DIVISION SEXUELLE ET DIVISION POLITIQUE DANS LA CITÉ GRECQUE
SEXUAL DIVISION AND POLITICAL DIVISION IN THE GREEK CITY

Summary/Abstract: This paper highlights, from a historical anthropology perspective, the femininity of the Greek hero and the role of the feminine imaginary in shaping the Greek vision of politics. The myth of the Athenians’ autochthony, that of the primeval androgynous being and the legends regarding the fighting skills of Goddess Athena and Zeus’s maternity illustrates the presence of the myth at the centre of the Greek political thinking. In this way the existence of femininity in man - of gender in sex - brings us back to the reversibility of pleasure and pain, of giving birth without copulation and of homosexuality whose tactical role in ascesis and in the wise man’s images has been highlighted by Michel Foucault. The blending of sexes (androgyny), their reversal (the comic disguising) and the inclusion of woman in man (the swallowing of Metis, Athena’s mother, by Zeus who neutralizes in this way her sexuality, potentially hostile) prefigures the triangle of imaginary meetings of sexes, at the same time making room to a space of conflict where sexual division becomes the prototype of political confrontation. In the political culture of the unique sex, ‘the other’ appears as a difference of gender which disturbs the unity and authority of the discursive-active male performance.

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