A lot of this is taken from Victoria Wohl's chapter on "Tragedy and Feminism" in A Companion to Tragedy edited by Rebecca Bushnell.

• First some needed background:
• In Ancient Athens in the times we are discussing, women had the power/legal status of minors their whole lives
• they were sequestered in their houses
• their lives were carefully managed and choreographed: public excursions to market, festival, etc. were vulnerable times (think Nausicaa doing laundry)
  
• it is fair to say that the underlying fabric of Greek society was not just sexist, but misogynistic
  
• from lots of evidence in many genres of writing
• not just literature
• oratory, philosophy, medicine, etc. : all genres exhibit this to a greater or lesser degree, and the status of women, insofar as we can see it does nothing to gainsay it
  
• women in ancient Greece, even wives of citizens, women of high social standing:
• could not vote
• could not own significant property
• had no official roles in civic life (although women did have certain precincts: there were some religious/civic rights that were performed and participated in by women, some exclusively, but those do not amount to that much compared to what men could do)
• could not represent themselves in court
• were confined in their houses
• there are, however, a few individual women who stand out for carving out for themselves some power and agency.
  
• there is no actual "feminism" in antiquity that I know of, although there are passages and authors who are more sympathetic to women:
  
• So what would count as "feminist"?
• an approach that valued women as women AND as individuals who deserve autonomy (self-direction)
• an approach that didn't talk about "humanity" but actually at every turn means 'huMANity'
• "Feminist scholars reject the adequation of humanity and masculinity upon which this humanism rests." (Wohl)
• a development much further along the lines of some of the thoughts Calypso voices so remarkably when Hermes visits her in the Odyssey
• There is no real awareness of the possibility of a non-binary or queer or gender-fluid identity: most of the larger context of Greco-Roman antiquity is hetero-normative too. There are hints of people who question this, and chinks in the mythology that supports it.
  
• This means that Greco-Roman antiquity is much like most of the world today.
  
• The great experiment that has been flowering in our culture is fragile and needs constant work.
• Knowing other cultures, whether present or past, can help in that effort, and is interesting, often in a horrifying way.
  
• BUT what about Clytaemnestra, Electra, Medea, Antigone, Penelope, etc.: all those strong, interesting women? nevermind those strong powerful goddesses.
  
• A feminist might have a love-hate relationship with tragedy. What to do?
  
• These characters are made to use reason, deliver speeches, take action, sacrifice, rule. They look and act like women who resisted oppression, who strived to be their own women.
  
• Just about every genre of just about every society I've ever heard of aside from modern "feminist"-conscious societies has misogyny and sexism. Perhaps some of you who study anthropology can tell me whether my experience is exceptional.
  
• The answer, say most intellectuals I've encountered, can't be to throw out all that is misogynistic and sexist: there's too much of interest and import there.
  
• Isn't there a way to read it as a feminist or queer or non-hetero-normative (without denying the reality of what it is)? one that still allows it to have worth without being blind to or forgiving its shortcomings?
  
• Tragedy treats some of the most serious questions that define what we are, whatever "we" means.
• It is rich ground for feminists, queer theorists, and other thinkers-with-agendas-for-change like them.
  
• And once you start taking any sort of feminism seriously, you start asking what it means to be masculine, and what it means to be human, and what alternatives there are and how they appear: if you deny that the default is that humans are men, you have to ask "well, then, what are men?"
• And we can ask that question when we study tragedy.
  
• But that's a further development
• It will, in the end, in a sort of circle, make you then revisit women as well. The cycle of hermeneutic discovery and investigation does not end, but grows richer.
• There is also a hermeneutic cycle that involves examining the women of tragedy as commentary on tragedy itself, and then examining the genre of tragedy as constituting the women in it, who then comment on tragedy itself.
• These "hermeneutic circles" go round and round, getting richer and richer.
  
• As you read:
• When you find an interesting statement (perhaps "she acts so manly"), ask yourself:
• Who says it?
• From what perspective is it true?
• What does it assume in order to be true?
• How do the words really relate to the actions?
• Is it an exception that proves the rule?
• Who gets what benefit or hurt from presenting things that way?
  
• Remember:
• Tragedy (and just about all ancient literature with a few exceptions):
• was written by men
• actors were all men
• the audience was likely men (although there are some people who find some evidence that women attended too)
• The aim
• to discover the underlying structures that gender fits into, and to figure out what gender meant at different times and places
  
• including especially latent power relations
• to find symbolic systems that gender fits into
  
• to critique them
• to learn from them
• to know the past and the culture so that we can effectively change it, but realize how it arose.
  
• This class is a survey and so will not pursue this much, but there are classes devoted to exploring these sorts of things: some GSWS courses have ancient content.
  
• Some approaches that have been taken to "women" in the Greco-Roman world:
• Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: an early feminist approach: tried to uncover what real women's, average women's, lives were like. Called a "naive" approach. I often like naive approaches.
• Helene Foley seems to think  of "woman" as a "cultural concept": a sort of concept to be thrown around in what might be called "culture wars"
• tragedy is its own world : each tragedy is its own world too
  
• its relation to the "real world" is complex: the "real world" isn't just one sphere
  
• tragedy's, and each individual tragedy's world bears some powerful relation to "democratic Athens"
• the same concepts exist in these worlds (nature v. culture, public v. private, man v. woman, etc.) and take on complex roles.
• "Clytaemnestra deploys the traditional tropes of femininity and domesticity to lure her husband to his death in Aeschylus' Agamemnon (offering him a warm bath then killing him in it), her action shows her as a skillful manipulator of signs, and simultaneously fixes her as herself a sign of monstrous inversion within the play's hierarchies of gender and power. This tension between woman as sign and woman as (the sign of) a producer of signs may help explain the jarring juxtapositions of misogynist and "feminist" statements within a single play." P.150 Wohl.
• Froma Zeitlin explains the prominence of women in tragedy as something whose real goal is not to say something about women but rather to "illuminate the male world and self."
  
• Aeschylus' Oresteia makes Clytaemnestra into a monster and thereby clears the way to exclude women from the political by linking woman with chaos (male/female = order/chaos = culture/nature and is parallel to god/mortal, life/death)
• the "self" that is of concern is always male, while the female is the other against which that self is defined
  
• Sidelining women becomes a "prerequisite for the construction of civilization."
• "women are never an end in themselves... they play the role of catalysts, agents, instruments, blockers, spoilers, destroyers, and sometimes helpers or saviors for male characters." quoted from Zeitlin, Playing the Other, 1996, P. 346
• Peter Rose points out that tragedy includes contradictory pulls toward preserving and innovating/challenging
• Oresteia shows first chaotic Clytaemnestra, then matricide/demonization of Clytaemnestra, then "the rule of law in a world of male citizens."
• So what do we do with Euripides? or Sophocles?
• First, perhaps we neet to interrogate ideas like fate, making one person/character central, the universal and general claims that appear all over tragedy: how to fit them into a world that wants to celebrate the individual, to affirm identities of all sorts, rather than build up a notion of "humanity": how to fit tragedy into the post-human is perhaps the question.
• It is clear that tragedy will continue to be read: people tend to dig backward in time to find origins, and these Greeks, including their tragedies, stand out in so many ways as a significant stage on the path that leads to our cultures today.
• We can strive for the "trans-historical" or even the "ahistorical," but the historical will always be with us too.