Matthew (2011) Contesting Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press.47 Tuana, Nancy (2004) “Coming to Understand: Orgasm and the Epistemology of Ignorance.” Hypatia 19 (1), 194–232.
48 van Gennep, Arnold (1960) The Rites of Passage, trans. M.B. Vizedom and G.L. Caffee, introduction by S.T. Kimball. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
49 Wambura, Boke Joyce (2018) Gender and Language Practices in Female Circumcision Ceremonies in Kuria, Kenya. PhD thesis, University of Leeds.
50 White, Hayden (1987) The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
51 Wyatt, Nick (2009) “Circumcision and Circumstance: Male Genital Mutilation in Ancient Israel and Ugarit.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 33 (4): 405–31.
52 Zucconi, Laura M. (2007) “Medicine and Religion in Ancient Egypt.” Religion Compass 1(1): 26–37.
NOTES
1 1 See the work of Ursula Le Guin and Donna Haraway for challenges to this limited view of reproduction.
2 2 Spay is the term used by the translators of the Loeb version that I am using. However, the word choice has more to do with an odd modesty than translation of the Greek and I have used excise to hold to the intentions of the original Greek.
3 3 The myth of the founding of the Poro relates a narrative about a wealthy and powerful old man or chieftain of the town who developed a disease of the nose (a metonym for the penis) and retreated or was made to retreat, to the bush with his wife Mabole and daughter Gboni. Although the other important men of the village continued to consult him, they decided to kill him, his wife, and his daughter and take his land. The townspeople, however, continued to want to consult the old man and so his killers told the townsfolk the old man had turned into a devil. To further frighten the people and provide proof of their story, they invented the Poro horn in order to imitate the old man’s voice. With the blowing of the horn, the first Poro was enacted and the male children were introduced to the devil. A mask representing the devil Gbeni frightens the women and uninitiated away in order to gather up the young boys who are to be initiated (Cosentino, 1982: 22–3; Arewa and Hale, 1975: 83).
Chapter Five Gender Rules: Law and Politics
Susan Kingsley Kent
Law, Freud theorized in a number of his later works, first arose when a primitive band of brothers rose up to kill their authoritarian father, who had monopolized sexual access to the women in their tribe. Out of their shame and guilt in committing parricide and in engaging in sexual intercourse with women of close relation, they produced three rules –the taboos against parricide and incest, and the proclamation of equality amongst the brothers – which established, Freud argued, the foundation of law in human society (Pateman, 1988). In yet another example of the many efforts over the course of centuries in virtually every culture in the world to explain how human societies and polities came into existence, Freud attributed to a conflict in gender and sexual relationships the development of a legal and political system that operated to bring civilization to prehistoric peoples. His story, of course, is no more accurate or real than any of those that had gone before, but it serves as a useful example of the ways in which gender and law and politics have been inextricably intertwined in myths about the origins of human society, in theories of law and politics, and in the workings of law and politics in everyday life. It gives vivid witness to Joan Scott’s pathbreaking theory that gender – what we’ve construed to be the sexual differences between men and women – is one of the most significant and oft‐used means by which we articulate and represent relations of power (Scott, 1988).
Almost everywhere we look, whether it be ancient Greece or Rome, medieval China or Europe, Renaissance Italy, precolonial Africa, indigenous America, early modern England, or revolutionary America or France, political elites told themselves and their subjects and constituents stories about how their societies had first emerged and how the right to exercise power and to make law had come to rest with them. In virtually all of these cultures, whether ruled by divine‐right absolute monarchs, hereditary aristocracies, or councils of citizens, law and politics depended upon a model of familial, and thus gender and sexual, relations for their conceptualization. Kinship, it appears, served as the model not only for most forms of social organization but for most forms of political ordering as well.
This may seem commonsensical, almost natural, but it is vital to remember that family, gender, and sexual arrangements are always fashioned within particular political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances. In consequence, they have differing effects for individuals according to gender; any legal and political worldview that depends upon a certain familial model will replicate those differing effects for individuals according to gender. Thus, a social order based on patriarchy, in which the law of the father over his wife and children prevails, underpins a political ordering in which authority rests with men, producing laws and relations of authority in which women and underage males suffer disabilities. Attempts to ameliorate such political and legal disabilities necessarily have to challenge the legitimating theories or cosmologies that inform them. This situation helps to explain why eighteenth‐century French revolutionaries turned to an idiom of brotherhood or fraternity to justify and narrate the toppling of their absolute monarch; and why feminists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, looking to implement a social and political order that would recognize and value women as full citizens, sought out historical or anthropological examples of matriarchy through which they could demonstrate that a previous “natural” order of beneficent and egalitarian women‐controlled and women‐dominated societies had been overthrown by authoritarian, inegalitarian patriarchal orders. In both instances, they sought to establish their own mythologies of law and politics that legitimated their contemporary political aims.
Ancient Patriarchy
Patriarchy has an ancient pedigree, arising, it appears, at about the same time that ownership of property by individual households became predominant in the societies of the Near and Middle East around 3000 BCE and later in India, Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean. The heads of households, or patriarchs (the word deriving from the Latin for father, pater), in the earliest societies for which we have written records, may have sought to maintain their control over property by controlling the actions of the members of their households, especially the women, ensuring that their legitimate offspring, and not some spurious claimant, inherited their wealth. The earliest forms of political units derived from family and kin groups in which fatherhood actually and/or figuratively served as the model for the exercise of power in larger clan, tribal, village, or state structures. The making of law and the exercise of power have thus always been gendered, and as far as the historical record can tell us, patriarchal in nature, though the actual playing out of day‐to‐day political operations might vary considerably, as we shall see below. In the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and in other, more modern states like medieval China or post‐revolutionary France seeking to impose or maintain patriarchal regimes, rulers implemented laws that regulated women’s marital, sexual, and reproductive practices, making them subjects of their husbands and fathers as well as of their kings. In sixth‐century BCE Greece, for example, Solon the “lawgiver” and so‐called second founder of Athens, reorganized the matrimonial system in the process of creating a new political community, the famous Athenian “democracy.” In the aftermath of civil war in which poor householders had arrayed themselves against rich
