Tan Men/Pale Women: Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt, a Comparative Approach

Amazon.com Price: $70.00 (as of 03/05/2019 05:47 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

One of the most obvious stylistic features of Athenian black-figure vase painting is using color to differentiate women from men. By comparing ancient art in Egypt and Greece, Tan Men/Pale Women uncovers the complex history in the back of using color to distinguish between genders, without focusing on race. Writer Mary Ann Eaverly considers the significance of this overlooked aspect of ancient art as an indicator of underlying societal ideals about the role and status of women. Any such commonplace method of gender differentiation proved to be a complex and multivalent method for expressing ideas about the relationship between women and men, a method flexible enough to encompass differing worldviews of Pharaonic Egypt and Archaic Greece. Does the standard indoor/outdoor explanation—women are light because they stay indoors—hold true in all places, or even, actually, in Greece? How “natural” is color-based gender differentiation, and, more critically, what relationship does color-based gender differentiation have to views about women and the construction of gender identity in the ancient societies that use it?

The depiction of dark men and light women can, as in Egypt, symbolize reconcilable opposites and, as in Greece, seemingly irreconcilable opposites where women are regarded as a distinct species from men. Eaverly challenges traditional ideas about color and gender in ancient Greek painting, reveals a very powerful strategy used by Egyptian artists to enhance pharaonic ideology and the role of women as complementary opposites to men, and demonstrates that relatively than representing an actual difference, skin color marks a society’s ideological view of the varied roles of male and female.


Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Asia » Japan » General » Tan Men/Pale Women: Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt, a Comparative Approach

Recent Products