Gynaikokratia and the Problem of Politics as Rule in Aristophane’s Ecclesiazusae

• In Event: Women In and Out of Power

Abstract

This paper uses Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae to explore the theme of rule by women as a way to reflect on the received gendered relations between public, private, and politics. Ecclesiazusae describes a female takeover of the Athenian government organized during a women-only religious festival, and the radical political reforms that followed. I contend that Ecclesiazusae, along with other Aristophanes’ comedies like Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae, opens up comparisons and relations between the ruling male public of the Assembly and the corresponding female ones of the religious festivals, allowing for an exploration not just of women’s lives outside of the oikos, but especially of their threatening political potential which surfaces time and again throughout Greek literature. In following this, I read Aristophanes’ play as offering a figuration of a lost tradition of rule and regime type, that of gynaikokratia (rule by women), which invites us to reconsider the terms according to which publicity, politics, authority, and rule were and are related. In doing so, I wish to problematize the boundaries that separate public from private and unsettle definitions that rely on the assumption that politics as publicity always already means maleness and rule. By dedicating renewed attention to gynaikokratia, I propose to open up new feminist forms of politics that can go beyond mere inclusion in a male political and public realm: rather, I wish to offer an exploration of alternate traditions of the public and new ways to think about what it means to rule and what imaginations of women ruling might offer for the transformation of our own society.

Author

• Silvia Fedi, University of Chicago