable which may influence athletes′ performance is coaching behavior. The aim of the present study is to investigate if coaching behavior and its antecedents differentiate athletes according to their gender, type of sport, competition experience and weekly practice-time. The sample consisted of 367 male and female athletes who participated in both individual and team sports. They completed the Greek (...) version of the “Coaching Behavior Questionnaire”. Results indicated that coaching behavior differentiated athletes of individual sports, and athletes of team sports and experienced women with experienced men. Furthermore, coaches’ behavior contributed to the differentiation on athletes who practice more than those who practice less. In conclusion, these results could help athletes, coaches and sport professionals become more familiar with psychological aspects that influence athletes′ behavior. (shrink)

This article examines the social and symbolic aspects of female performers’ nudity in Parisian café-concert at the end of the nineteenth century. The study of this scenic phenomenon is based on the example of Le Coucher d’Yvette [Bedtime for Yvette], whose popularity, renewed by numerous imitations, prefigures the later vogue of the effeuillage genre [striptease] in the programming of Parisian shows in the twentieth century. The analysis draws on manuscripts of effeuillage shows preserved in stage censorship archives, as well (...) as on iconographic sources and various discourses revealing the contemporary reception of female stripping on stage. It thus sheds light on the craze generated by the eroticization of this gesture and the impact of this reception on the history of the body and gender in that period. (shrink)

The recently published ‘Scientific Review’ by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport about transwomen’s participation in female sport doesn’t deserve its name; it is wholly unscientific. This publication follows a familiar pattern. The body is not important anymore when it comes to categorisation and eligibility in sport; instead, it’s all about a psychological phenomenon: gender identity. This side-lining of the body (which makes the side-lining of female athletes and the inclusion of male-born athletes possible) is now reinforced (...) by an attack on the bio-medical sciences. (shrink)

The idea of beauty in the West has often been connected with the idea of woman, whose beauty has been celebrated in sculptures of the nude since classical Greece and in paintings since the sixteenth century. the nude is not a genre in either traditional or contemporary Chinese art, however, and although there has been nakedness in the representations of the body in the contemporary art of China, its presence is marked by two characteristics that distance the Chinese naked body (...) from the Western nude. (shrink)

As medical professionals, we outline the science underlying disorders or differences of sexual development (DSD), discuss the nuances of sex and gender and how terminology can differ based on medical vs. non-medical context, briefly review the evidence of the ergogenic effects of hyperandrogenism, and discuss the medical complications with the hormonal contraceptive use currently dictated by World Athletics to allow DSD athletes to compete in the female category.

Trainers played an immensely important role in ancient sports. Yet, they often disappear in the descriptions of great athletic feats in epinician poetry, the poems of praise that celebrated great athletes in the ancient world. This paper examines the manner in which trainers fade from epinician narrative and argues that their disappearance may have to do with the nature of the body and the role of trainers and physicians in the Greek world. Admitting the importance of trainers might challenge (...) the notion that the greatness of athletes stemmed from birth and breeding. The fact that trainers sold their services as commodities would exacerbate this. (shrink)

Introduction:Athletes are at increased risk of disordered eating compared to non-athletes. Inspired by previous investigation into quantitative work on an etiological model of disordered eating in athletes, the current study aimed to explore a problematic aspect of the model: athletes' lived experiences of social and sport pressures in relation to the onset of disordered eating and differing eating behaviors.Methods:Nine (N= 9) male and female athletes representing a range of endurance sports took part in semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was utilized.Analysis:Analysis (...) revealed two main themes each with two corresponding subthemes (1) Conflating physical appearance and sporting ability with the subthemes of (1a) social comparison in a sporting world and (1b) societal notions of “the athlete body” and (2) Living as an athlete with the corresponding subthemes of (2a) discipline and sacrifice and (2b) the balancing act.Discussion:It is the complex interaction between societal expectations as lived out in social messages and comparisons, and sport pressures that contributes to the development of disordered eating behaviors. These findings suggest that prevention and treatment of disordered eating in athletes can be applied from those already established in non-sporting realm. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical GreecePaul ChristesenNigel James Nicholson. Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv + 280 pp. 12 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $70.In Aristocracy and Athletics, Nigel Nicholson examines the portrayal of charioteers, jockeys, and athletic trainers in Greek victory memorials (epinikia, statues, vases) produced between 550 and 440 b.c.e. He argues that reliance (...) upon paid, professional assistance put aristocratic victors in a quandary because it ran counter to their insistence on the importance of inherited ability and because it involved them in commodified exchange. Charioteers, jockeys, and athletic trainers were, as a result, carefully excluded from most victory memorials. In the handful of memorials in which they figured, their activities were represented in ways that made them compatible with aristocratic ideals. Nicholson builds directly on the work that Leslie Kurke and others have done on the ways in which Pindar responds to the social and political challenges faced by elites. He takes a firmly New Historicist approach in using detailed analyses of statues, inscriptions, and vases to identify peculiarities in epinikia.In order to assess Nicholson's work, it is necessary to differentiate between his explanation of the reasons for the omission of athletic professionals from victory memorials and his explication of how omission was effected. With respect to the latter, what might be called the poetics of exclusion, Nicholson does an outstanding job. He breaks new ground in highlighting the elision of athletic professionals from victory memorials and in elucidating how the poetics of exclusion shaped epinikia. He identifies seemingly odd features of individual odes that result from the elimination of charioteers, jockeys, and athletic trainers and unpacks the strategies used to generate representations of paid professionals that were acceptable to aristocratic sensibilities. This leads to stimulating new readings of about a dozen of Pindar's odes.There are, at the same time, some problems with Aristocracy and Athletics that spring from Nicholson's single-minded focus on commodified exchange. Nicholson argues that victory memorials came into being because of aristocratic concerns about engaging in commodified exchange with athletic professionals and that this was the primary and, possibly, the sole reason that those professionals were excluded from memorials. He does not take into account the profound changes that transformed Greek athletics in the first half of the sixth century, and he paints an unconvincing picture of triumphant aristocrats overcome by anxiety about commodified exchange. These problems will be addressed in detail below. For the moment, it is important to note that they do not invalidate Nicholson's [End Page 125] insights about how epinician poets went about excluding and accommodating athletic professionals. Aristocracy and Athletics is a significant contribution to the existing scholarship on Pindar that will be of interest to serious readers of Greek lyric and to historians of ancient sport. It is best suited to a specialist audience, though some sections may be useful to advanced undergraduates.Aristocracy and Athletics consists of nine chapters framed by an introduction and a conclusion. In the introduction Nicholson shows that "almost all the competitors in the equestrian and gymnastic contests relied on others in some significant way to secure their victories" (4). He also argues that "the services of athletic trainers, charioteers, and jockeys became increasingly commodified in the late archaic period" (10). He links this development to the creation of the first victory memorials sometime around 550 and sets the lower chronological limit of the study at 440, when "the market for victory odes all but collapsed" (14).The first five chapters of Aristocracy and Athletics examine memorials for equestrian victories. In chapter 1, Nicholson begins his articulation of the poetics of exclusion. Some victory memorials (falsely) represent the owner as having driven his own chariot. Other memorials make little reference to the actual race, eliding a key moment because it was one in which the charioteer rather than the owner featured. Furthermore, epinician poets avoid mention of drivers when describing victory parades and when recounting mythical narratives that typically included charioteers.In chapters 2 to 4, Nicholson looks at the handful of drivers that appear in victory memorials. In... (shrink)

