Becoming a resisting reader : enacting and enabling a feminist reading of women in Livy

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2011
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en_US
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Abstract
In Rescuing Creusa: New Methodological Approaches to Women in Antiquity both Marilyn Skinner and Phyllis Culham struggle with what it means to be a feminist scholar of classical sources. The problems faced by a feminist scholar of the classics are daunting and manifold. The classical texts we read are misogynistic, the societies we study are patriarchal and the scholarly framework and critical methodologies that are most widely accepted either cannot or choose not to see women and female characters in their own right. Both women, while giving credit where it’s due, struggle with the structure and sustainability of the broad survey work feminist scholars have tried to do. The traditional methods cannot work for the study of women in ancient society and classical literature because, while trying to adhere to the innately empiricist bias in mainstream scholarship, feminist scholars are actually forced to rely more on speculation. If we can get scholarship to value literature as a truly valid, if not comprehensive, source then feminist textual readings, close literary analysis in the most traditional sense, can have a chance of reinvigorating feminist scholarship. While literature cannot present us with the factual truth that historians usually crave, it can provide invaluable insight. We must then become Judith Fetterly’s resisting reader; we must appreciate the text, approach it with respect and then, only then, should we provide a critical and informed evaluation of the text as it relates to women and feminism.
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