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.