Women of Babylon

Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia

Zainab Bahrani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134601400
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Representations of sexual difference (whether visual or textual) have become an area of much theoretical concern and investigation in recent feminist scholarship. Yet although a wide range of relevant evidence survives from the ancient Near East, it has been exceptional for those studying women in the ancient world to stray outside the traditional bounds of Greece and Rome.
Women of Babylon is a much-needed historical/art historical study that investigates the concepts of femininity which prevailed in Assyro-Babylonian society. Zainab Bahrani's detailed analysis of how the culture of ancient Mesopotamia defined sexuality and gender roles both in, and through, representation is enhanced by a rich selection of visual material extending from 6500 BC - 1891 AD. Professor Bahrani also investigates the ways in which women of the ancient Near East have been perceived in classical scholarship up to the nineteenth century.

1

WOMEN/SEX/GENDER

Women’s history and the ancient Near East

Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity … Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem – those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply – you are yourselves the problem.

(Freud 1964: 113)

What is women’s history? To begin this book with such a question a quarter-century after the establishment of women’s studies as an institutionalised academic discipline may seem superfluous. It may seem obvious to any reader that women’s history is about studying women in historical accounts, a record of women’s activities parallel to those of men’s. Some, more academically inclined readers would surely point out that women’s history, per se, is no longer a discrete subdisciplinary area of investigation, because it has become clear by now that broader questions of gender are at issue in the study of women in history, or indeed in contemporary societies. The question I begin with merits some attention nevertheless, since not only is the enterprise of women’s history and its relation to antiquity still unclear, but also neither the gender category ‘Woman’ nor the term ‘History’ is unproblematic. Both words, as we utilise them in the study of antiquity, require some clarification. And the juxtaposition of the two terms into a disciplinary subdivision, furthermore, has a number of important implications for the field of ancient history that need to be brought to light and scrutinised. For this reason, I would like to begin by installing a set of enframing questions in order to introduce the issues of sex/gender and feminine subjectivity into the general discussion of women in history, as well as into analyses of ancient visual representation. At the same time, I shall introduce representation as a working theoretical concept into the discussions of sex and gender, as well as into the processes of writing history. The approach I propose to take is in effect an intersection of feminist and postmodern concerns, and historical, art historical, and archaeological questions. It is therefore a call for interdisciplinarity not only in the perusal of archives and data traditionally allocated to one area of scholarly expertise or another, but also an integral methodological interdisciplinarity; an interdisciplinarity that rather than simply borrowing methods from one area of specialisation to the next, and ‘applying’ them as an organisational grid to the material at hand, incorporates their theoretical concerns and insights.

How do we retrieve knowledge regarding women in a past culture? There are two basic areas of the construction of such knowledge that we need to clarify. One is encompassed by epistemology, including areas such as historicity, historical documentation, archaeological context, and scholarly context or subjectivity, issues of interpretation and translation, ideology, and reception, and how all of these work together in the production of knowledge. The second is ontology, which is the area of the fundamental notions with which we work: woman, man, sex, gender, the Gaze, difference, sexuality, eroticism, and even sight. The form that this epistemic/ontological regime takes in the study of antiquity is what is at issue here. I therefore envision this project as a latticework of sorts, where the meeting points as well as the interstices of the main areas of focus, woman, history, gender, and representation, are interdependent and work together in the creation of meaning. As a preliminary step, I shall present some working definitions here in a basic layout of the history of women’s studies and feminist scholarship. All of the fundamental working notions and terminology presented in this section and their analyses will be developed further, and their theoretical implications unpacked throughout the book in relation to the specific focal points of the chapters. The initial discussion presented here is thus an introduction to the disciplinary structure and theoretical parameters of feminist scholarship, and to contemporary feminist ideas currently circulating in the academy.

