Chercher la femme : identifying Minoan gender relations in the built environment
(2013) Minoan Realities — Location: Heidelberg (16.November.2009)
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- Authors
Driessen, Jan 
- Abstract
- Jan Driessen proposed an ethnological theory of Minoan society being a matrifocal society, in which the residences of large families and the structures of ownership were centred on and around women. Based on this theory he analyzed images and architectural spaces with regard to the occurrence of women. From the pictorial evidence, in which representations of female figures outnumber those of male figures by far, it further becomes obvious that women played a major role in the performance of religious and ritual practices. The dominance of women is, therefore, an essential characteristic of Minoan visual representation and might reflect a female dominance in Minoan social structures. Referring to architecture, Driessen proposed a distinction of male and female areas, the latter being recognisable, amongst other, by means of ritual areas such as the 'Lustral Basin'. These ritual areas - and, therefore, the female spaces of activity - most often occupied the remote parts of architecture, as he showed by access analysis. As this is a phenomenon well known from other premodern societies, a strict spatial division of the areas of male and female activity within Minoan architecture might be a hypothesis worth exploring further.
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Citations
Driessen, J. (2013). Chercher la femme : identifying Minoan gender relations in the built environment. In Diamantis Panagiotopoulos (ed.), Minoan Realities. Approaches to Images, Architecture, and Society in the Aegean Bronze Age (p. p. 141-164). Presses universitaires de Louvain. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/244370