Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being PDF
Preview Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being
~,. S Women and Culture Series The Women and Culture Series is dedicated to books that illuminate the lives, roles, achievements, and. status of women, past or present. Fran Leeper Buss Dignity: Lower Income Women Tell of Their Lives and Struggles Forged under the Sun / Forjada bajo el sol: The Life of Marfa Elena Lucas La Partera: Story of a Midwife Valerie Kossew Pichanick Harriet Martineau: The Woman and Her Work, 1802-76 Estelle B. Freedman Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 Susan C. Bourque and Kay Barbara Warren Women of the Andes: Patriarchy and Social Change in Two Peruvian Towns Marion S. Goldman Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode Page duBois Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being Mary Kinnear Daughters of Time: Women in the Western Tradition Lynda K. Bundtzen Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process Violet B. Haas and Carolyn C. Perrucci, editors Women in Scientific and Engineering Professions Sally Price Co-wives and Calabashes Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, editors Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century Joanne S. Frye Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience E. Frances White Sierra Leone's Settler Women Traders: Women on the Afro-European Frontier Barbara Drygulski Wright, editor Women, Work, and Technology: Transformations Lynda Hart, editor Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre Verena Martinez-Alier Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society Kathryn Strother Ratcliff et aI., editors Healing Technology: Feminist Perspectives Mary S. Gossy The Untold Story: Women and Theory in Golden Age Texts Jocelyn Linnekin Sacred Queens and Women of Consequence: Rank, Gender, and Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands Glenda McLeod Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance Lynne Huffer Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing Jill Ker Conway and Susan C. Bourque, editors The Politics of Women's Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, editors Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory Domna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Stewart, editors Feminisms in the Academy Ayala Emmett Our Sisters' Promised Land: Women, Politics, and Israeli-Palestinian Coexistence CENTAURS AND AMAZONS CENTAURS AND AMAZONS Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being Page duBois ANN ARBOR THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS ISBN-13 978-0-472-08153-0 (pbk.) ISBN-13 978-0-472-02154-3 (electronic) For Bob Preface This book began as a study of Amazons, the band of fear less, independent creatures so often inspiring to women now, near the end of the twentieth century A.D. Studying the myth of the Amazons in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., however, I real ized that just as a new Amazonian myth belongs to our history of liberation movements, of changes in the sex/gender system, of new ideas of community, so the ancient myth of Amazons is embedded in a network of events, ideas, and social relations. Thus this study became an attempt to see the whole of a complex system, the ancient Athenian speculation about sexual, racial, and species difference, in works of visual as well as verbal art, in myths, vase-paintings, monumental sculpture, tragedy, comedy, philosophy. It is a study of culture, of a particular culture's ideas of same and other; my goal was a mapping of how the changing representation of these patterns of same and other occurred in the world of the Athenians. A deliberate effort was required, to transgress the limits of traditional academic disciplines and to move towards a sense of a complex lived reality. Thus this book is not "history of ideas," not art history, phi losophy or literary criticism. And its writing demanded certain polemical choices. I limited my choice of examples, omitting some significant works of visual art; others were selected because they seemed illustrative of a patterning at work in Greek culture. I did not intend to offer an encyclopedia of all references to difference in the ancient world. Three tragedies, the Persae, the Trachiniae, and the Medea, were chosen because they are master pieces, because they exemplify principles of reasoning about sameness and otherness. To be exhaustive, to mention every tragedy in which difference is an issue, seemed to me to risk los ing the lines of my argument in a mass of detail.
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