Women’s history

Women’s history has been taken to refer to a narrative of the acts of women within the larger narrative of world history, or human history, the latter being presumably – by definition – a history of men. Women’s history is therefore often put forth as a parallel and oppositional history to the androcentric one. At times, women’s history has simply been taken to mean any historical approach or methodology whatsoever as long as it is written or taught by female scholars. Perhaps most frequently, women’s history is taken to mean historical investigations that concern themselves with what are conceived of as being intrinsically or essentially female preoccupations in history: reproduction, child-rearing, sexuality, emotionality, domestic spaces and economies, minor craft working, and so on. Basically this division and definition of essentially female activity amounts to the positioning of women in the private sphere of domesticity and family, and men into the public sphere of work and polity. A dominant explanation for this historical allocation of women to the domestic sphere is that they are ‘naturally’ (i.e. biologically) suited to these occupations, and thus this sexual division of historical concerns is seen as a natural division of labour and occupations that can be projected back in time unproblematically. The reason that such a categorisation of an intrinsic women’s realm is a powerful axiom of historical scholarship is that we take the categories of woman and man as self-evident. We take them as biological subdivisions of sex that naturally determine human behaviour. However, as we shall see, the very notion that biology is what underwrites the definition of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ is in itself historically defined and variable. It is certainly not absolute or universal as a means of viewing a sexual world order. Conceptions of biological difference vary both across cultures and within cultures across time. Thus we are always dealing with historically specific forms of masculinity or femininity, as well as with other notions of individuality and identity.

In the narrative historical accounts of the progress of civilisation from antiquity to the present day, women’s history has often come to mean a unilinear progression of women as a coherent and definable group beginning with ancient Greece and culminating in Western modernity. Consequently, women’s history as ancient history has been mostly limited to Classical antiquity. This situation is no doubt partly due to Euro-centric notions of history as the proper domain of the West, with the rest of the world merely peripheral to what is construed as the real historical development. But this state of affairs is not simply a result of exclusionary tactics on the part of Classical scholars. Classicists have been engaged with issues of gender and sexuality since the late 1960s, and many have successfully incorporated postmodern, feminist, and psychoanalytic theories, and even the very recent field of queer theory developed during the 1990s.¹ Near Eastern scholars, on the other hand, have been far more conservative in their willingness to delve into other areas of the humanities and social sciences, especially where sex-gender is concerned. Few have worked on these issues, even though the textual record, the visual arts, and the archaeological data pertaining to gender and sexuality are far from scarce. The study of gender in Pharaonic Egypt is in a slightly better condition than other areas of the Near East, but even in this area there has been little interest in the recent developments of historical criticism or theories of gender. In contrast, Classical history and archaeology, often accused of conservatism by those working outside the Western tradition, have been at the forefront of current theoretical developments in ancient studies, leaving Near Eastern scholarship far behind. The resulting academic situation is that when any reference is made to women, gender or sexuality in antiquity the assumption is that it is a reference to Classical antiquity. At best, examples of the plight of Near Eastern women (usually presented in a negative light) are mentioned for comparative purposes in women’s histories focused on Greece and Rome.

All of the definitions of women’s history briefly outlined above are clearly fraught with layers of preconceptions. These preconceptions, contemporary feminist criticism would argue, derive out of a hegemonic androcentric or patriarchal cultural ordering itself. In other words, to track what are considered to be essential female concerns in the historical record is to adhere to a priori notions not only of what is intrinsically female, but also of what constitutes the proper historical record, and thus to perpetuate the unilinear narrative of progress which is both androcentric and Euro-centric. Against such naturalistic or essentialising conceptions of sexual divisions, some feminists have argued that the division between public and private is in itself a gendered structure in which women and men come to be identified with differing spaces and activities and thus also certain ethics and values. Furthermore, to conceive of women’s history as anything at all as long as it is written by female scholars assumes that, essentially, women must be the same, and can think and write for all women en masse, and consequently, that all men are definable as a coherent and undifferentiated group. Finally, the notion of Western civilisation as central to world history has been seen by some feminists as a notion that is linked to an androcentric positioning of autonomous Western Man as the chief agent of that history. Contemporary feminism is therefore sensitive to postcolonial critiques of racial and colonialist oppressions that are not limited to bodily oppression and territorial colonisation, but concerned with the colonisation of the normative structures of scholarship itself.

