I haven’t landed on something specific yet, but I have in the past thought about (and enjoyed studying) the way gender and sexuality are expressed by the Ancient Greek gods, and the complexities that come along with it. I’ve really enjoyed the Gender Studies courses I’ve taken so far, and even once did a project on the theme of vagina dentata (vaginas with teeth) in Ancient Greek literature, which was very fun to present in class. I also was interested to learn about how Athena and Ares mirror each other in that they are both aspects of war, one favorable and one unfavorable. I wondered if, since Athena represents Attic ideals of masculinity (stoicism, logic, cunning strategy, etc.), I could find ways that Ares represents femininity (of the time) through his intense emotions and reactivity. I did bring this idea up to a previous professor, though, and she warned me against blending all of Ancient Greece together into one idea of “Ancient Greek femininity.” I need to be sure I have more than just blanket statements about Ares representing a misogynist image of woman-ness. I do have the argument that, while Athena almost always takes the side of men, sponsoring Odysseus and defending Orestes for the killing of Clytemnestra, Ares once killed his daughter’s rapist and defended his actions in court as just. I think that, in a time when gender and sexuality are more flexible now than they have been in a long time, this is a really good opportunity to explore it in ancient texts, with an open perspective.
I also might be really interested in the ways people used magic to relate to the gods, if I can’t find enough evidence for the first idea. I’m sort of going back and forth between these two very broad concepts, either of gender, or magic.
I think I might like to focus on vagina dentata as a concept, expanding it to include genitalia as weaponry or as tools in general. I could add the statues of Priapus that people used to put in their farms and/or orchards to scare away potential thieves, using the oversized, permanently erect penis on the statue as a threat, and often including notes stuck to the statue that described in grotesque detail how it would be used on anyone who dared to steal from the owner of the farm. I could look at the seemingly unstoppable fertility of the gods as something dangerous, as Zeus has been prophesized multiple times to be one day overthrown by a child of his, yet he cannot seem to stop reproducing. He constantly has sex with both goddesses and mortal women, and every single encounter ends in the birth of a god or demi-god. In this way, Zeus’ genitals almost function as a Damoclean sword, constantly pointing in towards him, threatening to one day be the death of him. Aphrodite, goddess of love and sexuality (possibly connected to Ishtar, goddess of love and war), was supposedly born from the castrated testicles of Ouranos, aka Father Sky, father of Cronus and grandpa of Zeus. In other words, the deity most associated with sex in the Greek Pantheon was born from an act of sexual violence. Genitalia can also be tools, not just weapons. A big example of this would be the winged, stone phalluses found in archaeological digs, possibly carried as charms to ward away the evil eye. In this case, genitalia is protective. I could dig for more examples and work to construct an argument based just on this.
Other questions I have, should the genitalia argument not work out, are how to define the way Ancient Greeks defined masculinity and femininity, which is no small task. If I were to make the Athena vs. Ares each being a reflection of the other’s gender, where and how would I find evidence for this? I would need some examples of femininity as villainized in mythology, and these would need to overlap with descriptions of Ares in terms of his character and behavior. I already have information on the ways Athena was essentially the prodigal son of Zeus. Maybe I could talk about the way death and the primordial, which Ares stands for, are often described as feminine deities in Greek Tragedy, while order, society, and strategy (Athena’s domain) are more likely to be associated with male deities. Athena even sides with Orestes during his trial in the play Orestes, claiming that she had no mother and therefore is on the side of men, even if the women on the other side are the Erinyes avenging Clytemnestra’s death! Either way, I think most of these questions can be answered with research, or if not, abandoned and swapped for another set of questions.
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