In her classic “Hairy Cobblers and Philosopher Queens,” Elizabeth Spellman shows us how Plato argues for the education of women alongside men, and for the inclusion of women in all social classes (including the ruling class), not out of some proto-feminist tendency, but out of logical necessity.(1) Quite simply, if the ruling class is to reproduce itself through time, it needs to include both women and men in its ranks. (Plato’s body politic is segregated into classes of citizens distinguished by their different kinds of souls.) The inclusion of women solves one problem, but presents another problem for Plato. While it makes absolute class segregation and his ideal polis possible, it opens him up to ridicule and objection.

Likewise, space-chora in the Timaeus is designed by Plato to solve the two of the most important ontological questions of his day: 1) the problem of how sensible beings partake in the intelligible Forms; and 2) the problem of the One and the Many that Plato inherits from the Presocratic philosophers. Similarly, the discourse about space-chora also leaves him open to ridicule and objection, which he tries to preclude by characterizing chora as strange, perplexing, and aporetic. He also puts some distance between the metaphysics of his middle dialogues (e.g., the Republic) and this late work by having the theory presented not by Socrates, his usual interlocutor, but by the newcomer Timaeus.

It is neither out of misogynist prejudice nor proto-feminist principle (depending whether one takes chora-space to be more or less progressive or regressive) that “woman” comes to be conceived as a kind of space in Plato’s Timaeus. The concept of woman that emerges through space-chora (and later, Aristotelian matter-hule) is the result of Plato’s address to his contemporaries on the metaphysical and political issues of his day. Actual women where simply not a part of the equation — this is a conversation by patriarchs, for patriarchs, in which the concept of woman is used to accomplish ultimately patriarchal ends. In other words, it has almost nothing to do with women.

I say almost because it’s effects on actual women are being felt even today. It is the view of women as passive containers for reproduction that sets the stage for the social control of women’s reproductive bodies — e.g., the current onslaught of state legislation attempting to curtail abortion rights in the United States, in the latest push to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Plato’s space-chora is just the beginning of the conceptualization of women as passive receptacles, and these notions are very deeply rooted in our contemporary realities.

It is not so much that an analogy is made to women and women’s reproductive bodies in the production of the concept of space, but the opposite is also true: the concept of woman is being co-constructed along side the concept of space (along with concepts of difference and identity, and what will later emerge as subjectivity and consciousness). You may have caught this when I wrote above: “that “woman” comes to be conceived as a kind of space in Plato’s Timaeus.” In a deep ontological sense, women are but walking, breathing metaphors for space, passive receptacles for man’s reproduction through time. Obviously, we need to smash this concept of woman, but how?