Kitchen and Cosmos: Chorus, Gender, and Politics in Aristophanes' Ekklesiazusai (Assembly Women)

Abstract

This paper presents a re-reading of Aristophanes’s comedy Ekklesiazusai (Assembly Women). It shows that this play exhibits the aporias of the binary gender order, which evolved in classical fifth-century Athens, along with other dualisms typical of the period, such as the opposition of pólis and oíkos. The paper argues that Aristophanes negotiates these dualisms against the background of changing epistemological conditions of the fifth century, i. e. the establishment of the “principle of bivalence”. From the perspective of theater and literary history, this development made the chorus increasingly unrecognizable, since it was primarily a figure of non-binary (and also cosmological) relations. The chorus becomes newly legible today precisely where dualisms erode.