According to the Differences of Sex Development Regulations of the International Association of Athletics Federations, Caster Semenya and other athletes with heightened testosterone levels are considered non-eligible for middle distance running races in the women’s class. Based on an analysis of fair equality of opportunity in sport, I take a critical look at the Semenya case and at IAAF’s DSD Regulations. I distinguish between what I call stable and dynamic inequalities between athletes. Stable inequalities are those that athletes cannot (...) impact or control in any significant way such as inequalities in biological sex, body size and chronological age. Dynamic inequalities, such as inequalities in strength, speed and endurance, or in technical and tactical skills, can be impacted and to a certain extent controlled by athletes. If stable inequalities exert significant and systematic impact on performance, they provide a rationale for classification. If high testosterone level is an inborn, strong and systemic driver of performance development, inequalities in such levels can provide a rationale for classification. As is emphasised by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, this leads to a dilemma of rights: the right of Semenya to compete in sport according to her legal sex and gender identity, and the right of other athletes within the average female testosterone range to compete under fair conditions. I conclude with providing conditional support of the CAS decision in the Semenya case and of IAAF’s DSD Regulations. (shrink)

Originally published in 1529, the Declamation on the Preeminence and Nobility of the Female Sex argues that women are more than equal to men in all things that really matter, including the public spheres from which they had long been excluded. Rather than directly refuting prevailing wisdom, Agrippa uses women's superiority as a rhetorical device and overturns the misogynistic interpretations of the female body in Greek medicine, in the Bible, in Roman and canon law, in theology and (...) moral philosophy, and in politics. He raised the question of why women were excluded and provided answers based not on sex but on social conditioning, education, and the prejudices of their more powerful oppressors. His declamation, disseminated through the printing press, illustrated the power of that new medium, soon to be used to generate a larger reformation of religion. (shrink)

Stripping the Virgin Mary of the myths, stories, and dogmas surrounding her is a task that has particularly appealed to a branch of feminist theology which seeks to reclaim her as a figure of female empowerment. This article aims to explore the transformation of Mary’s body into an element of resistance in the work of some contemporary artists. By depicting her nude or semi-nude, artists disrupt the gender values commonly associated with the Virgin and open up alternative possibilities of (...) affirmative selfhood through her body. I contend that, in these works, the Virgin’s body functions as a ‘relational’ body that enters into dialogue with hitherto marginalized categories, such as the carnal, the sensual, the notion of fleshly materiality, or even the excluded sexualities of transgender people. (shrink)

The article attempts to address the issue of nudity and eroticism in stage and screen versions of Shakespeare’s plays. Elizabethan theatrical conventions and moral and political censorship of the English Renaissance did not allow for an explicit presentation of naked bodies and sexual interactions on stage; rather, these were relegated to the verbal plane, hence the bawdy language Shakespeare employed on many occasions. Conventions play a significant role also in the present-day, post-1960s and post-sexual revolution era, whereby human sexuality in (...) Western culture is not just alluded to, but discussed and presented in an open manner. Consequently, nudity on stage and screen in versions of Shakespeare’s plays has become more marked and outspoken. Indeed, in both filmic and TV productions as well as stage performances directors and actors more and more willingly have exposed human body and sexuality to the viewer/spectator. My aim is to look at such instances from the perspective of realism and realistic conventions that the three media deploy and the effect nudity/sex can have on the recipient. The conclusion is that theatre is most conventional and stark realism and directness of the message need to be carefully dosed. Similarly to the theatre, television, more specifically television theatre, is, too, a most direct genre, as television is inherently a live medium, the broadcasts of which occur here and now, in the present tense. Film is markedly different from the two previous forms of art: it is narrated in the past tense, thus creating a distance between what is shown and the viewer, and allowing for more literalness. Naturally, particular cases discussed in the article go beyond these rather simple divisions. (shrink)

