Articles with keyword: ancient tragedy

“THE FEMALE BODY AS A MEANS OF EXPRESSION OF THE RELATION
BETWEEN THE TWO SEXES IN ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDY”
Maria Christina Zikoudi zikoudimx@gmail.com

ELECTRYONE 

2022
Volume 8, Issue 2

 | pp.

32-47

Abstract:

This article examines the physicality of the female characters in the tragedies of Medea, Hecuba, Andromache and Trojan Women by Euripides. Using the theories of performativity by Judith Butler as a key, the research seeks to explore how female physical behavior on stage could resonate elements about their performativity of gender in the Athenian society of the fifth century. Through a recording of references on the female body and after drawing parallels with the according speeches of the characters, a very fierce potential of disavowing the Athenian societal norms arises for the tragic heroines. The female figures manage to accept and utilize the social prescriptions in their favor in order to achieve some control over their lives. In this way, they meticulously employ their consciousness and they transform their passive adherence to males into a powerful abnegating means of manipulating them. Their abnegation patterns fall into eight categories for the purposes of organizing the way females produce their physicality and perform their gender. These patterns are submission, acceptance, supplication, subversion, indulgence, death, imprisonment and reproductive power.