Archaic Sculpture and Archaisms of Gender: Rethinking the “Brother and Sister Stele”

Abstract

The study of Archaic Greek sculpture has long been shaped by an axiomatic yet rarely articulated belief: that differences between figures carved in stone reflect biological differences between male and female bodies. I confront and contest this framework by reevaluating the “Brother and Sister Stele,” one of the most important surviving works of Archaic sculpture. Exposing previous misreadings of the monument’s imagery, I use it to model an alternative history of early Greek art, one that understands depicted bodies not as records of gender difference, but as precisely the kinds of cultural objects through which gender difference was imagined.