The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory 9781003184584

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CLASSICS AND QUEER THEORY

New directions in queer theory continue to trouble the boundaries of both queerness and the classical, leading to an explosion of new work in the v­ ast—​­and increasingly ­uncharted—​ ­intersection between these disciplines, which this interdisciplinary volume seeks to explore. This handbook convenes an international group of experts who work on the classical world and queer theory. The discipline of Classics has been involved with, and implicated in, queer theory from the start. By placing front and center the rejection of heteronormativity, queer theory has provided Classics with a powerful tool for analyzing ­non-​­normative sexual and gender relations in the ancient West, while Classics offers queer theory ancient material (­such as literature, visual arts, and social practices) that challenges a wide range of modern normative categories. The collection demonstrates the vitality of this particular moment in queer Classical Studies, featuring an expansive array of methodologies applied to the interdisciplinary field of Classics. Embracing the indeterminacy that lies at the core of queer studies, the essays in this volume are organized not by chronology or genre, but rather by overlapping categories under the following rubrics: queer subjectivities, queer times and places, queer kinships, queer receptions, and ancient pasts/­queer futures. The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory offers an invaluable collection for anyone working on queer theory, especially as it applies to premodern periods; it will also be of interest to scholars engaging with the history of sexuality, both in the ancient world and more broadly. Ella Haselswerdt is an Assistant Professor of Classics at UCLA. She has broad interests in poetics, aesthetics, and reception, and has published on the dreamscapes of the ancient body, the soundscapes of Oedipus at Colonus, the mythic geography of Philoctetes, and philology as a site of queer liberation. She has two current major projects: the first explores the conceptual, expressive capacities of the tragic chorus via trauma theory, queer theory, and posthumanism; the second is a multifaceted approach to Sappho and contemporary lesbian identity, under the rubric “­Deep Lez Philology.” Sara H. Lindheim is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides (­2003) and

Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire (­2021). She has also ­co-​­edited with Helen Morales New Essays on Homer: Language, Violence, and Agency (­2015), although her work generally focuses on gender and subjectivity in Latin poetry of the late Republic and the Augustan Age. Kirk Ormand is the Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics at Oberlin College. He is the author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (­1999), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece (­2014), and Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (­2nd ed., 2018); he has ­co-​­edited with Ruby Blondell Ancient Sex: New Essays (­2015) and has published essays on various ancient authors, Michel Foucault, and Clint Eastwood.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS OF CLASSICS AND THEORY Recent and forthcoming titles include:

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CLASSICS AND COGNITIVE THEORY Edited by Peter Meineck, William Michael Short, and Jennifer Devereaux THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CLASSICS AND QUEER THEORY Edited By Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim, and Kirk Ormand THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CLASSICS, COLONIALISM, AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY Edited by Ben Akrigg and Katherine Blouin

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CLASSICS AND QUEER THEORY

Edited by Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim, and Kirk Ormand

Cover image: The Hermanos bronze sculptures by Igor Mitoraj exhibited at the Valley of the temples, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo: Robert Down/­Alamy Stock Photo First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim, and Kirk Ormand; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim, and Kirk Ormand to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library ­Cataloguing-­​­­in-​­Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: ­978-­​­­1-­​­­032-­​­­02679-​­4 (­hbk) ISBN: ­978-­​­­1-­​­­032-­​­­02682-​­4 (­pbk) ISBN: ­978-­​­­1-­​­­003-­​­­18458-​­4 (­ebk) DOI: 10.4324/­9781003184584 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of figures xi List of contributors xiii Acknowledgmentsxviii

General Introduction Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim and Kirk Ormand

Classics and Queer Theory: Beginnings

1

11

  1 How Did We Get Here?13 Kirk Ormand Queer Subjectivities

27

  2 “­Wild” Achilles and the Epistemology of the Ferox in Homer’s Iliad Melissa Mueller

29

  3 Black[ened] Queer Classical: Cicero’s pro Archia poeta and Seneca’s Natural Questions (­and Epistulae Morales 114) in Posthuman Perspective Patrice Rankine

42

  4 Priapus Unlimited: Queer(­ing) Identity, Agency, and Bodies without Boundaries in Roman Art Linnea Åshede

53

vii

Contents

  5 Tribad Philaenis and Lesbian Bassa: Queer Subjectivities in Martial Kristin Mann

69

  6 Queering Divine Authority and Logical Consistency in Aeschylus’ Oresteia82 Giulia Maria Chesi   7 Catullus Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Between Freud and Foucault Paul Allen Miller

92

  8 A Murky Unlearning: Sophocles and the Greek Art of Failure Francesca Spiegel

106

Queer Times and Places

121

  9 Queer Musicality in Classical Texts Tom Sapsford

123

10 Encountering Absence: Queer Traces, Ghosts, and Performance Otherwise Marcus Bell

138

11 Queerly Beloved: Nemesis, Credula Spes, and Queer Temporalities in Tibullus Book 2 Sara H. Lindheim 12 Time and Punishment, or Terence’s Queer Pedagogy David Youd

153 166

13 Narcissus and the Happy Inch: Queering Social Reproduction in the Roman House David Fredrick

179

14 “­How Could a City Become Straight?” Aristophanes and the Trans Foundations of the Comic State Isabel Ruffell

202

Queer Kinships

215

15 Hippocrates the “­Father”? Disturbing Attachment Genealogies in the History of Ancient Medicine Nicolette D’Angelo

217

viii

Contents

16 Tamquam Favus: Queer Kinship and Monetary Value in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis230 Elliott Piros 17 Nonbinary Mercury and the Queer Arts of Astrology Hannah Silverblank 18 Queering Kinship against Genealogy: Crip Ancestorship, Chosen Families, Alternative Intimacies and Other Ways of Refusing the Classical Tradition Marchella Ward 19 Queer Kinship in Ancient Literature Jay Oliver

243

257 273

20 The Greatest Generation: Golden Age, Spontaneous Generation, and Queer Kinship in Vergil’s Georgics Martin Devecka

287

Queer Receptions

301

21 Queering Feminine Movement: Sappho, Hồ Xuân Hương and Vi Khi Nao Kelly Nguyen

303

22 Les Guérillères: Sappho and the Lesbian Body Irene Han

316

23 The Rise and Fall of the Queer Male Body in M ­ id-​­Century Muscle Photography Alastair J.L. Blanshard 24 Destiny’s Queer Scribblings: Greek Myth and Etiologies of HIV/­AIDS Emilio Capettini

331 347

25 Socrates and Sedgwick: Ancient Greece in Epistemology of the Closet360 Daniel Orrells 26 Shedding Light, Casting Shadows: Queerness, Club Performances, and the ­Faux-​­Natural Narratives of Classical Reception Eleonora Colli

ix

376

Contents

Ancient Pasts/­Queer Futures

391

27 Queer Philology Shane Butler

393

28 How to Do the History of Elagabalus Zachary Herz

408

29 Queer Interspeciesism, or Oppian’s Wild Love Mario Telò

423

30 Sappho’s Body, Queer Abstraction, and Lesbian Futurity Ella Haselswerdt

437

31 Medea’s Ghosts: Cherríe Moraga and Queer Ecologies Nancy Worman

458

32 Speculation on classical reception: Queer Desire and N.K. Jemisin’s “­The Effluence Engine” Mathura Umachandran

472

Locorum Index 487 Index494

x

FIGURES

4.1 Statue of Priapus. Roman, Imperial Period, A.D. 1­ 70–​­240. Marble, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 4.2 The Vicarello Goblet. Italy, Vicarello (­ancient Aquae Apollinares). Roman, Augustan period, 25 ­BC–​­AD 25. Silver, The Cleveland Museum of Art 4.3 Priape de Rivery. Rivery. 1st century AD. Bronze, Amiens, musée de Picardie 4.4 Statuette of Priapus. Etruscan, possibly 1st century AD. Terracotta. In the private collection of Dr. Johan J. Mattelaer 4.5 The author’s digital drawing of a rhyton in the shape of Priapus/­a penis. From Novaesium. Attributed to the Roman Imperial period, A.D. ­170–​­240. Ceramic. Private collection, Germany 13.1 Hedwig and the Angry Inch (­2001): “­What is that? It’s what I have to work with.” © 2001, Fine Line Features 13.2 Narcissus and ­Echo -​­Naples Museum 9380, used by permission of the photographer, Stefano Bolognini 13.3 Narcissus and ­Echo -​­Naples Museum 9380, detail 13.4 Selene (­left) and Endymion, Pompeii VI 16 1­ 5–​­17 (­House of the Large Altar), used by permission of the photographer, Tiffany Montgomery 13.5 Selene and Endymion, Pompeii VI 16 1­ 5–​­17, detail 13.6 Satyr (­left) and Hermaphroditus, Pompeii VI 9 6 (­House of the Dioscuri), used by permission of the photographer, Tyler Bell 13.7 Satyr (­left) and Hermaphroditus, Pompeii VI 15 1 (­House of the Vettii), Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Rom 56.459, used by permission 13.8 Hermaphroditus and Silenus, Pompeii IX 1 22 (­House of Marcus Epidius Sabinus), used by permission of the photographer, Miguel Hermoso Cuesta 13.9 Hermaphroditus and Silenus, Pompeii IX 1 22, detail 13.10 Sleeping Hermaphroditus, Rome, Palazzo Massimo Museum, author photograph 13.11 Sleeping Hermaphroditus, Pompeii II 2 2 (­House of Octavius Quartio), public domain 13.12 Sleeping Hermaphroditus, Drawing from the Townley Collection (­ca. 1790), used by permission of the British Museum xi

54 56 57 61 64 180 182 183 184 184 185 185 186 187 188 188 189

Figures

13.13 Sleeping “­Venus” sculpture today, infants and erection removed, used by permission of the National Museums Liverpool, World Museum 190 13.14 Cyparissus from the House of the Vettii (­VI 15 1), Collections patrimoniales numérisées de bibliothèques de l’Université de Strasbourg inv. #11205, photograph by Giacomo Brogi, between 1890 and 1900 190 13.15 Cyparissus from the House of the Vettii (­VI 15 1), photograph by A. Degli Orti, used by permission of Bridgeman Images 191 13.16 Pompeii VI 15 7–​­8 (­House of the Prince of Naples), Directed Graph, Betweenness Centrality (­left) and Eigenvector Centrality (­right). Illustration provided by the author 195 13.17 Pompeii I 7 1 (­House of the Paquius Proculus), Directed Graph, Betweenness Centrality (­above), and Eigenvector Centrality (­below). Illustration provided by the author 195 13.18 Pompeii VI 6 ­6–​­7 (­above, left), VI 10 6,17 (­above, right), Vi 7 4­ –​­6 (­below, left), I 2 1­ 7–​­19 (­below right), Undirected Graph, Betweenness. Illustration provided by the author 196 13.19 Paradigms of network centralization. Illustration adapted from Grewal 2010, based on Baran 1964, public domain 197 15.1 From the “founder” of medicine, to the “prince,” to the “father” 221 18.1 Medallion modeled by William H. Hackwood for Josiah Wedgewood, c. 1787. Brooklyn Museum, New York 262 22.1 Circle from Wittig’s Les Guérillères, an abstract symbol of the female anatomy. Monique Wittig 327 23.1 Model Bob Schwartz from the Spring 1953 issue of Physique Pictorial (­3.1: 3) 335 23.2 “A Roman ­soldier-​­boxer is prepared for the games by a slave boy and fellow soldier.” Tableau from the Spring 1955 issue of Physique Pictorial (­5.1: 21) 336 23.3 Roman emperor orders disciplining of slave (­Bob Riley) by a Roman soldier (­Wendel Lee). Tableau from the Fall 1957 issue of Physique Pictorial (­7.3: 27) 342 28.1 Billon tetradrachm. Obverse: laureate bust of Elagabalus. Reverse: a chariot facing forward, carrying a baetyl and an eagle. ANS 1944.100.64317. American Numismatic Society 412 28.2 Silver denarius. Obverse: bust of Severus Alexander. Reverse: PIETAS AVG and religious paraphernalia ANS 1944.100.52437. American Numismatic Society 413 28.3 Portrait of Elagabalus. Marble. Musei Capitolini 414 30.1 Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women 441 30.2 Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women. Visible text from Sappho translated by Suzy Q. Groden 442 30.3 Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women. Visible text from Sappho translated by Suzy Q. Groden 443 30.4 Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women444 30.5 From The Poetry of Sappho. Copyright 2011 445 30.6 From The Poetry of Sappho. Copyright 2011 445 30.7 Collage from Sapphopunk 447 30.8 Collage from Sapphopunk 448 30.9 ­Fifth-​­century BCE r­ ed-​­figure Attic hydria, attributed to a painter from the Polygnotos Group. National Archaeological Museum, Athens 450 30.10 ­Close-​­up of ­fifth-​­century BCE r­ ed-​­figure Attic hydria, attributed to a painter from the Polygnotos Group. National Archaeological Museum, Athens 451 xii

CONTRIBUTORS

Linnea Åshede is a Classical scholar and librarian, forever looking to queer everything she can get her hands on. She is the author of “­Neutrumque et Utrumque Videntur: Reappraising the g­ ender-​ ­role(­s) of Hermaphroditus in ancient art” (­2020), “­A demanding supply: prostitutes in the Roman world” (­2016), and ­co-​­author of “­Cassandra’s plight: gender, genre, and historical concepts of femininity in goth and power metal” (­2020), with Anna Foka. She has been on the editorial board of the database Svenskt Kvinnobiografiskt Lexikon. Marcus Bell is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. Their thesis focuses on choreographing tragedy at the turn of the ­twenty-​­first century, and they are working to align queer theory and practice in theater and performance studies with critical processes of (­undoing) classical reception. Marcus is also a ­co-​­creator and ­co-​­convenor of the “­Queer and the Classical” research project and an Associate Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmith’s University, London. Alastair J.L. Blanshard is the Paul Eliadis Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Hercules: A Heroic Life (­2005) and Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (­2010), and is the ­co-​­author with Kim Shahabudin of Classics on Screen: Ancient Greece and Rome on Film (­2011). He has edited collections on the classicism of Oscar Wilde and the reception of Hercules in contemporary culture. Shane Butler is the Hall Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University. With primary interests in aesthetics and queer theory, he has published widely on Classical literature and its reception, Renaissance humanism, the history of sensation, the phenomenology of reading, and the history of sexuality. His most recent monographs are The Ancient Phonograph (­Zone Books, 2015) and The Passions of John Addington Symonds (­Oxford University Press, 2022). Emilio Capettini is Assistant Professor of Classics at UC Santa Barbara. His research focuses on ancient Greek literature and ­culture—​­especially of the Imperial ­era—​­and on the evocations of ­Graeco-​­Roman antiquity in the modern and contemporary worlds. He has published articles on Euripides, Sophocles, Philostratus, Aelian, and Heliodorus, and with Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz he has ­co-​­edited Classics and Prison Education in the US (­2021). He has two current projects: one xiii

Contributors

examines the presentation of the fabric of the self in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica; the other explores the ways queer artists and writers have ­co-​­opted the literary and material remnants of Greek and Roman antiquity in their reactions to, and reflections on, the HIV/­AIDS crisis. Giulia Maria Chesi is Lecturer of Greek Literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests focus on Greek medicine and questions of technology in ancient Greek thought. In the field of medicine, she is working with Irene Calà on the first critical edition of the female physician Metrodora. Recent publications on ancient technology include an edited volume with Maria Gerolemou, forthcoming from Liverpool University Press (­Body Technologies in the G ­ reco-​­Roman World. Techno Bodies, Sex, and Gender); a chapter on Pandora’s robotic intelligence in the Bloomsbury reference volume Classical Literature and Posthumanism, which she ­co-​­edited with Francesca Spiegel; a chapter on human and artificial cognition in Classical literature in the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, edited by Stefan Herbrechter et al. Eleonora Colli is a DPhil candidate in Classics at the University of Oxford and a visiting research student in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. She is primarily interested in queer theory and critical Classical reception, and she is ­co-​­creator and ­co-​­convenor of the ‘­Queer and the Classical’ research project. Nicolette D’Angelo is a ­first-​­year PhD student in the Classics Department at UCLA and a feminist killjoy. Her research to date uses critical queer methods to study ancient Greek medical thought and its reception. Since 2021, she has ­co-​­convened the ‘­Queer and the Classical’ collective. Martin Devecka is Associate Professor of Classics and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He specializes in cultural history of the ancient world. He is the author of Broken Cities: A Historical Sociology of Ruins (­2020) and is currently working on a book about zoology and citizenship in the Roman Empire. David Fredrick is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Arkansas, where he also directs the Tesseract Center for Immersive Environments and Game Design. His publications include “­What Remains of Paquius Proculus: Video Game Bodies in Virtual Pompeii” with Rhodora Vennarucci and William Loder (­2022), “­Putting Space Syntax to the Test: Digital Phenomenology in the Roman House” with Rhodora Vennarucci (­2021), “­The Gaze and the Elegiac Imaginary” (­2012), “­Titus Androgynous: Troubled Masculinity in the Roman Movie” (­2008), and an edited volume The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the Body (­2002). Irene Han specializes in ancient political philosophy and received her PhD from UCLA (­2017) and BA from Columbia University (­2008). She teaches at ­NYU-​­Gallatin and received a Fulbright grant to the EHESS, Paris, France (­­2021–​­2022) to pursue her research on Sappho. Her publications include articles in Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica (­QUCC) and the Journal of Gender Studies in Antiquity (­EuGeStA). She has published on Deleuze’s Cinema I and Cinema II in Bloomsbury ­20th-​­Century French Thought, and her book Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine: One Hundred and One Nights has been published with Oxford University ­Press—​­Classics in Theory Series (July 2023).

xiv

Contributors

Ella Haselswerdt is Assistant Professor of Classics at UCLA. She has broad interests in poetics, aesthetics, and reception, and has published on the dreamscapes of the ancient body, the soundscapes of Oedipus at Colonus, the mythic geography of Philoctetes, and philology as a site of queer liberation. She has two current major projects: the first explores the conceptual, expressive capacities of the tragic chorus via trauma theory, queer theory, and posthumanism; the second is a multifaceted approach to Sappho and contemporary lesbian identity, under the rubric “­Deep Lez Philology.” Zachary Herz is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of C ­ olorado-​­Boulder. He works on Imperial political and ethical culture, with a particular focus on the role/­rule of law as a principle undergirding that culture. He also uses queer theory to explore the relationship between gender and the state, and has published articles on homoerotics in Juvenal’s Second Satire and the reception of Classical antiquity in American ­same-­​­­sex-​­marriage litigation. Sara H. Lindheim is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides (­2003) and Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire (­2021). She has also c­ o-​­edited with Helen Morales New Essays on Homer: Language, Violence, and Agency (­2015), although her work generally focuses on gender and subjectivity in Latin poetry of the late Republic and the Augustan Age. Kristin Mann received her PhD from UCLA (­2015) and now works as an academic advisor at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of “­The Puzzle in Babrius’s Prologue” (­2018), “­Reading Gender in Phaedrus’ Fabulae” (­2019), and “­Phaedrus’ Double Dowry: Laughter and Lessons in the Fabulae Aesopiae” (­2021). Paul Allen Miller is the Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is the former editor of Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness (­1994), Latin Erotic Elegy (­2002), Subjecting Verses (­2004), Latin Verse Satire (­2005), Postmodern Spiritual Practices (­2007), Plato’s Apology of Socrates (­2010) with Charles Platter, A Tibullus Reader (­2013), Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato (­2015), Horace (­2019), and Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth. He has edited 15 volumes of essays on literary theory, gender studies, and topics in Classics as well as published more than 90 articles on Latin, Greek, French, and English literature, theory, and philosophy. He is currently at work on Truth and Enjoyment: Cicero Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Melissa Mueller is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy (­2016) and ­co-​­editor, with Mario Telò, of The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (­2018). Her book, Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading, is forthcoming from Cambridge. With Lilah Grace Canevaro, she c­ o-​­edits the book series, Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms, for Edinburgh University Press. Kelly Nguyen is an IDEAL Provostial Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics at Stanford University. She has published on race and ethnicity in the ancient world and on Classical reception in the Vietnamese diaspora. She is currently working on her first book entitled Vercingetorix in Vietnam: Race, Empire and the Classical Tradition.

xv

Contributors

Jay Oliver is Assistant Professor of Classics and Sexuality and Gender Studies at the University of Guelph. They have longstanding research interests in the intersection between queer theory and Classics. They have published on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and female homoeroticism in antiquity. Their upcoming publications concern fraternity and queer sociality in Petronius, and the queerness of the ­Amazon-​­huntress archetype in Latin literature. Kirk Ormand is the Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics at Oberlin College. His work is principally concerned with archaic Greek poetry, ancient sexual practice, and narrative form, though rarely all three at the same time. He is the author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (­1999), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece (­2014), and Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (­2nd ed., 2018); he has ­co-​­edited with Ruby Blondell Ancient Sex: New Essays (­2015), and has published essays on various ancient authors, Michel Foucault, and Clint Eastwood. Daniel Orrells is Professor of Classics at King’s College London. He is the author of Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (­2011), Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy (­2015), and Antiquity in Print in the Eighteenth Century (­forthcoming). He is currently ­co-​­editing with Sarah Derbew and Phiroze Vasunia Classics and Race: A Historical Reader. Elliott Piros is a Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Archaeology at Loyola Marymount University. He received his PhD in Classics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. He has published an article on the epigrammatist Martial in Classical Antiquity. His current book project explores queer materialities in the Roman world. Patrice Rankine is Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (­U of Wisconsin Press, 2006), Aristotle and Black Drama: A Theater of Civil Disobedience (­Baylor UP, 2013), and The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (­­co-​­author, Oxford UP, 2015). His published essays include “­Helen: Queering the Barbarian,” in Queer Euripides (­Mario Telò and Sarah Olsen). His works in progress are Theater and Crisis: Myth, Memory, and Racial Reckoning, ­1964–​­2020 (­Lever) and a study of the Icarus trope in African American art and literature. Isabel Ruffell is a Professor of Greek Drama and Culture at the University of Glasgow. She writes on Greek and, occasionally, Roman drama, on Roman satire, and on ancient technologies, especially automata and related devices. Her major publications are Politics and ­Anti-​­Realism in Athenian Old Comedy: the Art of the Impossible (­Oxford, 2011) and Aeschylus@ Prometheus Bound (­2012). Tom Sapsford is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Boston College. He is the author of Performing the Kinaidos: Unmanly Men in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures (­2022) and several shorter pieces on performance and gender in ancient and modern contexts. Hannah Silverblank is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Classical Reception at Brown University (­­2022–​­). Her research focuses on how meaning is constituted and exchanged across time, languages, species, and embodied differences. Her book project, Listening to the Monster in Greek Poetry, tunes into the monster’s cosmic positioning in ­more-­​­­than-​­human worlds, by attending to the aesthetics of sonic expression in ancient Greek poetry. Several of Silverblank’s recent and forthcoming publications have focused on the role of disability and/­or queerness in xvi

Contributors

translation theory, lexicography, reception theory, and the occult arts and sciences. Silverblank received her DPhil in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford in 2017, and she taught in various Humanities departments at Haverford College from 2017 to 2022. Francesca Spiegel is a nonfiction writer working on madness in culture, history of the institutions, the Classics, and the personal. She has served as an Adjunct Lecturer in gender studies and Classics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and edited with Giulia Maria Chesi Classical Literature and Posthumanism (­Bloomsbury). She lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a communications consultant for Wells Fargo. Mario Telò is Professor of Rhetoric, Classics, and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon (­2016), Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (­2020), Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis (­2023), and Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading Through Pandemic Times (­2023). He has ­co-​­edited with Melissa Mueller The Materialities of Greek Tragedy (­2018) and with Sarah Olsen Queer Euripides (­2022). Mathura Umachandran (she/they) is an Eelam Tamil daughter of diaspora and Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter. Her current research project investigates the critical reception of Classical antiquity at the birth of Critical Theory. With Chella Ward, she c­ o-​­dreams the Critical Ancient World Studies collective. She is also committed to probing the colonial and carceral logics of Classics. She holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University (­2018). Marchella Ward (Chella) is Lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University. Her research focuses on disability justice and classical reception, and on attempts to find non-hierarchical, non-hegemonic and non-linear ways to figure ancient influence, drawing on the methodologies of queer studies, Black studies, disability studies, decolonial thought and other activist disciplines. Chella co-convenes the Critical Ancient World Studies collective with Mathura Umachandran, and writes frequently for non-specialists, and also for children. Until September 2022, when she left to go in search of a more egalitarian approach to the ancient world, Chella was the Tinsley Outreach Fellow at Worcester College, University of Oxford, where she split her time equally between research in classical reception and work to dismantle the inequalities and biases that structure access to Higher Education. Nancy Worman is Professor of Classics at Barnard College and affiliated with Barnard’s Program in Comparative Literature and Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on style and the body in performance in Classical Greek drama and its reception, as well as rhetoric and ancient and modern literary criticism and theory. She has published books and articles on these topics, including Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism (­Cambridge 2015), Virginia Woolf’s Greek Tragedy (­Bloomsbury 2019), and Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Tragedy (­Bloomsbury 2021), which won the 2022 PROSE Award for Classics. Her current research is focused on embodiment in ancient and modern literary theory and feminist receptions of ancient literature. David Youd is a PhD candidate in Classics and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. He has published essays on Euripides, Plautus, Apuleius, and Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of the Odyssey in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. His dissertation, “The Queer Art of Terence,” examines the intersection of normativity and queer style in Roman comedy. xvii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ella: I’m very grateful to the many mentors in the field who have encouraged my queer scholarly tendencies over the past few years, including Mario Telò, Melissa Mueller, Shane Butler, and Clara ­Bosak-­​­­Schroeder—​­know that even if our conversations on these matters were brief, they were very meaningful to ­me—​­and am especially pleased to count Sara Lindheim and Kirk Ormand among them. It was generous to invite me along for this project, which has proven to be intellectually and professionally formative, and, actually, quite a lot of fun. I’ve learned an extraordinary amount from them both, and look forward to a long future of collaboration and friendship. My career would likely have never taken the queer turn that it has if Mathura Umachandran hadn’t let me rant to her about Sappho and lesbianism in 2016 and encouraged me to write an essay for Eidolon. I’m so lucky to be in a department at UCLA that supports my interests, with colleagues that make my life better all the time. I’m particularly grateful to the ­2021–​­2022 lunch ­crew—​­Sam Beckelhymer, Sarah Beckmann, Bryant Kirkland, and Lydia S ­ pielberg—​­as well as my chair Alex Purves. And I couldn’t do any of it without Sasha Anemone. Sara: First and foremost I thank Kirk Ormand, my oldest friend in Classics, for inviting me to be part of this exciting project, and Ella Haselswerdt, for agreeing to join us on this adventure. Their intellectual energy, creativity, engagement, good humor, and patience have made working on this volume a bright spot in pandemic times. Thanks also to all of our contributors for their collaboration. I am grateful to Mario Telò for suggesting that I participate in the theoretical conversations around the Queer Euripides volume; the readings and the exchanges were foundational. My Friday night ­crew—​­Helen Morales, Tony Boyle, my husband, Bob ­Morstein-­​­­Marx—​­is always inspirational. Mom, Dad, and ­Rachel—​­as ever I am beyond grateful for your support. This volume is dedicated with love to Emily, Eric, and I­ sabel—​­not children but adults, and my hope for a better future. Kirk: I also would like to express my deepest thanks to my ­co-​­editors, who have made this project a treat to work on, and both of whom have tried to keep me honest. Thank you, Sara and Ella! Several colleagues at Oberlin make it possible to keep working in academia, most notably Jen Bryan and xviii

Acknowledgments

Bo Arbogast. I work in a terrific department, and Chris Trinacty, Ben Lee, and Drew Wilburn are the best colleagues I could ask for. Thanks also to Phil Highfill, who takes me out climbing and pretends that the 5.9’s are not easy for him, either. Much gratitude is due to Tom Cooper, a friend of the Oberlin Classics Department, who has provided material support for this volume. And as always, my love and thanks go to Gayle Boyer, my spouse, and our two amazing children (­now adults), Ella and Kevin Boyer.

xix

GENERAL INTRODUCTION Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim and Kirk Ormand

