Allison Glazebrook. Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts.

Abstract

Allison Glazebrook’s monograph, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts, is the product of the author’s expertise on sexual laborers in ancient Athens. The book comes at a time when several monographs dedicated to sexual labor have appeared, but it carves a notable space for itself in the literature. Glazebrook distinguishes her work from that of, for example, Konstantinos Kapparis and Edward Cohen, both by topic and form. She is not interested in writing “a social history of sexual labor” (5) but rather in using the figure of the male and female sex laborer in forensic oratory as a means for exploring Athenian ideas and attitudes on gender, the body, the household, and citizenship. Counting herself among historians such as Josiah Ober and Matthew Christ, she differentiates her method by eschewing the tendency to mine the orators for historical data at the expense of the text’s literary character. Glazebrook “is interested in how speakers manipulate the attitudes and practices in their discourses around sexual labor to cement and problematize social and civic boundaries” (4). Thus, she embraces the literary quality of the texts in the service of revealing Athenian ideology. To do so, each chapter treats a single court speech holistically. As opposed to the clever and privileged hetaira of other genres, oratory presents a broad range of sex laborer types that threaten the stability of the household and the city. Her readings make use of the anxieties revealed by the orators to shine a light on broader questions of, for instance, women’s status and pederasty.