The Dialectics of Gendered Character(s) in Byzantine History Writing

Characters emerge from the dialectical relationship between acts of reading (the interpretative, imaginative, and constructive interaction between an engaged reader and a finite set of textual elements) and regimes of reading (an assemblage of textual and readerly norms, constituted of many acts of reading, that govern an act of reading). In this, the production of characters as person-like inhabitants of storyworlds mirrors the act of performing gender, as delineated by Judith Butler. The repetitive act of reading certain collections of textual semes as past people is productive of personhood in the same way that the performance of gender creates the ostensibly stable categories of man and woman. This paper considers the double dialectic at play in the construction and narration of gendered characters, with examples drawn from Middle Byzantine history writing, particularly the Chronike diegesis of Niketas Choniates.