Mediating Agencies : Towards an Agential Realist Interpretation of Gender Identification and Self-representation in the Praedia of Julia Felix, Pompeii

Abstract: This thesis addresses the rational properties of women’s gender identification and self-representation from political theorist Lois McNay’s generative logics, employing the Praedia of Julia Felix, Pompeii, as a case study. Previous debates rooted in semantics and representationalism have focused on non-elite stereotypes or negative gendered dichotomies fostered by comprehensive views on Roman women’s exclusion from public life. In contrast, this thesis adopts a new materialist approach, specifically drawing on feminist theorist Karen Barad’s agential realist method building on intra-activity in order to shed new light on the well-studied subject of how a non-elite woman was able to carve out an existence for herself in patriarchal ancient Roman society. Whereas past research has labelled non-elite Roman women as both passive and unproductive individuals, the present thesis proposes that agencies functioned as lived experiences which determined individuals’ abilities to actively connect with things and surroundings in different ways. Therefore, in order to analyze the interceding effects of agencies on gender identification and self-representation in connection to the Praedia of Julia Felix I argue that a broader view of performativity, embodying processes and materiality is needed. This view calls for a reconceptualization of relational entanglements in which material and social worlds are seen as mutually interconnected rather than separate entities isolated from the bodies responsible for creating these settings. Presenting the results based on a combined analysis of generative and new materialist models, I suggest that the Praedia of Julia Felix demonstrates a non-elite woman’s active participation in creating personal sustainability. This dynamic interplay between Julia Felix and her social surroundings in worth understanding in detail.