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The ‘Classics and the new faces of feminism’

international ‘sandpit’ at the Institute of Classical Studies opened by challenging us to think about whether and how we could/should incorporate in our teaching and research the achievements of ‘3rd wave feminism’.

Barbara Gold, Hamilton College:’Today we accept gender, sexuality, narrative theory and intertextuality as inseparable from our reading of texts but are (most of us) so informed by such approaches that we cannot conceive of a scholarly analysis or pedagogy that does not engage with one or more theoretical approaches? Today we no longer have to explain (to most people at least) that “sex,” “gender” and “sexuality” are socially-constructed categories, that they are performative and evolving, and that these elusive categories need to be seen in a grid intersecting with other constructed categories like class or race (an often elided or ignored category)?’

Some answers:

*Sneak it everywhere into the curriculum and strategic conversations

*Fight for the reintroduction of gender into modules

*Tackle citation rings – cite and use female/feminist authors, scholars, translators

*Tackle the canon: other authors, genres, language forms? (eg, Medieval authors who wrote ‘feminine Latin’ , like Heloise, Hildegard of Bingen….)

*Resist resistance – gender issues are so last century! Caesar’s Gallic wars not interstitial spaces for us!

 

 

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