Macricostas Hellenic and Greek Studies Panel

MACRICOSTAS HELLENIC & GREEK STUDIES PANEL – “STILL STRIKING: LYSISTRATA AND RADICAL POLITICS”: From the revolutionary workers’ theater of the early 20th century, to the Bush-era “Lysistrata Project,” to the women’s peace movement in Liberia, to Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq and South Korean 4B activists, Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata has long been invoked to inspire, imagine, and interpret political movements for peace and sexual justice. The world’s earliest literary depiction of a work stoppage, most of Lysistrata’s action takes place on a picket line, where Greek women have seized the treasury and refused sex, childrearing, and domestic labor until Greek men end their destructive internecine wars.

This panel brings together classicists, feminist scholars, and theater practitioners to discuss the play and its legacy. What makes Lysistrata such an enduring vehicle for imagining collective refusal? Can it continue to nourish our ideas and practices of radical politics? Or has the play become a millstone, an outdated comic template that flattens and trivializes the realities of feminist and pacifist movements?

Panelists:
Dr. Ani Chen, Mitchell Center/SNF Paideia Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Danielle Hanley, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Clark University
Sam McChesney, Macricostas Teaching Fellow, Western Connecticut State University
Moshe Henderson, director, actor, singer, HB studio

From 5 to 7 p.m. in the Student Center Theater on the Midtown campus.