Irresistibly charming or shamelessly deceitful, remarkably persuasive or uselessly verbose, everything one loves to hate — or hates to love — about “French lovers” and their self-styled reputation can be traced to eighteenth-century libertine novels. Obsessed with strategies of seduction, endlessly speculating about the motives and goals of lovers, the idle aristocrats who populate these novels are exclusively preoccupied with their erotic lives. Deprived of other battlefields in which to fulfill their thirst for glory, libertine noblemen seek to conquer the (...) women of their class without falling into the trap of love, while their female prey attempt to enjoy the pleasures of love without sacrificing their honor. Yet, in spite of the licentious mores of the declining Old Regime, men and women are still expected to pay lip service to an austere code of morals. Asked to constantly denounce their own practices, they find that their erotic war games are thus governed by a double constraint: whatever they feel or intend, the heroes of libertine literature can neither say what they mean nor mean what they say. The Libertine Reader includes all the varieties of libertine strategies: from the successful cunning of Mme de T– in Denon’s No Tomorrow to the ill-fated genius of Mme Merteuil in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons; from the laborious sentimental education of Meilcour in Crébillon fils’s Wayward Head and Heart to the hazardous master plan of the French ambassador in Prévost’s The Story of a Modern Greek Woman. The discrepancies between the characters’ words and their true intentions — the libertine double entendre — are exposed through the speaking vaginas in Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels and the wandering soul of Amanzei in Crébillon fils’s Sofa, while the contrasts between natural and civilized — or degenerate — erotics are the subjects of both Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage and Laclos’s On the Education of Women. Finally, Sade’s Florville and Courval shows that destiny itself is on the side of libertinism. [Publisher's abstract]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient GreeceMindy FenskeBodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece by Debra Hawhee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 226. $40.00, hardcover.In Bodily Arts, Debra Hawhee constructs an often compelling, always interesting case for the conceptual and material linkages between the ancient arts of rhetoric and athletics. In so doing, Hawhee also highlights the integral role (...) of the musical arts to rhetorical and athletic training. Throughout the book, Hawhee weaves together close readings of multiple texts (poetry, oratory, sculpture, painting, architecture) in order to illuminate the intricate “network of overlapping practices” that connect the bodies of rhetoric, athletes, and musicians in Ancient Greece. To this reader, the central strengths of the study are methodological as well as conceptual. In terms of method, Hawhee carefully and with studied finesse integrates close readings of visual, spatial, and verbal texts and practices. In the wrong hands, this type of endeavor can easily appear as the worst kind of pastiche. Not so in this case where Hawhee manages the textual interpretation with deft expertise. Conceptually, the central premise that rhetoric was a practice that was fully embodied and, most importantly, that embodiment was not in a hierarchical relation to reason, rationality, and the mind is provocative. Hawhee argues that the relations of mind-body in Ancient Greek culture were understood as a complex interlocking system that, when trained through physical practices emphasizing rhythm, repetition, and response (to/with an encounter), resulted in the possible transformation of the very nature of the self. [End Page 197]In the process of constructing the argument for the connections between rhetorical and athletic training and performance, Bodily Arts moves through three phases. The Introduction and first three chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for the second phase: the introduction of the concept of phusiopoieses in Chapter 4. Chapters 5–7 then discuss the actual rhetorical and athletic spaces, practices, and bodies of and in phusiopoiesis.The introduction opens with description of a first-century BC bronze statue of an “Antikythera Youth” (3). Hawhee uses the mystery surrounding the identity of the figure (deciphered largely through interpretations of the actions implied by the stature of the statue) to articulate the connections between the body of the rhetor and the body of the athlete as well as to introduce the importance of the body to Greek values of hexis (comportment) and aretē (virtuosity). The Introduction also presents three critical relations that serve both as conceptual departure points as well as hail the multiple audiences of the book: relations of body and mind, learning and performing, and classical studies and rhetorical studies. Hawhee’s perspective is quite straightforwardly that rhetoric is an art that required physical training and physical performance.Chapter 1, “Contesting Virtuosity: Agonism and the Production of Aretē,” connects the values of agon and aretē and argues that the “very logic for linking rhetoric and athletics” lies at the heart of this relation (22). Hawhee argues that agon and aretē are less about ends (victory and virtue) and more centrally concerned with embodied processes. Agon, through Hawhee’s reading of Hesiod’s Work and Days, is articulated as a mode of encounter that produces a particular, and possibly transformative, response. Aretē is the bodily performance of virtuosity. Central to this performance, according to Hawhee’s interpretation of the Olympic ethos through Pindar’s poetry, is the activity of questing. Aretē is demonstrated rather than simply won or attained. Following these definitions of agon and aretē, the chapter moves to illustrating the shared language of rhetoric and athletics in terms of these values. Hawhee argues that this shared vocabulary confirms that sophistic rhetoric was understood and practiced as an embodied and agonistic art “fused and infused” with athletics (43).In Chapter 2, “Sophistic Mētis : An Intelligence of the Body,” Hawhee describes mētis as cunning and somatic becoming that “infuses the arts of rhetoric and athletics with a kind of bodily intelligence... not an explicit set of precepts but rather a tacit style of movement running through most kinds of actions, including thought” (47). Moreover, the movement of mētis [End Page 198] is corporeal. It... (shrink)

