Brides of Victory

Gender and sex are categories typically ignored in comparative studies of nationalism. The author explores these relations in the context of the Olympic victory ceremony, a globally familiar rite of deceptive simplicity and transparency. Focusing on gender asymmetries overlooked in popular and professional discourse, he shows that the rite encodes the Stranger-King mythic structure renowned among anthropologists, classicists and scholars of religion, but never previously recognized in such a transnational, mass public setting. Combining historical methods with the results of his ethnographic research, the author reverses the classic ritual theory of the myth. Building on recent research, which sees in the myth a theory of the origins of political power, the volume explores the political unconsciousness of liberal democracies.