The view that women are simply a minor element in what is in effect conceived of as ‘the real history of mankind’ is by now more or less defunct in the academy. Feminist criticism is today neither new nor novel as a theoretical approach in the fields of history, art history, or archaeology. Outside the ancient Near East, women’s studies, theories of gender, and feminist criticism have had a tremendous impact on the field of antiquity in recent years, especially among theoretically inclined scholars, and there is a steady and growing interest in these approaches that is beginning to have an effect even on the practitioners of a more traditional scholarship. Yet there is still a great deal of confusion in the air regarding these methodologies. The study of women, it is often assumed, is part of the larger project of social history. Few social historians or Marxist historians, however, would be willing to allow feminist concerns to intrude into a purer form of class-based analysis of society.² Instead, feminist critique is often seen as a marginal – if necessary – concern. Such an attitude, liberal as it may be, misses the point of feminist theory, which is that the matrix of sexual difference is integral to the structuring of societies. To use Marxist terms, sexual difference cannot be allocated to an epiphenomenal level of superstructure. Thus, sex/gender, or the position of women in society, cannot be analysed as a side issue, according to an empirical positivist methodology. Often, practitioners of ancient Near Eastern studies assume that to study women in the historical or archaeological record is the same as studying any other given object: one amasses the information, catalogues every extant mention of this object, records data from archaeological contexts, and the record is then complete, tidy, and accurate. The very different and complex nature of amassing such information when the object of study is ‘Woman’ is not usually confronted, or indeed even recognised. Contemporary feminist history, on the other hand, is concerned with this problematic of accessing ‘Woman’ in any historical account. Rather than simply finding ‘Woman’ in history, it attempts to find what ‘Woman’ means in that historical record.

Feminist criticism

Feminist criticism or theory, the second area I wish to discuss here, is in even greater need of elucidation than the definitions of women’s history. The misunderstanding and definitions of the latter are perhaps all a result of androcentric norms, and essentialising conceptions of women and men as gender categories. Misunderstandings of feminist theory, on the other hand, are not as easily set straight. Confusion has arisen even among self-proclaimed practitioners of feminist theory, sometimes leading to hostile disagreements regarding what ‘real’ feminist critique entails. Often such debates seem to assume a universal and monolithic method which all should follow faithfully as if it were a set of directions in a scientific formula. Feminist theory, however, is neither static nor is it to be reduced to one ‘correct’ method. A number of feminist approaches have been developed since the 1960s, and these are usually described as a series of ‘waves’ of scholarship. The waves began in the earliest feminist work, with the project of finding women in the historical record (described above), and soon began to concentrate on defining the means by which women are oppressed at particular historical moments, and in specific societies. In recent years, these interests have been superseded by a more theoretically based consideration of sex and gender as cultural constructs, and by theories of subjectivity and its relationship to power. I shall define what are conceived to be the three main waves, as well as discussing the newly emerging related areas of queer theory and masculinist theory. For my own purposes in this book, I shall point out at the outset that I work here with the belief that sex and gender are culturally constructed; that is, that they are socially determined discursive constructions that take on the qualities of the natural. My own project will be to formulate an account of gender in Mesopotamian antiquity as a complex construction specific to its socio-historical context. By focusing on visual and textual representations, my aim is to draw attention to the workings of difference and its articulation within discourse, rather than to retrieve the reality of the daily lives of women or men. As such, the theoretical base of this study is in Third Wave feminism, or postfeminism as it is sometimes labelled, but I shall argue that even Third Wave feminist theory still has limitations when applied to Near Eastern antiquity, limitations that indicate a need to move beyond a given set of ‘correct’ directions that are developed in the context of modernity and postmodernity and to forge methods that are informed by feminist, archaeological theories and historical criticism.

The question of theory

When feminist theory is discussed the inevitable question of the value of ‘doing theory’ is raised. Those who oppose theoretical approaches of any kind naturally consider feminist theory to be equally unproductive, biased, and misguided. However, as Terry Eagleton so aptly puts it, ‘hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people’s theories and an oblivion of one’s own’ (Eagleton 1983: 7). When we speak of a ‘traditional approach’ as opposed to a ‘theoretical approach’, we are in fact usually speaking of an opposition between positivism with its reliance on early modern epistemologies and, on the other hand, postmodern scholarship with its questioning of earlier forms of knowledge. Even processual archaeology, which is not a postmodern approach but a methodology grounded in structuralism, a late modernist theory, is still viewed with suspicion by ‘traditionalists’. In archaeology and ancient history the two camps are often more baffled by one another rather than actually hostile. Part of the problem here is that those who stand on the theory side of the fence have sometimes been slow to explain their own approaches to those who oppose them. This reluctance to clarify methods and to unpack critical language has led to a great many misunderstandings, including, no less, among the self-proclaimed practitioners of theory themselves. Even the term ‘postmodern’ is a point of great confusion for many, who seem to assume that it is ‘a theory’. It is perhaps better described as a Zeitgeist in which a scepticism has arisen in the midst of knowledge, a scepticism leading to numerous theories, many of which can be, and are often, in opposition to one another (e.g. postmodern pragmatist philosophy and deconstruction). However, they all have the similar stance that all knowledges are socially constructed, and that making distinctions between the natural and the cultural whether it is the sex/gender distinction which is at issue or the truth claims of other areas of knowledge is not as clear cut or as simple as it may seem at first.³