_Purpose._ The article aims to define the philosophical narratives about the "beautiful human" of Greek antiquity in the coordinates of the triad of "natural", "social" and "cultural" body. _Theoretical basis._ When achieving this purpose, the author based on the conceptual provisions of the philosophical anthropology of Н. Plessner, in particular, concerning the attitude of a limited body to its limit as an empirical comprehension of a human him/herself and the world. Developing the position of the body as a socio-cultural (...) phenomenon and proceeding from the definition of corporeality as a "transformed human body under the influence of social and cultural factors, which has socio-cultural meanings and performs certain socio-cultural functions" (I. Bykhovskaya) (transl. by O. G.), the triad of "natural", "social" and "cultural" body was used as a methodological basis to analyse the research object. _Originality_ lies in the explication of the peculiarities of aesthetic and anthropological discourse in Ancient Greek philosophy, not only through the prism of the dichotomy of "soul" and "body", but also through the prism of the triad "natural", "social" and "cultural" body, allowing rethinking of the narratives concerning the "beautiful human" of the formation period of the European anthropological aesthetics in Antiquity. _Conclusions._ The anthropological aesthetics of Greek Antiquity is masculine aesthetics, the aesthetics of the male "cultural body". If a man is an epistemological subject, he is able, despite the ugliness and abomination of his natural body, to reach the level of the cultural body, the level of "personal existence of corporeality". As for the female corporeality, since the Ancient Greek philosophy does not provide the status of an epistemological subject for a woman, she remains at the level of "social body". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 369-406 [Access article in PDF] The Body And Its Representations In Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai:Where Does The Costume End? Eva Stehle Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousaiis a rich and funny play, but it gives the impression of lacking a sustained point. Theater directors can happily stage it, subverting Aristophanes by casting women and recasting the text to speak to modern disputes over gender, sex, and politics, as Mary-Kay (...) Gamel has done so wonderfully (see her article in this volume). But the student of comedy who wishes to study the play in the context of its original production in 411, probably at the City Dionysia, has a harder time. Because it has no overt political theme it was for long passed over as a paignion, an escape from relevance in the tense atmosphere of that spring. As a "woman play" it seems less satisfactory than Lysistrata or Ekklesiazousai because it has no female lead character and Euripides' nameless kinsman (whom I call "Inlaw") upstages the women and their concerns. 1 With the current interest in performance and the metatheatrical aspects of comedy, Thesmophoriazousai has finally come into its own as a sly dialogue on theater and ritual, comedy versus tragedy, and gender. 2 But the older view remains in effect that the play has no politics. At the same time, it is assimilated to Aristophanes' other plays in its thematics, while its striking anomalies go unremarked. As a result, it still does not quite come into focus. [End Page 369]As a play about ritual and theater, Thesmophoriazousai is said to absorb women's ritual and restage it within its own festival setting at the City Dionysia. Yet this is the only one of Aristophanes' surviving plays in which the principal male characters exit the stage before the end of the play. Here they flee, in female dress to boot, leaving the chorus to play out the final scene with the Scythian slave. 3 Euripides and Inlaw do not share in the fun of sending the slave running in one wrong direction then another. And the play ends as it began, on Nesteia, the day of fasting for the women performing the Thesmophoria. 4 No revelry brings on the transition to feast and renewal that the audience probably expected. No procession points the way to a new instauration created by the comedy. 5 Given the importance of processions in Athenian life as an expression of community revival, this is a speaking absence. 6As a play about tragedy and comedy, Thesmophoriazousai is said to show the triumph of comedy over tragedy as the more encompassing and flexible art form. The plots of tragedy fail to rescue Inlaw, while a comic plot succeeds: Euripides brings on a dancing girl, Elaphion, who seduces the Scythian slave away for sex while Euripides frees Inlaw. But Euripides' final trick is no comic plot. In the Aristophanic comic plot the [End Page 370] hero wins a desirable young woman, often one whose name promises new fertility, peace, or power; he does not give one away to the blocking figure. 7 Euripides also capitulates to the women, promising never to speak ill of them again. Only by relinquishing both triumph and sex (and thereby also festivity) does he salvage his poor kinsman's life. Euripides' plot fit for a "barbarian nature" (1129) is rather a farcical version of his own rescue-play plot: like Helen and Andromeda it involves deceiving the blocking figure, which allows the principals to escape while leaving others (chorus or a god) to thwart the chase. But its success is based on abandoning pure representation and giving the "real" (within the world of the play) woman away to the internal audience in order to rescue a pseudo-woman.As for gender representation in the play, most analysis holds that men prevail. Different commentators take Aristophanes to be revealing that women on stage are all really men, or questioning what a woman really is since she is the very figure of mimesis, or showing that women deserve... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The History Written on the Classical Greek BodyNassos PapalexandrouRobin Osborne. The History Written on the Classical Greek Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xv + 260 pp. 62 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $85.The title of this pithy book requires some unpacking. Osborne thinks of history both in terms of the familiar literary genre and as the actual lived experience by individuals and communities. Here he is interested (...) in expanding his field of evidentiary data from well-known texts (e.g., historical and juridical) to bodies seen and perceived within a culture that would have shared with us the same ideas about what constituted the “classical Greek body,” a category of recent coinage. His book reads as a very interesting experiment of sorts, one that seeks to shed light on what texts tell us about civic roles and values versus what we can read on bodies represented mainly in vase painting and sculpture. The bodies Osborne avails himself of are never the actual bodies of individuals that lived and breathed in Classical antiquity. I opened this book anticipating that some archaeological data, e.g., those gathered in numerous deposits during the recent Metro excavations in Athens, would have made it to his analysis. Archaeology uncovers skeletons and these can tell a great deal about the personal histories of individuals and their bodies (sometimes even more than we usually expect: dietary habits, diseases, physiques, lifestyles, and roles that may be deliberately distorted in visual monuments and texts). Burial deposits also illuminate constructions of various personae during funereal ceremonies. But Osborne is interested in the discursive body and its constructions, literary and visual, and their mutual interconnections or lack thereof. His experiment is welcome and refreshing—it constitutes a model for further research and testing by others—and his arguments are interesting and thought provoking. What troubled me throughout this book is Osborne’s overly optimistic handling of the material/visual evidence, especially his assumptions about our ability to explain what we see in terms of what was perceived by contemporary viewers. As he himself puts it, “classical Greece also offers us a past society about whose visual experiences we are particularly well informed” (19). Is this really the case? At this point, I should disclose that I am not a trained historian, a primary target audience for this book, but a classical archaeologist trained in the analysis of material and visual culture. As Osborne warns his readers, “the past that archaeologists and historians study is not the [End Page 525] same past” (6), so it may well be that an archaeologist’s understanding is not necessarily that of the historian. In the remainder of this review, I provide a brief outline of the book’s structure and arguments, and I highlight methodological problems and the controversial nature of the set of data mined by the author. Despite these problems, or precisely because of them, this book warrants close and attentive reading by a wide spectrum of specialists.Osborne’s analysis unfolds mainly in the format of various cases that test social oppositions recorded in ancient texts (e.g., citizen/non-citizen, local/foreign, polluted/non polluted, divine/human) vis-à-vis their demarcation (or lack thereof) in visual monuments that were more directly embedded in daily life than the texts in question. The texts at the historians’ disposal have obvious communicational limitations, paramount among which is that the inherent structure of language preconditions how a world is expressed in it. As a remedy, Osborne advocates that historians mine visual documents not only as corrective lenses but also as a means for gaining insights into ancient experiences that lie outside the interestedness and particularity of texts. He seems to think that visual culture affords understanding of context, texture, and nuance of psychological experience, evidence that is by default absent from ancient texts but also much wider in scope than the realm of verbal experience: “to write a history based on texts alone is to write a partial history, a history which treats just one of the systems humans have for understanding the world as the only way of understanding the world” (17).Despite his “textual” skepticism, it is precisely... (shrink)

