ABSTRACT
It is rare that we who study past societies can claim any analytical advantage over colleagues who work in the present. But however much we do not and cannot know about a culture long dead, we have a panoramic view of social landscapes that those caught in the on-going flow of the same present as the people they study can never catch. The influence of Foucault’s writings on sexuality, especially The History of
Sexuality (1978-86), on subsequent studies of sexuality, gender and the discourses of power and oppression has been profound. In particular, Foucault has revolutionized the study of the social history of classical antiquity, where, with fifth-fourth century BC Athens, he ultimately decided to begin his investigations. Foucault’s intellectual framework is a maze in which a large amount of recent work on gender in classical antiquity is trapped. But every maze has a way out. Here I will argue that there are considerable difficulties with Foucault’s historical construction and contextualization of the discourses of sexuality and the implications of these discourses for both past societies and our own. This is not to say his contribution has been negligible; far from it. Foucault provides an analytical framework that can be expanded to explore the implications of sex and gender in the whole of social life. Foucault fashioned his analytical ‘techniques’ over a lifetime of archaeology,
geneology and ethics. This is grossly oversimplified, but archaeology (to maintain the metaphor) consists less of the systematic excavation of discourses than of remote sensing: of inferring the meanings of hidden landscapes of the mind by the lumps and bumps on the textual surface. Geneology is the progenesis of power in discourse: the uncomfortable kindred relation between claims to authority and the use of power. Ethics first emerges in Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality; its development as an analytical technique seems to be entangled with the major change in scope and design of his project. Ethics is best summed up by Foucault’s own phrase, ‘rapport à soi’; that is, the relationship of the self to itself and the concomitant creation of
moral systems. All these techniques have opened new directions in historical and cultural analysis. But the weakness of archaeology and geneology is that in both Foucault’s usage and other senses of the terms they are modes of enquiry founded in a past that has only a tenuous sense of the breadth and complexity of their present. Ethics, in contrast, collapses in on itself. The revelation that there is a reflexive
dimension to morality is an immensely valuable insight. But the exercise falters in the absence of the protean ‘others’ which are part of the self’s reflexive definition. Foucault produces a sophisticated history of ideas but ignores the complex ethnographic settings of these ideas. In the case of classical Greece (as laid out in The History of Sexuality, Volume 2) it is especially crucial that the reflexive self has been limited to an idealized male self – a limitation totally unjustified by the historical evidence. This kind of masculinist reflexivity underwrites and absorbs the masculine ideologies of the past as part of the process of living out those of the present. The dimension of enquiry I add to redress the balance could be called ethno-
graphy; that is, a consideration of the synchronic, simultaneous, changing contexts in which conflicting (often incompatible) discourses operate. Here I reevaluate sexuality as a part of personal and political identity through the social acts of constructing gender, whose meanings change with context. Being a man or being a woman, male or female, boy or girl does not always mean the same thing. Not that the Greek sources give us much positive assistance in such an exercise.
For specific reasons, all sorts of text from classical Greece are largely the products of a dominant masculine ideology. One can hardly blame Foucault for taking them literally. So do virtually all other scholars. I have tried to circumvent this problem by searching for the meanings of actions as well as ideologies, without delegating preferential constitutive status to either. I have also tried to avoid a mistake made by Foucault and others in working
with Greek material – that of construing the part for the whole. Even for ethnographers (in both a metaphorical and a practical sense) working in contemporary societies, not all contexts are accessible or are equally accessible. For ancient Greece only a limited number of contexts can be explored. Precisely because of the nature and context of the production of virtually all our sources, the touchstone of understanding is always the free, adult, male citizen. Hence discourses on power, love and life itself frequently take on the form of hierarchical definitions of ‘otherness’ in polar opposition to the pivotal pillar of society: the adult, free, male citizen. This illusion, partly a consequence of the production of the sources themselves, blurs our vision of the intricate detail of lived reality, if we allow ourselves to be swallowed up in it (Foxhall 1996). The ‘other’ of man is not only woman, but also slave, child, old man, god, beast
and barbarian. But what is the ‘other’ of woman? For Foucault, she has no ‘other’; only male selves are admissible in his analysis, and he never questions whether women complied with this negation of female selves. It is indeed harder to perceive woman as a first element from the texts alone. So, for example, women are never the starting point or focal person for defining an ankhisteia – which is the formally
structured bilateral kindred that children of first cousins used to determine inheritance and funerary obligations. In anthropological terms a woman can never formally be ‘ego’, because ‘significant’ kinship networks were seen to link men. Nonetheless, women were essential for connecting the ankhisteia together.
Indeed, it could not work without them and frequently female links were chosen as a means of emphasizing relationships between men who had no male link. Moreover, there were alternative social and kinship structures, which operated in particular contexts. These were just as real in people’s lives as those governed by the ideology of the adult male citizen. What is interesting is that they are not openly expressed in the texts. But if we start instead from the viewpoint that a number of significant aspects of social life were governed by feminine ideologies, an entirely new set of contemporary and simultaneous contexts is opened up in an ethnographic way.1