Classics and Queer Theory The discipline of Classics has been involved with, and implicated in, queer theory from the very start. That is, when queer theory came into its own, as an approach with means and aims different to those of the history of sexuality, its leading practitioners were engaged in conversation with Classicists who were working, in various ways, on sexual practice and sexual identity in the ancient world. But it is perhaps only in the last ten years or so that queer theory as such began to make inroads into classical scholarship. In those ten years, however, queer Classics has taken a distinctive turn. Scholars have begun to explore the ways that antiquity both was queer and has been received as queer in various periods. This has led to an impressive surge in queer work. While we have been in the process of putting together this volume, two events in particular have emerged, which seem to us to represent (­even if they do not fully exemplify) this recent surge. First, the volume Queer Euripides, edited by Mario Telò and Sarah Olsen, has done for Euripides what Madhavi Menon did for Shakespeare with her edited volume, Shakesqueer. In Telò and Olsen’s collection, readers will find brief, provocative essays on all of the extant plays of Euripides (­plus related drama), every author finding something queer in, or finding a queer way of reading, each individual play. The second event was the creation of the “­Queer and the Classical” collective (­QATC), initially founded by Marcus Bell, Eleanora Colli, and Nicolette D’Angelo, and kickstarted by their “­Future and Potentialities” seminar series that was held online in 2020 with the support of the Corpus Christi Centre for the Study of Greek and Roman Antiquity (­University of Oxford). Now an unaffiliated and independent project, QATC continues to push and pull at the interaction of Classics and queerness, in and through both past and present, by means of conferences, seminar series, and more events to come. The project is ongoing, and its leading team continues to change and evolve. It is in this somewhat heady atmosphere, then, that the current volume took shape. And because our sense is that we are in the early stages of a major turn in the discipline, we have tried to capture this present ­moment—​­and look toward the near future (­at least), more than to summarize the past 30 years. Teresa de Lauretis first coined the term “­queer theory” in 1990 in order, as she explains, to trouble the “­homogenization” of “­gay and lesbian studies,” as well as to find ways of thinking about the interrelation of sexuality and race; her goal was “­to construct another discursive horizon, 1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-1

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another way of thinking the sexual” (­2011, 257). A bold merging of a term of a­ bjection—​­queer as odd, abnormal, ­strange—​­with an established mode of intellectual academic discourse, queer theory burst onto the scene as an always impossible hybrid, a mode created with the express purpose of producing transgression, disruption, or, at the very least, uneasy juxtaposition. Eve Sedgwick offered an early and eloquent definition of queer as “­the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (­or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (­1993, 8). But queer theory, inherently resistant to being pinned down, leans hard into its foundational notion of queerness as first and foremost an opposition to fixed, bounded categories of any sort, thus always potentially, despite resistance from some quarters, beyond sexuality and possibly identity. In the work of Lee Edelman, to note one brief example, the queer is precisely that set of relations that cannot be represented and becomes “­the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form” (­2004, 4). In addition, queer theory evolved in conjunction with a political movement agitating for rights and protections for a heterogenous group of marginalized peoples. As these rights and protections have materialized for certain privileged members of this community, queer theory has sought to retain its radical promise by expanding to reject heteronormativity, defined in its broadest sense, intersecting with other theoretical frameworks like disability studies, trans theory, and/­or questions of race, class, nation, and citizenship. This volume strives to replicate the sense of capaciousness that sits at the heart of queer theory. Intersecting as it does with a multitude of theoretical ­discourses—​­e.g., feminist theory, postmodern theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, critical race theory to name but a ­few—​­while celebrating at its core a fundamental indeterminacy born from a sense of perpetual dynamism and fluidity, queer theory itself inherently denies any attempt at neatly formulated categories and definitions. In the ­oft-​­quoted words of Madhavi Menon, “­If queerness can be defined, then it is no longer queer. . . Queerness is not a category but the confusion engendered by and despite categorization” (­2011, 7). In as much as we can reduce any theory to a core set of principles, queer theory embraces ideas of multiplicities, lack of definition, disruption, openness, and indeterminacy. Language, while necessary for subjects to navigate the world, cannot but fail to represent the subject who uses it; language is inadequate, and cannot account for, or contain, everything. Queer theory trains its focus precisely on what resists definition, what is unrepresentable, and what escapes when there are attempts to codify, to impose fixed stability. So not queer theory, but queer theories; not temporal progression but queer chronologies; not subjectivity but subjectivities; not fixed genders but possibilities always in the process of becoming. In other words, queer theory is not a discrete, ­easily-​­defined area of study, but instead provides us with a shifting set of stances (­resistance to norms, inclusive acceptance, dynamism, fluidity) and a series of questions (­how can we deconstruct various stances, dichotomies, binaries, identities deemed stable, fixed, or otherwise culturally/­socially/­politically enshrined?). We do not intend to paper over the very real disagreements within the community of queer theorists. Some believe that queer theory is in crisis; the term “­queer” has been defined out of meaningfulness. If being queer is necessarily a position of disruption, is every form of normative disruption queer? For others, the question is precisely the opposite: is it fair to impose limits upon the field of queer theory to questions of sex, sexuality, gender, and the desiring body? Queer theorists also disagree on their theoretical approaches and fundamental outlooks. Should we strive for optimism or revel in pessimism? Should our readings be reparative or not? For some there is “­no future,” while for others a utopian future hangs just out of our reach, on the horizon: a queerness yet to come. Some embrace the possibilities of alternative narratives to those dictated by heteronormativity, while others insist that complete refusal is the only answer. The question of 2

General Introduction

embodiment can be a site of divisive contestation, and some trans theory comes into direct conflict with some queer theories that deprioritize experience and embodied subjectivities. Indeed, some trans theorists reject the mantle of “­queer” altogether, arguing that it undermines the distinctiveness of trans experience and thought, while others find the term to be crucial, underscoring a sense of shared community and objectives. At the beginning of this project, as we conceived of this volume, we deliberately chose not to take a doctrinaire stand on what constitutes queerness; we encouraged our contributors to engage with this very question as they defined their topics and contributions. We offered a handful of possible section divisions, very loosely a­ rticulated—​­e.g., queer temporalities, queer subjectivities, queer receptions. Many of these remain in the volume today, while others have morphed or grown organically into something entirely different (­see more below). This decision allows for groupings of chapters into sections whose meaning remains open to discussion, to multiple readings, not one static idea but a plurality of possibilities. It also means that, unlike more traditional handbooks, we did not prioritize a chronological coverage of genres. Instead, we purposefully solicited chapters from contributors at various stages of their c­ areers—​­with an emphasis on ­early-​­career s­ cholars—​­whose work represents a wide range of theoretical perspectives as well as the rich interdisciplinary possibilities of the field of Classics encompassing literature, material culture, medical/­social discourses, philology, philosophy, and reception. As a result, the volume features many different, and even conflicting, queer readings of ancient texts. We leave the tensions unresolved, but also unflagged. We hope the readers, creating their own paths through the chapters, will find their own moments of contact, of overlap, and of dissent. We believe that this approach will result in a handbook that looks toward the future of the field, rather than one that reproduces the state of the field as it is now.

The Shape of the Volume After an introductory essay about moments of convergence and divergence between the fields of the history of sexuality and of queer theory in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Classics’ interactions with the two, the volume presents 31 chapters, grouped according to five broad headings: Queer Subjectivities, Queer Times and Places, Queer Kinships, Queer Receptions, and Ancient Pasts/­Queer Futures. Each section considers a significant overarching issue (­or two) within queer theory from a variety of angles. In what follows we attempt to sketch out the major theoretical concerns that underpin each section and then briefly consider the chapters we chose to collect together under each broad umbrella. Finally, while categories can be helpful organizationally, they can never be fixed or uncontested. In that spirit, for each section, we suggest a few chapters from other parts of the volume that the reader might find productive to consult as well.

Queer Subjectivities It is impossible to discuss what “­queer” is without some notion of subjectivity. As the word queer itself indicates, to be queer is to turn a­ way—​­from norms, from the presumed standard, from the world as the dominant forces of society present it. One of the great advantages (­and perhaps disadvantages) of this capacious term is that what is queer does not remain constant across time or place. As what is normative shifts, so must that which resists, refuses, or confounds that norm. David Halperin puts this succinctly in a recent article, cited by several of the essays in this volume: Unlike gay identity, queer identity has no necessary, specific referent; it refers to no social or sexual transgression in particular. Rather, it emerges only in oppositional relation to specific, 3

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local norms or sets of norms. Queer identity, far from being identitarian, constitutes a resistance to identity. (­Halperin 2019, 418) Whether one thinks of subjectivity in ­post-​­Marxist, ­post-​­Lacanian, or Foucauldian terms, then, the queer subject is that person who feels themselves to be out of step, askew, and disruptive. Often, but not always, this sense of disruption is expressed in terms of desire, sexuality, or gender. But as recent theorists have argued, other forms of subjectivity can also feel queer; see, for example, Sara Ahmed’s discussion of race, and the way that ­non-​­white bodies “­take up space” (­Ahmed 2006, 111). When it comes to discussing queerness in relation to G ­ reco-​­Roman antiquity, the articles in this volume tend to move in one or two possible directions. The first is to read historically and to see how various figures, authors, or literary characters present a disruptive version of the subject in relation to contemporary norms. Those norms may not be our own: being a pederast in ­fifth-​ ­century Greece was not, in itself, in the terms of that society “­queer.” But some explorations of desire and the embodiment of desire do push against what we perceive to have been normal in ancient Greece and Rome. Though most of the essays in this volume take up this approach in one way or another, it is particularly prevalent in Kristin Mann’s subtle reading of Bassa and Philaenis in Martial, and Linnea Åshede’s critique of the figure of Priapus. Similarly, Melissa Mueller shows how Achilles in the Iliad exhibits a “­wild” form of desire that confounds the norms of that epic. The other direction taken in this section of the volume, sometimes in conjunction with the first, is to show how a particular queer subjectivity challenges our notions of normativity and forces us to recognize something in the ancient world as queer because of our relation to it. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the chapters that deal with tragedy work in this mode, invoking the incoherence of characters such as Orestes (­Giulia Chesi) and Philoctetes (­Francesca Spiegel). Though perhaps not queer in the narrower senses of the term, both of these characters force us to ­re-​­evaluate their mode of being in the (­fictional) world and to see the possibilities that their modes of social incoherence open up. Also working in this mode is Patrice Rankine, who sees in Cicero and Seneca definitions of “­humanities” that serve as precursors to, and possible paths beyond, the structures of modern racism. Allen Miller argues that the Catullan subject can only be fully understood through a melding of Freudian and Foucauldian theories of subjectivity, queer in his “­intertwining of the sexual and the grotesque.” The chapters in this section cannot, by definition, explore all the modes of queer subjectivity that are possible. Rather, they present a selection of modes of reading, each of which expands our notions of queer subjectivity in and through reading the G ­ reco-​­Roman past. And needless to say, many other essays in the volume also engage with questions of subjectivity: Eleanora Colli argues that queer reception of Classics should draw on the experience of queer club space; Marcus Bell discusses the way that performances leave traces that affect who we are, even if we are not present at the performance. In a somewhat different vein, David Fredrick explores the desires and experiences of n­ on-​­elite males in the Roman household, and the ways that the architecture of the house interacted with those experiences.

Queer Times and Places The title for this section refers to Jack Halberstam’s 2005 book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. Questions of temporality in particular constitute one of the major issues in queer theory, with the relationship between queerness and “­the future” occupying center stage. As Halberstam explains, the significance of queer time emerged hand in glove with 4

General Introduction

the AIDS crisis, from within queer communities whose notions of their relationships to futurity were severely challenged by the epidemic, and whose attachments to the here and now of the present became increasingly urgent. Queer chronologies and temporalities also emerge in response to heteronormative reproductive ­temporality—​­also commonly designated as “­chrononormativity,” “­­repro-​­time,” or “­straight time”—​­or the idea prevalent in Western culture that time progresses linearly and chronologically according to certain specific temporal milestones (­childhood, adolescence, adulthood, marriage) toward the ultimate goals of producing children and raising families. Queer theorists have multiple responses to what José Esteban Muñoz calls “­­straight-​­time.” All seek a version of disruption in the linear, chronological narrative of progression from past, to present, to future, but what that looks like remains multiple. Some espouse an unwavering a­ nti-​ ­futural or ­anti-​­social stance. This requires a deliberate refusal of reproductive futurity, a denial of the heteronormative Symbolic, and an embrace of a queer present that makes the radical demand: “­the future stops here” (­famously, Edelman 2004, 31). Conversely, one also finds a utopian strand of theory that mobilizes some amount of hopefulness. Here the present is not enough, perhaps even a “­prison house” (­Muñoz 2019, 1), a time in which queer subjects cannot inhabit a complete life. Instead, queerness belongs to the future, an imagined future that is not yet (­ever?) here. Other theorists prefer to concentrate on the present, seeking an overhaul of normative life narratives, suggesting the urgent creation in the here and now of other ways of living with other, alternative life milestones. Another option involves a different celebration of queer chronology, one that explores the interrelation of past, present, and future, as opposed to linear, unidirectional movement envisioned as progression from one to the next. For these theorists, albeit in various ways, queer temporality becomes a model of temporal interconnection and collapse, a model that develops aslant from chrononormativity, as past, present, and/­or future collide and intermingle through recirculation, repetition, delay, detour, and asynchrony. Once we acknowledge that there is no one monolithic way to experience “­real” time, then space too deserves a queer reassessment. Indeed, in In a Queer Time and Place, Halberstam argues that rethinking time to make room for “­queer time” equally demands a reconsideration of space. The spatial turn in the Humanities, dating from the late 1980s and drawing on a term made popular by Edward Soja’s 1989 book Postmodern Geographies, has taught us that space is no neutral backdrop against which action plays out. On the contrary, space plays an active role ­in—​­both participates in, and is a product ­of—​­constructions of subjects and subjectivities, identities, bodies, and social/­political relations. Emphasizing the perspective of the subject’s role in creating space, Sara Ahmed argues for a queer phenomenology, a queer interconnection between bodies, relations, objects, and space: “­Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘­who’ or ‘­what’ we direct our energy and attention toward” (­2006, 3). The essays in this volume touch on many aspects of queer time and space. Bell suggests the interconnection of the past and the present through an examination of performance and the traces that performances leave behind. Drawing together queer affect and queer temporality, Tom Sapsford explores ­non-​­normative resonances in Sapphic, Ionic, and galliambic verse. Adopting a psychoanalytic lens, David Youd reads against the grain of the normative familial and reproductive narratives of Terence’s comedy to uncover a “­queer striving toward ­self-​­dissolution.” Sara Lindheim considers the looping and iterative affair between Tibullus and Nemesis in contrast to the heteronormative reproductive futurity that marks the other couples in Tibullus’ second book of elegies. Fredrick queers the space of the Roman house in Pompeii, while Isabel Ruffell suggests, through the comedies of Aristophanes, that the city of Athens was always already trans. Beyond the boundaries of the “­Queer Times and Places” section, the reader will also discover questions of 5

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queer temporalities in Emilio Capettini’s exploration of how queer writers in the 1980s and 1990s turned to Greek mythology as a way of unsettling the public discourse around AIDS, in the ghosts that animate Nancy Worman’s exploration of Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, in Hannah Silverblank’s discussion about how the queer community recuperates Hellenistic astrology, in Ella Haselswerdt’s weaving together of various incarnations of Sappho, as well as in Mario Telò’s meditations on Oppian’s “­late” style. Queer spaces return in Colli’s analysis of the play of lights and shadows in queer nightclubs, and also, in a capacious sense of the term, in Alastair Blanshard’s consideration of 1950s muscle magazines.

Queer Kinships “­Queer Kinships” is a category that we did not originally conceive of or designate for contributors, but it is one that clearly emerged and asserted itself as the contributions rolled in. Though unanticipated by us, the category should not have been surprising. After all, what could be more normative in terms of gender, desire, and identity, and therefore more ripe for queering, than family? In the introduction to the recent collection Queer Kinship: Race, Belonging, Form, the editors assert that “­queer theory has always been a theory of kinship” (­Bradway and Freeman 2022, 1). And despite Halberstam’s suggestion that “­we may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place, not the place where the old engenders the new, where the old makes a place for the new, but where the new begins afresh, unfettered by memory, tradition, and usable pasts” (­2011, 70), and Lewis’s 2022 directive to not only “­forget,” but to Abolish the Family, kinship remains a useful, if not inevitable, model to think with, through, and against. Per Bradway and Freeman again, “…kinship names a radical and ­open-​­ended field of relational experimentation,” and therefore an ideal site for (­re)­imagining affective attachments in and with Classics. The chapters in this category explore the disruption or subversion of immediate family relations, but also the complication of “­biologizing,” genealogical models that have tended to dominate how we conceptualize relations between ourselves (­very broadly speaking) and antiquity. Many of the volume’s contributors note that modernity, especially “­Western” modernity, has long cast its relationship to G ­ reco-​­Roman antiquity as biologically familial, patriarchal, and ultimately normatively heteroreproductive. Though often employed as an unexamined metaphor, this model can be and has been used to exclusionary, and even eugenicist, ends. One way to queer Classics, then, is to reimagine this relationship as one of queer chosen family, as both Nicolette D’Angelo and Marchella Ward suggest; in response to rejection by, or rejection of, their families of origin, queer people have long sought ties deeper than friendship among each other, a phenomenon brought into stark relief during the AIDS crisis, when ailing gay men in particular, stigmatized by both their sexuality and the disease, leaned on each other for the kind of care and attention normatively provided by those with blood or ­state-​­sanctioned marriage ties, as documented by Kath Weston’s 1991 influential Families We Choose. Thus, D’Angelo follows Kadji Amin, 2017, to perform an “­attachment genealogy” of Hippocrates’ role as our “­father,” freeing us to imagine a queerer mode of medical filiation, while Ward follows Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick to decenter Classics’ normatively biological, hereditary, and white affinity for ­Greco-​­Roman antiquity to make way for a model of crip, queer ancestry. Alongside these debates, it is important to note that for all of Classics’ conservatism and normativity, ­Greco-​­Roman antiquity has often served as a locus for queer identification and queer connection. Silverblank argues that contemporary engagement with Hellenistic astrology constitutes a dynamic and powerful mode of classical reception that enables queer subject formation and queer 6

General Introduction

community building. Other contributors work to uncover the queer ­kin-​­making and subversion of normative heteroreproductivity that was always already latent in ­Greco-​­Roman antiquity, as Jay Oliver does in a survey of ancient Greek and Roman literature. Elliot Piros focuses on Petronius’s Satyrica, exploring reproductive pederastic ­kin-​­making negotiated via wealth and enslaved status. Martin Devecka’s chapter examines the discourse of spontaneous generation in natural philosophy to argue that the phenomenon fundamentally queers models of physiological regeneration that anticipate the necessity of sexual difference and heterosexuality. One could also look beyond this section to Worman’s exploration of ­non-​­normative family structures in Cherríe Moraga’s dystopian world, or Kelly Nguyen’s notion of the phở shop as a site of intertemporal lesbian ­kin-​­building, or to Fredrick’s attention to the ­non-​­elite, and complexly gendered, figures of the ancient Roman household.

Queer Receptions As a range of recent research has made clear, the interaction of ancient Greece and Rome with modern forms of sexual identity has a long and important history (­see, e.g. Fisher and Langlands 2015; Orrells 2015). The sexologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were deeply invested in the study of ancient Greece and Rome, and as modern sexual identities began to emerge, early theorists looked to classical antiquity for models, justifications, and understandings. John Addington Symonds, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Katherine Bradley and Edith ­Cooper—​­to name but a few of the most ­prominent—​­each looked to ancient Greece to find expression for homoerotic desire. For these early theorists, classical antiquity became, in itself, q­ ueer—​­a time and place where the n­ on-​­normative desires that they felt would have been, it seemed to them, at home. Ancient Greece and Rome were for them the origin and expression of a different kind of love, and thus different ways of being in the world. Modern sexual identities emerged, in part, from these interactions with the classical past. It is no coincidence, then, that queer theory is experiencing a resurgence in the field of Classics at the same time that reception theory has become a significant subfield. As we have argued elsewhere in this volume, queerness is not a thing but the product of a response. We do not “­find” queerness already made in ancient texts, but queerness precipitates out in our interaction with ancient authors and works. Nowhere is this more immediately apparent than in examining various modern responses (­critical, cultural, and artistic) to the ancient world. In this section, we have not drawn an artificial line between critics and artists. We have therefore grouped together essays like that of Irene Han, who sees the critical and artistic work of Monique Wittig as expressing a critical element of desire to be found in the poetry of Sappho, with Nguyen’s sensitive reading of Vi Khi Nao’s ­re-​­imagining of Sappho and Hồ Xuân Hương. Dan Orrells takes us into the fundamental work of Eve Sedgwick to explore her interactions with ancient Greece, while Cappetini examines queer fictions about HIV/­AIDS and their use of classical texts to “­unsettle…narratives of the epidemic’s origin.” Finally, Blanshard examines the ways that early male ­muscle-​­mags invoked Classical Greece and Rome both to legitimize and to fetishize an erotic male body; and Colli analyzes the queer use of artificial light and shadow in queer rave spaces, and argues that classical reception work should complicate its use of light/­dark imagery in reading classical texts. Other essays in the volume also deal with reception in important ways. Silverblank looks at the way that modern queer astrologers use ancient myth in creating a highly contextualized and relational process of identity formation. Ward presents a strong critique of the practice of classical reception, as it has been traditionally enacted, and argues instead for a set of queer and crip 7

Ella Haselswerdt et al.

kinships to structure our thinking. And Mathura Umachandran draws on queer Black feminist science fiction to question the compulsion that Classics shows for tracing its queer roots to (­white men of) the Victorian era.

Ancient Pasts/­Queer Futures As discussed above, and as will be reiterated by many of this volume’s contributors, the future is, per Muñoz, “­the proper domain of the queer.” The utopian impulse of Muñoz’s assertion should not inure us to an appreciation for the fundamental dissatisfaction with the present that grasping for the future’s horizons entails. That is, though the term “­handbook” implies an established body of knowledge over which one might gain mastery if only they had the proper guide, as we have emphasized repeatedly through this introduction, the sprawling realm of queer t­heory—​­and indeed, its role in the field of ­Classics—​­is a constantly shifting and evolving one. Rather than provide a series of landmarks through which one might traverse ­well-​­worn territory, then, this “­handbook” is meant to offer endless interweaving paths and waystations toward the future of Classics. The chapters in this section are all ­future-​­oriented, in that they attempt to map the contours of queer futurity or to introduce novel methodologies that will shape future studies. Worman, informed by queer ecology and materialities, shows how Cherríe Moraga’s dystopic play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, representing a ­near-­​­­future-­​­­to-­​­­an-­​­­alternate-​­history, navigates indigeneity, chicanx identity, and lesbianism, via Greek and Aztec antiquities, to craft a vision of the future that resonates simultaneously with Muñoz’s world of potentialities and the disaffirmation of bourgeois futures demanded by, e.g., Edelman. Telò undertakes a “­too close reading” of Oppian’s Halieutica and its depictions of interspecies desire, arguing that an octopus’s love affair with an olive tree is emblematic of a trans*, ­anti-​­colonial, ­death-​­driven fugitivity. Shane Butler argues that philology, in its most fundamental sense, has always been queer; that both queerness and philology might be understood as attunements to indeterminacy. Some of the section’s authors make explicit pleas for how the future of discipline should unfold. Zach Herz pushes for a reconsideration of Elagabalus and the cinaedus more broadly as a discursive object, demonstrating how historians of antiquity might use queer literary analysis and media theory. Haselswerdt engages with artists’ books of Sappho’s poetry, employing queer abstraction to push back against positivist and essentializing approaches to Sappho’s corpus and role in the history of sexuality. For Umachandran, Afrofuturism and queer Black speculative fiction provide a means of escaping some of classical reception studies’ most i­ntractable—​­and ­whitest—​­habits. Of course, many, if not most, of the other chapters in the volume could easily reside here, as they push us to conceive of new realms where the queer and the classical intersect. Colli takes us to the kaleidoscopic light of the dance club, Bell to queer performance’s vibrant aftermath, Nguyen to a speculative lesbian (­Sap)­phở restaurant, Ruffell to Athens’ trans foundations, and Silverblank into consultation with queer astrologers, while Åshede has us rummaging for phalloi in the ­compost heap. In one sense, as argued earlier in this introduction as well as in Ormand’s chapter, queer theory has always already been intertwined with the classical, and, per Shane Butler, philology has always already been queer. But as queerness’ reach (­in its intertwining capacity as both lived experience and theoretical conceit) expands and evolves, and Classics continues to probe its own boundaries and limitations, the relationship between the two is more generative than ever. If Classics has traditionally had its gaze fixed on the past, while queerness resolutely marches toward the future, the collision between the two might be conceived as a rupturing of the ­space-​­time continuum, opening whole new realms of scholarly exploration and queer be(­com)­ing.

