Now You See Her, Now You Don’t: Female Gender and Its Contexts at Teotihuacan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores the confounding issue of female-gendered images at Teotihuacan. Figures clad in female-gendered clothing appear within Teotihuacan’s most prominent and luxurious arts. Some of the largest sculptures and most precious stone figures are female, and these sculptural images were recovered from highly symbolic, civic spaces. Similarly, females appear frequently among the humbler figurines of the city, suggesting that women played important and prominent roles in Teotihuacan’s domestic and public realms. While females regularly appear within Teotihuacan’s three-dimensional art, curiously, their presence within the two-dimensional arts of murals and ceramics are decidedly less frequent. By examining the presence of women in various art media and contexts at Teotihuacan, a case will be made for both their public, and potentially political, prominence but also their possible suppression in some forms of civic activities. Through an examination of sculpture, figurines, murals, and stuccoed ceramics, the tensions between women holding important civic roles versus state efforts to codify proper gender roles may be better comprehended. In exploring these various art media, attention will be given not only to what is depicted, but also what is not, thereby resulting in a better understanding of Teotihuacan’s socially constructed ideals of gender.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36329.0