The articles in Naked Truths demonstrate the application of feminist theory to a diverse repertory of classical art: they offer topical and controversial readings on the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean. This volume presents a timely, provocative and beautifully illustrated re-evaluation of how the issues of gender, identity and sexuality reveal 'naked truths' about fundamental human values and social realities, through the compelling symbolism of the body.

Contents:
1. Naked truths about classical art: An introduction 2. 'Ways of seeing' women in antiquity: An introduction to feminism in classical archaeology and ancient art history 3. Female beauty and male violence in early Italian society 4. divesting the female breast of clothes in classical sculpture 5. When painters execute a murderess: the representation of clytemnestra on attic vases 6. Sappho in attic vase painting 7. Gender and sexuality in the Parthenon frieze 8. Naked and limbless: Learning about the feminine body in ancient Athens 9. Nursing mothers in classical art 10. Making a world of difference: Gender, Asymmetry, and the Greek nude 11. The only happy couple: Hermaphrodites and gender 12. Violent stages in two Pompeian houses: Imperial taste, aristocratic response and messages of male control 13. Epilogue: gender and desire

Alice Dixon (1851-1910) was born into a comfortable middle class life in London that she eagerly left behind to travel to YucatAn as the young bride of Maya archaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon. Working side by side as photographers and archaeologists, the Le Plongeons were the first to excavate and systematically photograph the Maya sites of ChichA(c)n ItzA and Uxmal. After spending eleven years in the field, she devoted the rest of her life to lecturing and published books and articles on a wide range of topics, including her exploration of Maya civilization, political activism and social justice, and epic poetry.
Alice's papers became public in 1999 and included photographs, unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, and a handwritten diary; over two thousand of her prints and negatives survive today in public and private collections. Combined with Lawrence Desmond's biography of this remarkable woman's life, her diary offers readers a rare glimpse of life in the YucatAn peninsula during the final quarter of the nineteenth century, and an insider's view of fieldwork just prior to the emergence of Mesoamerican archaeology as a professional discipline.