8

General Introduction

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Amin, Kadji. 2017. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bradway, Tyler and Freeman, Elizabeth, eds. 2022. Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. de Lauretis, Teresa. 2011. “­Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.” GLQ 17 (­­2–​­3): 2­ 43–​­263. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fisher, Kate and Langlands, Rebecca, eds. 2015. Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halperin, David M. 2019. “­Queer Love.” Critical Inquiry 45 (­2): ­396–​­419. Lewis, Sophie. 2022. Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. New York: Verso Books. Menon, Madhavi. 2011. Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2019. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. 10th Anniversary Edition. Olsen, Sarah and Telò, Mario, eds. 2022. Queer Euripides: R ­ e-​­ Readings in Greek Tragedy. London: Bloomsbury. Orrells, Daniel. 2015. Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Soja, Edward. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Weston, Kath. 1991. Families We Choose: Gays, Lesbians, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

9

Classics and Queer Theory Beginnings

1 HOW DID WE GET HERE? Kirk Ormand

Historicism and Queer Theory I have been trying to write this chapter since 1996. Let me explain. At the second of the ­field-​­changing conferences on feminism and Classics (­now having just finished its eighth iteration), Nancy Rabinowitz invited me to ­co-​­lead a workshop with her on what was then the relatively new field of queer theory, in relation to both feminism and Classics. I was young, foolish, and pretty full of myself, so I agreed, and Nancy and I tried to lay out some of the major fault lines, points of stress, and areas of conflict. A contentious but productive discussion followed. Reading back over my comments from that conference, I am struck by three things: first, a lot of the groundwork for the debates that would occupy the next 25 years was already pretty well established. Second, I was relying on a notion of intersectionality, although I did not yet have the vocabulary to express it (­I was late to the game). And third, though I did not recognize it at the time, I was concerned with the distinction between important developments in two different, but related fields: the history of sexuality and queer theory. These two fields have different aims, but like sexuality and gender, they are mutually implicated. And more to the point, both had a moment of fruition in the early 1990s, so much so that some of the major figures in ancient sexuality studies managed to break through the traditional boundaries of the field of Classics, and were directly engaged with major figures in queer theory. And while that interaction had salutary effects, it also meant that at times I misunderstood the work of queer theorists because I was reading them as historians of sexuality. I also missed, along the way, some of the potential for queer theory of explicitly historical work. I suspect that I was not alone. What is clear to me with hindsight is that two strands of work have been developing, each along its own track and only sometimes interacting with one another. The first track is the one I have primarily been involved in, namely the history of sexuality. The work in this field, exemplified by David Halperin, Jack Winkler, Craig Williams, Amy Richlin, Marilyn Skinner, and many others in the field of Classics (­not to mention scholars working in the medieval and early modern European traditions), has been concerned to understand the development of the idea of “­sexuality,” both as a form of personal identity and as a mode of legal, medical, and social control. Though Paul Veyne and others were there before him, the work of Michel Foucault was fundamental in positing the 13

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-3

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idea that sexuality was a correlative of a certain kind of legal and medical discourse that came into being in the late nineteenth century (­Foucault 1978, 68). As Foucault traced its development, sexuality (­here especially in the sense of h­ omo-​­and heterosexuality) grew out of a medicalization of the practice of confession, and in so doing, brought about two critical changes: first, the wide range of forms of sexual deviance that were being discussed in the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries were reduced to a question of sexual type dependent on the object of one’s desire. And second, understanding this sexuality, discovering it, and rooting it out became a social imperative, the key, in short, to understanding modern subjectivity (­Foucault 1978, 43, 78). A corollary to this ­argument—​­not, at least in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, the primary aim of Foucault’s ­work—​­was the argument that homosexuality “­as we understand it” did not exist in the ancient world. In a surprising confluence of events, in the same year that Foucault’s History of Sexuality volume one was published in English, Sir Kenneth Dover published his groundbreaking work, Greek Homosexuality. Though Dover was not working with the theoretical apparatus that Foucault brought to bear, his book provided a sober and thorough analysis of the evidence for Greek homoerotic practice (­especially between men). What Dover found, and described, was a system of sexual practice in which primarily older men performed sexual acts on primarily younger men, with a set of social rules and expectations that did not line up with modern homosexual practice or desire as Dover understood it. Though Dover may have overstated what later came to be known as the “­penetration model” of ancient Greek sex, and though his understanding of contemporary sexual practice is now severely dated, his book is admirably nuanced in its treatment of ancient sources. And because he discussed these sources in a dispassionate, careful way, he provided a vast resource of evidence for theorists like Foucault, who saw the ancient world functioning according to a different set of considerations than the modern. That argument was taken up with enthusiasm in three books that came out almost simultaneously: Jack Winkler’s The Constraints of Desire (­1989), David Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (­1990), and Winkler, Halperin, and Froma Zeitlin’s edited volume Before Sexuality (­1990). These three books are often treated as monovocal, although they in fact present a wide range of investigations into the culturally and historically specific forms of ancient Greek and Roman (­admittedly mainly Greek) sexual practice, generally informed by what came to be known as New Historicism.1 Before Sexuality in particular includes Giulia Sissa’s important article on Greek virginity; an article taking contrasting views of physical virginity by Anne Hanson; and Maud Gleason’s fundamental work into the presentation and physiognomical recognition of the figure of the cinaedus (­among many others). Winkler’s Constraints of Desire includes an influential article on Sappho and sexuality, as well as a foray into the ancient romance, Daphnis and Chloe. So these books argued a great deal more than the simple point that the ancient Greeks and Romans seem not to have had a meaningful category of “­homosexuality,” or, for that matter, a notion of sexuality as constitutive of a personal identity, and that we should understand modern categories of sexual identity as culturally specific. That point, however, was made by all three books, perhaps most forcefully by Halperin: Does the “­paederast,” the Classical Greek Adult, married male who periodically enjoys sexually penetrating a male adolescent share the same sexuality with the “­berdache,” the Native American adult male who from childhood has taken on many aspects of a woman and is regularly penetrated by the adult male to whom he has been married in a public and socially sanctioned ceremony? Does the latter share the same sexuality with the New Guinea tribesman and warrior who from the ages of eight to fifteen has been orally inseminated on a daily 14

How Did We Get Here?

basis by older youths and who, after years of orally inseminating his juniors, will be married to an adult woman and have children of his own? Does any one of these three persons share the same sexuality with the modern homosexual? (­Halperin 1990, 46) This argument was met with hostility by other historians of sexuality, who saw something akin to ­homophobia—​­and thus connections to the idea of h­ omosexuality—​­in the brutal invectives of ancient Greece and especially Rome. Feminist Classicists, especially, argued for a congruence between the ancient gender category of the cinaedus (­Greek kinaidos) and modern male homosexuality (­perhaps most forcefully Richlin 1993). Though Richlin and others pushed to see connections between the ancient and modern worlds, they primarily did so on historicist grounds, arguing that identities that we understand today existed more or less as such in antiquity (­see, e.g., Richlin 1993, 530). Their argument, then, was not only that it was politically useful to make such connections, but also that understanding the ancient and modern structures as part of a continuity was historically valid. More recently, James Davidson has issued a series of challenges to what has become known as the ­Dover-​­Foucault model (­most notably in Davidson 2007). Davidson is, again, primarily arguing on historicist grounds, but an important part of his critique of Dover and Foucault is that their analysis is fatally flawed by their modern obsession with male anal sex (­which Davidson terms “­sodomania”). As Davidson puts it, It is hard to convey to general readers the pervasiveness of anal sex in the work of classicists today, most of them happily married men whose knowledge of sodomy tends to be the kind you get from book or dim rememberings of reckless nights at boarding school. (­Davidson 2007, 119) And elsewhere, he argues that these analyses are in fact motivated by homophobia: he writes of the “­penetration model,” At worst it represents an obnoxious m ­ yth-​­making of sexual intercourse as essentially dominating, and of gay sex as gestural and instrumentalizing, motivated by a quite ­self-​­conscious and opportunistic desire to undermine the already strongly contested identity of a sexual minority. At best it has been a distraction. (­Davidson 2001, 49) For Davidson, then, our reading of the ­past—​­which implicitly includes “­gay sex” as well as gay ­love—​­has been irretrievably distorted by our anxieties in the present. In particular, he argues that historicist scholars’ obsession with anal sex has clouded their vision such that they cannot see or understand the gay love that Davidson finds pervasive in ancient Greece. I find this line of argument problematic, for several reasons: I do not think that a strict historicist reading of ancient Greece necessarily works to discriminate against gay men in the present (“­a sexual minority”); I think that considerable evidence does exist for the power differential inherent in “­the penetration model” in ancient Greece; and I think the description of ancient Greek sexual practices as “­gay sex”—​­simply collapsing the differences between our cultural ­practices—​­is both oversimplifying and potentially harmful to modern gay communities. But Davidson’s work is important in that it forces us to think, once again, about the relation between ancient sexual practices and categories and our modern reception of them. I will not go further into the long and now tired debate here; the “­sexuality wars” in Classics are now, it seems to me, a topic for curious antiquarians. 15

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While all this was going on, queer theory came into its own, proceeding along a somewhat different track. The term was first coined by Teresa de Lauretis for a conference in 1990, and as she explains, the goal of the conference at the time was …A call to lesbians and gay men to confront our respective sexual histories and deconstruct our own constructed silences around sexuality and its interrelations with gender and race, and from there “­to recast or reinvent the terms of our sexualities, to construct another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual.” (­de Lauretis 2011, 257, quoting from her own work from 1991) That, of course, is not exactly the way things turned out. Though queer theory has had a number of productive turns, including engagements with race (­e.g., Ahmed 2006), and an ongoing debate about the idea of the queer and its relation to futurism (­see Edelman 2004, Muñoz 2009, and de Lauretis 2011), in the past ten years, the idea of “­queer” has become, for the most part, an expansive one. To be queer is to be n­ on-​­normative, in almost any manner, whether that has to do with sex, gender, race, class, kinship, or almost any other social category. As Halperin put it fairly recently, Unlike gay identity, queer identity has no necessary, specific referent; it refers to no social or sexual transgression in particular. Rather, it emerges only in oppositional relation to specific, local norms or sets of norms. Queer identity, far from being identitarian, constitutes a resistance to identity. (­Halperin 2019, 418) Or as Madhavi Menon puts it, “­If queerness can be defined, then it is no longer queer… Queerness is not a category but the confusion engendered by and despite categorization” (­Menon 2011, 7). Clearly one of the most important developments of this broadening of queer theory has been the inclusion of queer gender identities into the mix; this again is a development that can be traced at least back to 1990, with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. That work, which destabilized our understanding of sex as a biological category, allowed the understanding of ­non-​­normative gender identities as being similar to, perhaps parallel to, minority sexualities. That work influenced Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity, in which Halberstam lays out the complicated interaction between sexual minorities and gender ­non-​­normative identities (­Halberstam 1998, ­1–​­41), and there has since been an explosion of work on trans* theory.2 Once we agree, with Butler, that gender is performative, two possibilities open up: first, gender itself becomes fluid, dependent not only on the specific cultures in which it appears but also on the individuals who enact it; and second, the category of genderqueer comes into its own as a reclaiming of deliberately ­non-​­normative gender identities. Queerness is no longer limited to questions of sexual desire. In close conjunction with this development is the vast body of work on idea of embodiment itself: if gender is performative, we perform it with our b­ odies—​­and queerness becomes a way of being in the world, distinct from (­if inevitably related to) the form of our sexual desires or the lack thereof. Here again, some words of caution spring to mind. The broad umbrella of queerness is undoubtedly useful, but the historicist in me wants to insist that gender identity and sexuality may be more different from each other than the umbrella term “­queer” suggests. As de Lauretis argued over a decade ago, it is the very embodiment of gender that separates it from notions of sexuality, which are first and foremost a matter of a person’s libido. Writing in an explicitly psychoanalytic mode, de Lauretis argues, “­One’s sense of one’s gender may be unclear, confused, contradictory, 16

How Did We Get Here?

conflicted, but it is so in a conscious or preconscious way; gender pertains to the ego, not to the unconscious” (­de Lauretis 2011, 251). At the same time, it is unfortunate but incontrovertible that some gay and lesbian communities have often treated trans* people with distrust, suspicion, and sometimes outright hostility, despite the fact that trans individuals have played key roles from the very start of the gay liberation movement (­see, e.g., Raymond 1979; useful discussions by Riddell 2006; Whittle 2006. See also Devor and Matte 2006; Ruffell in this volume). From the other side of the issue, some trans* theorists “­have argued that queer is exclusionary, that it does not include or describe trans experience” (­Ahmed and Butler 2016, 490). As Butler goes on to explain, “­Many people with intersexed conditions want to be categorized within a binary system and do not want to be romanticized as existing ‘­beyond all categories’” (­Ahmed and Butler 2016). One way to highlight this difference is to consider two radical statements, produced nearly forty years apart: in 1980, Monique Wittig wrote that: Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (­woman and man), because the designated subject (­lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically…our survival demands that we contribute all our strength to the destruction of the class of women within which men appropriate women. (­Wittig 1981 [1980], 250)­3 In 2019, Grace Lavery took an equally radical stand: Latency presents as the discovery of an identity in the other end of desire… [which] dedramatized for me the statement “­trans women are women,” whose rather fragile realism I had, myself, felt a little too tired to bother with. I now suppose it to be a descriptive statement, rather than a petition. The phrase “­trans women are women” means: we are already women. (­Lavery 2019, 130, italics in original) On one end of the spectrum, Wittig insists on her right to break free of the gender binary through her sexuality; on the other, Lavery insists on her right to exist in the gender binary because of her gender identity. Both statements are politically effective (­and, in my view, true), but because they are uttered in different political contexts, against different forms of discrimination, the forms of their complaints are diametrically opposed. In brief, there is some political danger in considering all forms of ­non-​­normativity as variations of the same thing: a man may be quite gender normative and still harassed because gay, and a trans woman may be straight but ­harassed—​­or not accepted by radical lesbian ­feminists—​­because trans. The forms of those harassments will be different, and they will have different political effects in the world; conflation runs the risk of confusion and even obliteration. But one of the advantages of the queer umbrella is the ability to form alliances. And since both lesbian and genderqueer will experience normative oppression, there is value to forming those ties, if we can remember the need for nuance in our internal interactions. As Sedgwick wrote in a similar vein, “…it is more to friends than to enemies that gay women and gay men are perceptible as distinct groups” (­Sedgwick 1990, 38). The same is surely true of sexually queer and genderqueer individuals. In any case, the broad notion of queerness, when productively coupled with receptions of ancient texts (­most frequently literary, though historical texts, as well as visual arts, also come into play), has led to an explosion of creative and performative work. At the risk of oversimplifying, we have chosen to read ancient texts as queer, not in order to make a statement about their purpose 17

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or effect in their original ­context—​­always a chimera in any c­ ase—​­but in order to explain how they can affect us now, here, in the present. As the editors of the recent Queer Euripides state, To conceive of the interpretive act not as the impossible inhabiting of irreproducible, historically determined cultural codes but as a creative experience, in which the interpreting subject’s and the interpreted artwork’s temporalities deterritorialize each other, lays the ground for productive forms of queer unhistoricism. (Olsen and Telò 2022, 7) In other words, in the last decade, scholars have deliberately embraced the kind of anachronism that I have spent the better part of my career arguing against. The point has not been to argue that Socrates was viewed as gay by the Athenians but to argue that Sappho can be lesbian for us, and that it is useful for us to read her as such. This move, though clearly productive in a range of ways, has been accompanied by a dizzying broadening of what constitutes queerness. The editors of the recent Queer Euripides, to take a recent example, put forward the case for reading Euripides’ Medea in terms that are deliberately inclusive. These reasons include (­and here I am quoting or paraphrasing loosely): a lack of futurity; Medea as an icon of gaga feminism; Medea as a figure for creative failure; liberation from gender confinement; ­a-​­temporality; dissolution of heteronormative kinship; negativity of female rivalry; intimations of female homosociality; simultaneously reparative and a­ nti-​­reparative modes; and expressions of “­kinship laden with… an anerotic eroticism” (­Olsen and Telò 2022, 2). My point is not simply that Medea is polyvalently queer (­nor to argue that it is not) but rather to highlight how broad the notion of queerness has become, and how many ways we can recognize, if we choose to do so, queerness in a text. Now, this move immediately gives rise to my suspicions, and in part, my first (­paranoid?) response is to ask where the limits are. Sure, Sappho can be a lesbian, and Socrates can be gay. The tragedians have all already come into the fold, not implausibly, given the fact that they often recast political conflicts in familial and sexual terms, and given that tragedy is by definition the genre where social norms (­and divine forms of power) come into conflict with human desires. Herodotus would be easy to queer, with his dizzying temporal and narrative digressions, his focalization alternately of and through “­barbarian” eyes, and his valorization of treachery, deceit, and deception, though I have not yet seen it done. Are we going to produce queer readings of Thucydides? It seems a bit perverse to read Cicero in this vein, given his rants and complaints about Marc Antony’s sexual ­transgressions—​­but it would not be all that hard. Ovid has already been read as queer in myriad ways, though he strikes me, often, as reductionist and heteronormative (­see Ormand 2022). Any author from the Roman empire seems fair game, given our preoccupation with Roman “­decadence,” a mode that has been creatively reclaimed by queer theorists (­Dellamora 2005; Olsen and Tèlo 2022, 5). Cato? Please. The man was clearly fabulous. I am oversimplifying, and I do not want to trivialize the political force of choosing to read our ancient texts as queer. But we have reached a point, I think, where it is difficult to find anything that can not be read as queer. The issue is not so much the inherent queerness of a text, image, or even historical person. The issue is whether, in relation to their own society, a text, image or person resonates with our sense of queerness, of running aslant of whatever ­identity-​­normative forces we see ourselves in opposition to. That brings us to a certain paradox. Though being queer in a straight world is demonstrably difficult, almost all we need to do in order to make a text queer is find a way to declare it so. I would take this argument a step further: the act of reading a text, especially an apparently normative text, 18

How Did We Get Here?

as queer in itself creates a series of queer relations, between us and the text. In other words, when we read (­say) Thucydides as queer, or queerly, we position ourselves outside of the obvious normativity of the text, and we interpellate a form of queerness into that text. In so doing, we engage in a double action, both making the text our own and highlighting the work that must be done to do so, the distance that we are traversing and collapsing in producing that reading. That deliberate confounding of boundaries, whether chronological, erotic, or ideological, can be taken as symptomatic of queerness, such that the act of queer reading produces the result that it seeks. One could argue, in fact, that the more heteronormative the text, the queerer the act of queering it. In saying this, I do not mean to be critical (­well, not overly so), but simply to outline the mechanisms and effects of a certain kind of reading. The political results of such efforts are, it seems to me, not yet entirely clear, and constantly evolving. But given the long and dangerous history of the use of classical texts to prop up slavery, racism, ­post-​­industrial capitalism, and homophobia (­to name but a few), it seems better to queer more of the classical world than less. That, I think, is where we are now.

From There to Here The question remains: how did we get here? I would like to sketch out two points. First, we have been here for a very long time; in a sense, we have been here at least since Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet. And second, I would like to recognize and highlight a few of the moves made by ­early-​­career scholars, some of whom are happily included in this volume. When Eve Sedgwick published The Epistemology of the Closet, she was ­well-​­informed about recent developments in the study of Classics, and she sought to address the specific challenges that work produced for the emerging field of what was still then gay and lesbian studies. The starting point for this analysis is, not surprisingly, the work of Foucault, and in particular, the way in which volume one of the History of Sexuality sought to identify a historical moment when the early modern panoply of different sexual and gendered forms of identity were reduced, as it were, to the ­master-​­trope of homosexual and heterosexual (­with, at the time, “­bisexual” as a suspect third term, not fully accepted by either camp). Sedgwick recognized the value of this historical inquiry, and did not seek to downplay the vast effects that this particular turn in the sexual landscape has had on the modern subject. But she also saw this work as creating unnecessary limits on the way that we think about the past and the present: It seems that the topos of “­homosexuality as we know it today”…. has provided a rhetorically necessary fulcrum point for the denaturalizing work on the past done by many historians. But an unfortunate side effect of this move has been implicitly to underwrite the notion that “­homosexuality as we conceive of it today” itself comprises a coherent definitional field rather than a space of overlapping, contradictory, and conflictual definitional forces. (­Sedgwick 1990, 45) In other words, the risk of a purely historicist reading of the ancient world is that in drawing too sharp a break between the ancient Greeks and us, we oversimplify “­us.” As she said a few pages later, Sedgwick’s goal was “­to denaturalize the present, rather than the past” (­1990, 48). And indeed, recent developments in queer and trans* studies have confirmed Sedgwick’s understanding, tenfold: “­homosexuality as we know it today” has given way to an understanding of queerness that is expansive and inclusive, and at the same time actively disruptive of values such as coherence, linearity, and comprehensibility (­see especially Edelman 2004, ­2–​­4) and, in another 19

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vein, actively outside of the present moment, always a projected into a utopian future (­see Muñoz 2009, 21, 26). It is difficult to overstate how important Sedgwick’s insistence on this point has been, and it is worth pointing out here that in making it, Sedgwick was reacting specifically to the work of Halperin, who had become one of the leading Foucauldians in the field of Classics. Sedgwick’s complaint was not with the way that Halperin understood the past but rather the assumptions that he seemed to be making of the present. After discussing the various forms of gender identity from early modern ­Europe—​­which, in general, were constructed along lines of gender ­inversion—​­Sedgwick critiqued Halperin for insisting on too sharp a break with the contemporary world: “…he then seems to assume that any elements of the inversion model still to be found in contemporary understandings of homosexuality may be viewed as mere historical remnants whose process of withering away, however protracted, merits no analytic attention” (­Sedgwick 1990, 47). And she went on to call for a more nuanced and deliberate analysis of those elements of the “­inversion model.” Now, one should point out that Sedgwick and Halperin were in dialogue, and it has too often been the case that Classicists have taken Halperin’s work from 1990 as his final word on the subject. In his later book, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, Halperin maintains a historicist method, but acknowledges Sedgwick’s critique, and is keenly aware of the danger that “­historical temporality itself will function as a strategy of exclusion, and as a figure for the assertion of social privilege” (­Halperin 2002, 18). In the course of the final chapter of the book, he produces the sort of nuanced history of (­at least one part of) male homosexuality, carefully exploring the breaks and continuities with earlier and continuing categories of effeminacy, inversion, sodomy, male friendship, passivity, and the emerging category of homosexuality. Halperin still sees homosexuality as significantly different from these earlier forms of sexual ­non-​­normativity in its ability to absorb and combine significant features of previous forms of social deviance, and reduce them, in effect, to a question of object choice. As Halperin explains, “­I wish to bring out the particularity of ‘­homosexuality’ as a singular, distinctive formation that pretends to represent all ­same-​­sex sexual expression, a partial perspective that claims to encompass the whole” (­2002, ­107–​­108). This careful historicist work opens the door to many of the modes of queer analysis being done today, particularly on ancient t­exts—​­allowing, as Halperin suggests, “­a history [that] privileges neither the present nor the past, but the unstable relation between the two” (­2002, 23). To return to Sedgwick: though it seems obvious now, one of the points that Sedgwick made in the next section of her work is that the challenge faced in the study of queer literature is fundamentally different from that of other forms of marginalized groups (­especially women and underrepresented minorities). The reason for this is that the traditional argument against shifting the canon is to claim the universally acknowledged superiority of the canon as it stands: the standard form of the question is “­has there ever been a female Shakespeare?” (­One might want to consult Virginia Woolf on this topic, but never mind.) When it comes to authors who look, to modern eyes, sexually ­non-​­normative, it turns out that they already (­over)­populate the canon: “…not only have there been a gay Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust but that their names are Socrates, Shakespeare and Proust” (­Sedgwick 1990, 52). What this means is that a different set of obstacles have been set in the way of acknowledging the queer canon, and unfortunately, one of those obstacles has been the very historicist argument that has been so helpful in articulating gay and lesbian studies. In a particularly powerful and influential passage, Sedgwick lays out the litany of forms that this argument ­takes—​­and here I must admit that these are arguments that can be found in my own work: It didn’t happen; it doesn’t make any difference; it didn’t mean anything; it doesn’t have interpretive consequences. Stop asking just here; stop asking just now; we know in advance 20

How Did We Get Here?

the kind of difference that could be made by the invocation of this difference; it makes no difference; it doesn’t mean. (­Sedgwick 1990, 53) Sedgwick was right to identify these arguments as a barrier to queer work, not only on the modern world but also in particular on the p­ re-​­modern world and its relation to the modern world. And it is those arguments that the recent turn in queer studies in Classics has roundly rejected.

The Current Turn The purpose of literary histories is, of course, to draw a path from back then to now, and every reader’s path will take different routes and engage in different nodes. For me, two developments have been crucial. The first development has been the relative opening up of the profession of Classics to both queer people and queer interpretations. This may come as a surprise to younger queer scholars, who still find the field and the profession to be surprisingly closed, oppressive, and vaguely threatening. But from the perspective of over 30 years in the field, change is, to my eyes, plainly visible. When David Halperin and Tina Passman founded the (­then) Lesbian and Gay Classical Caucus (­LGCC) in the late 1980s and had their first meeting and party at the (­then) American Philological Association, there were roughly eight of us in the room, and my guess is that about half of us were straight. We weren’t exactly crashing the barricades.4 Today, the Lambda Classical Caucus is a thriving, active, ­well-​­recognized affiliated group of the Society for Classical Studies, and queer scholarship on the ancient world appears regularly in the most ­well-​­regarded journals in the field. And with a growing number of openly queer scholars, many of them doing traditional as well as queer scholarship, the face of the field has changed. It will change still more, but when I think back to that workshop that Nancy and I put on in 1996, the gulf between where we are now and where we were then is stark.5 And second, there is (­or was) Eidolon: Eidolon was an explicitly feminist online classical journal, founded by Donna Zuckerberg, which lasted for a little under five years. Its closure in December 2020 is still keenly felt. As with many developments discussed here, I was late coming to Eidolon, and by the time I had found it, it was nearly done. The remarkable thing about Eidolon was that it provided a natural forum for scholars who wanted to produce w ­ ell-​­researched, ­peer-​ ­reviewed work that had an explicitly public face. Though Eidolon published essays on a wide range of topics, one of its strong suits was the presentation of work that concerned the way that reading texts from antiquity affects us, in the current moment. And that work included, not surprisingly, several groundbreaking articles on queerness in the ancient world, broadly defined, much of it by ­early-​­career scholars. Though there are many that I could choose to talk about here, I discuss only two, both of which exemplify several of the trends that I have outlined above. Ella Haselswerdt, one of my ­co-​­editors, published “­­Re-​­Queering Sappho” in August 2016. In it, she argues for understanding Sappho as queer, which one might be excused for thinking should not need all that much argument. In the course of her essay, however, Haselswerdt first has to dismantle a highly skilled, technical, philologically based argument by Glenn Most, which has cast doubt on whether or not one of Sappho’s most erotically charged poems (­fr. 31) is addressed to another woman, and is about her desire for that other woman (­Most 1995). Now, the difficult thing about this argument is that Most is not wrong: the text of Sappho is in a highly tenuous state, and one of the lines on which a queer reading of the poem most depends has been emended by modern scholars so as to make that queer reading more possible (­Sappho fr. 31.7). And while Most 21

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brings out certain aspects of Sappho’s poetry that are, without a doubt, present in the text, he also adopts a stance of scholarly neutrality to negate the possibility of queer romantic passion. Here Haselswerdt’s article sets up the turn that she will make later, by exposing the political edge of such scholarly neutrality: The poem has traditionally been translated from a female perspective directed at a female object of desire, but some critics have labored greatly to demonstrate that the Greek is, in fact, more ­ambiguous — ​­and, while paying l­ip-​­service to preserving ambiguity, strongly suggesting that the poem is about heterosexual desire. (­Haselswerdt 2016, citing Most 1995, 31 n.74) Once she has uncovered the normative direction of this neutral, philological argument, Haselswerdt goes on to talk about how and why Sappho makes sense to her (­and to so many modern readers) as queer: Rather than identification with an imagined biography, I find in Sappho an ethical, aesthetic, and affective complex that is meaningfully familiar. Softness and abundance, beautiful textiles, blossoms, overripe sweet apples, the flash image of a woman’s ­ankle—​­Sappho’s fragments show us eros and pleasure for their own sake, not as an exchange of property, the exploitation of one for the sake of the other… (­Haselswerdt 2016) One of the best things about the work that we find in the articles in Eidolon is represented by this kind of thinking: the willingness to discover in ancient Greek and Roman literature sets of ideas that are “­meaningfully familiar.” The claim here is not that Sappho would have understood us, or that she wrote in order to be understood in this way by us, but that we can, and do, understand her in this way. The point is not simply that Sappho loved women; it is that the way she expresses desire resonates with certain forms of modern queer desire, with both the sumptuousness of that desire and the way that it is structured. The reception of Sappho as queer, in other words, becomes a queer act in itself, and a recognition both of queerness in Sappho (­as we read her) and in ourselves (­as she writes for us). And to quote Haselswerdt once more, the important theoretical point is that when we fail to do this, we enact a kind of tyranny over Sappho’s reader: “­In an effort to greater respect the uniqueness of Ancient Greek civic identity, we have eradicated any possibility of respecting or relating to Ancient Greek people” (­Haselswerdt 2016). Writing in a similar vein but about a very different kind of text, Grace Gillies produced “­The Body in Question” in November 2017. In the course of this moving essay, Gillies runs through a series of representations from the ancient world that might be thought of as genderqueer, or trans. They talk about the famous statues of Hermaphroditus from the first century in Rome; the now ­well-​­known Dialogue 5 from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans (­which includes a depiction of a biological female, Megilla, who calls himself Megillos and declares at one point that he is “­all man”); the figure of Attis in Catullus’ poem 63, who castrates himself in order to become a devotee of Cybele and appears, at least in her own mind, to change gender; and the lovely, androgynous sculpted bodies of Dionysus and Apollo in the Palazzo Massimo. Gillies is ­clear-​­eyed about the way that these literary and sculpted representations functioned in Roman society. They recognize that, in several cases, the genderqueer aspect of these representations was, at least in their original context, a joke, probably intended to produce shame. But there is, for Gillies, also a point to 22

How Did We Get Here?

recognizing that shame as part of the history of genderqueer folk. I can do no better than to quote their last two paragraphs: I do see myself in Megillos, in Hermaphroditus, in Attis, and in Medea. I see them as icons in a history of othering and shame. I see them as people to claim and reclaim for the history of queer gender. The current language of nonbinary gender is relatively new, which can make us seem like a people without a h­ istory—​­it is essential to acknowledge that we have a history, and that it is riddled with exclusion, violence, disgust, and haunting lacunae. At the same time, that very history makes it all the more essential to find ways to ease its weight. In looking at those two bodies as murky reflections of myself, I knew I was rewriting ­history—​­something I had sworn to avoid as a historian. But integral to many genderqueer people’s lives are episodes of personal rebirth and rewritten history. (­Gillies 2017) Like Haselswerdt, then, Gillies sees the importance of recognizing the ties between these ancient representations, their reception in our present moment, and the lives of those of us receiving them. The act of creative reception reflects, for Gillies, the acts or ­re-​­creation common to many trans folk’s experience. This is not ahistoricism, precisely, but a historicizing presentism. And that turn, which so often took place on the digital pages of Eidolon, is precisely the turn that much current queer work in Classics takes part in. How did we get here? How did we get here? (­And yes, the reader is right to ask with suspicion, “­what do you mean we, Mr. Heteronormative?”) I am sorry to say that the field got here while I was largely asleep. While many other scholars and I were engaged in a lively and occasionally useful debate about the history of sexuality, another ­group—​­perhaps generationally somewhat ­distinct—​­simply sidestepped that debate altogether in order to insist on their right to read antiquity through queer reception. This move, as any theoretical move, is not without its perils, which I feel perhaps more keenly than do many of the contributors to this volume. I am sure that some of our authors do feel, as Halperin suggested, that historicism is a “­strategy of exclusion, and… a figure for the assertion of social privilege” (­Halperin 2002, 18). Others, perhaps, will consider as I do that some of that early historicist work has also made possible the most recent queer turn in the field of Classics, by emphasizing the contingent and fluid qualities of sexual identities, gender identities, and the embodied queerness of trans* identities. But whether we view historicism as a step up or as a block in the road, the work in this volume generally tries to move beyond it, in order to create a queerer past. In that sense, I think that the work presented here is properly, queerly utopian, and I am glad that we have somehow landed here, as we look toward a queerer future.

