Current studies on the topic of sexuality in the ancient Greek world tend to favour the active/passive paradigm of understanding sexual relations which was originally proposed in Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality (1978) and Michel Foucault's three volume History of Sexuality (1978, 1985, and 1986). In Dover and Foucault, the sexual behaviour of the classical Athenian male takes primacy, so much so that the reader of either scholar can be left with the impression that the role of the active partner was available only to adult citizen males. Alciphron's Letters of Courtesans (Book 4 of his works) depict a group of desiring female subjects who demonstrate that sexual agency, the assumption of the active role in a sexual relationship, need not be the exclusively masculine phenomenon that Dover and Foucault describe. Letters of Courtesans prove that female sexuality can be portrayed as active and therefore that women in literature can be sexual agents. Additionally, these letters demonstrate the limits of the approaches of Dover and Foucault, that sexuality need not be defined as exclusively active or exclusively passive. By approaching Letters of Courtesans from this perspective, we are able to see that ancient Greek literature includes depictions of active female sexuality that Dover and Foucault overlooked. Letters of Courtesans are therefore a way to challenge and develop the work on ancient sexuality that has followed from these two landmark studies. Because of their fictional nature and their epistolary format, Letters of Courtesans lay bare the process of Alciphron's construction of sexuality and gender. I shall therefore show that Alciphron's Letters of Courtesans are an ideal locus for a discussion of these topics. This study will establish that Letters of Courtesans ought to occupy a place of importance in any discussion of ancient ideas of sexuality and gender.

This thesis examines how livelihood diversification is also a site in which gender relations are unsettled, maintained and (re)configured. With the aim of strengthening the links between feminist and agrarian change scholarship, I present ethnographic material from Naga, a medium-size city in Bicol, Philippines, to explore how daily discourses, practices and performances of livelihood change are instrumental in mapping ways of life that are gendered. In the first part of the thesis, attention is devoted to the inadequate, or at least outdated, attention to gender relations in previous models of livelihood change, and to spell out some of the implications its integration may bring. In the remaining part of the thesis my aim is to indicate how this integration should be achieved. Specifically, I highlight some of the problems stemming from ‘structural’ analyses of gender, and emphasize the fresh perspectives opened up by a post-structural, performative approach. I then proceed to the Naga context, where I present two case studies to ‘flesh out’ these theoretical claims in more depth. Part One traces the involvement of state institutions in these changing political economies. Specifically, I consider how local state policies and practices associated with agrarian change are not simply implicated in people’s tendency to diversify, but also in the (re)production of gender identities. Notions of male responsibility and women’s rightful position in the home emerge as particularly important in this respect. In Part Two, I move to Pacol, a small farming community located on Naga’s peri-urban fringe. By drawing on interview and focus group material provided by ten ‘diversifying’ households, I consider how these discourses come into being; how they are worked through and (re)produced inperformances.

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