Despite the reality of intersex individuals whose biological markers do not necessarily all point towards a traditional binary understanding of either male or female, the vast majority of sports divide competition into categories based on a binary notion of biological sex and develop policies and regulations to police the divide. In so doing, sports governing bodies (SGBs) adopt an imperfect model of biological sex in order to serve their particular purposes, which, typically, will include protecting the fundamental sporting value (...) of fair competition. Yet, one potential consequence of enforcing such an approach would seem to be the exclusion or marginalization of individuals whose biological development does not fit within the binary model, whether due to genetics or through a choice to undergo medical intervention to better represent a chosen gender identity. Any such exclusion or marginalization will inevitably tend to undermine another fundamental value of sport, that of inclusivity. In the context of those with differences of sex development, SGBs appear to be faced with a difficult problem: dealing with a conflict between two fundamental values of sport. Different approaches to this problem have been suggested, with some academics proposing that sports organisations, in general, ought to prioritise fairness above, while others suggest the need to ‘balance’ competing values or even to prioritise inclusion over fairness. However, it is argued that any of these approaches are, in principle, justifiable as any sport should be free to prioritise or balance its own values. What seems more important for any SGB is the need for a rational and transparent justification of regulations that pursue fair competition at the expense of inclusivity. Furthermore, where fair competition and inclusivity are fundamental values, any such justification would seem to demand adherence to some basic norms. First, the regulations should be built on (and articulate) a consistent and principled basis of what ‘fair competition’ means in a particular sport. Second, any regulations should only exclude or restrict participation to the minimum degree necessary to achieve the sense of fair competition so articulated. Third, SGBs should be transparent about what their values are and where their priorities lie so that participants and other stakeholders are able to make an informed choice as to whether they wish to participate in, support, or be associated with a particular sport. With reference to the adoption of the Eligibility Regulations for Athletes with Differences of Sex Development (the ‘DSD Regulations’) by the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF), this article seeks to evaluate whether the approach of the IAAF satisfied these basic requirements. (shrink)

