“How (not) to Interpret Gender in Phoenician Anthropoid Sarcophagi” - S- Rebecca Martin

“How (not) to Interpret Gender in Phoenician Anthropoid Sarcophagi”
Dr S. Rebecca Martin, Boston University
Friday, 31st of May 2024
16.00 CEST (Rome, Paris, Berlin / GMT+2)
15:00 BST (London, GMT+1)
17.00 (İstanbul, Athens / GMT+3)
10.00 (New York / GMT-4)
The image-representation relationship in Phoenicia is complex thanks to an established habit of artistic receptivity. The Phoenician anthropoid sarcophagus is a good example of imagery born from culture contact. They first appear in Sidon during the Persian period (ca. 525-300 BCE) and were from the start clearly indebted to Egyptian and Greek cultural practices while still being exclusively Phoenician. The sarcophagi are uniquely concerned with the representation of the body and accordingly should tell us something about how Phoenicians perceived bodies and the relationship between bodies, representation, and identity-including gender identity. Although there is a good deal of scholarship focused on interpreting the appearance of these objects, we still cannot claim to fully understand what they show. The assessment of gender presentation in this corpus has been hampered by a loose grasp of its logic in its Egyptian and Greek prototypes and a tendency to misread the images through modern stereotypes, especially with respect to hairstyles. I will discuss how scholarship arrived at these interpretations and how new evidence has upended them, opening up a path for novel thinking about gender presentation and the image-representation relationship in Phoenician art.