Plato, feminist philosophy, and the representation of culture: Butler, Irigaray, and the embodied subjectivity of ancient women

This paper seeks first to interrogate the ways in which two contemporary feminist thinkers (Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray) have appropriated and reformulated a fundamental principle of pre-modern thinking about human action and conduct (Plato’s philosophy of Forms). I will argue that any view on issues of essentialist and constructivist social history which Butler and Irigaray inadvertently raise must first accommodate a thoroughgoing presentation of all available evidence. The second half of this paper explores the ways in which specific representations of female identity—the gravestone of two citizens of the late-republican city of Rome (CIL 6/3.18524) and the graffito of a Roman “poetess” in the epigraphic environment of early-imperial Pompeii (CIL 4.5296)—engender (in many senses) exactly the kinds of tensions and ambiguities which Butler and Irigaray bring to bear on Plato’s philosophical strategies. What I hope to illustrate is two-fold: a practical method of, and the critical need for, integrating post-modern theoretical standpoints on sex/gender issues with the representational discourses of the ancient world.