The understanding of the soul in the West has been profoundly shaped by Christianity, and its influence can be seen in certain assumptions often made about the soul: that, for example, if it does exist, it is separable from the body, free, immortal, and potentially pure. The ancient Greeks, however, conceived of the soul quite differently. In this ambitious new work, Michael Davis analyzes works by Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle to reveal how the ancient Greeks portrayed and understood (...) what he calls “the fully human soul.” Beginning with Homer’s _Iliad_, Davis lays out the tension within the soul of Achilles between immortality and life. He then turns to Aristotle’s _De Anima_ and _Nicomachean Ethics_ to explore the consequences of the problem of Achilles across the whole range of the soul’s activity. Moving to Herodotus and Euripides, Davis considers the former’s portrayal of the two extremes of culture—one rooted in stability and tradition, the other in freedom and motion—and explores how they mark the limits of character. Davis then shows how _Helen_ and _Iphigeneia among the Taurians_ serve to provide dramatic examples of Herodotus’s extreme cultures and their consequences for the soul. The book returns to philosophy in the final part, plumbing several Platonic dialogues—the _Republic_, _Cleitophon_, _Hipparchus_, _Phaedrus_, _Euthyphro_, and _Symposium_—to understand the soul’s imperfection in relation to law, justice, tyranny, eros, the gods, and philosophy itself. Davis concludes with Plato’s presentation of the soul of Socrates as self-aware and nontragic, even if it is necessarily alienated and divided against itself. _The Soul of the Greeks_ thus begins with the imperfect soul as it is manifested in Achilles’ heroic, but tragic, longing and concludes with its nontragic and fuller philosophic expression in the soul of Socrates. But, far from being a historical survey, it is instead a brilliant meditation on what lies at the heart of being human. (shrink)

Changes in women’s clothing at the end of the eighteenth century in France (the revealing dresses worn by the merveilleuses) provoked a medical reaction. Physicians described the mode for such clothing as a harmful form of undressing ; in so doing, they sought to regulate the practices of women who followed fashion, and called for the preservation of individual and collective morality, beauty and health. Through a close and contextualized reading of a selection of medical texts, this article highlights the (...) gendered conceptions and standard knowledge underlying them, and examines the rhetorical devices and discursive strategies employed. These discourses, seeking both to dissuade and persuade, reveal how the medical gaze was in fact stripping and eroticizing the female body. By highlighting a moment when the clothed body was perceived as naked, the article contributes to the history of representations of female nudity. (shrink)

The idea that the womb moved freely about a woman's body causing spasmodic disease enjoyed great popularity among the ancient Greeks, beginning in the classical period with Plato and the Hippocratic writers and continuing on into the Roman and Byzantine periods. Armed with sophisticated analyses of the medical tradition and new texts pertaining to the magical, this essay describes how both approaches to the wandering womb develop side by side in mutual influence from the late classical period onwards. Of special (...) interest will be the tendency in both traditions to imagine both demons and errant wombs as wild animals and to use fumigations to control both. It concludes with a discussion of the historical development of and consequences for the idea that women alone possessed an internal organ that was variously interpreted as a mechanically defective body-part, a sentient and passionate animal, and then finally a demon with malicious intent, who bites and poisons the female body. It also argues against the hypothesis or assumption that midwives or wet-nurses were the original source for the idea of the wandering womb, suggesting that the syndrome never fit comfortably into the category of gynecological illness, because the womb was not the site of disease, but rather a cause of spasmodic disease in other areas of the body. (shrink)

The ancient Greek word kalon can be translated as beautiful, good, noble, or fine—yet somehow it transcends any one of those concepts. In art and literature, it can apply straightforwardly to figures like Helen or Aphrodite, or enigmatically to the pais kalos: the youthful athlete that decorates so much sympotic pottery. In the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, meanwhile, it takes on an ethical, even transcendent dimension. And yet, the thread between a beautiful painting and the Platonic form (...) of the beautiful is never completely broken. In the summer of 2018, a group of scholars from varying disciplines gathered in Siracusa, Sicily – a place of not indifferent beauty itself – to discuss the nature of to kalon in ancient Greek culture. We were especially interested in the large part of that heritage that derives from or was influenced by Western Greece – the ancient Hellenic cities of Sicily and Southern Italy. The result is a volume that considers art, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy in exploring the nature of beauty. (shrink)

In “What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?” A. W. Eaton argues that the female nude in Western art promotes sexually objectifying, heteronormative erotic taste, and thereby has insidious effects on gender equality. In this response, I reject the claim that sexual objectification is a phenomenon that can be generalized across the experiences of women. In particular, I argue that Eaton’s thesis is based on the experiences of women who are white, and does not pay adequate attention to the (...) lives of racialized women. This act of exclusion undermines the generality of Eaton’s thesis, and exposes a more general bias in discussions of the representation of women in art. Different kinds of gendered bodies have been subjected to different kinds of objectifying construal, and the ethics of nudity in art must be extended to take such variation into account. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the connections between shame and embodiment in Euripides’s play Helen. The paper focuses on the play’s underlying theme of sexual violence and rape, and on the descriptions of metamorphoses that the mythological female victims often undergo in the face of rape. In my analysis on shame and embodiment I apply two insights from Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the phenomenon of victim shame in The Remnants of Auschwitz. These are, first, the definition according to which (...) shame is “to be consigned to what cannot be assumed”—that is, to be consigned to one’s self, being and physical body—and second, the claim that in shame one is affected by one’s own passivity. Building on these definitions, I explore the intimate connection between shame and embodiment at work in Helen. As a result we can see how the female metamorphoses before or after sexual violence—in Euripides’s play and in Greek mythology in general—can be read in terms of victim shame. Furthermore, I suggest that this shame of the victims of sexual violence originates from the very nature of the crime itself: from being forced to experience the body’s abject passivity. (shrink)