Conversely, the resistance to theory on the part of resolute traditionalists is often more like a fear than a scholarly position. Rather than arguing against a theoretical stance, such traditionalists will often dismiss it as ‘jargon’ and decree it non-scholarship. There is no doubt that the difficulty of the majority of the primary theoretical texts leads to this resistance to reading theory, but difficulty of texts is not usually enough to deter scholars from their task. Added to this inevitable struggle with the complexity of the texts is the disillusion to which such readings finally lead. Reading theory is not a rewarding process that provides immediate gratification because it in fact works towards a constant undoing of the premisses on which our knowledge has been based. As Jonathan Culler argues, ‘the intimidation we feel when confronted with discourses we do not know or understand is inseparable from the possibility of new understanding’ (Culler 1994: 17). The undoing of such premisses of knowledge is therefore an important and valuable aspect of understanding how we create knowledge itself. With regard to Near Eastern antiquity this is particularly valuable because we are dealing with an extreme temporal and spatial otherness at the same time. Any study of the Near Eastern past is hampered at the start by a number of preconceptions that have long since become embedded into the discourse as scientific or empirical facts. Thus nineteenth-century Orientalist definitions of the ancient Orient as violent, despotic, sexually unrestrained, and depraved, or conversely and paradoxically conservative and repressed, often trickle down into contemporary scholarship without so much as the most cursory questions regarding how such knowledge has been acquired, and I shall cite such examples in the following chapters. A theoretically informed scholarship is therefore long overdue and (one might even say) of dire necessity in this field. Theory is therefore not an approach that a scholar might choose in place of a (purported) objective fact-based scholarship. The latter is already dependent on unstated beliefs and models that are taken as commonsensical and thereby requiring neither definition nor explanation. In other words, in rejecting ‘theory’, positivist scholars have been either unable or unwilling to explain what they believe history consists of, or how it is retrieved. Instead, they argue that it is self-evident. The theoretical innovations of poststructuralism and postprocessual archaeology are still viewed with suspicion, and often disparaged as illegitimate, non-objective methods. Yet, by taking on philosophical questions that concern such things as interpretation, ideology, and rhetoric, these approaches provide valuable insights for understanding the processes of history.⁴

The other, quite common, charge levelled against postmodern theories is that they perpetrate a mindless relativism of interpretation which is politically dangerous. This is a charge particularly made against reception theory and deconstruction by scholars who, one can only conclude, have not actually read the theoretical and philosophical works in question. As Richard Rorty puts it:

‘Relativism’ is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as any other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called ‘relativists’ are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than they had been thought.⁵

(Rorty 1982: 166)

A similar sentiment is expressed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:

Deconstruction does not say there is no subject, there is no truth, there is no history. It simply questions the privileging of identity so that someone is believed to have the truth. It is not the exposure of error. It is constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced.

(Spivak 1996: 27)

The point of postmodern theories such as deconstruction is not that all interpretations are equally good, but that all knowledge is necessarily a construction. On this view then, contemporary feminist theory is not a method of looking at history from ‘a female point of view’ equivalent and parallel to a male view, nor is it a lamentation over the marginalisation of women in historical accounts. It is a theoretical stance based on the belief that all knowledges, including those that define the body, sexuality and normative gender roles are produced rather than found by scholarship.

Charting feminist scholarship

The feminist movement is generally seen as consisting of three developmental waves, although there is little consensus as to how these waves are to be defined or delimited one from the ot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: women of Babylon – gender and representation in Mesopotamia
• 1 Women/sex/gender: women’s history and the ancient Near East
• 2 Envisioning difference: femininity and representation
• 3 The metaphorics of the body: nudity, the goddess, and the Gaze
• 4 That obscure object of desire: nudity, fetishism, and the female body
• 5 Priestess and princess: patronage, portraiture, identity
• 6 A woman’s place: femininity in narrative art
• 7 Ishtar: the embodiment of tropes
• 8 Babylonian women in the Orientalist imagination
• Notes
• Annotated bibliography
• References
• Index