Embodying Women’s Colonial Experiences

Description:

Mortuary evidence from the necropoleis of Pantanello, Pythekoussai, and Morgantina such as funerary architecture, burial posture, jewelry, and tooth morphology, suggests that intermarriage between indigenous women and Greek-speaking migrants was a widespread practice among newly founded “Greek” colonies (Buchner 1975; Coldstream 1993; Becker 1999; Ziskowski 2008; Saltini Semerari 2016). Throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, the graves of non- elite women living in multicultural colonial environments are often the only evidence of these women’s lives. In death, these women continue the work they performed while living – developing, transmitting, and embodying new ways of being within the shifting cultural landscapes and intersectional power imbalances of ancient colonies.

For scholars of gender archaeology and history, the body has become a privileged site for the investigation of women’s lives in antiquity (Liston 2012; Shepherd 2012). Though potentially silenced, marginalized, or erased in narratives dominated by male voices and perspectives, women’s concrete experiences of and their contributions to the material and cultural world in which they lived still survive through the signs inscribed onto their bodily remains and the grave goods deposited with them. This is especially true for women required to move between worlds, carrying out much of the emotional, cultural labor necessary to creatively negotiate daily practices and relational dynamics among kin groups.

This virtual conference seeks investigations of the woman’s body (broadly defined to include anyone who identifies as such) and embodied experiences of womanhood in colonial, middle ground, and hybrid spaces, where what it meant to be ‘woman,’ ‘man’, ‘Greek,’ 'Roman,' or 'barbarian' was subject to constant, creative negotiation and redefinition. Inspired by developments in modern Black and North American indigenous feminisms (Jackson 2020 and Barker 2017, among many others), we ask how ancient (indigenous) women challenged naturalized Greek notions of “civilized” womanhood and the feminine body and shaped new articulations of womanhood across and beyond the Greek-speaking world. How has the role of women in colonial contexts been represented, silenced, erased or marginalized in the extant evidence and in modern scholarship? How and under which conditions or with which limitations can the bod(il)y (of) experiences of these women be recovered, reassembled, or re-membered?

 The deadline for submissions has passed.

In this conference we invite papers from scholars working on various corpora of evidence and from a variety of theoretical perspectives which contribute to ‘embodying women’s colonial experiences’ in the Graeco-Roman world. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Examples of (indigenous) women resisting, manipulating, negotiating or creatively reinterpreting normative cultural categories and practices (gender related or otherwise)

• Examples of ancient women code-switching and acting as cultural negotiators in colonial contexts, contributing to the creation of middle ground and hybrid spaces

• Processes of (de)constructing the relationship between biological sex and gender in antiquity; analyses of the frictions that can arise when different cultural constructions of gender coexist in colonial environments

• Self-fabrication and the crafting of womanhood through textile, costume, domestic arts, graffiti, vase painting, and other material acts

• The contributions of women to local economies and processes of production; relationship between women and labor

• Gendering mortuary contexts (challenges and biases, evolution of the practice, and implications for reading scholarly literature)

• The intersection of the bioarchaeological and the biopolitical in the study of women in the ancient world (theoretical underpinnings, problematic implications, potential positive contributions and possibilities)

• Microhistorical, multiscalar, and biographical approaches to the study of (indigenous) women in ancient colonial contexts

• Comparative and ethnoarchaeological approaches to the study of women's experiences of, participation in, and contribution to the (social, cultural, political, economic, gendered) construction of colonial contexts

• Issues of terminology (how should we talk about gender, ethnicity, indigeneity, and the mixing of practices, bodies, aesthetics, customs with reference to ancient colonial contexts? What possibilities and limits are inscribed in these terms? Are there possible ways - words - forward?)

• Tensions, productive and otherwise, that arise from the application of modern postcolonial and de-colonial theory to ancient contexts

• Critical fabulations and other means of engaging with the silences and erasures in the archive (Hartman 2008, Foucault 2003, Trouillot 1995)