Motherless Daughters and Female Monsters Androcentric Fantasy in Ancient Greek Myth and Freudian Theory

This book is a feminist analysis of Greek myth and tragedy that reimagines the structures of Freudian theory. The objective of this analysis is political—by revealing the structures that undergird patriarchal oppression, feminist thinkers can work to transform these symbolic constellations through the work of sabotage, parody, and imagination. Jessica Elbert Decker attempts here to read Freudian theory through a wider lens of Ancient Greek culture, since our contemporary philosophical and social culture has inherited many of its symbolic structures (e.g., patriarchy, binary thinking).
The major argument of the book is that our Western philosophical, social, and symbolic systems are, as they were in the Ancient Greek world, suffused with a set of values that reflect one version of masculinity and androcentrism, and that those values are destructive to human beings as well as the non-human world, including other beings.

Chapter 1. Introduction: Athena Wins the Olympian Throne.- Chapter 2. Origin Stories: War is the Heart of Androcentric Fantasy.- Chapter 3. Hail Hera, Mother of Monsters! Monstrosity as Emblem of Female Sexual Sovereignty.- Chapter 4. The Medusa Complex: Silence the Name of the Mother.- Chapter 5. Aphrodite of the Spangled Mind: Eros and the Death Instincts.- Chapter 6. Don’t Call Me Baby: The Athena Complex and Feminine Masochism.- Chapter 7. Lesbian Eros in Three Movements: Sappho, Gretl, and Dora.- Chapter 8. Ariadne’s Thread is Umbilical: Woven Together, Growing Untamed.

Jessica Elbert Decker is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, San Marcos, where she teaches in the philosophy and environmental studies programs. Her research focuses on Ancient Greek poetic texts, especially those of Sappho, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Homer. Her philosophical methodology uses the tools of Continental Philosophy, Feminist Classics, and psychoanalysis to approach these ancient texts from a critical feminist (and often ecofeminist) perspective. She is co-editor of Otherwise Than the Binary: New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture (SUNY Press, 2022) and Borderlands and Liminal Subjects: Transgressing the Limit in Philosophy and Literature (Palgrave, 2018). Her current book project is a monograph on the text of Heraclitus that contextualizes his philosophical value in the Continental tradition.