Suggestions for Further Reading Foucault 1978 is more often criticized than read by Classicists, and represents a fundamental shift in our understanding of sexual practice and sexual identity. Sedgwick 1990 is critical for the development of gay and lesbian studies as well as what became queer theory. Butler 1990 redefined the way that we think about gender and gender identity. Halperin 2002 provides a nuanced historicist reading of ancient and modern forms of sexual categories. For those interested in the “­sexuality wars” in Classics, Skinner 1996 provides a balanced discussion of the early years. Useful essays on Foucault’s work and Classics can be found in Larmour, Miller, and Platter 1997. The online journal Eidolon still exists at https://­Eidolon.pub, and the essays there represent some of the best recent p­ ublic-​­facing work on Classics and queer reception. 23

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Notes 1 It took another 17 years for a nuanced and careful Foucaultian understanding of female homoeroticism in ancient Greece and Rome; see Boehringer 2007. 2 A useful, huge selection is available in Stryker and Whittle 2006. In the field of Classics, the last few years have seen an increasing interest in exploring trans* identities in the ancient world; see especially the collections edited by Campanile, C ­ arlà-​­Uhink, and Facella 2017, and Surtees and Dyer 2020. 3 See the useful discussion of Han in this volume. 4 I vividly remember a ­well-​­known feminist scholar entering the room where the LGCC party was taking place, looking around, and saying to her companion in a ­stage-​­whisper, “­Oh, let’s leave, S_____; there’s nobody here.” 5 Both Nancy and I (­as far as I know) are straight, which should tell you something.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Raleigh: Duke University Press. Ahmed, Sara, with Judith Butler. 2016. “­Interview with Judith Butler.” Sexualities 19: ­482–​­492. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Campanile, Domitilla, Filippo ­Carlà-​­Uhink, and Margherita Facella, eds. 2017. TransAntiquity: Cross Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World. New York: Routledge. Davidson, James. 2001. “­Dover, Foucault and Greek Homosexuality: Penetration and the Truth of Sex.” Past and Present 170: 3­ –​­51. ———. 2007. The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1991. “­QueerTheory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, An Introduction.” Differences 3: ­iii–​­xviii. ———. 2011. “­Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.” GLQ 17.­2–​­3 (“­Queer Bonds”): ­243–​­263. Dellamora, Richard. 2005. “­Productive Decadence: ‘­The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought’: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde.” New Literary History 35: 5­ 29–​­546. Devor, Aaron H., and Nicholas Matte. 2006. “­ONE Inc. and Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, ­1964–​­2003.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 3­ 87–​­404. New York: Routledge. Dover, Kenneth. 1989 [1978]. Greek Homosexuality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. (­1978 [1976]). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Gillies, Grace. 2017. “­The Body in Question.” Eidolon November 2017. https://­eidolon.pub/­­the-­​­­body-­​­­in­​­­question-​­d28045d23714 Halberstam, Jack [Judith]. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halperin, David. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge. ———. 2002. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 2019. “­Queer Love.” Critical Inquiry 45: 3­ 96–​­419. Halperin, David M., John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds. 1990. Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haselswerdt, Ella. 2016. “­­Re-​­Queering Sappho.” Eidolon August 8 2016. https://­eidolon.pub/­­re-­​­­queering-­​­­ sappho-​­c6c05b6b9f0b. Larmour, David H.J., Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter, eds. 2007. Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lavery, Grace. 2019. “­The King’s Two Anuses: Trans Feminism and Free Speech.” Differences 50: ­119–​­151. Menon, Madhavi. 2011. “­Introduction: Queer Shakes.” In Shakesqueer, edited by Madhavi Menon, ­1–​­26. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Most, Glenn. 1995. “­Reflecting Sappho.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 40: 1­ 5–​­38. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.

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How Did We Get Here? Olsen, Sarah and Mario Telò, eds. 2022. Queer Euripides: ­Re-​­Readings in Greek Tragedy. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Ormand, Kirk. 2022. “­Ovid’s Hermaphroditus and the Mollis Male.” Ramus 51: ­74–​­104. Raymond, Janice. 1979. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the S­ he-​­Male. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Richlin, Amy. 1993. “­Not before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love between Men.” Journal of History of Sexuality 3: ­523–​­573. Riddell, Carol. 2006. “­Divided Sisterhood: A Critical Review of Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, ­144–​­158. New York: Routledge. Sedgwick, Eve. 1990. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Skinner, Marilyn. 1996. “­Zeus and Leda: The Sexuality Wars in Contemporary Classical Scholarship.” Thamyris 3: 1­ 03–​­123 Stryker, Susan and Stephen Whittle, eds. 2006. The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Surtees, Allison and Jennifer Dyer, eds. 2020. Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Whittle, Stephen. 2006. “­Where Did We Go Wrong? Feminism and Trans ­Theory—​­Two Teams on the Same Side?” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, ­194–​­202. New York: Routledge. Winkler, John J. 1990. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. New York: Routledge. Wittig, Monique. 1981. “­One Is Not Born a Woman.” In Feminist Theory Reader, edited by Carole R. McCann and S ­ eung-​­kyung Kim, ­246–​­251. London: Routledge.

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Queer Subjectivities

2 “­WILD” ACHILLES AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE FEROX IN HOMER’S ILIAD Melissa Mueller

Iliadic Achilles embodies what Jack Halberstam refers to in Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (­2020) as the “­ferox” (­Latin for “­wild” or “­fierce”).1 Dwelling in the metaphorical hinterlands, on the very edges of human civilization, Achilles resists classification within the binary system of sexuality operative since the end of the nineteenth century; his character in this sense offers us an opportunity to explore the n­ on-​­normative, ­so-​­called “­perverse” desires that historians of sexuality are only now beginning to rediscover. As classicists reading the Iliad, we have been conditioned to see only what (­we believe) would have been historically possible. In the case of ­same-​­sex relationships, this often comes down to the question of whether Achilles and Patroclus conform to the paradigm of the erastēs and erōmenos (­an older, active male lover paired with a younger, passive male lover), familiar from our p­ ost-​ ­Homeric classical sources; the consensus among scholars is that their relationship does not.2 And thus it becomes more likely, if not inevitable, that we can understand the Iliad’s own reticence on the subject of male homosexuality as confirmation that there is nothing gay, or queer, about their companionship. In Achilles in Love, for example, Marco Fantuzzi (­2012, 4) considers the strategies used by ­post-​­Iliadic authors for responding to what he terms the Iliad’s “­noisy silence” on the subject of Achilles’ love life. Only in later works of classical reception, he argues, is the erotic potential of the “­friendship” between Achilles and Patroclus fully realized. Fantuzzi concludes that the Iliad itself steers clear of sexualizing the intense feelings between characters of the same sex.3 Others disagree: W. M Clarke, James Davidson, and, to a lesser extent, David Halperin all regard the pair as bound by some sort of intimacy (­although Halperin rejects the term “­homosexual” as being anachronistic). But in our efforts to situate Achilles and Patroclus within the homo/­hetero binary, we have failed to appreciate what is unique and, to speak with Jack Halberstam, “­wild” about Achilles’ ­grief-​­laden longing.4 Propelled by the wrath of Achilles (“­wrath,” or mênin, is the very first word of this epic), the Iliad’s plot traces a narrative arc from Achilles’ retreat in anger, following King Agamemnon’s theft of Briseis (­Achilles’ captive woman) in Book 1, all the way to his return to battle in Book 19. Patroclus has been killed by the Trojan warrior, Hector. Driven mad with grief, Achilles’ only desire is to see Patroclus’ death avenged. During the central, ­action-​­packed books of the epic, however, Achilles and his Myrmidon soldiers remain on the sidelines, as losses pile up for the Greeks. Even when Agamemnon sends ambassadors to plead with Achilles, promising him riches 29

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-5

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if he returns to the front lines, he spurns their offer. The insult to his honor cannot be repaired with material gifts alone. Achilles staunchly refuses to be brought back into the fold. Likewise, he refuses all consolation while mourning for Patroclus. His grief is boundless. Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things presents the “­epistemology of the ferox” as a type of wildness that exists as a set of relations between the (­postnatural) human and his untamed and, by the reckoning of modern classificatory systems, perverse or excessive desires. In advocating for what he calls a postnatural approach to sexuality, Halberstam (­2020, 7) asserts the need for “­new lexicons for the forms of desire and the shapes of bodily legibility and illegibility that currently make up our postnatural world.”5 An incorporative model of sexuality traces how terms that were initially used to pathologize and alienate certain sexual acts (­and those who performed them) are reclaimed as positive markers of identity. So, what was originally a term of denigration came to be recuperated, along with the sexual acts to which it pertained. Something like “­queer,” for example, which, when applied to a “­closeted” individual was pejorative and ­shame-​­inducing, became a source of pride once it was publicly embraced; and “­coming out” became the culturally recognized process for assuming such an identity. Recently, however, scholars of the history of sexuality have questioned whether the epistemology of the closet leaves too many out in the cold, as it were. Its evocation of the domestic, and of interiority, is difficult to reconcile with the “­wildness” of the sexualities that were remaindered by the consolidation of identities around the homo/­hetero binary. And why the whittling down of multiple sexualities to a single question about s­ exual-​­object choice (­one answerable in a single word: “­same,” “­different,” or “­both”)? In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick gives this ­whittling-​­down phenomenon a name: The Great Paradigm Shift. Referring to Foucault’s contestation that the homosexual emerged as a recognizable “­species” (­and homosexuality as a veritable sexuality) toward the end of the nineteenth century, Sedgwick (­1990, 44) counters that the “­historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.” 6 The coherence, in other words, of “­homosexuality as we conceive of it today,” has been achieved at the expense of those other sexual acts and proclivities that had to be subsumed and superseded (­Sedgwick 1990,­ 44–​­45). The Great Paradigm Shift marks the historical and historic occasion in European and North American history when sexuality was conceptually and categorically delimited to the gender binary of object ­choice—­​­­same-​­sex versus ­opposite-­​­­sex—​­while at the same time being refashioned into a coherent and stable identity.7 In line with Foucault’s narrative, David Halperin (­1990, 29) similarly emphasizes that while there have always been individuals who sought out s­ ame-​­sex contacts, “­it is only within the last hundred years or so that such persons (­or some portion of them, at any rate) have been homosexuals.” This, as Halperin (­1990, 25) elaborates, is because sexuality as such “­represents the appropriation of the human body and of its erogenous zones by an ideological discourse.” All cultural formations emerge from particular historical circumstances. But why this particular ­configuration—​­heterosexuality vs. ­homosexuality—​­when, as Sedgwick (­1990, 35) has observed, “­sexuality extends along so many dimensions that aren’t well described in terms of the gender of o­ bject-​­choice at all”? Michel Foucault famously declared 1870 as the year in which modern homosexuality was born.8 But as Benjamin Kahan (­2019, 5) has recently affirmed, “­we do not yet have a narrative of how object choice became the defining attribute of modern sexuality.” The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (­2019) is where Kahan seeks to provide that very narrative; his focus is on the etiologies and the causal accounts of subjects (­i.e., “­patients”) themselves, both historical and literary. We will return at the end of this essay to Kahan’s suggestive reliance on ­first-​­person testimonials. But for the now, I simply underline once again that the Great Paradigm Shift, along with its ideological 30

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correlative (­the epistemology of the closet), has had the perhaps unintended consequence of making illegible “­the wild and odd systems it absorbed and erased” (­Halberstam 2020, 110, my emphasis). These are the wild and undomesticable desires that the epistemology of the ferox renders visible once again.9 “­In the terrain of the ferox,” as Halberstam (­2020, 110) puts it, “­bodies flee, escape, hide, and seek. They express themselves not simply in s­ ame-​­sex or o­ pposite-​­sex orientations, but through murderous desires, violent longings, flights from time, chaotic and illegible political associations, and deeply felt relations to animals and the wild.” Now, it may seem perverse to apply a “­postnatural” theoretical framework to a p­ re-​­modern work of art such as the Iliad. But if the postnatural and ­pre-​­modern (­or better yet, archaic) have anything in common, it is in their recognition of a range of sexual behaviors that have not yet reified around the hetero/­homo axis (­or even, for that matter, around the a­ ctive-​­passive binary outlined above). I divide my discussion into two parts. First, I consider the Iliad’s broader sexual economy, paying particular attention to how women act as intermediaries for male homosocial/­homosexual desire. Second, I examine how his grief unmakes Achilles into something “­wild,” a state of unbecoming from which, I argue, his desire for Patroclus finds its fullest expression, not least of all in simile form: in his pursuit of Hector, Achilles is compared to a predatory hawk. The sexual subjectivities elucidated by Halberstam, Kahan, and others, I suggest, will help us rediscover an Achilles who in his wildness continues to elude ­classification—​­although not in the way scholars have typically argued.

The Structural Economy of Desire in the Iliad Achilles loves Briseis for herself, as well as for the status she brings him. She is a visible metric of his value (­his honor) among the Achaeans. Patroclus is his caretaker and “­trusty companion” while he is alive, and his s­ oulmate—​­and cause of unquenchable ­grief—​­when he is dead. These relationships ­co-​­exist in parallel in function of the Iliad’s patriarchal economy, which sublimates homosexual and homoerotic relations through a system of heterosexual reciprocity and social exchange.10 In a venture only briefly alluded to within our Iliad, we are told that Achilles raided several cities in the Troad. Lyrnessus was one of them, and among the women he captured from that city was Briseis. When it came time to divvy up the spoils, Agamemnon included Briseis as a part of the allotment of goods he awarded to Achilles in recognition of his martial achievement. When Agamemnon subsequently takes Briseis away from Achilles, he provocatively and very publicly diminishes his honor (­timē). Achilles then chooses to withdraw his fighting prowess from Agamemnon’s army, and he negotiates with his goddess mother, Thetis, to have the Achaeans suffer a series of devastating losses in battle. That way, they will learn what it means to have insulted their best soldier. Achilles’ loss of timē (­honor) will be felt by all. The theft of Briseis alienates Achilles from the Achaeans but at the same time brings him even closer to Patroclus, with whom he passes his days in isolation; together they sing and listen to one another sing, rather than fighting on the front lines. But it is only when Briseis is returned to him and he has at the same time been permanently deprived of Patroclus that the full intensity of Achilles’ attachment to the latter comes into view. He wishes Briseis had been killed on the day he sacked Lyrnessos (­19.­59–​­60); he blames her for Patroclus’ death. With Patroclus gone, Achilles finds no comfort in Briseis, at least not immediately. And it is this paradoxical turn of events that reveals the homosocial character of an apparently heterosexual relationship (­i.e., that between Achilles and Briseis). Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial 31

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Desire (­2016 [1985]) offers two insights that I think will be helpful for analyzing the ­Achilles-­​ ­­ Briseis-​­ Patroclus triangle. First, as Sedgwick (­2016 [1985], 25) observes, “­in any m ­ ale-​­dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (­including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power.” In the works of early modern literature that constitute Sedgwick’s archive, ­male-​­male intimacy is channeled through networks of heterosexual exchange and marriage.11 Sedgwick (­2016 [1985], 26, emphasis in the original) also ­explains—​­and this is the second ­insight—​­that the normative man “­uses a woman as a ‘­conduit of a relationship’ in which the true partner is a man.”12 In the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, Briseis acts as the conduit for the intense feelings of aggression and homosocial desire between these two men. But the presence of Patroclus is a complicating factor for Achilles. It is only while Patroclus remains by his side that Achilles is capable of turning the loss of Briseis into a continuing source of grievance against Agamemnon; Patroclus’s support of Achilles is what enables the homosocial triangle between Agamemnon, Achilles, and Briseis.13 Notably, Achilles’ erotic feelings for Briseis dissipate as soon as Patroclus is out of the picture, and Achilles’ anger finds a new target: Hector. We may conclude, therefore, that the initial conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles was never ­really—​ ­or never only—​­about Briseis. I do not mean to suggest that Achilles’ attachment to Briseis was in any way superficial, or inauthentic, only that queer desire often manifests in the Iliad in the form of triangular homosociality. After his fallout with Agamemnon, Achilles retreats to his ships with Patroclus and his other companions (­1.­306–​­307). When Agamemmon’s emissaries come to collect Briseis, Achilles sends Patroclus to fetch the girl (­1.­337–​­338), and he bursts into tears when she is taken away from him (­1.­348–​­350). In recounting this episode to Thetis, Achilles refers to Briseis as “­my prize”: “­The ­wide-​­ruling son of Atreus, Agamemnon, has dishonored me for he keeps my prize (­geras), having taken it from me himself” (­1.­355–​­356).14 Ancient readers were apparently already debating Achilles’ seemingly contradictory feelings for Briseis. Fantuzzi (­2012, 104) observes that ancient commentators “­interpret Achilles’ distress and tears as being erotic in nature”; they mention the issue of slighted honor as “­an alternative or additional cause for Achilles’ tears.” Later, at Iliad 1.­428–​­430, we are told that Achilles is left “­sorrowing in his heart for the sake of the ­fair-​­girdled woman whom they were taking by force against his will.” It is clear that Achilles feels sorrow because of his emotional attachment to Briseis, but this does not preclude his also smarting from the blow to his masculinity and pride. His feelings are complicated. And they are imbricated in a s­ ocio-​­economic system (­i.e., patriarchy) within which a woman’s primary function, whether she happens to be enslaved, a concubine, or a wedded wife, is to communicate a man’s status relative to other men. Achilles’ personal feelings about Briseis cannot, therefore, be easily disambiguated from the value that accrues to him from owning her. Agamemnon’s theft of Briseis produces a materially real loss of honor for Achilles. This “­economic” loss translates into a sense of aggrievement, which in turn underpins the erotic longing Achilles simultaneously feels for Briseis.15 When Agamemnon restores Briseis to Achilles (­19.­245–​­46), the latter displays no interest in her; this loss of interest is ­temporary—​­for in one of the very final scenes of the epic, Achilles lies down for the night with Briseis at his side (­24.676)—​­but it is nonetheless significant. It tells us, first of all, that Briseis is no longer a pawn in the game for status and power that Achilles was playing with Agamemnon; with his acceptance of Agamemnon’s ransom and the resolution of their conflict, his honor has been restored. Second, and more pressingly, Achilles’ longing has now shifted to the dead Patroclus and the impossibility of restoring that relationship. For her part, Briseis recalls in her lamentation for Patroclus (­at Iliad 19.­283–​­300, the only words she speaks in the entire epic), how kind he always was to her. She lost her husband and her three 32

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brothers on the day Achilles sacked her city.16 But Patroclus made sure she was not left behind, and he even promised to make her Achilles’ lawfully wedded wife (­alla m’ephaskes Achillēos theioio kouridēn alochon thēsein, ­297–​­298). And for this reason, she mourns him “­insatiably,” addressing him here, as previously, in the second ­person—​­tō s’ amoton klaiō tethnêota, meilichon aiei (­300). Patroclus’ kindness toward Briseis (­his being “­always gentle”—​­meilichon aei) mitigates the grief she feels in the loss of her husband and brothers. If Patroclus had succeeded in having Achilles marry her, the three of them would have been bound to one another through a combination of sexual companionship and caretaking. As the man overseeing Briseis’ marriage, moreover, Patroclus would have acted in place of her father, who had been killed by Achilles. Patroclus in fact fulfills “­caretaking” roles for both Achilles and Briseis. He makes sure the former eats before battle, for example, and has promised to provide for Briseis in the form of marriage to Achilles. Indeed, in his own lamentation for Patroclus (­19.­315–​­337), Achilles contrasts his present inability to eat with times in the past when Patroclus set tasty food before him. Now, because of longing for Patroclus (­sêi pothêi, 321), whose corpse he addresses directly, he refuses all nourishment. Achilles’ longing for his dead companion forecloses any other appetitive impulses.17 And there is no greater grief that Achilles can ever suffer: not even the death of his father or his son will rival the pain he feels in the loss of Patroclus. It is described in the Greek as an achos ainon, a “­terrible grief.” He had been hoping, moreover, that Patroclus might step in as a sort of surrogate father to his son, Neoptolemus, after Achilles’ own death, taking him back to Phthia, and showing him Achilles’ possessions.

The Wildness of Achilles When Antilochus arrives in Book 18 bearing the terrible news of Patroclus’ death, we are told that a “­black cloud of sorrow closed on Achilleus” (­Iliad 18.22). He pours dust over his head, disfiguring his beautiful face. And lying in the dust he tears at his hair with his own hands (­­26–​­27). Achilles’ despair is so powerful that Antilochus fears he may slit his own throat with his sword (­34). The mass rampage on which Achilles subsequently embarks, and that culminates in the killing of Hector, stems directly from his unquenchable grief.18 These acts of vengeance are often described as an aberration from Achilles’ otherwise humane demeanor: an “­Outburst of Savagery” is the subheading of one scholar’s recent treatment (­see Gregory 2019, ­98–​­101).19 His meeting with Priam (­Hector’s father) in Book 24 is likewise heralded as demonstrating Achilles’ empathy and his essential humanity: this is where the two exchange kind words and Achilles restores to the old man his son’s corpse.20 Such a humanistic reading of Achilles’ character is indeed consoling. It allows us to rejoice in the restoration of order and human decency by the epic’s end. But we should take care not to gloss over the savagery that remains intrinsic to Achilles’ character.21 After all, even after they have come to terms, Achilles still worries that he may kill Priam (­24.­585–​­586). One could, in fact, argue that the few moments of reconciliation and empathy highlighted at the end of the Iliad are the a­ berration—​­not what comes before. That argument might look something like this: Achilles’ wildness is effectively harnessed by his participation in the Achaeans’ collective brutality, which provides a legitimate outlet for his fury and menos (­virility) until that outlet is removed because of his quarrel with Agamemnon. With Patroclus at his side, Achilles nurses his grievance quietly, waiting patiently for the moment when he will r­ e-​­enter battle on his own terms. This is not exactly the argument I present here, since I am concerned, somewhat more narrowly, with how to characterize Achilles’ relationship with Patroclus. But it poses a related ­question—​­namely, how wild is Achilles, and why should we care? The savagery of Achilles, I want to suggest, expresses itself not only as grief but also as a form of disorderly desire. Rather than a unique aberration from an otherwise 33

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civilized record of behavior, I posit that his “­wild” desire and the unquenchability of his ­rage-​­fueled longing are at the very core of Achilles’ character in the Iliad. Rather than regarding his humanistic, compassionate side as Achilles’ true character, and his wilder, bestial side a temporary deviation, we may have to accept that the uncomfortable tension between them is never fully resolved. We have seen already that modern classifications (­­hetero-​­/­­homo-​­/­­bi-​­sexual) are inadequate in so far as they imply a degree of cognizance (­on the part of the individual) and coherence (­regarding ­sexual-​­object choice) that are not easily matched in the ancient sources. But the anachronism of these classifications touches upon a related issue: the erasure of the ­so-​­called “­perverse” sexualities’ by the binary ­sex-​­gender system that established itself in their place. Once we free ourselves from the compulsion to privilege ­sexual-​­object choice over all the other variables of desire, we will be able to hear the “­wildness” of Achilles’ words. Only then will we understand that his ­single-​­minded devotion to avenging Patroclus’ death is in itself a manifestation of Homer’s epistemology of the ferox. As he closes in on his prey, Achilles rejects Hector’s supplication. Hector has asked him to abide by the ethical norms of warfare, where loved ones are permitted to reclaim their dead from the battlefield. But Achilles scoffs at this request (­22.261ff): Hektor, argue me no agreements. I cannot forgive you. As there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions, nor wolves and lambs have spirit that can be brought to agreement but forever these hold feelings of hate for each other, so there can be no love between you and me, nor shall there be oaths between us, but one or the other must fall before then to glut with his blood Ares the god who fights under the shield’s guard. Achilles’ ­blood-​­lust here overpowers the imperative to honor human moral obligations.22 In the natural (­nonhuman) order of things, the wolf pursues the lamb. There are no oaths between men and lions. Hector himself might have been willing to swear such an oath, but Achilles heeds no such rules. At Iliad 22.­345–​­347, Achilles tells Hector he wishes his life’s force (­menos) and his spirit would urge him to “­cut off his [i.e. Hector’s] flesh and eat it raw.” Michael Clarke (­1995, 157) reads these lines as proof that Achilles “­stands outside the pale of human behaviour” and “­has become like the beast that battens on the flesh of its victims.” Achilles, in other words, differs from the other Homeric heroes whom animal similes liken to wild beasts. The similes comparing heroes to animals in the Iliad are so widespread that “­their combined effect may be not only to amplify the narrative but even to assimilate aspects of the appearance and personality of the warrior to those of the animal” (­Clarke 1995, 14).23 Achilles’ wish to eat Hector’s flesh raw is not just a rhetorical flourish;24 it attests rather to the dangerous metamorphosis Achilles has undergone in mind and body as he wills his menos, his warrior’s fury, to consume him.25 Homer’s Iliad is at pains to downplay Cheiron’s role in Achilles’ childhood, but the Centaur is a familiar presence in the visual record and in ­non-​­epic literary testimonia.26 According to the late antique writer Libanius, Cheiron fed Achilles on lion’s marrow instead of milk, “­because it contributed to his courage” (­Libanius Progymnasmata 8.3.2, cited by Gregory 2019, 100 n. 62). And other sources relate how “­as an infant on Mt. Pelion Achilles was fed the flesh, innards, or marrow of the fiercest wild animals” (­Gregory 2019, 100). Knowing this, one might be more inclined to view Achilles’ savage behavior in Books ­20–​­22 of the Iliad as a reversion to his natural state of being, perhaps even “­a legacy of his childhood nurture,” as Justina Gregory (­2019, 100) puts it. This “­legacy” is on full display in the l­ead-​­up to his final verbal exchange with Hector. 34

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At Iliad 22.­139–​­144, Achilles is compared to a hawk: As when a hawk in the mountains who moves lightest of things flying makes his effortless swoop for a trembling dove, but she slips away from beneath and flies and he shrill screaming close after her plunges for her again and again, heart furious to take her; so Achilleus went straight for him in fury, but Hektor fled away under the Trojan wall and moved his knees rapidly. Achilles is the hawk, pure predation. In a chapter devoted to sex, death, and falconry, Halberstam (­2020, ­77–​­111) introduces us to a range of writers, wanderers, and solitary individuals whose most ardent wish is not to subject the wild to their whims but to become feral themselves. Texts include J.A. Baker’s 1967 The Peregrine, a book offering, among other things, advice on how to train a falcon (­an ultimately futile endeavor); Helen Macdonald’s much more ­widely-​­read H is for Hawk (­2014); T.H. Whites’ The Goshawk; and Glen Westcott’s The Pilgrim Hawk (­1940). In The Peregrine, which Halberstam (­2020, 83) describes as “­a postnature, queer love letter to an era coming to an abrupt and catastrophic close,” Baker’s love for his birds leads him to identify with them; the drive is so powerful, he himself longs to become hawk (­Halberstam 2020, 82). ­Hawk-​­trackers such as Baker and Macdonald are drawn to the “­bristling potential of a set of desires that have little to do with the homosexual/­heterosexual binary” (­Halberstam 2020, ­79–​­80). Part of the attraction, to be sure, is the escape, the desired flight, from humanness itself. For T.H. White (­The Goshawk), who tries and fails to train his hawk, “­falconry provides an opening to wildness and an opportunity to sit alongside the feral” (­Halberstam 2020, 93). The epistemology of the ferox thus, in Halberstam’s words (­2020, 79), “­frames an orientation that turns away from the human and toward the animal,” and as such, it seeks a language also that will carry it beyond human realms of communication. This turns out to be a language “­approximated only by using the grammars available for expressions of love, desire, and sex.” I would venture that within Homer’s epic landscape, the simile form, where heroes momentarily become ­animal-​­predator and a­ nimal-​ ­prey, approximates this turning away from the human toward the ferox. In the case of Achilles, his own language, and in particular his use of the charged term menos, communicates the fury that, if fully indulged, would have had him eating Hector’s flesh raw. Menos appears frequently in these animal similes. Michael Clarke (­1995, ­149–​­152) argues that menos expresses the predilection toward violence and mania that the male warrior shares with beasts. In epic similes, “­the beasts are symbols of the excess of μένος [menos] that characterises the young and the reckless” (­Clarke 1995, 150). But menos also speaks to the erotics of the ferox in a way that resonates with Achilles’ disorderly desire. I want to turn now to a telling moment in Book 24 when, after the funeral games for Patroclus have ended and all have returned to their campsites for sweet slumber, Achilles ruminates alone (­Iliad 24.­3–​­8): only Achilleus wept still as he remembered his beloved companion, nor did sleep who subdues all come over him, but he tossed from one side to the other in longing for Patroklos, for his manhood and his great strength (­Patroklou potheōn androtēta te kai menos ēü) and all the actions he had seen to the end with him, and the hardships he had suffered.27 35

