Re-embodying Syrinx in the ancient Peloponnese and French colonial Belle Époque: Investigating bodily change associated with sexual assault

Abstract

This article investigates related contexts and connections that both hide and display the coercion and sexual violence manifest in Western cultural and aesthetic artefacts during ancient Greek and Roman eras and the French imperialist epoch. Exploring ‘Pan and Syrinx’ from Ovid’s ‘Book I’ of the Metamorphoses (8 ce) and Claude Debussy’s Syrinx (1913) for solo flute, I historicise the meanings of rape and sexual assault that informed Ovid’s epic and then revisit the genesis of Debussy’s Syrinx because of the uneasy elements surrounding its creation. I show how its cultural production is complicit with the imperial in several ways. I consider how sexual violence impacts voice, subjectivity and the body, and finally, I draw on Luce Irigaray’s work to sketch an embodied Syrinx in relation with others and her environment. I suggest the desiring potential of sexual difference, with limitations, as a generative conception of figuring the feminine-maternal body beyond masculine appropriation. In this way I open the myth up to watery material-social relations.