An Intersectional Approach to Theocritus, Idyll 15

Abstract

Theocritus's Adoniazusae (Idyll 15) has long been recognized as one of his most historically pertinent Idylls, but the complex social dynamics of the narrative frame warrant further investigation. Building on earlier feminist readings of the poem, this study pays careful attention to the characters' comments about ethnicity and gender in order to explore the intersection of these two categories. The concept of intersectionality arose as a means to critique judicial reasoning that relies on solitary, exclusive categorical identities. Crenshaw's foundational studies (1989, 1991) show that judicial decisions often handle race and gender in separation and isolation, and that this "single-axis" approach to identifying categories made it effectively impossible to contemplate the experience of women of color. By applying this method to Idyll 15, we can escape the limitations of the poem's Hellenocentric perspective and consider the poem in terms of the Egyptian gender norms with which it builds an implicit contrast. An intersectional reading of the poem acknowledges that such categories as Greek and Egyptian, women and man, cannot be treated in isolation; rather, they are co-determinative. The seeds of this way of thinking existed already in antiquity in Herodotus's famous ethnography of Egypt (Hist. 2.35–36), which employs an oppositional matrix to relate Egyptian and Hellenic gender norms. This passage remained a touchstone for ancient writers, and was likely familiar to Theocritus and his audience. Despite its clear ethnocentric limitations, Herodotus's account helps reveal the constitutive oppositions of gender and ethnicity that underlie Theocritus's poem. By contrasting the rigid gender roles of the Greek protagonists with the more adaptable gender roles of the native Egyptians, we can reveal a subtle critique of Greek gender itself.