Charlene Elsby

Amy Schumer’s feminist revolt is a rejection of the feminine mystique – that is to say, a rejection of the idea that certain aspects of the experiences of women should remain mysterious. Through persistent honesty, Schumer’s comedy and other works contribute to the feminist goal of revising patriarchal concepts of femininity by expanding those concepts to include a more complex representation of women and our experience. Her portrayals of women’s physicality, women’s sexuality, and of woman as a social being demand a reconceptualization of woman as a moral and rational entity (i.e., a full-blown human). Her work laughs at the dehumanizing social constructs that define woman as something less-than, and in doing so reduce woman’s alienation by reconciling concepts of women as we are and women as we are perceived.

In Plato’s texts, and especially in the Apology, the Platonic Socrates refers to a daimonion, or daimonion sēmeion that appears only to contradict Socrates in some course of action on which he is about to embark. Socrates infers, as well, that its not interfering is a sign that what he is doing is right. I argue that the Socrates’ daimonion is not a divine spirit in its own right, i.e., the Greek daimōn. Daimonion is used in an adjectival or diminutive sense, describing Socrates’ sign; it is a human reflection of a divinity, the divine in the human, the culmination of Socrates’ participation in the reasoning of the divine. As a “demonic man”, Socrates maintains a relation to the divine, having become habituated to the same reasoning.