We critically analyze four images of female Paralympians posing nude in ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issue from the years 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2014. Past literature shows that media portrayals of female Paralympians emphasize esthetically pleasing bodies, able-bodied images and asexualization. Weaving’s continuum of sexual objectification was applied to assess the varying degrees of sexual objectification showcased within each image. From a feminist perspective, discourses of heteronormativity and ableism were applied to outline the concerns with female Paralympic (...) representation in The Body Issue. We argue that by normalizing disability and sexual objectification, woman athletes are trivialized. (shrink)

How do institutions respond to expert contests over epistemologies of sex and gender? In this article, I consider how epistemological ascendancy in debates over the regulation of women athletes with high testosterone is established within a legal setting. Approaching regulation as an institutional act that defines forms of embodied difference, the legitimacy of which may be called into question, I show how sexed bodies are enacted through and as part of determinations of expertise. I focus on proceedings from 2015 when (...) the Court of Arbitration for Sport was asked to decide whether an Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand, could compete as a female athlete. Despite acknowledging that sexed bodies are unruly, the court ultimately endorsed the use of testosterone as seemingly essential to women’s athletic performance, thereby reasserting a two-category model of biological difference. The legitimacy of these regulatory efforts was established through the concurrent narrowing of expertise and the body, a process that is also revealed to be gendered. (shrink)

This article critically examines the evolving policies surrounding the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sports categories, with a focus on the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) framework. The author highlights the implications of prioritizing inclusion over fairness, arguing that the fundamental value of fairness in sports is compromised when male-bodied athletes compete in female categories. Through a detailed analysis, the article explores the role of categorization in preserving equitable competition, the impact of physiological advantages, and the socio-cultural narratives influencing (...) policy shifts. It concludes by questioning the long-term consequences of redefining sports to prioritize social justice concerns over their traditional purpose of fair competition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 125.1 (2004) 148-152 [Access article in PDF] Paul W. Ludwig. Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiv + 398 pp. Cloth, $65. This is a very ambitious and very important, but also importantly flawed, book. It issues from an excellent stable, the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and admirably maintains that (...) stable's thoroughbred tradition of sophisticated interdisciplinarity and equally sophisticated interfacing between the ancient subject matter and the target contemporary readership. It aims not merely to interpret the ancient world but also to change the modern. It takes for its subject matter rival constructions of eros (unitalicized, since this is mostly not used as a mere transliteration of the Greek word): a sometimes deadly, sometimes fructifying, amalgam of altruistic and selfish passion, emotion, and reasonable calculation. The flaws lie not so much in the conception as in the execution. This is one of those books in which the whole is palpably less than the sum of its parts, some of which are quite exceptionally thoughtful and thought-provoking. It is partial, too, in that it selects its source texts very precisely and deliberately but neglects others that a less partial (in another sense) reader might have expected the author to tackle at comparable length and with comparable assiduity. It suffers, probably, from an overlong period of gestation. It would have benefited, certainly, from a Maxwell Perkins in the editorial cutting room.Eros is currently, if the pun may be permitted, a sexy topic in ancient or classical studies. Ludwig's own generally accurate listing of works cited (381-92—not, he stresses, xiii, a "bibliography") includes nearly a score of articles and books in the titles of which "eros" or "erotic" appears, one of them a translated article by Freud (Ludwig cites in all eight Freudian works, having no truck with feminist or other rejections of any or all versions of Freudian psychodynamic theory). To these could be added (exempli gratia) Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.'s Symposia: Plato, the Erotic and Moral Value(which appeared early enough, in 1999, for Ludwig to have taken it into account) or Thomas F. Scanlon's Eros and Greek Athleticsand Victoria Wohl's Love Among the Ruins. The Erotics of Democracy(which did not—they were also published in 2002). It is odd, however, that Ludwig seems to have overlooked Wohl's 1999 article, "The Eros of Alcibiades," which treats a subject that Ludwig himself could hardly not treat, and unfortunate that he did, in that the article appears in revised form in Wohl's new book, the chief premise of which is that "the erotics of democracy is not merely a trope but a dense point of convergence within Athenian social relations and subjectivity."Both Plato's Symposiumand Greek athletics bulk large in Ludwig's account, the former understandably more so than the latter. Indeed, Ludwig begins with a minutely detailed account of—just one speech from—the Symposium, that attributed to "Aristophanes," to which he counterpoints the views that he thinks he can confidently attribute to the "real" Aristophanes, the author of the extant comedies (on which Ludwig concentrates especially, including Clouds, Wasps, and Birds; he promises to return to Lysistrataand Ecclesiazusae). Besides [End Page 148] Plato and Aristophanes, Ludwig's author of choice is Thucydides, at any rate the Thucydides of the Periclean Funeral Oration and of the account of the Athenians' "erotic" decision to go to war in and over Sicily in 415. As for Wohl's claim (above), Ludwig could not agree more. The devil, however, is in the details.And, this is a very detailed book indeed. Ludwig first defines what he means and understands by eros in a variety of subtle and acute ways. It is a "predicament to be experienced and perhaps ameliorated rather than a problem to be solved once and for all" (18); it "occurs in cases in which the desire, whether sexual or not, becomes obsessional" (13, my emphasis); and it was... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and ArtT. H. CarpenterMichael J. Anderson. The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. xii 1 283 pp. 21 figs. Cloth, $75. (Oxford Classical Monographs)The Fall of Troy in Early Greek Poetry and Art presents three extended essays on aspects of the Ilioupersis. The first, based on the Iliad, the Odyssey, (...) and surviving fragments of the lost epics, is an analysis of correlations between events from the fall of Troy and the body of epic material, correlations which can be signaled by narrative continuity, structural and compositional continuity (a neoanalytic tool), and/or allusion. The second essay focuses on three tragedies (Aischylos’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Andromache and Troades) in an attempt to see “how the tragedians further developed the mythic network constructed by the epic poets” (106). The third essay is a study of composite images of the Ilioupersis in Greek art, with a particular focus on Attic painted vases. Anderson’s underlying thesis is that elements of the Ilioupersis exert “a centripetal gravitational force” within the body of interconnected stories that comprise the epic cycle with “its grip extending deep into episodes at both ends of the saga and beyond” (102).The originality of the work, as well as the strengths and weakness of the approach in part 1, is illustrated by Anderson’s discussion of the tale of the wooden horse and the abduction of Helen as correlative episodes. Noting that both in Proklos’ summary of the Kypria and in the Iliad (5.59–64) reference is made to the building of ships for Paris’ voyage to Sparta, Anderson argues that “in conception, manufacture, and deployment, the horse is a precise narrative parallel to [those] ships” (20). The underlying narrative link is the “simple complementarity between beginning and end” (25). The building of the ships engenders conflict, the building of the horse brings the conflict to a close; both function as tools to capture Helen. This narrative link, he argues, is supported by a complex series of analogies. Both building processes (horse and ships) are undertaken for the specific occasions, both are inspired by goddesses, both have architects who earn fame from the projects, and both are accompanied by mixed tones of celebration and doom. Furthermore, since no mention of the building of the “thousand ships” of the Achaian fleet survives, “the building of Paris’ ships stands alone in the remains of the Trojan cycle as the most significant building project of its kind” (22). The horse, Anderson claims, is “a kind of ship in disguise”—both are large wooden structures designed to carry men—and the poets “sculpted the horse to resemble the ships and vice versa.” [End Page 453]Attractive as this correlation is, much of its strength hangs on the assumption that the building of Paris’ ships was treated in some considerable detail in the lost works of the epic cycle. Anderson argues that the ships “might easily have provided material for a substantial slice of poetry” (21) and that the launching of Paris’ ships “probably received a fair share of attention from the poets” (21), but “might easily” and “probably” make a weak base for such a powerful hypothesis. While I admire the ingenuity of the argument, as an archaeologist I crave more solid evidence to support it.Perhaps the greatest danger of such a study, focusing as it does on the relationship between myth and myth, comes from the lack of any external reference that might allow the writer to check, on occasion, the validity of perceived thematic or structural parallels. How does he determine when the links he sees are expressions of his own brilliance—like the creation of a new poem—and when they are links that the poets intended or contemporary Greeks might have perceived, which is presumably a goal of a scholarly work such as this? Anderson is aware of some of these dangers—early on he notes the risk of losing any “immediate social relevance” (10)—but he has difficulty guarding against them.He devotes fully one-third of the book to the study of images. Certainly no discussion... (shrink)

