Please focus your analysis on 2 or 3 texts assigned for the course and utilize at least 5 secondary sources that situate, support and strengthen your line of argumentation. You may also choose to intervene in a scholarly debate and explain why your interpretation/reading is new and original.

1. Is Plato a feminist? Why or why not?

Contrast
Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae
PARODY so ridiculous that when would come into power
Pushing back against conventional norms that are eroded by comic writer
Revolutionary in gender philosopher  queens

That would be an argument against Irigarays reading of the cave 

Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman
In the last section, “Plato’s Hystera,” Irigaray reinterprets Plato’s myth of the cave, of the womb, in an attempt to discover the origins of that ideology, to ascertain precisely the way in which metaphors were fathered that henceforth became vehicles of meaning, to trace how woman came to be excluded from the production of discourse. Between these two sections is “Speculum”–ten meditative, widely ranging, and freely associational essays, each concerned with an aspect of the history of Western philosophy in its relation to woman, in which Irigaray explores woman’s essential difference from man.

Plato was not a feminist, but because he ends up making women into men for the sake of the unity of the ideal city. Women once more, and only apparently not, are subordinated to their reproductive roles in a new form of the family.

Nevertheless, what he says can still be used to knock down any attempt to build a case for sexual, class or racial discrimination.

Allegory of cave?

Texts

Plato, Republic, tr. G.M.A. Grube

Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae

Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

Vlastos, G. 1994. Was Plato a Feminist in Feminist Interpretations of Plato. Nancy Tuana (ed.) University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 11-23.

Annas, J. 1976. Plato’s Republic and Feminism. Philosophy 51: 307-321.

Wender, D. 1973. Plato: Misogynist, Paedophile and Feminist. Arethusa VI: 75-80.

IF YOU FIND ANOTHER TEXT SIMILAR TO THE SCHOLARLY LEVE OF THE THREE LAST ONES, PLEASE USE

For citations of the ancient texts, please use the following format, abbreviations according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary:

For Platos Republic: Quotation. (Pl. Resp. Paragraph #.)
For Platos Laws: Quotation. (Pl. Leg. Page #).
For Aristotles Politics: Quotation. (Arist. Pol. Paragraph #.)
For Platos Timaeus: Quotation. (Pl. Ti. Paragraph #.)
For Aristophanes Assemblywomen: Quotation. (Ar. Eccl. Page #.)

For references to modern texts and scholarship, please adhere to the MLA format.