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We have seen menos used of the warrior’s maniacal surge of violence in the heat of battle, and this, to be sure, is its primary semantic sphere. But there is another sense that is also worth mentioning. As James Davidson (­2007, 258) puts it, “­menos refers to spunk in the broad sense of courage and mettle, but in 1974 a long fragment of Archilochus was published which revealed unequivocally that it can also mean spunk in the more specific sense of semen.” Both meanings are relevant to the passage I have just quoted.28 Given the semantics of the word, both would already have been accessible to Homer’s audience. Potheōn, in the same verse, brings home that his sexual longing for Patroclus intermingles with Achilles’ extreme sense of loss. And these feelings of longing and loss can also be read as symptoms of Achilles’ being ferox (“­wild”). For Helen Macdonald, it was the sudden death of her father and the unbearable grief she felt from that loss that drove her toward falconry. Loss is, in Halberstam’s words, An avenue to ­wildness—​­the irreconcilable knowledge that the loved one is gone and will never return shakes the foundations of human stability and opens the body to its own potential disappearance even as it strums a new chord of sexual longing. (­2020, 89) The sexual current is undeniably present for Achilles as well; it is on the surface of the epic’s language (­there is no need to resort to the borrowing of other registers of intimacy, familial relations, etc.). And, in fact, W. M. Clarke and Davidson both offer compelling readings of Achilles’ “­longing” for his dead companion, which gives the sexual element its proper place. What we can add, and what has been left out of their accounts, are the ways in which Achilles flickers in and out of humanness in turning toward the animal: how he fully embraces what the simile form allows him, just as their falconing made possible for Baker, Macdonald and T.H. ­White—​­the becoming hawk, the ultimate predatory bird. Achilles’ restless tossing and turning in Book 24 represents not the wild Achilles in the heat of pursuit, but that creature’s reluctant return to its human body: a place from which, now that he is restored to human language and feeling, he can remember and long for those moments of ecstatic escape. Halberstam (­2020, 95) resists the idea that T.H. White’s intimacy with animals, with the hawk he tries and fails to tame, and with his dog Brownie, is merely sublimated or redirected gay desire: “­It is a desire for the wild and a wild desire.” For while “­White may well have lacked a language for his desire,” yet, Halberstam (­2020, 95) insists, it is not at all certain that if his love could speak, it “­would have spoken in the language of homosexuality.” Achilles’ love for Patroclus is similarly without a language.29 For Achilles, there is no animal object of desire, no actual hawk. He longs only for the dead Patroclus to return to him alive, and it is the unrelentingness of his grief that drives him to become animal ­himself—​­to assume the form and ferocity of the hawk so that he can quench his rage in Hector’s blood. This excess of emotion and the disordering force of his desire are, to my mind, what situate Achilles along the axis of the ferox rather than as one of the Closet’s open secrets. The epistemology of the closet would assign him to one or the other of its binary categories. Those who fall outside, or in between, have no names, their desires being rendered effectively illegible. James Davidson (­2007, ­257–​­259) writes lyrically about Achilles and Patroclus. He rightly asserts that their “­relationship is by far the most emotionally intense in the poem, and the climax of the Iliad is engineered around it” (­2007, 257). But in his effort to normalize them as a gay couple, Davidson skims over the Iliad’s presentation of Achilles’ passion as ­boundary-​­defying and unparalleled. There is a scene in Book 23 where, in his sleep, Achilles is visited by the ghost of Patroclus. Declaring his devotion to Achilles, Patroclus’ ghost gently chides Achilles for “­forgetting 36

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him” and begs him to bury him as swiftly as possible, so that he may cease his restless wandering. He asks also for Achilles to arrange for their bones to be placed together in the same urn. Achilles promises to fulfill this request and asks Patroclus to move closer so that the two of them may embrace, and he uses here a dual form of the participle for “­embracing” (­amphibalonte, 97). It is not the first time Achilles has spoken using the dual. In Book 16, when Achilles addresses Patroclus, praying to Zeus that “­you and I could emerge from the slaughter so that we two alone could break Troy’s hallowed coronal, ­99–​­100)” he also employs dual forms. As W. M. Clarke (­1978, 385) observes, this shows “­in extreme terms the intensely exclusive relationship of the two heroes.”30 But these are not just the poet’s words, they are Achilles’ words, spoken to Patroclus. He speaks in the first person, offering a sort of etiological testimony of his feelings for Patroclus. The dual excludes all ­others—​­past, present, and ­future—​­who might intrude on this pair of lovers, or come to replace one of them for the other. In his description of “­patient” narratives, Benjamin Kahan (­2019, 3) recalls the modernist writer Djuna Barnes, who is known to have said about her longtime partner Thelma Wood, “­I’m not a lesbian, I just loved Thelma.” As Kahan comments, such a statement has typically been read as “­homophobic disavowal,” a resistance on the speaker’s part to being categorized as lesbian. But, Kahan wonders suggestively, what might the theoretical implications be of taking her at her word? Such a sexuality, he proposes, would not “­encompass a host of sexed bodies and objects, but a singular one.” Is it not then possible to read Achilles’ desire for Patroclus as similarly “­singular”? Not, that is, as a statement about the likelihood of his desiring other men, but as a particular desire directed at a singular object? What if “­the object of desire is the cause of desire” and not just a symptom of a ­pre-​­existing tendency? I do not here disregard the traditions from antiquity reporting that Achilles had other male lovers, and love interests.31 I mean only that, within the Iliad, his desire and its disordering force are monomaniacal. His “­wildness” revolves entirely around his failure to bring Patroclus back from the dead, or even to wrap his arms around his fleeting ghost, much as he longs to. This is the epistemology of the ferox that we come to witness in and through Achilles. Achilles’ is no ordinary grief. In Book 24, Apollo criticizes the other gods for not intervening and putting a stop to his excessive desecration of Hector’s corpse: Achilles, within whose breast there are no feelings of justice, nor can his mind be bent, but his purposes are fierce, like a lion who when he has given way to his own great strength and his haughty spirit, goes among the flocks of men, to devour them.

(­24.­40–​­43)

He has been turned into something both more and less than human by the loss of Patroclus. What the epistemology of the ferox allows us to see is how his grief unmakes and, at the same time, defines Achilles. By undoing the societal bonds that have held him in place as the “­best of the Achaeans,” companion of Patroclus, and lover of Briseis, his disorderly desire restores to us an Achilles who might not otherwise have existed. His is a sexuality that has gone undetected because it is unknowable within the cultural and critical frameworks that have sought to recuperate it. Neither “­gay” nor “­straight,” Achilles exists outside the realm of the heterosexual/­homosexual binary which underpins the logic of sexual orientation, at least in so far as that logic can be traced back to the middle of the last century.32 Achilles’ sexuality also predates the emergence of the ­active-​­passive paradigm for male lovers that was prevalent in the classical period, and to which many scholars 37

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have gestured when they assert with confidence that there is no erotic element between him and Patroclus. It is true that these two do not fit easily into the roles of erastēs and erōmenos. As we have seen here, however, both the ancient, ­classically-​­derived model and the more modern models of s­ ame-​­sex relationships fail us when we try to map onto them what the death of Patroclus engenders in Achilles. This failure may speak more to the limitations of the paradigms themselves than to any particular missteps on the part of the scholars who have applied them. But whatever their source, such limitations have afforded us a chance to explore, with Halberstam and others, the Iliad’s own epistemology of the ferox.

Suggestions for Further Reading Reception Studies provides one of the more promising and innovative areas of scholarship for those who are interested in Achilles and Patroclus, both in Homer and beyond. Butler 2016 follows the Victorian scholar John Addington Symonds in arguing that the literary tradition as a whole recognizes the love between Achilles and Patroclus, even if the precise language to describe their relationship is absent from the Iliad. Delbar 2023 likewise sees a continuity between ancient and more modern treatments; he argues, moreover, that there is an unappreciated queerness to the sleeping arrangements that are described at Iliad 9.­658–​­68, where Achilles and Patroclus retire to the same room, each with their own female concubine. See, too, Lesser 2023, with its focus on the triangles of desire that structure the plot and the queer subjectivities of Achilles, Paris, and Helen.

Notes 1 I am grateful to the editors of this volume for their invitation to contribute and their help in shaping this chapter. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful comments I received (­on an earlier version) from Lilah Grace Canevaro, Jonathan Ready, and Mario Telò. 2 See Dover 1978 and Ormand 2018, ­55–​­72 for the sources and how to interpret them; Halperin 1990, 86 notes that “­if later Greeks could agree (­and they could not all agree) that Achilles and Patroclus were a paederastic couple, they had more difficulty deciding who played which role in the relationship.” 3 For example, Fantuzzi 2012, 198 concedes that Homer presents their connection as “­something most intense” but insists that “­there is no hint of a sexual component to their relationship.” Austin 2021, 33 similarly claims that although in the ­fifth-​­and ­fourth-​­century sources “­the two men are portrayed unambiguously as lovers, yet in Homer there is no erotic element” (­my emphasis). Warwick 2019, by contrast, argues the men’s feelings for and behavior toward one another constitutes a homoerotic “­subtext” in the Iliad. 4 On this longing, and the semantics of pothos, pothē and related terms in the Iliad, see Austin 2021. 5 The postnatural, as Halberstam 2020 uses the term (­­7–​­17, ­25–​­29), marks out a realm that lies beyond the cultural conscription of certain sexualities as unnatural or “­against nature.” 6 This is Sedgwick’s Axiom 5 and it responds to the section of Foucault’s History of Sexuality (­i.e., 1990, 43) where he ascribes to the publication in 1870 of Carl Westphal’s article on “­contrary sexual sensations” (­Die Konträre Sexualempfindung: Symptom eines neuropathologischen (­psychopathischen) Zustandes) a cultural shift from discrete sexual relations to a “­sexual sensibility.” Foucault 1990, 43 neatly sums up this claim by asserting that while “­the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” 7 Sedgwick 1990, ­82–​­83 summarizes, in terms laid out by Foucault, the nineteenth century shift in European thought from viewing ­same-​­sex sexuality as a matter of prohibited and isolated genital acts (­acts to which, in that view, anyone might be liable who did not have their appetites in general under close control) to viewing it as a function of stable definitions of identity (­so that one’s personality structure might mark one as a homosexual, even, perhaps, in the absence of any genital activity at all). (­emphasis in the original)

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“Wild” Achilles 8 On the year 1870, see note 6 above. Halberstam 2020, 14 observes that whereas homosexuality appeared neatly to have “­siphoned off” desire and sexual activity that had previously been dispersed among various “­acts,” a side effect of this relatively new classification is that it “­also resulted in another realm of disorganization, a set of remaindered categories that seem quaint and strange to contemporary scholars.” 9 Sedgwick’s 2016 [1985], 2 definition of “­desire” may also be useful here: I will be using ‘­desire’ in a way analogous to the psychoanalytic use of ‘­libido’–​­not for a particular affective state or emotion, but for the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important relationship. 10 Lyons 2012, ­53–​­64 offers a succinct overview of this e­ xchange-​­based Iliadic economy. 11 On the homosociality of marriage in Greek tragedy, see Ormand 1999. 12 The phrase “­conduit of a relationship” comes from Rubin 1975, 174. Sedgwick 2016 [1985], 26 here responds to this quote from L ­ évi-​­Strauss 1969, 115: The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners. 13 Lesser 2023, 141 points out that by refusing to take back Briseis in Book 9, Achilles “­reveals how his aggressive homosocial desire to humble the Greek commander has fully subsumed the heterosexual desire he felt for his concubine.” 14 Quotations are taken from Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad, but the line numbers cited are those of the OCT edition of the Iliad (­in Greek), edited by David B. Monro and Thomas W. Allen. 15 Part of the challenge here is the subtly shifting nature of Achilles’ rhetoric, which requires careful parsing. For example, when he refers to Briseis as his alochonthumarea (­at Iliad 9.336) he echoes the language that is used by Odysseus of his wife Penelope (­at Odyssey 23.232). Fantuzzi 2012, 108 suggests that “­precisely in the case of Achilles, who defines Briseis as his wife to ­Odysseus—​­the use of familiar language would have been a nice way for Achilles to persuade Odysseus of the intensity of his own feelings for Briseis.” 16 Briseis has in common with Andromache that each has survived a raid by Achilles on their hometown; see Andromache’s speech to Hector in Book 6 where she mentions that Achilles killed her father and her seven brothers (­at Iliad 6.­414–​­424). 17 At 19.­304–​­308, Achilles voices impatience with the continued pressure being placed on him to eat. He refuses, and groaning he says, “­Stop ordering me to fill my heart with food and drink, since terrible grief is upon me (­epei m’ achos ainon hikanei, 307).” 18 On the blending of grief and rage, see Austin 2021, 5­ 0–​­81. 19 And this view is supported by the fact that in the past Achilles did accept ranson (­for example, in the case of Lykaon) in place of killing an enemy supplicant. 20 Clarke 2019, ­294–​­300, however, rightly emphasizes how precarious their pact is, noting that “­Achilles is still b­ east-​­like, still gripped by the sinister mood in which he has been approaching his end” (­299). 21 See Edwards 1991 on 19.­212–​­224, where Achilles tells Agamemnon that he has no interest in receiving ransom or sitting down to eat, only in avenging Hector’s death: “­The bloodthirsty line 214 has no parallel in form… Akhilleus is the only character who speaks like this, and only in his present mood.” 22 Ready 2011, ­61–​­69 argues Achilles, in disparaging ­oath-​­making, is distancing himself from the conventions of Homeric epic and echoing the genre of fable instead. 23 Ready 2011, 64 suggests that the simile at Iliad 22.262 “­not only cites the usual antipathy between lions and men but also takes us inside the lion’s head” (­my emphasis). Schein 1984, 79, by contrast, argues that the animal similes are mostly “­in the realm of rhetoric” and that although Achilles temporarily loses his civilized standing, in his grief “­Achilles in fact acts like a deranged human being, not like an animal.” An animal “­would eat its victims raw, not sacrifice them alive.” 24 See Wilson 2002, 1­ 74–​­176 on Hera and Hecuba’s similarly expressed wish to eat flesh raw. 25 On the sexual meaning of menos, see below. 26 Cheiron is, however, mentioned at Iliad 11.832. 27 Ancient commentators were already debating the authenticity of these lines and defending them against athetization, as noted by Fantuzzi 2012, 212. 28 Lesser 2023, 202 demonstrates that the related verb meneainō often signals “­aggressive desire” in the Iliad, and is used, for example, of Achilles when he is simultaneously experiencing unresolved longing for Patroclus and “­unrelenting aggression against Hektor” (­227).

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Melissa Mueller 29 As Halperin (­1990, 85) notes, Homer draws on conjugal relations and kinship ties “­in order to define, to make familiar, and to situate (­both socially and emotionally) the central friendship” between Achilles and Patroclus. 30 For a different take on these duals, see Buchan 2012, 126, who writes of Achilles and Patroclus that “­their togetherness occurs only in a fantasized future that will never arrive.” 31 See Fantuzzi 2012, ­15–​­16 and ­215–​­225 on Achilles’ homoerotic love affairs in (­lost) tragedies such as Aeschylus’ Myrmidons and Sophocles’ The Lovers of Achilles (­a satyr play). 32 Kahan 2019, ­135–​­36 discusses an entry from the OED of 1946 that testifies to the congealing of the notion of sexual orientation around object choice, sexual orientation being defined as “­a person’s sexual identity in relation to the gender to whom he or she is usually attracted.”

Works Cited Austin, Emily P. 2021. Grief and the Hero: The Futility of Longing in the Iliad. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Buchan, Mark. 2012. Perfidy and Passion: Reintroducing the Iliad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Butler, Shane. 2016. “­Homer’s Deep,” in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, edited by Shane Butler. London: Bloomsbury: 2­ 1–​­48. Clarke, Michael. 1995. “­Between Lions and Men: Images of the Hero in the Iliad,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 37: ­137–​­159. Clarke, Michael. 2019. Achilles Beside Gilgamesh: Mortality and Wisdom in Early Epic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, W. M. 1978. “­Achilles and Patroclus in Love,” Hermes 106.3: ­381–​­396. Davidson, James. 2007. The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Delbar, David. 2023. “­Achilles and Patroclus Revisited (­Again),” in The Routledge Companion to the Reception of Ancient Greek and Roman Gender and Sexuality, edited by K. R. Moore. London: Routledge: ­22–​­40. Dover, K. J. 1978. Greek Homosexuality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edwards, Mark W. 1991. The Iliad: A Commentary. Volume V: Books ­17–​­20. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fantuzzi, Marco. 2012. Achilles in Love: Intertextual Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1990. (­Translated from the French by Robert Hurley). The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. Gregory, Justina. 2019. Cheiron’s Way: Youthful Education in Homer and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2020. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halperin, David M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge. Kahan, Benjamin. 2019. The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergence of Sexuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lattimore, Richmond. 2011. The Iliad of Homer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lesser, Rachel H. 2023. Desire in the Iliad: The Force that Moves the Epic and its Audience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ­Lévi-​­Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (­Revised edition). Translated from the French by J. H. Bell, J. R. Von Sturmer, and R. Needham. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lyons, Deborah. 2012. Dangerous Gifts: Gender and Exchange in Ancient Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press. Macdonald, Helen. 2014. H Is for Hawk. New York: Grove Press. Ormand, Kirk. 1999. Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ormand, Kirk. 2018. Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (­2nd edition). Austin: University of Texas Press. Ready, Jonathan L. 2011. Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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“Wild” Achilles Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “­The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘­Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Rayter. Monthly Review Press: ­157–​­210. Schein, Seth. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2016. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. 30th Anniversary edition. New York: Columbia University Press. Warwick, Celsiana. 2019. “­We Two Alone: Conjugal Bonds and Homoerotic Subtext in the Iliad,” Helios 46.2: 1­ 15–​­139. Wilson, Donna. 2002. Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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3 BLACK[ENED] QUEER CLASSICAL Cicero’s pro Archia poeta and Seneca’s Natural Questions (­and Epistulae Morales 114) in Posthuman Perspective Patrice Rankine Any discussion of the connection between “­the queer” and “­the classical” benefits from a consideration of posthumanism. In this essay, I use humanism and posthumanism as heuristics for understanding some of the entanglements that determine the gendered and racialized subject. I do so tentatively and inconclusively but in ways that I believe properly interrogate what we might mean by queer and the classical, and I urge us not to inquire into these without consideration of race as manifest in the Black[ened] person, a modern subject.1 By queer, I mean both an embodied reality as well as the askant perspectives that such embodiment can engender. As it pertains to queer embodiment, the new possibilities within the posthuman, such as cyborgs, disrupt humanistic norms having to do with biological sex and gender. In this context, technology enables and engenders relationships between human beings and other objects. Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, for example, invoked “­multiple heterogeneous, inhomogeneous, accountable, and connected human agents” (­Haraway 1991, 3). As a cyborg potentiality, the assimilation of tools, such as artificial limbs, is evidence of the plasticity between humans and machines.2 “­Freedom of gender,” as one potential posthuman technological adaptation, is “­the gateway to a freedom of form and to an explosion of human potential.” The individual freedom to choose one’s ideal embodiment reveals gender and sexuality as sites where humanism had always already been under duress, challenged or “­explo[ded]” (­Rothblatt 2013, 318).3 Posthumanism suggests a different relationship from humanism between persons and other phenomena, including the tools at their disposal. Julian Pepperell defines posthumanism as a period “­after humanism” (­Pepperell 2009: iv), but the problematic relationship  – ​­rather than the temporal emphasis, i.e., “­post” as subsequent ­to – ​­of the human species to other phenomena in the world is a crux of the intellectual framework. Humanism placed human beings at the center of natural order, but the “­traditional view of what constitutes a human being is now undergoing a profound transformation” (­iv), owing to the “­convergence of biology and technology” (­iv). The convergence, the profound transformation of which Pepperell speaks (­iv), disrupts classical humanistic discourse and, within that, the normativity of biological sex and gender, even as culturally produced. It is commonly recognized that humanism constituted the subject; the subject, e.g., the female or woman, is “­produce[d]” in linguistic, juridical, and political systems of power (­Butler 2006, 2, her italics). “­If,” therefore,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-6 42

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Postmodernism deconstructed the idea of a human unified self and paved the way for emancipatory discourses on gender, race, ethnicity, and class, the Posthuman turn inaugurates a liberatory discourse for groups of n­ on-​­human entities (­such as animals, objects and machines). (­Chesi and Spiegel 2020, 2) As I am suggesting, this liberatory discourse would also pertain to human gender, race, ethnicity, and class, just as postmodernism did. Postmodernism “­deconstructed” the self in emancipatory ways; posthumanism queers classical humanistic discourse, both in embodied and theoretical senses of the term. It is worth stating that the framework for posthumanism I offer here differs somewhat from that of Chesi and Spiegel, in so far as I question the “­emancipatory” or redemptive potentiality of humanism, even an “­other Humanism, one that endlessly promoted critical thinking and preserved the idea of the inviolable dignity of the Other” (­Chesi and Spiegel 2020, 5). The most exquisite challenge to the emancipatory strain of humanism can be found in Frank B. Wilderson III’s Afropessimism, and here discussions of Blackness enhance our understanding of humanism’s normativity and why I propose posthumanism as a space not only for “­­non-​­human entities” but also for subjects at the periphery of humanism, such as queer and Black[ened] ones. These call the entire humanistic enterprise into question. For Wilderson, humanism is not emancipatory or “­redemptive.” Rather, humanism Fed on me for its coherence. Everything meaningful in my life had been housed under the umbrella called ‘­the humanities’ and ‘­radical politics.’ The parasites had been capital, colonialism, patriarchy, homophobia. And now it was clear that I had missed the boat. My parasites were Humans, all Humans. (­Wilderson 2021, 57) The Black[ened] ­being – ​­Black[ened] because such a ­non-​­human embodiment is a process, i.e., the Black subject is also ­produced – ​­is abject, and there is no recovery from such a transformation. As Wilderson puts it, “­Humans are sentient beings who are not Black” (­2021, 41). Zakiyyah Iman Jackson extends this analysis, in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (­2020), expressing skepticism about any admittance of the Black ­person – ​­previously ­not-­​­­human –​ ­into universal humanity. That is, if we take up the proposition of “­the Human,” as in Wilderson and Jackson, it becomes evident that the category depends on an order of being in which even seemingly human subjects are faced with certain conditions on their status.4 In Jackson’s assessment, Black women in humanistic discourse reveal the norm to be plasticity, i.e., subjects placed on an expanding and contracting sphere of possibilities. Although Jackson does not use this example, Henrietta Lacks, the Black woman whose cells were used to map the human genome, without her knowledge or permission, is not treated as a human being with agentive rights, but she makes others human beings possible (­Skloot 2011). She is the animate tool of the human, even in the ­post-​ ­emancipatory (­­post-​­slavery) twentieth century of the United States. While it is commonly recognized that humanism constitutes the subject, I want to locate in classical texts the structure of alterity that Wilderson and Jackson name through Black[ened] being. I would add a deeper historical dimension, or the longue durée, to their analysis. Even before race emerges as a genealogical category, the structure of relationships established in humanism, e.g., in the Hegelian master/­slave dichotomy, was already implicit in such areas as Cicero’s discussion of

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Archias, the latter a tool of the human. Any number of Ciceronian works could be cited as evidence of this humanism, but pro Archia poeta, which Cicero delivered in 62 BCE in defense of Aulus Licinius’ (­Archias’) claim to Roman citizenship, is a locus classicus for humanitas. It should be remembered that the petition for citizenship is one for legal status, to exist as a person under the law.5 As it pertains to legal status, Archias is like a Roman woman, a ­non-​­person (­Chatelard and Stevens 2016). Wilderson’s idea of “­natality, honor, and contingent violence” as “­three constituents…of Human subjectivity” (­2021, 42) is useful in framing a discussion of subjects across temporal and cultural differences. Although Wilderson does not provide a complex genealogy of events leading to his Afropessimistic outlook, we might view his perspective as the extreme of a position already embedded in humanism.6 I diverge from classicists who locate racialization in classical texts (­e.g., Murray 2021).7 I see Black[ened] being as a novel (­or modern) development on a structure already embedded in humanism, inscribed in the laws. Gender and sexuality, however, as manifestations of humanism, are active in these texts and illuminate my position. As Butler argues, the subject is legally constituted, and the law is where we might look for a genealogy of the human and even of the racial subject. I suggest a productive affiliation between the Black[ened], the queer, and the classical in, for example, a view of the law. The human subject is produced historically, and race, gender, and sexuality are only particular forms of its production. They are forms, however, that emerge across time, and genealogy is important to our discussions. Gender and sexuality were constitutive of humanism in Cicero’s pro Archia poeta. Seneca’s Natural Questions interrogates the norms through a kind of “­­proto-​­humanism” (­Dressler 2020, 227). In pro Archia poeta, Cicero presents the norms of humanism. In Seneca’s case, posthumanism is already evident in such texts as Natural Questions and Epistulae Morales 114, in the technologies of rhetoric and gender.

