Joan Connelly has a new book out about the role of priestesses in ancient Greece. James Davidson's is not a fan:

For an upbeat vision seems to mean "women like us", "women" meaning "decent women", and "like us" meaning "like modern Western women", wise-cracking, independent, opinionated, stylishly dressed. That means that a lot of women in the modern and in the ancient world are not welcome at this cheerleaders’ party. It is a door policy that becomes especially obvious when Connelly nose-holdingly deigns to touch upon the religious role of the girls who are less than fully decent, the courtesans: "A third area of popular preoccupation merits only the briefest mention. This is the 'myth' of Greek priestesses in the service of sacred prostitution, for which there is no firm evidence". In fact, a lot of evidence, constantly added to, has been adduced to confirm that there were indeed some rather direct links between prostitutes, courtesans and the sacred in the Greek world...

The book opens with a famous image from the inside of a drinking-cup, of a woman carrying a sacrificial basket pouring a libation at a flaming altar. Connelly uses her as a launchpad for discussion of "problems of signification" and the need to be "open to signifiers that have previously gone unrecognized". She neglects to mention that the incense-burner behind the woman is a pretty strong signifier for one particular cult, that of Aphrodite, which may help to explain the scene on the other side of the cup, which likewise passes without mention: men offering bags of money to courtesans and "flute-girls". The cultural bias here is the assumption that sex and the sacred do not mix.

Page Dubois criticizes Foucault on similar grounds, suggesting that "he's not interested in gender, he does not see women in ancient Greece except as wives in the household, another occasion for the master's self-mastery." But the genuine concern of that essay - her appropriation of Foucault's historiography - is perhaps even more relevant to this debate. She wants to use Foucault to warn against the familiarization of ancient Greece: "his work lays the ground for the assumption that life in [Sappho's] world was different, that Sappho's culture was... different from our own." She's more specifically concerned about his on women that ends up "producing woman as a category for ourselves, for ourselves to inhabit as we continually produce it in discourse". The risk now appears to be that academics like Connelly, in an attempt to mine the ancient world for positive role models that contemporary women can look towards, imposes both models and roles on ancient women.

References:
* Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton University Press, 2007.
* How to be a modern goddess
* duBois, Page. Sappho Is Burning. University Of Chicago Press, 1997.

Previously:
* Sigmund Freud Head Lollipops. Yes, Really.
* Mickey Avalon Embraces Rock And Roll Lifestyle With Something Less Than Ironic Distance [Video]
* Cog Sci Blog Roundup