The Politics of Objects

Chapter 2 offers different models and parameters of female agency. Iliadic and Odyssean women are differentiated in terms of their roles in war- and peacetime respectively, and the ways in which Andromache and Helen weave are used as case studies for ‘normal’ and ‘exceptional’ female characters. The chapter engages closely with these exceptional women, bringing together Helen and Penelope in terms of their liminal position in society and the elevated agency that allows. Drawing on feminist literature on female communicative channels and the potentially liberating power of technology, this chapter then presents the ‘politics of objects’: the creation and distribution of textiles through which supposedly ‘commodified’ characters create their own kind of commerce, and their own way of communicating.