Images of Aphrodite, Sexual Desire, and the 'Chilly Climate' of Classical Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "What Have You Done For Us Lately?: Discrimination, Harassment, and Chilly Climate in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since 1792, nine catalogues of surviving ancient Roman replicas of the Knidian Aphrodite—the first monumental image of an unclothed woman in Western art—have been compiled. During this time, the number of known ancient replicas has increased by two orders of magnitude, yet analyses of this corpus have not changed. Overwhelmingly, elite, cis-gendered, heterosexual men of central or northern European origins have employed connoisseurial methodologies to analyze these images, advancing formalist arguments that consistently elevate the same few images above hundreds of others. Such analyses inspect the bodies that these images show, rank these images by their bodies’ perceived sexual desirability, and preferentially analyze the subset of images that show more sexually desirable bodies. By contrast, this paper’s author begins his analysis from a different standpoint—that of a cis-gendered, multi-ethnic, gay man—and reframes the study of this corpus through social archaeology and anthropological approaches to images. Two conclusions emerge. First, modern scholarly interpretations premised on the sexual desirability of these images’ bodies are the products of a longstanding "chilly climate" in classical archaeology. Second, analyses from different standpoints can produce more nuanced and reflexive interpretations of the past and bring about disciplinary transformation in the present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• What Have You Done For Us Lately?: Discrimination, Harassment, and Chilly Climate in Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24170