Nudità iniziatica e confini di genere

In the space of what Van Gennep calls liminal rites, abnormal behavior can occur, often dramatized and completely foreign to the traditional social rules of the “civilized” polis. One of these othernesses emerges in the sexual sphere, from which certain circumstances arise involving homosexuality-whose initiatory value in Greek mythology has been particularly investigated by Bernard Sergent-and sexual inversion, often associated with transvestism. The latter dynamic is usually expressed through “carnivalesque” and dramatized ceremonies, in which the expression of apparently eccentric traits and the overturning of customary norms is made possible, actually aimed at consolidating the canonical social organization of the polis. Transvestism also has as its counterpart the ritual nudity that often emerges in initiatory contexts, as for example in the Spartan κρυπτεία and probably also among the bears of Brauron; such nudity evidently possesses symbolic value since it is part of the set of anomalous circumstances that distinguish liminal space.