ABSTRACT
If any common point emerges from all of the papers in this volume, it is the complexity of the process by which women and men are or were inserted into a social order. Representation reveals this complexity on two levels: firstly, as it shows us the many ways of marking gender on or as body and thus visually constructing or reproducing social identities, and, secondly, as it forces us once more into humility before the problematic relationship of images and social practices. Granted that making images is one social practice among many; nevertheless, what the images tell us is how rarely they directly reflect institutions and behaviors. The enduring puzzle of the Parthenon’s iconography (here discussed by John Younger, pp. 120-53), like the struggle to understand the meanings and functions of the Hermaphrodite statue (see here Aileen Ajootian’s essay, pp. 220-42), points up the need for gender-conscious interpretation while, at the same time, making evident the resistance of the monument to any simple equation of image and social practice. The job of representation, if we can call it that, is to reconfigure the world; in the process it may help to challenge or to reproduce social arrangements in such way as to make institutions and practices seem completely natural, so inevitable and universal that they couldn’t possibly need any help at all.
