Ancient Bodies, Contemporary Selves: Reading Gender in Late Antique Christian AsceticismSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference PortalThe National Endowment for the HumanitiesThe International Balzan Prize FoundationDavid A. Michelsoncbsc_adminRecord added to Zotero bycbsc_adminSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portalhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/87K2Z2RB/tei
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CREATED: This bibl record was autogenerated from a Zotero record.Kathryn SummerDrabinskiAncient Bodies, Contemporary Selves: Reading Gender in Late Antique Christian Asceticismhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/87K2Z2RBhttps://www.zotero.org/groups/a_comprehensive_bibliography_on_syriac_studies/items/87K2Z2RBhttps://www.zotero.org/groups/4861694/items/87K2Z2RB2006This dissertation explores the role of gender and sexuality in the transforming ethical subject in the turn from classical to Christian ethics in late antiquity. I analyze Michel Foucault's genealogy of ethics by taking as central the question of the role of gender in the constitution of the ancient subject in order to argue that gender is itself a central historical structure of subject formation. Foucault does not see gender as fundamentally part of the 'stuff' of things, rendering gender difference an incidental part of subjectivity, and making gender categories immune to transformation. This dissertation upsets this tendency in Foucault's work and foregrounds the role of gender difference in the making of ascetic subjects. Central to this inquiry are questions about the elaboration of masculinity and femininity as Christian communities redefined self, community, and nation in the face of persistent pagan ethics. The dissertation examines these larger questions through an analysis of the hagiographical works of Theodoret of Cyrrhus and the elaboration of gendered subjectivities found therein.
Although the project is historical in nature, it is also concerned with the status of contemporary ethics, subjectivity and selfhood as it reads the past as itself a history of the present: who are we, how did we come to be this way, and how might we be differently? Taking redefinitions of gender as central to our understanding of subjectivity across time and space, I ask how we might think our present selves differently and imagine new ways of being in the future. This feminist intervention into the history of subjectivity demands a rethinking of the Western subject as constituted by and constitutive of gender. I begin by developing a feminist genealogical method and then use this method to explore the varied production of gendered subjectivities in ascetic practice generally, and then more specifically in hagiographies of male and then female ascetics. The dissertation ends with a discussion of the ways in which this study of late antique holy figures and the feminist methodology I employ here can be used to analyze contemporary modes of self-making and subjectivity and the political and ethical possibilities that arise from this intellectual practice.
Drabinski, Kathryn Summer. “Ancient Bodies, Contemporary Selves: Reading Gender in Late Antique Christian Asceticism.” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of California, Berkeley, 2006.
Kathryn Summer Drabinski, Ancient Bodies, Contemporary Selves: Reading Gender in Late Antique Christian Asceticism (Ph.D. dissertation, The University of California, Berkeley, 2006).IV-VII CETheodoret of CyrusV CEasceticismgenderhagiographysexualitywomen