Kinship and Truth in Ancient Greece

Emanuela Bianchi
Thursday, April 17th 2025
4:30pm - 7:00pm
Goldwin Smith G22
Reception in the History of Art & Visual Studies Gallery GM01

This talk takes as its focus the ancient Greek concept of “genos.” Genos has multiple meanings in English that semantically fall into two main spheres, that of “lineage” or “genealogy,” and that of “kind.” That is, it is a way of temporally reckoning human and divine origins and kinship in mythical and literary discourses, and also a tool for the static categorization of types (including gender and other kinds of human categorization, though the Greeks did not categorize according to “race” in our modern sense). Looking closely at the archaic genealogy of gods and humans in Hesiod, and approaching question of genos through (post)structuralist conceptions of kinship, we will see how patriarchal kinship strives to determine the truth of genealogy and inheritance, while women’s relationship to truth is relentlessly disqualified. This will shed light, in turn, upon how mythical gender agonism within genos undermines women’s relationship to truth, and also points the way toward the future emergence of philosophy “without women.”

Workshop: Reading closely, reading queerly: Resituating Sedgwick's Paranoid vs Reparative Reading (Rockefeller 190 - 12:00pm, Friday April 18th)

In this workshop we will reappraise Eve Sedgewick’s arguments for paranoid and reparative modes of queer reading alongside other classic methods of textual analysis such as hermeneutics and deconstruction.

Co-Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Department of Classics, and Department of Philosophy.