Post-penélopes: imagen, arquetipo y repetición en la cultura visual contemporánea.

Abstract

This article analyzes the continuity of the Urtyp (archetype) of Homeric Penelope as a passive woman/waiting woman. Following a methodology of cultural and visual studies akin to the thinking of Aby Warburg and his concept of the afterlife of images (nachleben), it examines the patriarchal archetypes of suitable/unsuitable women as cultural survivals that “resonate” (Calasso 1988: 36) and persist in models indebted to Homeric epic and Hellenic mythological tradition. Via the here deployed notion of post-Penelopes, such research situates representations of women depicted as “dead matter” (Theweleit 1987; 2019), as genuine “tricked myths” of transnational and transtemporal patriarchy (Dumézil 1968: 234), surviving “stocks” (Bourdieu 2000: 9–10) that manifest belatedly and shape the patriarchal worldview through the repetition of images linked to a mythologem (Kèrenyi 2012) that transcends and precedes them.