Browsing by Author "Vasillopulos, Christopher"
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Item The degradation of athenian women in the phallicratic polis(Uludağ Üniversitesi, 2008) Vasillopulos, ChristopherThe rise of hoplite-democracy and the virtual imprisonment of respectable women in the oikos (household) and the more extreme exploitation of all other women for male convenience and pleasure was no paradox of the Athenian conception of freedom. The increase in the power and wealth of Athens implied (in the male-dominated politics of the day) that respectable women, i.e., those who might bear legitimate heirs, had to be kept under close supervision, lest this all-important function be compromised, thereby jeopardizing the all the gains Athens had procured since the victory at Marathon. Self-consciously Athenians related hoplite democracy to their remarkable and sudden success. Equally, they appreciated their vulnerability, individually and politically, to domestic uncertainty. Their remedy was not merely to sequester their wives and daughters, but to degrade women generally. This process was more than an expression of male arbitrariness or an adolescent desire to have women serve male needs, cheerfully, instantly, obediently and without complication. It was seen as essential to the survival of Athens as a political entity. The Phallicratic Polis has twin foundations: (1) the need to deliver effective martial valor at the behest of the polis; (2) the need to secure domestic order, so that the oikos, the most important under-lying social unit of the polis, could protect family succession and property, and ultimately the polis itself.Item Gendered justice: Tragedy and the revision of the feminine(Uludağ Üniversitesi, 2009) Vasillopulos, ChristopherAthens had grown too rich, too powerful, and too politically astute to allow a primitive, apolitical form of justice to prevail. Revenge and retribution had to be transformed into a form of conflict resolution that was suitable to a sophisticated polis. How Aeschylus has Athena proceed with this transformation reinforces the feminine principle of reconciling reason. The enemy of reconciliation is not merely a desire for justice-asrevenge-and-retribution. The enemy of reconciliation is an absence of political spacetime. We have already seen how the trial creates space-time between an infraction and its punishment. In the transformation of the Furies, Aeschylus illustrates this process more fundamentally. At the level of speech, Aeschylus realizes that words can be just as implacable as revenge and retribution. Words by themselves do not create political or juridical space-time. They have to be open or have to be opened to reason.