Cicero’s Pro Archia Poeta: Rhetoric, Humanism, and the Gendered Subject Classical rhetoric is a social practice and technology, a tool that constitutes the human being. In his discussion of rhetoric and posthumanism in “­Writing and Rhetoric and/­as Posthuman Practice,” Casey Boyle understands “­rhetoric as a framework for facilitating human agency” (­2016, 536), although he does not expand upon rhetoric in the ancient world. Prior to the formality that moves rhetoric from its role in ironic duplication (­e.g., ‘­I meant that rhetorically’), rhetoric is taken as “­the site for developing one’s agency to participate in a society of ‘­free exchange of discourse’” (­536). Rhetoric, as a tool for human expression, has been central to classical humanism insofar as it “­exacerbates our dispositions as subjects empowered to control an objective world” (­537). Rhetoric is traditionally understood as a means of connecting one’s “­professional knowledge and technical skill acquisition with a person’s ability to situate oneself in and among technical knowledge” (­534). Boyle does not name Cicero as the quintessential example of what he means by classical rhetoric, or the agent endowed with technical knowledge, but he might well have. Rhetoric constitutes the human, and specifically the vir, the Roman man who can master the social discourses around him, in Cicero’s case the cursus honorum, the public offices that bring prestige. Cicero’s pro Archia is illustrative of Wilderson’s structure of humanism. Cicero posits that “­all the arts that pertain to humanity have a certain common bond and cohere through a certain logic (­etenim omnes artes quae ad humanitatem pertinent quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur)” (­2. ­3–​­5). The cognatio quaedam (“­certain logic”) involves the relationship of the human being to tools, artes, and to other human beings. Cicero sees rhetoric as an ars that gained traction at a time when Archias was traveling through Italy: “­Italy was at the time full of Greek arts and 44

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sciences and these practices were being strongly cultivated in Latium at the time” (­5. ­1–​­2). As it pertains to human relationships, rhetorical training builds upon ingenium – ​­here Wilderson’s natality, “­inborn genius” – ​­to produce honor. As Cicero puts it, “­when a certain reason and formation through teaching is added to an outstanding and gleaming disposition, something really unique and outstanding is wont to coincide (­cum ad naturam eximiam et illustrem accesserit ratio quaedam conformatioque doctrinae)” (­15. ­7–​­9). Speaking ability and ease develop from literary studies (­13. ­6–​­7).8 Through instruction, refinement, and the deployment of rhetoric, the vir gains honor. Archias is initially outside of the society of Roman men.9 As a ­non-​­citizen, he does not hold the status of person before the law. Rhetoric gives him the ability to demonstrate his character through association with and service to Roman viri. Although initially situated outside of Roman masculine virtue, Archias gains credibility through the consuls, Marius and Catulus, because he can inscribe (­ad scribendum) their deeds, their res gestae, and for this reason, Cicero seeks his legal status. The structure of natality, honor, and power as constituents of the human is evident in the transformation (­presumably, if Cicero is successful) of Archias into Cicero’s human vir. It is noteworthy that the way in which Cicero constitutes the human through natality, honor, and power could have been otherwise, as a view from another context illuminates. It would be anachronistic to speak of Archias in terms of race (­or even ethnicity), but a different structure is evident in corresponding Greek texts, in terms of the human being’s relationship to tools, work, and nature (­evident in the role of the gods). Although we cannot know with any certainty if any of the writers by the name of Archias in the ­first-​­century BCE Anthology of Meleager of Gadara was the same poet of Cicero’s pro Archia (­and we know that there were many poets named Archias) (­Law 1936),10 the epigrams preserve another kind of rhetorical usage. Whereas Cicero’s viri seek honor in the preservation of their heroic deeds on behalf of the res publica, the subjects of Archias’ poems are workers, hunters, and fishermen, who dedicate their nets as votive offerings at the end of their careers, or upon their deaths. In 6.16, for example, three men, Damis, Pigres, and Cleitor dedicate their nets to Pan, in this case as a prayer for continued success. Each hunted a different bounty, and each now seeks mastery in his territory, “­one again by air (­for birds), another by sea, and the third in the bushes.” Archias calls these men kinfolk, but even if brothers, they form an association, a fellowship of workers. In the honor of these subjects, moreover, the poet (­or poets) seem(­s) indifferent to gender. An Archias writes a dedication for three Samian sisters (­6. 39), Satyra, Heraclea, and Euphro, daughters of Xuthus and Melite. These women were weavers, and their dedication is rightly to Athena. These dedicatory poems, the types that Cicero’s Archias might have been commissioned to write for pay, were no slight matter for these workers. In the dedication to Athena, in which each of the sisters gives a gift befitting the goddess, Archias notes the sister’s poverty (­chernês). Their craft gives these workers (­ergatides) nobility, but nothing in their birthright is named as noteworthy. Their power is in their submission to nature, manifest through the gods they name. Cicero’s humanitas has been celebrated for its expansiveness, a characteristic that can ostensibly lead not only to Archias’ inclusion but also to that of other subjects initially not in Cicero’s expressed purview, such as women.11 One can, therefore, speak of a “­womanly humanism” in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (­Altman 2009), where virtus moves from the battlefield, to the courtroom, and ultimately to emotional valor.12 Through Archias’ talent and mastery of a tool (­rhetoric), he can be included in an expansive humanitas, and the rights of citizenship underscore his status. As Wilderson has it, natality and honor are constitutive of the human, but the violence to which he points is not immediately apparent, save for the urgency of Archias’ indeterminacy as a subject. On the surface, nothing seems particularly violent about Cicero’s relationship to Archias, but his great interest in Archias, his desire, the reason “­why I am so taken with this man,” cur tanto opera hoc 45

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homine delectemur, 12. 1), is to assimilate Archias as an extension of himself.13 Archias becomes like the tools that the subjects of the anthologized poems surrender to the gods. The violence is in Cicero’s power to constitute Archias as a person before the law. Cicero’s epideictic (­rather than forensic) style connects his Archias to the objects of ­desire – ​­beloved objects (­tools), embodied ­beloveds – ​­in the anthologized poems.14 In Cicero’s epideictic speech, he displaces his emotional desire for Archias, whether as a beloved object, or an embodied beloved, into his own rhetorical training (­12.4). Cicero’s body and desires, or any danger and pain, become secondary, subjected to mastery, such that his erudition and eloquence (­again, ingenium or natura, polished through use) lead to praise and honor.15 Attic oratory, specifically, prevalent in Rome during the ­first-​­century BCE, results from a restrained bodily regimen.16 For Cicero, the tool is an extension (­or articulation) of the body. Similarly, Archias himself, as tool, becomes part of (­or an extension of) the vir. In the beginning of the speech, Cicero prompts the judges that his approach in this case will be different from other cases. He notes his divergence in style from the customary manner in the courtroom. He does this to heighten the association between himself and Archias, as worthy of honor. The strange, acquisitive, even queer coupling of these two men underpins Cicero’s drive for recognition. He needs to humanize Archias, through citizenship, so as for Archias to be able to do for Cicero that which Cicero has done for Archias: to eulogize him through oratory and literature. Cicero’s defense of Archias reifies his own natal status, honor, and power, not Archias’. In Cicero’s rhetorical formulation, Archias was to be an extension of his own manly virtue. The violence of such appropriation is constitutive of the human, a slave/­master relationship operative even before the transatlantic slave trade, the genealogical roots of Wilderson’s Black[ened] being. Violence finds precedent in a triangular relationship: between, first, the human master (­creator) to the subject (­slave); and second, the human (­master or slave) to technology, e.g., the tool of rhetoric that, according to Cicero, develops outside of Rome but, in masterly fashion, is appropriated to Roman use. The tool becomes an extension of the human, a means of domination. The potential violence of the extension, or the technology (­in this case rhetoric), remains unexamined in Cicero’s text. Seneca, however, scrutinizes the relationship between rhetoric, technology, and gender, as these relate to the violence of the human.

Senecan Posthumanism: Natural Questions and Epistulae Morales 114 As Alex Dressler argues, Seneca might be regarded as an early posthumanist writer (­Dressler 2020). As we have seen, posthumanism offers a different understanding of persons in their relationship to other subjects in the world. As it pertains to rhetoric as an ancient technology where humanism is readily demonstrated, Boyle frames posthuman rhetoric as an “­emergent” practice that situates persons within a “­way of becoming” rather than as masters of the universe (­2016, 538, Boyle’s italics): “­I turn then to posthumanism for reconsidering rhetorical training as an orchestration of ecological relations and not simply as a method for increasing an individual’s agency” (­539).17 In Senecan philosophy, the notion of living in accordance with nature (­ad naturam) meant for adherents of Stoicism an ongoing commitment to submitting themselves to a cosmos in which humans were not necessarily at the center.18 Within Stoicism, the idea of sympatheia, that of nature sharing emotions with people, is one example of a concept that could point to mutuality between and among species. Wilderson’s framework of natality, honor, and violence clarifies Seneca’s posthuman commitments. As it pertains to natality, Seneca’s allegiances lie outside of the res publica (­the Roman state), as he explains in de Otio (­4. ­1–​­2). Although a human being is born into one res publica, 46

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philosophical sentiment and ideas connect that person to others across time and space. Seneca dislodges the requisite of citizenship as in itself of value, and this is distinct from the position of Cicero, where value pivoted on belonging within a Roman identity, as the case of Archias demonstrated. As such, honor is not produced in culture but has to do with a disposition toward natura, which, again, is not determined but emergent. Seneca’s disposition toward natura allows him, in the best of expressive moments, to equivocate on the norms of sexuality and gender expression because even nature is always ever emergent. With masculine citizenship displaced for a nascent cosmopolitanism, the role of gender also comes into question. In examples like the effeminacy of one’s oratory or in manners of dress, Seneca might seem to take a normative position on gendered social roles. It might also be argued, however, that the violence he laments lies not specifically in expressions of gender or sexuality but in the individual’s disposition toward the tools available to humankind. Gender and sexuality are only secondary means of expressing this primary disposition. In Natural Questions, the use of technology, in this case, a mirror, is reflective of bodily practices. Seneca demonstrates a posthuman ­self-​­consciousness about its usage oriented toward process rather than mastery. Seneca signals his understanding of the human being’s relationship to violence through the mirror’s pernicious potential to distort reality, or to obscure our view of natura, using the mirror as an example of the kind of refraction of light that produces a rainbow. Seneca calls upon the example of a man named Hostius Quadra, whom he describes as given to aberrant sexual practices.19 Hostius embodies the kinds of distortions that the misuse of technology can engender. The obsession with the technology itself manifests in his sexual practices. His extreme behavior is rendered in terms of virtues and vices: “­This man was rich, greed, and a slave to money” (­16.1). Seneca characterizes Hostius as avidus, a “­greedi[ness]” that then finds its way to sexual partners of any gender expression. His practices are a result of an unhealthy relationship to an extension of the self, the mirror. Seneca might be read as stating that Hostius’ vileness (­impurus) is in his sexual choices, but if we follow the role of the mirror that Seneca establishes, we see that the problem lies not in Hostius’ choices per se, but rather in relationship to the technology. He becomes obsessed with his own reflection; he is always in the mirror. The mirror allows him to indulge in extremes.20 Through his discussion of Hostius’ use of the mirror, Seneca wants to expose something about the role of technology in relation to persons. Technology facilitates the subject’s depravity, his alienation from established norms. Increasingly removed from natura, he manufactures mirrors that distorted reality (­16.2). He sees his sexual acts enlarged: “­It’s foul to talk about the things that man said and did when he set up these mirrors all around so that he could be witness to his own shame” (­16.3). For Seneca, what is disgraceful is not the acts themselves. He comes to assert sexual choice as private (­quae secreta), the expression of which everyone engages in, “­even if they deny it” (­quaeque sibi quisque fecisse se negat, 16.3). The problem with Hostius is his ignobility, the violence of his practice; he broadcasts his acts, which emanate from a distorted relationship to nature. Seneca goes on at length to describe the variations of sexual practice (­the description itself an indulgence). As it pertains to the technology of the mirror, the premise for Seneca’s digression, the focal point is the extractive practices (­luxa) of the human, and Seneca turns to a prelapsarian time before luxa were tantamount to decline: “[Mirrors] were invented so that the person might know themselves, poised to derive many things from this: first to know themselves, and then take to counsel toward certain things” (­17.4) Seneca does not offer whether the initial prelapsarian violence, after the Golden Age, could have been avoided. A use of technology that is not tantamount to violence would liberate the human from its historical limitations, but Seneca’s link between this technology and the aetates mundi places the fall at a time beyond repair, perhaps even beyond genealogy. A posthuman disposition redeems persons in their relationship to technology. 47

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Seneca continues his treatment of technology and gender in Epistulae Morales 114. As we have seen with Cicero, rhetoric is among the early tools that mark gender, and in the letter, Seneca again aligns rhetoric and sexual expression. A tool not unlike the mirror, rhetoric is (­here again) a site of gender expression: “­As is the oratory of a man, such is his life” (­1.11). Gender expression manifests in speech and clothing. Seneca uses gendered ­language  – ​­delicatus, femina, solutus, discinctus, mollis (“­delicate, effeminate, dissolute, unbelted, soft”) – ​­to describe men who have diverged from normative masculinity within Roman society: “­Thus wherever you see that corrupt oratory pleases, there also there can be no doubt that the morals have also slipped from what is right” (­11. ­7–​­9). As was the case with the example of the mirror, it might seem that Seneca is establishing humanistic norms for all time, but it is more consistent to read his comments in terms of process. He recognizes, for example, that the issue of rhetorical style is temporally bound, a matter of social taste rather than a fixed, universal, or moral good. Seneca puts the case as follows: “­Speech (­oratio) does not have a fixed rule. The custom (­consuetudo) of the civitas circumscribes it. Custom is never fixed once and for all” (­13.­1–​­3). As de Otio demonstrates, the civis might well pertain to a particular place and time, but Seneca also displaces citizenship, dislodging the human from ties of natality or adopted belonging. The civitas determines habits, but if Seneca is consistent, the civitas itself is of an e­ ver-​­changing nature.

Black[ened] Queer Classical The problematic constituents of humanism that Wilderson locates in natality, honor, and violence find their most extreme expression in race, but they were always ever present, even before a racial genealogy can be traced historically. As we have seen, humanism establishes a particular relationship to nature, with persons as its master, through technology, whether a mirror or a speech (­oratory). The production of the human subject is already gendered in Cicero and Seneca, and Cicero’s queer desire for Archias unveils a relationship not racial but certainly parasitic, to use Wilderson’s term. In Cicero’s humanistic formulation, rhetoric was a means of power and mastery. Because of the work oratory does in the world, mastery of rhetoric is heroic, demonstrative of (­manly) virtue. Rhetoric binds Cicero to Archias, and it allows Cicero to displace his desire for Archias onto a relationship with oratory (­the tool) and its w ­ orld-​­making potentiality. Cicero inscribes Archias into his humanism through an economy of desire (­one that leads to Cicero’s own demise).21 This economy is expressed in ­gendered – ​­even if not explicitly ­sexual – ​­terms.22 By contrast, Seneca agrees that style makes the man, but the person is, by nature, emergent not fixed. Seneca reorients the person away from a humanity constructed through citizenship and toward the civitas in private, where the relationship to nature is not one of mastery but of discovery. Whereas Wilderson argues that “­Humans are sentient beings who are not Black” (­41), the Black[ening] of the human being is not a feature of the humanism we see in Cicero or in Seneca’s later articulation. Thus, with the benefit of genealogy, I disagree with Wilderson that “­analogy,” or affiliation, is unhelpful in disentangling the roots of the structure of alterity present in humanism. Affiliation affirms the modernity of an enmeshed relationship between race and the queer (­along with the antiquity of the production of gender), as a kind of counterhegemonic association with its own genealogy and embeddedness in discourse. In Gender Trouble (­2006), Judith Butler, addressing a lacuna in her earlier edition, puts the affiliation as follows: I would note here not only that racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse on gender in ways that need to be made explicit, but that race and gender ought not to be treated 48

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as simple analogies. I would therefore suggest that the question to ask is not whether the theory of performativity is transportable onto race, but what happens to the theory when it tries to come to grips with race. (­xvi) Butler’s “­theory of performativity” exposes how expectations about gender hold the force of law, and how “­anticipation conjures its object” (­xv). The anticipation typifies performativity, and ­gender—​­like r­ace—​­can seem to hold “­an interior essence that might be disclosed, an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon it anticipates.”23 Rather than “­transport[ing]” the idea of gender performativity to race, Butler wants to treat race and gender together, not as analogies, but through “­multiple lenses at once.” Analogy is a starting point, necessary but not sufficient. The foregoing reading of Cicero and Seneca suggests that independent of the performance of gender or race, which are produced, attention to relationships and processes helps in our understanding of the human being’s situatedness in discourse. Cicero conceived of natality in terms of citizenship and belonging to Rome, whereas Seneca moves this orientation away from constructed extensions of the person to a res publica of the imagination. Cicero’s sense of honor is gendered and established through law, which is itself a kind of second nature. Archias becomes an animate tool for Cicero’s honor. Through Hostius, Seneca interrogates the human being’s relationship to technology. The mirror is a means for Hostius’ own gratification. Because the technology distorts reality, it leads Hostius down a hall of mirrors where he can no longer discern what is real. Seneca recognizes this violence and directs us toward process. Seneca’s posthumanism disrupts natality and honor, and locates violence in the human being’s relationship to nature. I have been emphasizing a relational rather than temporal framework for posthumanism (­as a process, as a disposition toward and situatedness in nature), but within its genealogy, posthumanism also reveals why an emphasis on racial categories in classical texts might not always be particularly helpful. After all, neither Cicero nor Seneca ever mentions the hue of Archias or Hostius’ skin. Rather, the subject is produced, first, within humanism, through mastery of nature in the law; and then as gendered, the male citizen, as performed through oratory. Humanism, as Jackson argues, is plastic, and it can extend to a Black[ened] woman just as readily as to a Greek, ­non-​­Roman poet. Race is a feature of this ­expansive  – ​­and therefore ­contractible – ​­humanism, albeit belated. Within such a relationship, one of mastery, racialization would be inevitable. Posthumanism, which allows us to step outside of humanism, even as a heuristic experiment, queers our perspectives by moving outside of the established framework to ask what new relationships and processes of understanding might emerge.

Suggestions for Further Reading Any conceptualization of gender as produced in culture through law and norms benefits from the work of Judith Butler. I cite Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (­originally published in 1990), but other work is relevant, such as Butler 2004. Butler does not consider race in the first edition of Gender Trouble, but, as discussed above, she addresses the lack in later volumes, calling for an understanding that goes beyond affiliation or analogy. As the scholars I discuss here see, race requires genealogical study. In addition to the readings cited, the ties between ­race – ​­Blackness, in ­particular – ​­and the queer, beyond affiliation or analogy, are teased out well in Best 2018 and Rao 2020. As it pertains to the relationship between humanism and race, for a good overview, see During 2021. 49

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Notes 1 There are, of course, other manifestations of the modern construct of race, and I believe they also deserve attention. Even its Nazi expression, however, finds its roots in the United States, where racial theory was being perfected on Black[ened] persons, an idea I define later. I find Gilman 1995 and Wilkerson 2020 particularly helpful. 2 For the work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab on cyborg technology and the activation of artificial limbs through human energy, go to https://­www.media.mit.edu. 3 Akin to posthuman thought, transhumanism takes a skeptical stance toward humanism. Transhumanism further illuminates the finality of gendered and racialized bodies. The transhuman position is “­that a human need not have a flesh body” (­Rothblatt 2013, 318), as technology affords another vantage point to the plasticity of the human. See also More and ­Vita-​­More 2013. 4 As Jackson puts it, for example, there is a “­necessity of the abjection and bestialization of black gender and sexuality for both the normative construction of ‘­the human’ as rational, ­self-​­directed, and autonomous and as the reproduction of the scientific matrix of classification” (­2020, 13). 5 The posthuman condition will also come to be contested juridically. 6 For the fullest articulation of Afropessimism as a ­no-­​­­way-​­out scenario for Black[ened] people, see Wilderson 2020. 7 There is no space for full discussion here, but Murray applies the concept of “­racecraft” from (­Fields and Fields 2014) to a reading of Homer’s Odyssey. For Fields and Fields, racecraft is “­mental terrain” and “­pervasive belief” about others (­18), whereas “­racism refers to the theory and the practice of applying a social, civic, or legal double standard based on ancestry, and to the ideology surrounding such a double standard” (­17, their italics). I do not believe that Fields and Fields meant their theory of racecraft outside of its modern genealogy, but by taking this genealogy for granted, they left the door open for it to be applied to places and settings before the historical advent of race. 8 See Dugan 2001a. 9 He is like a woman in this regard. As Chatelard and Stevens put it, The citizen, for whom the Latin terms are civis or quiris, can only be a man (­vir), indeed a free man, who only attains his full role when he comes together with other viri in the service of the city (­Populus Romanus Quiritium). (­2016, 27) 10 Law 1936 is quite a dated essay, but there does not seem to have been much of an attempt since then to amplify the world of Archias outside of Cicero’s use of him, his role as an extension of the Roman orator and statesman. 11 These humanities have been deployed in an ­ever-​­expanding universalism, the claim to a recognized, undeniable society of mankind. Cicero, and the pro Archia in particular, has been called to witness in the case of the humanities as liberating for Black people. As Mathias Hanses puts it in a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois’ Ciceronian humanism, Cicero “­stresses the ‘­profit’ [fructus, 16] derived from higher learning and literature’s role in the acquisition and perfection of manliness and virtue [ad percipiendam colendamque virtutem, 16]” (­Hanses 2019, 17). 12 Smith 2008 argues that Cicero has also been instrumental in the ­eighteenth-​­century women’s rhetorical identity. 13 I am reading against the grain what has been taken as Cicero’s love of literature, which he articulates as a space for practicing potential activity in the res publica, where passion is also placed. See, for example, Porter 1990. I am suggesting a displaced desire, or queering the desire, momentarily, to explore other potentialities. 14 He notes the strange style of speech by which he addresses the judges in Archias’ case, a mode more fitting for epideictic oratory or funerals than for the courtroom. See Dugan 2001b. Epideictic oratory is the genre of praise, akin to the love poems attributed to the Archias of the Hellenistic anthology. 15 Dugan defines Cicero’s process in terms of ­self-​­fashioning, where a gendered production is evident in speech (­2001b). 16 “­Rhetorical style is both predicated upon, and is an expression of, one’s bodily and ethical self, and vice versa” (­Dugan 2001a, 413). 17 On mastery, see Singh 2018. 18 As Chiara Bottici (­2010) notes, beginning with Greek writers nature (­physis) is not determined but emergent, “­nature in its most general sense, the sphere of the totality of being that literally comes to light” (­28).

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Black[ened] Queer Classical 1 9 For a reading of Hostius Quadra’s sexual practices in Foucauldian terms, see Ormand 2022. 20 His death might have occurred precisely whence he could not tear himself: “[Hostius] ought to have been sacrificed in front of his own mirror” (­16.9). 21 We might transpose Seneca’s condemnation of Hostius (“­sacrificed in front of his own mirror”) onto Cicero, slain on the rostra in his pursuit of honor. 22 As Dugan puts it, Cicero “­make[s] explicit connections between this vocal dynamic [pronunciation as linked to refinement] and gender: he says that all agree that an orator’s voice should avoid effeminacy, on the one hand, and atonality and discordance, on the other” (­2001a, 422). 23 Butler’s 1999 Preface to Gender Trouble catalogues her revisions to her initial formulation of performativity, such as her reconsideration of gender and “­internality” as it pertains to psychology. Race is one of the lines along which Butler expands her original scope. See Butler 2006.

Works Cited Altman, William H. F. 2009. “­Womanly Humanism in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 139: 4­ 11–​­445. Best, Stephen. 2018. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bottici, Chiara. 2010. A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyle, Casey. 2016. “­Writing and Rhetoric and/­as Posthuman Practice.” College English 78: ­532–​­554. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. —​­—​­—​­. 2006 [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1st ed. London: Routledge. Chatelard, Aude, and Anne Stevens. 2016. ‘“­Women as Legal Minors and their Citizenship in Republican Rome’.” Clio. Women, Gender, History 43: 2­ 4–​­47. Chesi, Giulia Maria, and Francesca Spiegel, eds. 2020. Clasical Literature and Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury. Dressler, Alex. 2020. “­Posthumanism in Seneca’s Happy Life: “­Animalism”, Personification and Private Property in Roman Stoicism (­Epistulae Morales 113 and De Vita Beata ­5–​­8).” In Classical Literature and Posthumanism, edited by G. M. Chesi and F. Spiegel, 2­ 27–​­235. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2007. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dugan, John. 2001a. “­Preventing Ciceronianism: C. Licinius Calvus’ Regimens for Sexual and Oratorical ­Self-​­Mastery.” Classical Philology 96: 4­ 00–​­428. —​­—​­—​­. 2001b. “­How to Make (­and Break) a Cicero: Epideixis, Textuality, and ­Self-​­Fashioning in Pro Archia and In Pisonem.” Classical Antiquity 20: 3­ 5–​­77. During, Simon. 2021. “‘­Whiteness’ and the Humanities: An Impasse.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, September. https://­www.chronicle.com/­article/­­whiteness-­​­­and-­​­­the-​­humanities. Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. 2014. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequity in American Life. Paperback. New York: Verso. Gilman, Sander L. 1995. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hanses, Mathias. 2019. “­Cicero Crosses the Color Line: Pro Archia Poeta and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 26: 1­ 0–​­26. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press. Law, Helen H. 1936. “­The Poems of Archias in the Greek Anthology.” Classical Philology 31: ­225–​­243. More, More, and Natasha ­Vita-​­More, eds. 2013. The Transhumanist Reader. West Sussex: ­Wiley-​­Blackwell. Murray, Jackie. 2021. “­Race and Sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey.” In A Cultural History of Race. Vol. 1, edited by D. McCoskey, ­137–​­156. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Ormand, Kirk. 2022. “­Perversion in Antiquity? Foucault, Seneca, and Psychiatric Reasoning.” In Foucault, Sexuality, Antiquity, edited by S. Boehringer and D. Lorenzini, 4­ 8–​­64. New York: Routledge. Pepperell, Julian. 2009. The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain. Reissue. Bristol: Intellect Ltd. Porter, William Malin. 1990. “­Cicero’s Pro Archia and the Responsibilities of Reading.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 8: ­137–​­152.

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Patrice Rankine Rao, Rahul. 2020. Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rothblatt, Martine. 2013. “­Mind Is Deeper than Matter: Transgenderism, Transhumanism, and the Freedom of Form.” In The Transhumanist Reader, edited by M. More and N. ­Vita-​­More: ­317–​­326. West Sussex: ­Wiley-​­Blackwell. Singh, Julietta. 2018. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Skloot, Rebecca. 2011. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishing. Smith, Tania. 2008. “­Elizabeth Montagu’s Study of Cicero’s Life: The Formation of an ­Eighteenth-​­Century Woman’s Rhetorical Identity.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 26: ­165–​­187. Washington, Booker T. 2004. Up From Slavery. West Berlin, NJ: Townsend Library Edition. Wilderson, Frank B. III. 2020. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright. —​­—​­—​­. 2021. “­Afropessimism and the Ruse of Analogy: Violence, Freedom Struggles, and the Death of Black Desire.” In Antiblackness, edited by ­Moon-​­Kie Jung and Joâo H. Costa Vargas, ­37–​­59. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wilkerson, Isabel. 2020. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. New York: Random House.

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4 PRIAPUS UNLIMITED Queer(­ing) Identity, Agency, and Bodies without Boundaries in Roman Art Linnea Åshede

Mission Statement The purpose of this chapter is not to ultimately explain one of the queerest figures in Roman art. Rather, it should be read as a concrete example of how the equally queer ontologies of philosophers Karen Barad and Donna Haraway offer classical scholarship novel ways to approach material which has historically proved resistant to the ­tried-­​­­and-​­true rules of academic engagement. For the purpose of this exploration, “­queer” will be used as both adjective and verb. I understand “­a queer body” to be one that falls outside of that which is considered normal in a given context, specifically in ways that challenge the categories, hierarchies, or the unexamined nature of normative expectations, often by exhibiting surprising or uncomfortable plurality and o­ pen-​­endedness. Likewise, “­to queer something” means to creatively break the rules of a given order, thereby enacting challenge or protest and raising the specter of c­ hange—​­however unlikely it may be that such change is widespread, lasting, or realized at all (­Hall 2013, ­xvi–​­xvii). The main issues on trial in this text are the concepts of identity and agency. Both are integral to the ­sub-​­discipline of Roman archaeology and art history in particular. When confronted with an artifact, particularly one incorporating visual representations, the very first question we ask ourselves is “­what is this?”—​­quickly followed by “­who made it?”, “­who used it?”, and “­why?” Whenever we fail to satisfactorily answer the initial question of identification, the agentic capacities of the artifact (­the whos and the whys) seemingly slip out of reach. And where identity is concerned, classical scholars strive for precision. The disciplinary roots of Roman art history, firmly planted in Kopienkritik (­the systematic study of sculptures as copies of original “­types”) and reaching all the way to the methodologies of philology, dictate that identity should be established systematically. From the general type of object down to the individual elements of any occurring motifs, every aspect of an artifact should be correctly taxonomized, ideally with their genealogy traced to an original source (­see e.g. Stewart 1997, 578; Megow 2000; Dunleavy 2019, 23). There is nothing by definition wrong with systematic scholarship. Categories are an integral component of how human brains relate to the world. The problem is that the systemic approach tends to break down as soon as an artifact defies classification, with the result that such objects tend to be avoided by scholarship, relegated to the realm of the conceptually ­un-​­thinkable (­and

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museum catalogs). To exemplify this problem, I have chosen for my muse one of the queerest characters populating the Roman visual landscape: Priapus.

The Priapic Problem Priapus has proven offensive to ordered scholarship from the ­start—​­and not just because his proudly displayed, exaggerated penis has been considered an unfit object of academic interest (­see Dunleavy 2019, ­32–​­47 on the influence of ­nineteenth-​­century morality on research into Priapus). An even more massive stumbling block appears to be our modern inability to successfully pin this apparently hugely popular figure down. We do know how he is supposed to look from both ancient art and the seemingly most trustworthy source we could find, i.e. contemporary texts. So Encolpius, ­anti-​­hero of Petronius’ epic spoof Satyricon, describes how at Trimalchio’s convivium “­a figure of Priapus, fashioned by the chef, occupied the center, and in his expansive paunch he held fruit of every kind, and grapes in the conventional mode” (­Petronius Satyricon 60.­4–​­5).1 Even ­latter-​­day readers such as ourselves immediately recognize the pose of many a sculpted Priapus, such as ­Figure 4.1: a marble statue of Imperial Roman date. This is Priapus as we think we know him best: mature and bearded, with covered head and filleted brow, dressed in a lifted, ­high-​­belted garment and rustic boots, laden with fruit and showing off his massive genitals.

­Figure  4.1  Statue of Priapus. Roman, Imperial period, A.D. ­170–​­240.  Marble, 159 × 53 × 32 cm (­62 5/­8 × 20 7/­8 × 12 5/­8 in.) Museum of fine arts, Boston, RES.08.34a. Gift of Fiske Warren and Edward Perry. Photograph © 2022, Museum of fine arts, Boston.

