Vase Painting, Gender, and Social Identity in Archaic Athens

This study explores the phenomenon of spectators in the Classical world through a database built from a census of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, which reveals that spectator figures flourished in Athenian vase painting during the last two-thirds of the sixth century BCE. Using models developed from psychoanalysis and the theory of the gaze, ritual studies, and gender studies, Mark Stansbury-O'Donnell demonstrates how these "spectators" emerge as models for social and gender identification in the archaic city, encoding in their gestures and behavior archaic attitudes about gender and status.