Gender, space and warfare in the early plays of Aristophanes
Sulprizio, Chiara (University of Southern California)
PhD Dissertation, University of Southern California (2007)
Abstract
This dissertation examines how Aristophanes articulated and staged gender difference in his five earliest extant comedies, which were produced in succession during the initial period of the Peloponnesian War. These plays present a diachronic picture of the war’s destabilizing effect on the Athenian political system and its 
sex/gender system, which underpinned the democratic state through its regulation of marriage and reproduction. By submitting
these plays to a historicized and socio-spatial analysis, I explain why the comic stage became such a potent venue for the conflation of the political and sexual conflicts occurring in Athens during the 420s BCE. I also consider the ideological developments that prompted Aristophanes to foreground the feminine in his later work.
Through his use of geographic imagery and his manipulation of the theatrical space, Aristophanes emphasized the intimate relationship between civic identity and gender identity. In particular, he employed the feminine spaces of the body and the home, or oikos, as metaphorical battlegrounds, where physical and ideological conflicts could be synthesized, scaled down and humorously represented.
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