APA 2010 Annual Meeting scheduled for Anaheim California
Call for Papers for Panel Sponsored by the Women's Classical Caucus

GENDER, EAST AND WEST IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

Maryline Parca (mparca@illinois.edu) and Angeliki Tzanetou (tzanetou@illinois.edu),
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Organizers
Date & Time, TBA
Location, TBA

The Greeks and the Romans started conceptualizing the West as a space, mental and physical, and over time came to define the West's historic, political and cultural distinctiveness in relation to the East. Gender as a category played a central role in articulating this dichotomy, and it now provides a tool for retrieving and analyzing the interactions, tensions, and accommodations that underlie the polarity. Distinct pairings--male vs. female, free vs. slave, Greek and Roman vs. other, civilized vs. barbarian, democratic vs despotic, center vs. periphery--and the meanings attached to them lie at the heart of hierarchies which informed the social and political identity of the Greeks and the Romans.

Difference in polarity is as old as Homer and offers rich ground for reflection. The Amazons, Circe, Medea, Dionysus, Cybele, Hippocratic determinism, luxury and eastern corruption, Attic vs. Asianic rhetoric, slaves and freedmen in the social Roman hierarchy, the gendered language of conquest and victory, the Orient in epic, mime and pantomime, Cleopatra, Rome and Alexandria, Roman empresses--these are but a few topics that prospective panelists are invited to address. We are also looking to reconstruct the evolution of attitudes toward the East in different periods; to classify the character of the interactions between East and West (e.g. trade, war, migration); to document and examine case-studies in particular areas (e.g. religion, literature, art, social and political institutions) as well as probe the ways in which they informed various ideologies (e.g. otherness, superiority, hybridity, assimilation).

The role of gender in defining the relationship between East and West has been the subject of structuralist analyses and, more recently, has become an object of enquiry informed by feminism and post-colonial theory. We invite abstracts of papers that propose to explore the intersections and connections between the 'feminine' and the East, and how they stand as foils for the 'masculine,' 'civilized,' 'orderly,' 'hegemonic' West, employing these and other analytical and interpretive approaches.

Abstracts whould be sent as Word documents in an email attachment to Laura McClure (lmcclure@wisc.edu) by 6 February 2009. Do not send them to the panel organizers. Personal identifying information should appear only in the cover message, not on the abstract itself. Abstracts whould be no more than ONE page in length, and should follow the instructions for formatting of individual abstracts provided on p. 6 of the APA Program Guide at http://www.apaclassics.org/Newsletter/2007newsletter/1007insert.pdf