Feminist Thread of the "Killjoy" Variety: Gendering objects.

In the past couple years, I’ve noticed a growing number of people using feminine pronouns to refer to objects, although this used to be the purview of non-feminist men. Bob to Fred: "Look at my car, ain't she a beaut!"

But now I hear even feminists and people with liberal ideas about gender and sex/uality, referring to things around them using gendered pronouns. Of course, these pronouns seem mostly feminine. "Don't use just love her!?!" a friend says in reference to a briefcase.

So, a lot of my academic writing has been on the gendered images in the Book of Revelation (a first-century text now part of Christian scripture), and how the author uses contrasting city-woman images (Babylon-Prostitute) and (New Jerusalem-Bride) to persuade his audience.

I'm def not the first person to look at these images. For example, Tina Pippin has a classic book in which she explores how these images are framed as objects of male desire. Male readers of Revelation are prompted to hate/ destroy the Prostitute and love/ embrace the Bride.

The imagery, based in ancient understandings of gender, is metaphorical, but misogynistic.

"But what does this have to do with me calling my favorite handbag 'she'?" you ask. Well, gendering objects, especially using feminine pronouns, draws upon a long history in which women were equated metaphorically as objects and objects as women.

In the ancient Mediterranean, especially in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, there was, for instance, a special association between cities and women with a city's "fortune" (tyche in Greek) often imaged as a goddess, called Tyche. The most famous example is Tyche of Antioch.

Here's a version from the Vatican Museums (my pic, btw). Tyche sits on a personification of the river Orontes, represented as a male figure, just like the city "sat" on the actual river. This is a kind of conceptual mapping of the concepts of "woman" and "city."

The metaphorical mapping "works" because both women and cities in the ancient world were envisioned as containers. Women were culturally envisioned as a kind of container because of the assumption that women had penetrable vaginas and uteri to to contain fetuses.

(Note: Not all women have uteri and not all people with uteri are women.)

Cities were also envisioned as containers, as ancient city-centers often had walls. The city could be entered by going through a gate or walls could be penetrated violently. Here we begin to get a sense of how the metaphorical connection between sexual violence and war emerges.

Here's a Tyche from Roman era Philippi (my pic). You can see she wears a "mural crown," a crown that looks like a city's wall. This is common of Tyche depictions and reflects this conceptual connection between city and women as containers.

This association between cities and women also appears in the Hebrew Bible prophets, upon which Rev's author draws. Ezekiel, for instance, paints a picture of Jerusalem as a young girl found by the divine who "enters into" a covenant with her. The story does not end well.

Cities are not the only container-like objects that are metaphorically envisioned as feminine/ female. Paige du Bois offers a range of such things, including fields, vases, ovens, etc.

These conventional metaphors are part of logic that allows women to be understood as passive things in which men, in particular, put "things," like penises, sperm, and other penetrative objects.

Even though people today don't necessarily restrict feminine pronouns to container-like objects, this is the logic that undergirds talking about places like colleges (which often have walls and gates) in feminine terms. See "alma mater.”