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Here, however, ends the orderliness. For every established aspect of Priapus, there appears to be a confirmed contrast, or six. As a god, he is most often attested as a rustic protector of domestic gardens and their produce (­e.g. Tibullus 1.1.­15–​­20; the Priapea; Stewart 1997, 581; Fantham 2009, ­145–​­147; Dunleavy 2019, 21, 176), but he also figures as protector of seafarers (­Palatine Anthology 10.1; O’Connor 1989; Neilson 2002). The Priapus who speaks in the anonymous collection of epigrams known as the Priapea boasts his epic wood in every sense of the word, appearing as a wooden effigy threatening thieves with ­gender-​­specific rape and comparing his mentula to the thunderbolt of Jupiter (­Priapea 13, 202; Richlin 1983; Dunleavy 2019, 30, 109). Yet he who threatens one (­the thief), protects another (­the rightful owner), and scholars are adamant about Priapus’ apotropaic function in domestic artscapes: luring the Evil Eye from its inhabitants with his exaggerated genitals (­Dunleavy 2019, 76, 89; Blanton 2022). Despite his frequent cockboasts, there are Roman texts aplenty that paint him as helpless, frustrated, and plain impotent.3 The literary Priapus is presented as a violent oppressor of sexual Others (­women, children, and men who are mollis or otherwise fail the norm), and yet Priapus’ most common appearance, as an artwork within an ­artwork—​­an ithyphallic herm included in painted or sculpted ­sacral-​­idyllic ­landscapes—​­seems to function as a visual shorthand for harmony (­Dunleavy 2019, 209). Priapus can even be nurturing, as attested by sculptures where he is covered in infants as well as fruit (­LIMC Suppl. 1037, s.v. Priapos 114; Dunleavy 2019, 54). Some scholars see Priapus as normatively hypermasculine, the given figure of identification for elite Roman men and their unquestionable supremacy over all sexual and cultural Others (­Dunleavy 2019, 6, ­52–​­53, 109, 134, 167). Others regard him as a ­cross-​­dresser designed to elicit apotropaic laughter, as exemplified by the famous Priapus weighing his penis from the entrance of the Casa dei Vettii (­VI.15.1) in Pompeii (­Oehmke 2007; Blanton 2022). Not even the two constants of Priapus ­ultra-​­masculinity, the beard, and the penis, are absolute: there exist numerous versions of Priapus as youthfully beardless (­Henig and Leahy 1995; LIMC Suppl. 1040, s.v. Priapos 161; Boppert 2015; Dunleavy 2019, 29 ­Figure  10)—​­even images where his flowing garment is not raised, penis barely visible in outline (­Oehmke 2007, ­Figures ­6–​­7). Katherine Dunleavy makes a compelling case that one of the few constants about Priapus in art is his literal uprightness: that he is always represented in the shape of a herm or sculpture fixed to his raised plinth, or otherwise as a firmly ­upright-​­standing figure (­Dunleavy 2019, 151). And yet, there exists at least one ­well-​­worn wall plaque of a naked, very ­well-​­endowed figure posed ­contrapposto—​­exceptional for ­Priapus—​­with his arm thrown over the head in an unprecedented Lykeios-​­gesture (­Boppert 2015, ­120–​­123). Those ancient epigrams that so delight in putting words into Priapus’ mouth paint him as a wooden ­dummy—​­never as the statuettes, sometimes ­large-​­scale sculptures and reliefs on a variety of objects in stone and metal that remain in multitude to this day. Typically enough, the one wooden figure identified as Priapus still surviving looks nothing like the ­rough-​­hewn Priapi described in the Priapea, or the ubiquitous ithyphallic herms of Roman landscape scenes. Instead, the figure from a Roman shipwreck in the Musée des Docks Romains is a beardless youth atop a square base, wearing something resembling a bulla around his neck, high boots, and a tunic ending just above the main basis of his identification as Priapus: a square dowel hole in the groin, presumably the fixture for a lost erection (­see Neilson 2002, 250 ­Figure 2). The list of apparent priapic contradictions goes on: ancient texts refer to Priapus as an imported deity of Eastern origins, but most scholars today argue that his use in text and art is as a vessel of thoroughly Roman ideas and ideals (­Stewart 1997, 575, 583; Fantham 2009; Dunleavy 2019, 51, 102, ­144–​­148). Ancient writers emphasize Priapus’ rustic nature and he mostly appears as part of landscape scenes, but the find contexts of objects bearing his likeness point unanimously to urban, domestic contexts of use and display (­Dunleavy 2019, ­10–​­11). Likewise, his crude and humble 55

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nature as both a god and a work of art is repeatedly stressed by ancient writers (­Stewart 1997; Hunt, 2011), but several of his representations adorn objects of luxury (­Dunleavy 2019, 131). Moreover, scholars emphasize the highly s­ elf-​­aware intellectual witticisms inherent in both literary and artistic representations of Priapus (­Young 2015b; Dunleavy 2019, 3­ –​­4, 18). Many of the inherent contradictions reside in the way that Priapus is o­ ften—​­but by no means ­always—​­represented specifically as a herm/­sculpture, even within clearly mythological settings (­see F ­ igure 4.2, and discussion in Dunleavy 2019, 12). He is a ­man-​­made god, an oxymoron of which both he and his contemporary authors are well aware (­e.g. Horace Satires 1.8; Martial 8.40; Priapea 10; Hunt 2011, 36 n. 21). Modern scholars’ consternation over Priapus’ exact status is perhaps best summed up by Dunleavy, who in the conclusion to her dissertation on Priapic imagery states that “­there is an inherent contradiction in the representation of a deity with an erect phallus and a plinth that restricts movement; Priapus is at once powerful and impotent in his image” (­Dunleavy 2019, 237). Summing up, Priapus appears capable of transgressing or refusing every categorization we can throw at h­ im—​­but he does not transgress all of them all of the time. Not only does Priapus queer a wealth of ancient conceptions about divinity, masculinity, and Romanness, but above all modern expectations of identity as a stable phenomenon. In fact, to look at a Roman image of Priapus all too often proves the experience of questioning whether I

­Figure  4.2  The Vicarello Goblet. Italy, Vicarello (­ancient Aquae Apollinares). Roman, Augustan period 25 ­BC–​­AD 25.  Silver, 12.2  × 7.8  cm (­4 13/­16 × 3 1/­16 in.) The Cleveland Museum of Art, 103 Roman. Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 1966.371.  Photograph by The Cleveland Museum of Art, CC0.

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am actually looking at Priapus or not (­Dunleavy 2019, 10, 29, 98 n. 273). Despite continuing attempts to systematize his visual repertoire, most notably by Hans Herter (­1932) and ­Wolf-​­Rüdiger Megow (­LIMC Suppl. s.v. Priapus), Priapus’ appearance seems changeable to the point of the shapeless. This begs numerous questions. Where does, after all, the penis end and Priapus begin? Is a hole in the groin together with a carved plinth and the context of a Roman shipwreck enough to label a wooden youth as Priapus, protector of seafarers? Conversely, can P ­ riapus—​­whose very name is presumed to mean something like “­god who makes the penis grow” (­Vlahov 1987, 237)–​ ­be himself if he is shown fully clothed and decent, as Herter once argued about the s­o-​­called “­noble” ­Priapus-​­type, identified primarily by his beard and filleted brow? (­Herter 1932; Megow 2000; LIMC Suppl. 1­ 037–​­1038, 1041, s.v. Priapos ­114–​­124, ­175–​­178). If Priapus can be the personification of phallic power, can the image of a penis all on its own refer metonymically back to Priapus, as Harry R. Neilson III (­2002) argues of a terracotta ship find? And is the ­two-​­part bronze figurine of ­Figure 4.3, with its andromorphic top dressed in hooded cuculus (­cloak) that comes away to reveal a huge penis on two legs, meant to be ­Priapus—​­or a man who is literally a dick (­certainly not a modern concept)? Allegedly, this Roman bronze was at the time of its discovery, in an urn grave in French Rivery in 1771, gilded and smelling of sweet spikenard oil (­Mahéo 2004, ­148–​­149). Is such an object supposed to be an object of veneration, apotropaia, a good luck charm, or a joke? And how do we distinguish Priapus from other ithyphallic

­Figure  4.3  Priape de Rivery. Found in 1771 in Picardie; Somme; Rivery. First century AD. Bronze, 18 × 9.2  × 5.3  cm. Amiens, musée de Picardie, M.P.1876.477.  Photograph © Michel Bourguet/­ musée de Picardie.

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herms in Roman landscape scenes and beyond? Is for example the figure with a disproportionate erection and winged footwear, caduceus, and moneybag from an unknown house in Pompeii, now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (­Grant 1975, 155), Priapus with the trappings of Mercury, or Mercury with the tool of P ­ riapus—​­or both? How, in short, is scholarship supposed to be able to grasp Priapus, when we typically get stuck at the stage of identification? My suggestion is to turn to the queer ontologies of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, whose alternative approaches to identity seem well suited to the complexities of this slippery god.

Queering It Up Another Notch: (­Com)­posthuman Identities How best to label the theoretical insights gained from two scholars who approach the world from different empirical angles but reach complementary conclusions about ontology and agency, who appreciate each other’s work but adopt different names for their standpoints? Karen Barad, whose philosophical springboard constitutes the queer uncertainties of quantum physics, is a s­ elf-​­professed posthumanist: a label she accepts as a pledge to call into question differential categories such as “(­human) actor” versus “(­inhuman) object” (­Barad 2003; Barad 2011, 154 n. 9). However, Donna Haraway, whose signature work on Otherkin explores human relations with dogs and microbes as well as cyborgs, actively opposes this label, which she feels to be yet another expression of human exceptionalism (­Haraway 2008, 19). She professes herself to be a compostist, or, actually, compost itself, a critter of the earth’s humus ­who—​­like all others: animals, plants, fungi, viruses, microbes, etc.—​­exists here ­together-​­with/­­because-​­of everyone else, living with/­in/­on each other, composing and decomposing each other “­in every scale and register of time” (­Haraway 2016, 97). I view these two scholars as mutually fertilizing ­cross-​­pollinators that, when added to my own lively compost heap, propose excitingly queer approaches to studying the material world. Like Alexander’s approach to the Gordian knot, Barad’s and Haraway’s solution to the question of identity is radical but effective: they would tell us to stop asking “­what is Priapus?” because we are asking with the wrong expectations. Whether or not an individual object such as ­Figure 4.3 “­actually” represents Priapus may not be particularly interesting. Because exact classification is ontologically impossible, we cannot ask “­is this Priapus?” and expect a single, definitive, and lasting answer. Let me explain why, beginning with Barad’s musing on elementary particle physics. According to traditional Newtonian physics, the world can be divided into particles, taking up a given space at a given point in time, and waves, which can both exist as multiple waves in the same place at the same time, and as a single wave occupying multiple spaces at the same time. However, this strict determinism is called into question by quantum physics, as evidenced by the (­theoretically) simple experiment of sending a number of electrons through a screen with two slits in it, one at a time; the pattern that emerges “­is a diffraction pattern, characteristic of waves”—​­even though the electrons, unlike waves, are supposed to be particles, with all that entails (­Barad 2011, 141). Worse, if a device is added to observe which of the two slits every electron passes through, the electrons will suddenly be observed to behave like orderly particles, passing through one of the slits and creating a scatter pattern, rather than a diffraction ditto. However, if the data from the ­which-­​­­slit-​ ­observation is destroyed, which can only happen after the electrons have already completed their path through the apparatus, “­then a diffraction pattern characteristic of waves is once again in evidence” (­Barad 2011, 143). In other words, an entity’s relative position in both space and time does not just become affected by the method of measurement, but actually turns out to be ontologically indeterminable 58

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in itself. According to B ­ arad—​­who delves into the implications in more d­ etail—​­the above experiment constitutes empirical evidence that even at the s­ ub-​­atomic level, as in the whole world of matter, identity is never stable or inherent, but always both performative and diffracted, i.e. codependent and open to past and present reworkings (­Barad 2017, ­65–​­69). In short, quantum physics queer everything we thought we knew about matter. Furthermore, there exists no sharp division between particles of matter and the spaces between them. Vacuum is not void, but is understood by quantum physics as a dynamic mass of constantly ongoing processes. The “­individual” electron undertaking the above experiment thus “­does not exist as an isolated particle but is always already inseparable from the unruly activities of the vacuum” (­Barad 2019, 530). Writing from the contrasting perspective of multispecies relations, Donna Haraway illustrates the wider applicability of this entangled view of identity in the introduction to When species meet, when she exults that “­of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body,” human genomes can only be found in a 10 percent minority, while the rest constitute bacteria, protists, fungi, and the l­ike—​­co(­in)­habitants simultaneously essential to and dependent on human life (­Haraway 2008, 3). In her words, “­to be one is always to become with many” (­Haraway 2008, 4). Just like a marble sculpture actually constitutes myriads of elementary particles temporarily grouped together, so a human body actually constitutes a lively multispecies collective. Taken together, Haraway and Barad lead me to conclude that “­identity” as we understand the term only ever exists in a constant process of ­change—​­you cannot be something, you can only constantly become. More importantly, nothing ever exists in isolation. If neither electrons nor human bodies have discrete existences, then we must infer that everything comes into existence in relation to many different ­something-­​­­elses—​­other phenomena which simultaneously help define the phenomenon in question, and in turn become affected and defined by it. Essential to both Barad and Haraway is the concept of “­­becoming-​­with.” Every encounter is an action which momentously creates and names its actors, who in turn come into position through every new e­ ncounter—​­and in an ontological sense do not predate it. Consequently, we should shift focus from studying individual entities to studying relationships, which Haraway terms “­the smallest possible unit of analysis” (­Haraway 2008, ­25–​­26). This thinking, as applied to studies in classical art and mythology, would refer to relationships among elements within an image, as well as between the image and its materiality, the object and its potential contexts, and, not least importantly, the relationships entailed in how we as scholars relate to the objects we study. It is in these relations we may locate the significance of an object, idea, action, or other phenomenon. In short, if we cannot satisfactorily label or classify something, this does not prevent us from conducting fruitful ­research—​­if we shift focus from singular naming to studying multiple elements in relation. The significance of this approach to the field of art history specifically is that the roles and power relations (­such as subject contra object) that we analyze can never be assigned a priori. Elsewhere, I have employed the entangled ontologies of Barad to question how the mythological figure of Hermaphroditus in Roman art has been misconstrued by modern scholars as an assemblage of ­ready-​­made building blocks: male genitals, female breasts, female dress, and so on. Instead of isolating them, we must look at what these elements do ­to-­​­­and-​­with each other, what they become together when implicated in each particular ­encounter—​­a penis in the groin of Hermaphroditus is for example not a man’s penis, it is Hermaphroditus’ penis, and how we should understand it depends on how the rest of this particular Hermaphroditus looks, engaging in these particular encounters in this particular company (­see Åshede 2015, 2020). Instead of looking for stable, singular answers to the question of identification, a (­com)­posthuman approach suggests 59

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finding local, temporal ­resolutions—​­relevant only to the specific contexts and research goals in question. Priapus, too, might benefit from this queer approach. Remember Dunleavy’s description of Priapus as an oxymoronic god with a raging erection on the one hand and a restricting plinth on the other (­Dunleavy 2019, 237). Is Priapus in ­Figure 4.2, where his lively torso is in the process of pouring a libation onto his penis but his legs taper into a narrow herm mounted on a column, powerful or impotent in his image? At first glance, he appears essentially different from the fully formed Dionysian revelers dancing freely through the landscape adorning the goblet, one of whom is touching his beard. It might seem reasonable to infer that they are intended to be “­alive,” while he is just a herm in his shrine, unable to partake in the orgiastic encounter. But that would be to dismiss the entire mythological context of this motif, where Priapus is a god. As such, his body does not fit the frame of binary impositions, and there is nothing stopping him from being alive/­divine as well as a mounted effigy. It is no use basing our understanding of his relative status in this scene on speculations about whether he would be capable of climbing down and putting his penis to other ­uses—​­the unspoken preoccupation behind the entire “­powerful or impotent” distinction. That particular question is better suited to discussing images of Priapi as literary figures, particularly in the Priapea where the efficacy of his sculpted penis in sexual encounters with fleshly bodies is highlighted time and again. The ­image-­​­­in-­​­­an-​­image of Priapus in F ­ igure 4.2 is involved in a different type of encounter, where he simultaneously occupies double positions, both resonating with piety: that of a god in his rustic shrine, and that of a devotee in the process of honoring said god with a libation onto his Godhead. The popularity of the motif of Priapus paying his respects to the divine principle embodied in his own flesh (­see e.g. LIMC Suppl. ­1031–​­1032, 1039 s.v. Priapos 13, 28, 143) suggests that, contrary to the accusations of later Christian writers, the pagan Romans were aware of the distinction between an image of god and god him/­herself (­see Hunt 2011). However, they seem to have found this line more interesting to blur than to draw in the first place (­Stewart 1997, 583; Dunleavy 2019, 4). Consider another example: the Etruscan terracotta statuette of ­Figure  4.4 shows the naked, bearded body of a Priapic figure with an exaggerated erection nearly as big as himself. The crown of its head reaches well above the crown of his as he cradles his member in his arms. His entire body with separate legs and feet is articulated, yet he appears to be seated atop a small column extending from the square base, seemingly staggering under the weight of his genitals. He leans his cheek against his erection, mouth open in a moan of pleasure, pain, or both. Is he intended to be Priapus with his penis or the penis with its Priapus? Alive, or a sculpture taking a break from posing? A powerful god, or a buffoon overpowered by his prick? If we take our cue from the queer ontology of entanglements, the answer can easily be all of it at the same time. There exist no inherent ­oppositions—​­rather, the material specifics of this particular statuette, posed so that the column and the jutting erection form a continuous visual line of sight, suggest an interest in creating ambiguity. ­Figure 4.4 begs many questions about agency, which brings us over to the second important contribution by Barad and Haraway: the queering of agency as an exclusively human phenomenon.

On Agency, Intentions, and Effects In discussions of ancient art, we are accustomed to thinking in terms of people. We ask “­who created this goblet?”; “­who could afford to buy it to showcase his taste and erudition?”; and “­who later placed it in a private collection for the enjoyment of his peers?” When working from a (­com)­posthuman perspective, however, we need to queer this traditional narrative, by considering 60

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­Figure  4.4  Statuette of Priapus. Etruscan, possibly first century AD. Terracotta. In the private collection of Dr. Johan J. Mattelaer. Photograph © Johan J. M ­ attelaer -​­Private Collection.

the multitude of further actors involved. Active agents are obviously not limited to men of privilege, but neither are they limited to individual humans, or even the complex human networks we label “­cultures.” The entangled ontologies of Barad and Haraway challenge us to consider the agentic capacities of an image itself, its specific materiality, its shifting locations and contexts of consumption, the effects of time and the elements, and not least the effects of shifting ideas. For some, the less humanlike the agent, the more controversial it becomes to claim its capacity for agency. Most today would ascribe agency to mammals and maybe stretch as far as trees, now that their capacities for communication are becoming common knowledge (­e.g. Wohlleben 2016). Sculptures, however, are another thing. Few would be prepared to go as far as Jane Bennett, who challenges us to consider the agency not just of artifacts but of raw materials and acid rain (­Bennett 2010). Many are only prepared to accept that inanimate objects may exercise secondary agency, dependent on the primary human agency behind their creation. The classic example is a hand grenade: it may kill people, but it does so because people create and use it. According to this logic, the given focus of any study of a sculpted Priapus is figuring out the intentions behind its creation, as revealed by its later use and treatment. That initial intention can be perverted or reinterpreted, but always remains at the center of the discussion. The simple reply would be that hand grenades are capable of malfunctioning and spiting human intentions, just as a sculpted Priapus may fail to perform its duty due to material circumstances. However, the materialisms of Barad and Haraway suggest a more interesting response: 61

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the complete rethinking of agency as a phenomenon. If we, like Haraway, try thinking about agency not in terms of intentions (­which require a mental capacity based on the workings of a human mind) but in terms of the capacity to cause effects, we not only open ourselves to the agentic capacities of all sorts of creatures, matter, processes, and language (­Haraway 2016, 34). We also gain a more useful understanding of human agency specifically. Despite the labels, neither Barad’s posthumanism nor Haraway’s compostism purports to dismiss human influence in the world. Rather the opposite: they both call for increased human awareness and accountability, toward others and each other, but they also herald a ­long-​­overdue ­de-​­privileging of human exclusivity in philosophy and research; what I understand as a queering of human exceptionalism (­Haraway 2008, 2016; Barad 2011, 2017, 2019). Individually and collectively, human beings are just as entangled as any other entities in existence. The point is not that sculptures are capable of acting completely independently from human ­influence—​­the point is that neither are humans. Human agents are just as circumscribed by systems and shifting material realities as artifacts, and the effects they cause on their surroundings are very often unconscious and ­unintentional—​­but no less real.

The Potency of Potential How, then, to approach Priapus? The fact is that unless we find a very rare and specific surviving testimony, we cannot answer questions such as “­what was the intended audience of F ­ igure 4.4 supposed to think?” We can work much more effectively with questions like “­how did this object affect people’s movements within a certain space?” or “­what do we do to this object when we insist that its function must have been apotropaic?” When regarding agency as a widely distributed phenomenon, agency must above all be understood as inherent potential, not as ­imperative—​­not everything capable of causing effects on its surroundings does so all of the time. Conversely, even if the transformative ­Figure 4.3 could be funny, that is not to say that it must have been so to everyone, all of the time. It may not even have been Priapus to everyone, all of the time. Just like agency, (­com)­posthuman concepts of identity rest on foundations of inherent potential, rather than adamant fact. ­Figure 4.3 is a good example of this. As a find from Roman Gaul, dressed in a distinctively Gallic coat, it seems quite possible that this particular figurine amalgamates colonial Roman ideas with indigenous ones, offering a host of different interpretations as to the hooded figure’s identity, depending on the individual viewer or shifting contexts of display. It is equally possible that recognition of a named entity was never the important response during an encounter with this discoverable, disproportionate penis. Surprise, delight, amusement (­apotropaic and/­or not), distaste, awe, and ennui (“­of course, a dick again”) are all potential human responses to artfully hidden m ­ otifs—​­different responses inherent in different cultural contexts, different personalities, and the same person at different times. And yet, the question “­but is it Priapus?” continues to haunt the discussion, because so much of research into ancient artworks is thematically organized. “­Is it Priapus?” really refers to the validity of research, meaning “­is this d­ ata-​­set appropriate to include in this particular analysis, i.e. is it a source of empirical knowledge or error?” If I set out to study “­Priapus in Roman art,” it is of course essential that the artworks I cite as sources are both Roman and reliably identifiable as Priapus. But as we know, neither of these concepts is that easily defined, “­Priapus” least of all. This tends to consign objects of uncertain nomenclature and ethnocultural origins, such as F ­ igures 4.3 and 4.4, to the footnotes. In Barad’s parlance, fear of committing scientific error literally leads to scholarly ­a-­​­­void-​­ance, when objects that cannot be engaged without risk are expunged from the collective body of research (­Barad 2019, ­539–​­540). 62

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When dealing with queer, slippery characters like Priapus, it would therefore be sensible to adopt a more pragmatic approach. Let us turn back to literature, and consider a diatribe against unmanly perverts by Juvenal (­2.­93–​­98): One of these men has blackened his eyebrows with damp soot and is extending them with a slanting pencil, raising his fluttering eyes as he applies the makeup. Another is drinking from a ­phallus-​­shaped glass with his substantial hairdo filling a golden hairnet, dressed in a tartan pattern of different shades of blue or in green satin, and with his slave swearing by his master’s Juno. Behind that ­phallus-​­shaped glass from Susanna Morton Braund’s translation (­2004, my emphasis) lurks an interesting Latin passage: vitreo bibit ille priapo. Given Priapus’ one big claim to fame, it is not an unreasonable leap of conjecture to read this as “­drinking from a glass shaped like a penis,” but might it not more correctly be a glass shaped like Priapus? The excitingly queer answer is that it can be all of it at the same time. At least one example of a drinking vessel of Imperial Roman production shaped like a ­man-­​­­with-­​­­an-​­erection who in his turn is shaped like a penis (­or the other way around) survives, in a private collection in Germany (­see LIMC Suppl. 1034, s.v. Priapos 71, and my interpretation in ­Figure 4.5). This is a ceramic rhyton rather than a glass, but the shape, which appears to be the whole point of Juvenal’s description (­what manly man would put a phallic object to his lips?) fits the bill: a drinking vessel, which is also a penis, which is also a man with an erection and an armful of fruit. Its surface detail is worn from handling. Instead of trying for the obligatory “­is this Priapus?” it would be exciting to see research that embraces all of this object’s diffracted identities, as a priapic artifact that is both penis and Priapus, image and drinking vessel, décor, and utensil, potentially both a lark and a possession to take pride in, decorated with a Godhead that could signal both pietas and luxuria—​­a right queer compost of entangled appearances, functions, and potential meanings. This priapic object is by no means alone in delighting to refuse dichotomies and confound intentions. Even the seemingly straightforward ­Figure 4.1 has its secrets. If you compare the arrangement of Priapus’ ­fruit-​­laden garment with those of other similar objects (­e.g. ­Figure 4.5; LIMC Suppl. 1035, s.v. Priapos ­76–​­77, 81), you will note that it has been arranged into two distinct, rounded folds, instead of the more typical single one. Whether or not the garment of ­Figure 4.1 is intended to resemble a pair of buttocks being parted by Priapus’ penis may not be ­all-​­important, compared to the fact that its arrangement does make that one possible interpretation.

Where Does This Leave Priapus? I propose that the (­com)­posthuman approach to Priapus would be to recognize him as a subject capable of being almost anything: a god who can be a dick who can be a speaking statue who can be a novelty glass who can be a scarecrow who can be a voyeur who can be a laughing stock who can be a ­self-​­righteous rapist who can be a perpetually frustrated victim of priapism and/­or impotence, who can be a powerful ­awe-​­inspiring guardian who can be a piece of rotting wood who can be a master of seduction who can be an uncontrollable beast who can be a god. He may not be all of it all of the time, but he is ready, willing, and able should the opportunity arise. There is no canonical, “­right” way to do (­com)­posthuman research because its indispensable component is plurality: for every question you ask, you must be prepared for multiple answers. When looking at a Priapus, we are never helped by tracing a genealogy of models, possibly not even by grouping motifs thematically. Instead, we may assume that an individual object is 63

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­Figure  4.5  The author’s digital drawing of a rhyton in the shape of Priapus/­a penis. From Novaesium. Attributed to the Roman Imperial period, A.D. ­170–​­240.  Ceramic. Private collection, Germany. Digital sketch of images published in LIMC Suppl. 1034, s.v. Priapos 71; Digital LIMC (­2020): Digital LIMC, DaSCH. http://­ark.dasch.swiss/­ark:/­72163/­­080e-­​­­7401b3700c1cb-​­e.

produced at a certain point in time because it is considered relevant to that particular ­context—​­but we may also assume that its functions and relative significance will have changed frequently over time. Instead of asking Priapus to straddle a series of dichotomies, we could recognize that within the context of the Roman world, he is happy to inhabit the ­border-​­less gray area between gods, images of gods, and humans delighting in putting words into the mouths of gods. There just is no such thing as every Priapus. The wooden Priapi of the Priapea cheerfully draw attention to the seeming paradox of people demanding divine favors from an object which they themselves manufactured yesterday (­see Hunt 2011, 33, 38). This is a stark contrast to the silver and bronze Priapi piously pouring libations onto their divine erections, and a far cry from the beardless Priapus whose penis functioned as a scintillating waterspout in the garden of Casa dei Vettii (­VI.15.1) (­Dunleavy 2019, ­87–​­88 ­Figure 39). When looking at the multiple types of objects and testimonies accommodated within the large, fluid world of priapic imagery, we must accept that they will rarely present a coherent picture. As Ailsa Hunt demonstrates, even within the same literary trope, Priapi hewn from different types of wood present themselves quite differently to the readers (­Hunt 2011, ­40–​­42, 50). A cypress wooden Priapus is not the same as an oaken one. This may be Priapus’ greatest strength. One undeniable effect of his queerly inconsistent image is that it makes h­ im—​­as both god and m ­ otif—​­unlimited. Priapus is ­one-­​­­who-­​­­is-​­many, and thus in 64

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a sense indestructible. Even if his wooden effigy in Martial’s epigram 8.40 is threatened with ending up as firewood lest he fulfill his duties to his maker, the very reminder that there is a maker to replace him makes Priapus simultaneously perishable and immortal. The theme of multiple Priapi can also be found in the Priapea, most explicitly at 33.­1–​­2, where a ­latter-​­day Priapus laments that Naidas antique dryadasque habuere priapi, et quo tenta dei vena subiret erat: “­The Priapuses of old used to have Naiads and Dryads, and there was something for the god’s turgid member to enter.”4 As for the world of art, at least one s­ acral-​­idyllic Pompeiian landscape from the triclinium of House I.12,9 includes two ithyphallic herms (­bifurcated branches really) on either side of an altar, that Hunt interprets as two Priapi in the same picture (­Hunt 2011, ­46–​­47 ­Figure 4). While these examples may be seen as exceptions to the rule of “­one Priapus at a time”, they clearly illustrate Priapus’ most enduring characteristic: the capacity to bend rules, transcend limitations, and upset ­expectations—​­in short: to queer everything. Perishable and yet indestructible, Priapus inhabits the borderland somewhere between “­easy come, easy go” and “­the king is dead, long live the king!”

