Politics and visibility: women eulogy in Athenian funerary contexts (5th - 4th BC.)

Abstract

In this essay the author intends to explore an approach to Politics that goes beyond its more or less institutionalized feature as delimited social spaces for government action, and takes it as a wider and socially spread process linked to the formation (and the even the possibility of existence) of communities and associations. The connection with the “public” or “common” sphere must emerge from a discussion concerning the appraisal of exposition and visibility as practices which define the agents and the space of politics, on every occasion, by way of the allotment and negotiation around the shapes of communities and the disputes of power. The main focus here consists of the eulogies addressed to women on funerary contexts in Attica, in remarkably higher number of occurrences in the classical period, because they are a way of granting glory and public renown to female figures. It is generally attributed to women a normative discourse that creates tension between the opposite poles of appearing and disappearing, speaking and silence, in ways that cannot be generally understood just as signs of male domination over “the women”. They should be primarily understood as a form of questioning the (social) production of political space and as kóinos, as “making common” actions. The connection between “the” feminine and the political space problems should be considered as emerging from the role played by gender and by the inclusive exclusion of women in a constitutive sociological dimension concerning the poliad shape of Athenian community.