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Seminar Sign-Up

The 2021 annual meeting will feature a seminar-style paper session for which the organizers are requesting sign up in advance.

Click on the link for the sign up form:

See below for more details about this seminar:

Believing Ancient Women: A Feminist Epistemology for Greece and Rome (Organized by Mary Hamil Gilbert, Birmingham Southern College, and Megan Elena Bowen, University of Montana)

Wednesday January 6, 2021, 9am-12pm CST

This seminar is open to 50 annual meeting participants. In admitting attendees to this session at its scheduled time, the organizers will give priority to those who have signed up for the seminar beforehand. The organizers will circulate papers to all those who have signed up.

Seminar Description and Speakers:

Over the past few years women who speak out about abuse have been increasingly visible in the United States. An extensive feminist epistemological literature presaged the #metoo movement. Feminist epistemologists have long questioned how concepts like knowledge, belief, rationality, objectivity, and evidence have been constructed to exclude and pathologize women’s experiences (cf. Code; Jaggar; Bordo; Harding; Solomon). For instance, Miranda Fricker pioneered a theory of epistemic injustice to explore issues of unfairness related to testimony (see also hooks; Allen; Pohlhaus; Medina; Chapleau et al.), and psychiatrist Patricia Evans developed a method to interrogate how abusers withhold, undermine, and trivialize information (i.e. gaslighting, see also Abramson; McKinnon; Rollero & Tartaglia). More recently, scholars like Linda Alcoff and Kate Manne have explored the backlash to the #metoo movement. This seminar proposes to apply these and other feminist epistemological tools to the ancient world to (re)consider how epistemic authority is gendered in Greek and Roman societies and their reception.

Believing Ancient Women: A Feminist Epistemology for Greece and Rome (Organized by Mary Hamil Gilbert, Birmingham Southern College, and Megan Elena Bowen, University of Montana)

Mary Hamil Gilbert (Birmingham Southern College)

Gendering Knowledge and Experience in Prometheus Bound

Edith G. Nally (University of Missouri-Kansas City)

Bodies of Knowledge: Women's Reproductive Expertise in Plato

Fiona McHardy (University of Roehampton)

Women's Complaints about Violence at Athens: Zobia and Aristogeiton

Serena S. Witzke (Wesleyan University)

Plautus' Truculentus and Terence's Hecyra: Patriarchal Authority and Women's Truth

Megan Elena Bowen (University of Montana)

Blaming Ovid's Leucothoe: The Role of Rape Myths in a Mythological Rape

Anise K. Strong (Western Michigan University)

"Grey" Rape on the Silver Screen: Rape & Questionable Consent in Mass Media about the Ancient World

To sign up for this seminar, please fill out this form by December 1, 2020.