This article examines a neglected ancient source for desire between women that nonetheless has a rich reception history in the context of female homoeroticism: the Callisto episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The article argues that the relationship between Diana and her hunting companion Callisto can be read as homoerotic and that, unlike many ancient accounts of female-female eroticism, neither character is represented as a tribas (a gender-deviant “woman” with a masculinized body, who seeks to penetrate other women). The (...) Callisto episode is therefore an invaluable piece of evidence for ancient discourses on sexuality exceeding the bounds of the active/passive model. (shrink)

We aimed to characterize the age of onset of training, age at menarche, menstrual periodicity, and performance perception during the menstrual cycle and examined the impact of these reproductive variables on body composition, morphology, and body weight satisfaction in Brazilian elite futsal players. The study consisted of 115 female Brazilian elite futsal players from the top national teams. Data were collected during the twentieth Women’s Brazil Futsal Cup. Players were interviewed and self-reported their age of onset of training, age (...) at menarche, menstrual periodicity, and the menstrual period, where they performed best. We also asked for what they considered to be their ideal body weight as well as information related to their training. Subsequently, anthropometric measurements were performed to estimate the body composition and determine morphological characteristics. Fifty-nine players were postmenarche-trained and 52 were premenarche-trained. Eighteen, 65, and 28 were classified as early, normal, and late menarche, respectively. Only 11 and 1 had irregular menstrual cycles and were amenorrheic, respectively. Seventy-three, 23, and 9 reported that their game performance was the best at the follicular phase, menses, and luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, respectively. No associations between the four reproductive-related variables were found. Postmenarche-trained players had significant lower age at menarche and higher percentage body fat. The somatotype profile registered lower ectomorphy rate for the postmenarche-trained participants after controlling for covariates. Early menarche group presented higher sum of six skinfold thickness and endomorphy rate compared to normal and late menarche groups. No differences were found when menstrual periodicity groups and best performance groups were compared, except for higher femur width in the regular menstrual cycle group compared to the irregular one. The association between body weight satisfaction and the four reproductive-related variables were not observed. Premenarche-trained Brazilian elite futsal players had the menarche later than the postmenarche-trained athletes. Most of the participants had menarche age classified as “normal,” presented “regular” menstrual cycles and perceived to perform better during the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle. (shrink)