Events Calendar

The Babylonian Section of the Museum presents an open conference, Mapping Ancient Near Eastern Masculinities (MANEM), Friday, March 25 through Saturday, March 26, in Penn Museum's Classroom 2.

For more information see http://www.penn.museum/manem/ or email Ilona Zsolnay at izsolnay@sas.upenn.edu

In contemporary discussions of constructions of gender, one does not speak today of a singular masculinity but of masculinities. Just as with femininity, Gender Studies, the field which evolved out of Women's Studies, informs us that in each society, whether ancient or modern, there were and are multiple culturally defined constructions of masculinity. Yet, too often, a singular hegemonic masculinity formed from modern Western stereotypes has been both presumed and projected by scholars onto the societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, and the greater Syro-Levantine region. A striking example of a discordant alignment of modern gender constructions with ancient ones is found in Greco-Roman society. While in many modern societies, it is considered a masculine role to be promiscuous (e.g.,