Feminist Engagements with Ancient Philosophy: Birth, Belonging, and Corporeality

The first paper excavates the approach to natality embedded in the metaphor of the seed to explore how ancient Greek fantasies about birth are enlisted in a project that naturalizes the reduction of women to reproductive service, and the indenturing of that service to the interests of an elite masculine citizenry. It mines ancient Greek resources to critique natal alienation and for tracing by what paths refusal of this reduction might be imagined and enacted. The second explores the multiple risks of ignoring and affirming the specificity of birth: ignoring denies real bodily sacrifice and vulnerability of birthing persons while affirming opens the door to nationalism, anti-immigration xenophobia, and at base, fascist thinking, even as it risks demanding of birthing bodies that they serve this role for the community. It concludes with a gesture toward a view of birth that accounts for these risks. The third returns to Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman to consider its narrative structure as a source of feminist philosophical innovation. The paper draws on the figure of the “burning mirror” found in Irigaray’s citation of Plotinus to reveal a transformative feminine bodily morphology both animating and effected by the text of Speculum.