<i>Questioni di genere e metafore animali nella letteratura greca</i>

Abstract

On the threshold of separating humans from animals, we can trace not only taxonomic and cognitive issues but also power dynamics through literature and language. Anthropology has long started focusing on the normative function of the zoomorphic images created by these cultural media. In the ancient Greek culture this function can be found in the construction of gender identities, as shown by the very ancient model by which women formed their own génos, conceived in term of a species completely different from the male one, and marked with a specific nóos. Another example can be found in the set of metaphors illustrating the woman as a sort of animal to be tamed. In a specular way, the animal species met with a gender characterization: this is quite clear in the physiognomy, whereby "male" species such as the lion, the wolf and the wild boar, were opposed to "female" species like the leopard, the dog and the swine. This phenomenon could sometimes find an equivalent in the linguistic use, where the semantic gender of some animal names shifts to match the marked male/female features of the species, reinforcing the impression that the gender characterizations of the different species could constitute a coherent and meaningful semantic set, with well defined functions in the building of the social identities man/woman.