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Sponsored by the Women's Classical Caucus
Chiara Sulprizio (Independent Scholar) and Sarah Blake (York University), Organizers

The association of women with water runs deep in the ancient world. Women’s work, for example, often included fetching drinking water from wells and washing clothing in rivers or streams; women were frequently represented in art and literature near these sites (e.g., the royal women of Eleusis in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter; Nausikaa and her companions at the beach in the Odyssey; Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well at John 4: 5-15). Similarly, implements related to water use or consumption carried a gendered connotation in many contexts (e.g., loutrophoroi in Greek wedding and funeral rituals; the Jewish ritual bath or mikvah after menstruation). In mythological narrative, female figures were pervasively associated with water, and female sexuality was often conflated with the danger and volatility of the ocean, ponds and springs, or with the inability to understand or master these bodies of water (e.g., the thalassic birth of Aphrodite; Hylas and the Naiads; Scylla, Charybdis and the Sirens in the Odyssey; Isis’ tears and the flooding of the Nile; the nymph Juturna in the Aeneid; the Roman Camenae and the festival of Carmentalia). The correlation of women with wetness and moisture also figures prominently in Greek and Roman medical and philosophical texts (e.g. the Hippocratic corpus; Aristotle’s On the Parts of Animals). What was it that made ancient women so watery and wet?

This panel seeks to survey the relationship between women and water and to explore the many meanings generated by this relationship as it evolved in the visual, written and material record of ancient Greece and Rome. Why did these societies so strongly identify water with femininity, and why was sexuality such a pronounced aspect of this association? How did this gendered understanding of water and of the aquatic realm influence women’s cultural experiences and daily lives, as they gathered drinking water, offered sacrifice, bathed and nourished themselves? Does this association remain at all relevant to notions of gender difference in the modern world?

We are soliciting academic papers from scholars wishing to explore the artistic, literary, philosophical or archaeological links between women and water in antiquity. We welcome papers from a variety of theoretical approaches.

Abstracts of 500 to 800 words, suitable for a 15-20 minute presentation, should be sent by email attachment (PDF) to Ric Rader at richarderader@hotmail.com. All submitted abstracts will be judged anonymously. Please do not identify yourself in any way in the abstract itself. Please follow the formatting guidelines for individual abstracts that appear on the SCS website: http://apaclassics.org/annual-meeting/guidelines-authors-of-abstracts. All persons who submit abstracts must be SCS members in good standing, and all proposals must be received by March 1, 2015.