Who’s Afraid of Women’s Rule? Figures of Gynocracy as Conservative Backlash

• In Event: Staging the Political: Theater, Politics, and Representation

Abstract

In November 2023, in response to nation-wide feminist protests that gathered hundreds of thousands of participants, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni announced the names of the commission who would be charged with creating programs to combat femicide and other forms of gender violence. Among those names was that of Alessandro Amadori, a lecturer in psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, who quickly became known for his claims that a significant percentage of women wants to institute “gynarchy,” that is – he explains – the complete devaluation of masculinity and the enslavement of men as a sex class. Amadori is far from alone in making these claims as conservative men in so called “manosphere” (made up of online communities like r/TRP and r/incels) claim that modern feminism has inverted the “proper” gender hierarchies and that now women are more than men’s equals: they control virtually all aspects of men’s lives. These claims, far-fetched as they may seem, are part of broader trends of conservative backlash against progress made on issues of gender, race, sexuality, and similar political issues. Also, they can draw their roots from a number of oft-overlooked texts from Greek classical antiquity concerned with gynocracy, that is polities in which women rule over and have control of men.
In this paper I draw from the Greek tradition of gynocracy, composed not by the familiar myth of the Amazons (in which men are simply excluded from a society), but rather of texts like Aristophanes' “women plays,” foundational texts of the Western canon like Plato’s Republic, and several court speeches concerned with the transformation of gender dynamics (e.g. Demosthenes 43 and 57). I do so to show how Greek anxieties regarding gynocracy express anxieties about the most radical aspects of democracy – in particular the prominence of contentious politics like popular uprisings in the democratic polis. I suggest that, in classical Athens like today, aristocratic political commentators strategically linked the most radical aspects of democracy, those very aspects that threatened the socio-political status of the aristocracy within the city, to anxieties about women’s rule, power, and upending social hierarchies. In doing so, these imagination of women’s rule over men provide us with theoretical tools to interpret the ways in which the contemporary conservative backlash against #MeToo and LGBT+ rights has similarly deployed images of women’s (undue) power to counter perceived challenges to the existing social and political structures. That is, today like in classical Athens, figures of women’s rule and warnings about their political power serve to curtail changes in existing hierarchies by deploying imaginations of the inversion of the most naturalized one – namely, the gender hierarchy of men over women – to combat the possibility of more equitable or radical forms of democracy.

Author

• Silvia Fedi, Emory University