Taking a Cue from Priapus: Putting Yourself Out There The point of this chapter has never been to provide answers, but to inspire new questions and angles of research. I can thus proclaim that every individual priapic image is capable of contradicting all the others and still being right. Likewise, the inanimate objects that we label “­source material” are capable of talking back and wrecking our intellectual expectations, just as their changeable materiality frequently puts obstacles in the way of our inquiries. The objects that we study may not do this intentionally, and they may not do so in the same ways that a human being would, but this does not mean that they are not capable. If not even the past of an electron is finished, fixed, and done, then all worldly ­figurizations—​­including Priapus, as a concept and as individual ­figures—​­are still ongoing; that is open to past, present, and future reconfigurations. We need to recognize this if we are to be able to work with queer figures like Priapus, rather than against them. It seems to me that one overlooked aspect of Priapus is his ability to still inspire fear, in the enlightened and ­agile-​­minded researchers of the ­twenty-​­first century. Whether for fear of exposing our own mental limitations when unable to grasp something unlimited, or for fear of inducing the scorn of our peers by revealing an interest in such a crudely ­hyper-​­sexualized body, we shy away from the encounter and tend toward attempts to defuse the threat. Because we take ourselves very seriously, there may be a tendency to reach for the safely serious explanation of an apotropaic function to deal with uncomfortable aspects of P ­ riapus—​­such as his capacity to induce giggles and sneers. Afraid of too close an association with Priapus, we stick to proper scientific protocol and prefer to remain largely absent from our own narratives. Yet, as Donna Haraway demonstrated some 33 years ago, it matters who is asking the questions, if we are to become ­response-​­able for the premises of our own research (­Haraway 1988). I, for instance, arrived here because I began my academic career by seeking the company of the queerest character I thought I could find at the ­time—­​­­Hermaphroditus—​­only to discover that within the context of Roman erotic and pictorial conventions, ze appears disappointingly conventional (­see Åshede 2015, 2020). This led me to question what a queer Roman ­body—​­in the n­ orm-​­defying, subversive sense I postulated at the beginning of this c­ hapter—​­might actually look like. One answer seems to be “­like Priapus”, and not just because his apparently unlimited figurations queer the very notion of stable categories. If we define “­a queer body” as one that firstly exposes the demarcations of the given order of things, and secondly enacts creative opportunities of unsettling this very order, then Priapus is particularly queer because he offers audiences ancient 65

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and modern a rare opportunity of refusing the ­taken-­​­­for-​­granted narrative of Roman phallic veneration. The invitation to receive his cockboasts with scorn instead of ready acceptance is certainly not just open to Roman elite men. Anyone in the vicinity of Priapus’ ­body—​­women, slaves, freedmen, children, foreigners, and queers of all ­kinds—​­are, in the right circumstances, theoretically capable of looking at him as the raving embodiment of just how mean, boorish, and anxious the Roman idea of virility comes across. Whether we take this opportunity is another matter, but the opportunity to laugh at Priapus remains on offer. Just as we might laugh at Priapus for failing the powerful phallic i­deal—​­whether by going to excess or by failing to get it u­ p—​­we can laugh at him for achieving an ideal that reveals itself as rather quaint to anyone not already a s­ take-​­holder in its equation of phallic capacity with might and right. We can even laugh at him simultaneously with admiring/­venerating/­celebrating/­desiring him. One final example of the unruly multitudes of potential embodied by priapic imagery may be offered by the stone sculpture of Priapus flanked by a gladiator found in a Pompeian tavern (­I.201). Dunleavy suggests that their juxtaposition revolves around the status of the gladiator, as exemplum of masculine toughness on the one hand, but sexually objectified outsider to Roman society on the other (­Dunleavy 2019, ­227–​­228, ­Figure 111). However, given their relative positions, where the gladiator stands seemingly poised to defend his comparably smaller companion, sword drawn and shield raised above Priapus’ head, it seems possible to interpret the group as a queer(­ing) commentary on virility as such. The grouping together of two embodiments of aggressive masculinity calls attention to their common denominator, threatening to undo as much as enforce it. After all, the presence of the “­bodyguard” suggests that Priapus exposing his genitals is not just a god exposing his might, but also a man exposing a vulnerable spot on his body. And vice versa: the flashing Priapus under the elbow of the ­battle-​­ready gladiator gleefully reminds us that the ­life-­​­­and-​­death battles of the arena are nothing more than glorified ­cock-​­fights. Yet none of this suggests that Dunleavy’s erstwhile interpretation is incorrect. Perhaps my point is that we are all as ­multi-​­faceted as Priapus, and this is what a (­com)­posthuman approach can also be about: to recognize that as scholars, we change, redefine our ideas, and we can be right even when contradicting each other.

Suggested Further Reading For those desiring an overview of Priapus in ancient art, as well as the impact of modern sexual morality on this topic, Katherine Dunleavy’s dissertation “­The Image of Priapus: Ambiguity and Masculinity in Roman Visual Culture” (­2019) constitutes essential reading. Priapus as a literary character has received extensive treatment, of which Ailsa Hunt’s “­Priapus as Wooden God: Confronting Manufacture and Destruction” (­2011), the chapter “­Gods in a ­Man-​­Made Landscape: Priapus” in Elaine Fantham’s Latin Poets and Italian Gods (­2009), and Amy Richlin’s classic The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman humor (­1983) provide a good starter kit. For those interested in further applications of Barad and Haraway to classical research, I recommend the edited volume Beyond the Romans: Posthuman Perspectives in Roman Archaeology (­2020), as well as my own publications on Hermaphroditus (­Åshede 2015 and 2020).

Notes 1 Translation is that of Walsh 1997. 2 In my opinion, none of the most accessible translations of the collection of poetry known variously as the Priapea, Carmina Priapea or Priapeia (­Parker 1988; Smithers and Burton 1995; Hooper 1999) achieve

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Priapus Unlimited a balance between poetic presentation and faithfulness to the original Latin. Parker’s edition, however, provides the most comprehensive epigraphic and editorial information. 3 See, e.g. Ovid, Fasti 1.­391–​­440, 6.­319–​­348; Martial 6.72; Priapea 18, 26, 50, 55; see Frazel 2003; Holzberg 2005; Oehmke 2007, ­267–​­268; Fantham 2009, 144; Young 2015a, ­203–​­204; Dunleavy 2019, 104, 113. 4 Translation from Fantham 2009, 157.

Works Cited Åshede, Linnea. 2015. Desiring Hermaphrodites: The Relationships of Hermaphroditus in Roman Group Scenes. PhD Dissertation, University of Gothenburg. Åshede, Linnea. 2020. “­Neutrumque et Utrumque Videntur: Reappraising the ­Gender-​­Role(­s) of Hermaphroditus in Ancient Art.” In Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World, edited by Allison Surtees and Jennifer Dyer, ­81–​­94. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barad, Karen. 2003. “­Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to ­Matter.” Signs 28.3: 8­ 01–​­831. Barad, Karen. 2011. “­Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Qui Parle 19.2: 1­ 21–​­158. Barad, Karen. 2017. “­Troubling Time/­s and Ecologies of Nothingness: ­Re-​­turning, ­Re-​­membering, and Facing the Incalculable.” New Formations 92: 5­ 6–​­86. Barad, Karen. 2019. “­After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice.” Theory & Event 22.3: 5­ 24–​­50. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blanton, Thomas R. IV. 2022. “­Apotropaic Humor: The Fresco of Priapus in the House of the Vettii.” Archimède. Archéologie et histoire ancienne [Online] HS2: ­167–​­182. https://­doi.org/­10.47245/­archimede.hs02.ds1.13 Boppert, Walburg. 2015. “­Ein ungewohnliches Priapos.” Mainzer Archaologische Zeitschrift 10: ­119–​­127. Braund, Susanna Morton (­ed. and trans.). 2004. Juvenal and Persius (­LCL 91.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dunleavy, Katherine. 2019. The Image of Priapus: Ambiguity and Masculinity in Roman Visual Culture. PhD Dissertation, University of Bristol. Fantham, Elaine. 2009. Latin Poets and Italian Gods. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Frazel, Thomas D. 2003. “­Priapus’s Two Rapes in Ovid’s ‘­Fasti’.” Arethusa 36.1: ­61–​­97. https://­www.jstor. org/­stable/­44578805 Grant, Michael. 1975. Erotic Art in Pompeii: The Secret Collection of the National Museum of Naples. London: Octopus Books. Hall, Dondald E. (­ed.) 2013. The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Haraway, Donna J. 1988. “­Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3: 5­ 75–​­599. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina: Duke University Press. Accessed August 24, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. Henig, Martin, and Leahy, Kevin. 1995. “­A Herm of Priapus from Haxley, Lincolnshire.” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 148: ­169–​­171. Herter, Hans. 1932. De Priapo. Giessen: A. Toepelman. Holzberg, Niklas. 2005. “­Impotence? It Happened to the Best of Them! A Linear Reading of the Corpus Priapeorum.” Hermes 133: ­368–​­381. Hooper, Richard W. (­trans.). 1999. The Priapus Poems: Erotic Epigrams from Ancient Rome. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hunt, Ailsa. 2011. “­Priapus as Wooden God: Confronting Manufacture and Destruction.” The Cambridge Classical Journal 57: ­29–​­54. Mahéo, Noël. 2004. La Marque de Rome, Samarobriva et les Villes Antiques du Nord de la Gaule, (­cat. expo. Musée d’Amiens, Févr.-​­mai 2004). Amiens: Musée d’Amiens. Megow, ­Wolf-​­Rüdiger. 2000. “­Überlegungen zur Ikonographie des ‘­Edlen’ Priapos.” In Mythes et Cultes: Agathos Daimōn: Etudes D’iconographie en L’honneur de Lilly Kahil, edited by Pascale Linant de

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Linnea Åshede Bellefonds (­Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique Supplément 38), ­365–​­375. Athènes: École française d’Athènes. Megow, ­Wolf-​­Rüdiger. 2009. “­Priapos.” In Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (­LIMC). Supplementum 2009, edited by Pierre Müller, Martin Dennert, and Pascale Linant de Bellefonds, ­1028–​­1044. Zürich: Artemis. Neilson, Harry R. III. 2002. “­A Terracotta Phallus from Pisa Ship E: More Evidence for Priapus as Protector of Greek and Roman Navigators.” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 31.1: ­248–​­253. https://­doi:10.1006/­ijna.2002.1000 O’Connor, Eugene Michael. 1989. Symbolum Salacitatis: A Study of the God Priapus as a Literary Character. Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang. Oehmke, Stefanie. 2007. “­Halbmann oder Superman? Bemerkungen zum effeminierten Priapos.” In Geschlechterdefinitionen und Geschlechtergrenzen in der Antike, edited by Udo Hartmann, Elke Hartmann and Katrin Pietzner, ­263–​­276. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Parker, W. Holt. 1988. Priapea: Poems for a Phallic God; Introduced, Translated, and Edited, With Notes and Commentary, by W.H. Parker. London: Croom Helm. Richlin, Amy. 1983. The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor. New Haven: Yale University Press. Selsvold, Irene and Webb, Lewis. (­eds.) 2019. Beyond the Romans: Posthuman Perspectives in Roman Archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Smithers, L. C., and Richard Burton (­trans.). 1995 [1890]. Priapeia: Sive Diversorum Poetarum in Priapum Lusus, or, Sportive Epigrams on Priapus by Divers Poets in English Verse and Prose. Ware: Wordsworth. Stewart, Peter. 1997. “­Fine Art and Coarse Art: the Image of Roman Priapus.” Art History 20: 5­ 75–​­588. Vlahov, Kiril. 1987. “­Dechiffrierung des Gottesnamens Πριαπος.” Euphrosyne 15: ­235–​­238. Walsh, P. G. (­trans.). 2009[1997]. Petronius. The Satyricon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wohlleben, Peter. 2016. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World. Vancouver: Greystone. Young, Elizabeth M. 2015a. “­The Touch of the Cinaedus: Unmanly Sensations in the Carmina Priapea.” Classical Antiquity 34(­1): ­183–​­208. https://­www.jstor.org/­stable/­10.1525/­ca.2015.34.1.183 Young, Elizabeth M. 2015b. “­Dicere Latine: The Art of Speaking Crudely in the Carmina Priapea.” In Ancient Obscenities: Their Nature and Use in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds, edited by Dorota Dutsch and Ann Suter, ­255–​­280. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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5 TRIBAD PHILAENIS AND LESBIAN BASSA Queer Subjectivities in Martial Kristin Mann

In the poetry of Martial, a Latin epigrammatist active in the second half of the first century CE, there are two women who are explicitly described as engaging in sex with women. First, there is Bassa in 1.90, a seemingly demure and proper woman who secretly has sex with her many female companions. Then there is Philaenis of 7.67 and 7.70, a woman who openly flouts ­convention—​ ­wrestling in the gymnasia, eating and drinking too much, and engaging in copious amounts of sex with both boys and girls. In this essay, I will approach these two individuals from two directions: first, I will seek to understand them in their own context, examining both how Martial as the narrator understands and judges them, and how the women (­if they were real) may have understood themselves. Second, I will consider how people today might categorize these women, demonstrating how they do and do not interact with modern, western categories of sexuality and identity. The first exercise places me in a rich and evolving field of classical scholarship, as important work is being done on understanding these women in an ancient Roman context. The second exercise builds on work being done on gender, queer subjectivity, and queer history by scholars in queer studies. Combining the two approaches is essential, I argue, for a better understanding of Bassa, Philaenis, and their relevance both in the past and today. Traditionally, work focusing on Bassa and Philaenis has sought to understand them in an ancient context: what did they mean to the Romans? In answering this question, modern scholarship has tended to erroneously assume that Bassa and Philaenis are both tribads, a Latin word of Greek origin often defined as masculine women who penetrate their (­usually female) partners. Judith Hallett, for example, in her foundational article on female homoeroticism, analyzes both Bassa and Philaenis among a much larger group of women who display what Hallett sees as the three essential aspects of the tribad in Roman literature: masculinization (­which, for Hallett, means that the tribad is imagined to possess a literal, physical penis used to penetrate others, usually vaginally), anachronization (­in other words, treated as belonging to the distant past), and Hellenization (­in other words, treated as being a Greek, not a Roman phenomenon) (­Hallett 1997, 257). Grouping Bassa and ­Philaenis—​­and treating them both as tribads—​­has been a trend in much subsequent scholarship.1 However, as I will demonstrate in this paper, Martial’s characterizations of Bassa and Philaenis are, in fact, vastly different: Bassa is not a tribad like Philaenis, does not penetrate as does Philaenis, and does not seek to be masculine as does Philaenis. In fact, aside from their joint interest in having sex with women, Bassa and Philaenis could hardly be more different. 69

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-8

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In making this argument, I am building on the groundbreaking work of Sandra Boehringer, who has revolutionized scholarship on “­female homosexuality” in a myriad of ways. Boehringer establishes that a number of common assumptions about how female homosexuality is depicted in ancient texts cannot stand up to close scrutiny. For example, she demonstrates throughout her 2007 book that female homosexuality is not modeled after the asymmetric pederastic model (­that is to say, adults with greater power and status being the sole penetrators in relationships with younger partners), and that women who engage in sex with women do not tend to be “­masculinized” or “­phallic” at all. In the process, Boehringer has uncovered numerous places where our modern biases have unfairly distorted the interpretations of ancient texts. Boehringer establishes, for example, that Bassa is not a tribad, that she is not a penetrator, and that she is not wholly masculinized (­Boehringer 2007, ­321–​­324, 345). Boehringer similarly argues that although Philaenis is a tribad, she is not masculinized either (­2007, ­288–​­294). I will discuss Boehringer’s arguments in more detail in what follows, but for now, it suffices to say that Boehringer’s work has nuanced and improved our understanding of how the ancients viewed female s­ ame-​­sex activity. Boehringer also argues that there is a crucial disjuncture between ancient and modern understandings of sexual activity. Boehringer repeatedly ­emphasizes—​­following the Foucauldian ­model—​­that our way of understanding sexuality and our modern categories of identity cannot be found wholesale in ancient Rome: sexuality is not transhistoric or transgeographic, but rather a construction of specific time periods and specific cultures (­2007, 21, ­28–​­30). Such a Foucauldian framework underpins the work of many scholars of G ­ reco-​­Roman sexuality, such as Halperin (­1990), Winkler (­1990), and the edited collection of Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin (­1990). And it is certainly true, as Boehringer and others have shown, that modern terms and categories cannot be applied to the ancient world without risking distortion. At the same time, the Foucauldian perspective has met with substantial critique. Eve Sedgwick has argued (­2008, ­44–​­48) that the Foucauldian idea of a “­Great Paradigm Shift”—​­the moment that homosexuality “­as we know it today” replaced the n­ ow-​­defunct former m ­ odel—​­is inadequate: for one thing, it erroneously assumes some sort of unified modern understanding of homosexuality, a “­homosexuality as we know it today,” and secondly, older understandings and paradigms did not simply vanish quietly from existence. Boehringer, then, may demonstrate that the past is alien, but Sedgwick shows that the present is not so easy to understand either. The second part of my ­thesis—​­asking how well Bassa and Philaenis suit modern, western notions of sex and ­gender—​­confronts both sides of the equation at once. My analysis not only shows the familiarity and strangeness of the past but also forces a genuine consideration of what exactly sex and gender mean to “­us” in the first place. Accomplishing my two goals will require three steps. First, we will look at Martial’s subject position, by which I mean, the perspective offered by the (­heteronormative, male) narrating voice of the text. Next, I consider the subjectivity of the women themselves: if these women were real, and if they acted and thought as Martial claims, then how might we understand their motivations? Finally, I consider our modern understanding: to what extent can we, from a modern perspective, categorize these women according to our own ­sex-​­gender identity categories? Through this essay, I show that considering the layers of ­perspectives—​­from Martial’s to those of the characters to our ­own—​­provides the fullest picture of these poems, their meanings, and their relevance to ancient and modern identities.

Martial’s Perspective All of the poems under discussion in this essay are written in the judgmental voice of a ­first-​­person narrator, whom I will refer to as “­Martial.” As I will show in the discussion that follows, Martial 70

Tribad Philaenis and Lesbian Bassa

treats Bassa and Philaenis as two distinct individuals: both despicable, yes, but for highly different reasons. To begin, here are my own translations of the three poems under discussion: 1.90 Because I never saw you associating with males, Bassa, and because no rumor gave you a lover, but around you always, engaging in every activity, was a crowd of your own sex, with no man ever approaching, 5 you seemed to me, I confess, to be a Lucretia. But you (­oh the crime!), Bassa, you were fucking the women! You dare to join twin cunts to each other and your unnatural Venus falsely promises a man. You have devised a monstrous riddle worthy of the Sphinx, 10 that where there is no man, there is adultery. 7.67 Philaenis the tribad pegs boys and, more savage than the h­ ard-​­on of a husband, she pounds eleven girls a day. She also plays with a handball, all bound up, 5 and she grows yellow with sand, and she whirls around heavy weights with the easy arm of an athletic stud, and, muddy from the stinking gymnasium, she is beaten by the blows of an oiled instructor. Nor does she dine or lie down before 10 she has vomited up twelve cups of unmixed wine, to which she thinks it right to return when she has gobbled down sixteen steaks. After all these things, when she’s horny, she doesn’t suck ­cock—​­because she thinks that’s too ­unmanly—​­ 15 but naturally, she goes down on girls. May the gods give you sense, Philaenis, you who think that licking cunt is manly. 7.70 Tribad of the very tribads, Philaenis, you correctly refer to the woman you fuck as your girlfriend. Although, as I mentioned in the introduction, modern scholars tend to treat Bassa and Philaenis as a pair, Martial himself never does so: the two women occur in separate poems in separate books, and they are never referred to jointly. Furthermore, they are not even referred to by the same term. Philaenis is labeled a tribad in the first line of both poems that refer to her (­7.67.1; 7.70.1), but Bassa, critically, is not. Grouping together Bassa and Philaenis is a distinctly modern phenomenon. 71

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Bassa’s chief crime is that her presumed feminine virtues are a lie, a deception which the narrator deems to be both criminal and incomprehensible. In 1.90.5, Martial declares that Bassa seems to be a “­Lucretia”—​­that paragon of female chastity and w ­ ifehood—​­because of what the narrator has seen and heard of Bassa’s behavior. Bassa surrounds herself with women (­1.90.­3–​­4), she never lets any strange men approach (­­1–​­4), and there is not even a rumor of male association (­2). However, in the second half of the poem, Martial reveals that Bassa’s consummate femininity is a lie. Bassa is having sex with those women who are always around her (­1.90.6); she is not a chaste wife at all. “­Oh, the crime!” (­6, pro facinus), Martial exclaims when he realizes that Bassa is sleeping with women, an act that Martial calls “­adultery” (­10, adulterium). Adultery was a legally punishable crime in Rome, although only for married women, and usually with the presumption that these women slept with a man (­Berger 1953, 342). Martial uses the vocabulary available to him to describe Bassa’s misdeeds as legally culpable offenses, even if they technically fall outside of the real legal code (­cf. Boehringer 2007, 323). But more than criminal, Martial finds Bassa’s actions to be beyond understanding. Bassa possesses an “­unnatural Venus” (­8, prodigiosa Venus) and has “­devised a monstrous riddle worthy of the Sphinx” (­9) by managing to commit adultery without a man (­10). Bassa’s behavior goes against nature and strays into the realm of the monstrous (­cf. Boehringer 2007, 3­ 43–​­344). Her “­unnatural Venus” has been read by some scholars as an enlarged clitoris, but Boehringer has shown that this cannot be the case (­2007, ­333–​­334); rather, as I will discuss in more detail below, the “­Venus” here must refer to Bassa’s sexual appetite for women. Martial does not even know what to call Bassa; the closest he comes to labeling her is when he calls her a fututor in line 6, a word that refers to men who vaginally penetrate women with their penis.2 Yet Bassa is not a man, does not possess a penis, and is not even penetrating the women she sleeps with. Instead, Bassa has sex in a way only available to cisgender women by “­joining twin cunts together” (­7, inter se geminos audes committere cunnos). The word fututor, then, does not truly describe Bassa, which I’d argue is the point: there are no words for what Bassa is or what she does, which only serves to heighten the narrator’s sense of horrified confusion at this inexplicable yet clearly criminal woman. The narrator’s characterization of Philaenis is much the opposite. No one would accuse Philaenis of pretending to be a virtuous woman; if anything, Philaenis flaunts her rejection of proper femininity. Pedicat pueros, “­pegs boys,” are the first words of 7.­67—​­a sexual act usually reserved for adult men shockingly applied to the woman Philaenis. From there, 7.67 piles on example after example of Philaenis’s outrageous behavior. The narrator already ­knows—​­without any sort of moment of discovery, as with ­Bassa—​­that Philaenis sleeps with almost a dozen girls every day (­­2–​­3), that she visits the gymnasium (­­4–​­7), has a trainer (­8), eats and drinks too much (­­9–​­12), and engages in oral sex with women (­­13–​­15). In 7.70, we learn that Philaenis calls (­2, vocas) the woman she fucks her girlfriend, again suggesting that Philaenis in no way hides the nature of their relationship. No one could mistake Philaenis for a “­Lucretia” even for a moment. In fact, the end of 7.67 emphasizes that it is Philaenis who lacks understanding, not Martial (­­16–​­17): May the gods give you sense, Philaenis, you who think that licking cunt is manly. This ending could not be more different than the ending of Bassa’s poem, which focused on the narrator’s deep and abiding incomprehension. Martial knows all there is to know about ­Philaenis—​ ­given her behavior, we can assume that everyone does. Because there is nothing mysterious about Philaenis and because she does not appear to be a married woman, the narrator does not characterize her as “­criminal” or “­incomprehensible” as he 72

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does Bassa. Instead, Philaenis is, beyond anything else, repugnant, as Boehringer has amply shown (­2007, ­287–​­295). Boehringer deems this the essentially “­antierotic” nature of Philaenis (­­294–​­295), arguing that Philaenis’s actions, attitude, and excess place her entirely outside of the erotic sphere where women in poetry usually reside. Philaenis shows none of the ­self-​­control or modesty that a “­proper Roman woman” should; she has way too much sex, and eats and drinks far too much. She is dirty both literally from the yellow sand of the gymnasium (­7.67.5) and spiritually from engaging in oral sex (­15).3 In fact, while many scholars argue that Philaenis is “­masculine,” Boehringer points out that none of these characteristics are masculine either (­2007, ­293–​­295). Manliness was about ­self-​­control and virtue, qualities entirely lacking in Philaenis, in Martial’s estimation. Neither men nor women were supposed to act as Philaenis does. We will come back to Philaenis’s relationship to masculinity in the next section. For now, suffice it to say that ­Martial—​­unlike many modern ­scholars—​­seems to view Bassa and Philaenis as entirely different. Bassa looks like a proper woman; Philaenis openly defies gender norms. Bassa is criminal and inexplicable; Philaenis is repugnant but entirely known. It is true that, at the most basic level, they are both “­bad” women, and that their badness relates at least in part to the kind of sex they have and to their gender performance. But in general, Martial characterizes them as bad in different ways; lumping them together not only erodes these differences but also runs contrary to Martial’s own perspective.

Bassa’s and Philaenis’s Subjectivity Talking about the “­subjectivity” of fictional characters created by a deeply hostile narrator may seem like a nonstarter; Bassa and Philaenis have only the thoughts and feelings that Martial’s invective agenda has projected onto them. Nevertheless, I would argue that Martial has created figures that are to some extent worth reclaiming. Grace Gillies (­2017) has described the experience of looking at ancient statues and ancient texts from a nonbinary perspective, of the importance and the complications of reclaiming (­or rewriting?) history. Reflecting on a museum visit, Gillies writes: The current language of nonbinary gender is relatively new, which can make us seem like a people without a h­ istory — it ​­ is essential to acknowledge that we have a history, and that it is riddled with exclusion, violence, disgust, and haunting lacunae. At the same time, that very history makes it all the more essential to find ways to ease its weight. In looking at those two bodies [statues of Apollo and Dionysus] as murky reflections of myself, I knew I was rewriting ­history — ​­something I had sworn to avoid as a historian. But integral to many genderqueer people’s lives are episodes of personal rebirth and rewritten history. In a similar way, I am undoubtedly projecting myself backward here, in trying to imagine how these women saw themselves as if they were real and believed in the rightness of their own behavior. Yet such a thought experiment reveals, I argue, two potential models for how a nonconforming person may have interacted with gender and sex within the confines of the Roman ­sex-​­gender ­system—​­if only in an imaginary, poetic setting. A reclaiming of Bassa, one that reads her behavior as driven by her own desire and sense of self, might read her as a woman chiefly driven by a desire to be “­feminine:” she strictly avoids men and masculinity, presents herself in a way a man like Martial reads as feminine, chooses only women as sexual partners, and has sex in a “­­non-​­masculine” way. In fact, according to our narrator, Bassa’s chief motivation is the extreme avoidance of men. She does not join with “­males” 73

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(­1.90.1, maribus), she does not have a male lover (­2, moechum), and no vir ever approaches (­4). The word vir can carry connotations of a “­real man” and/­or a husband, meaning that there is a subtle implication that Bassa does not let her husband come near her either. Bassa even separates herself from ­masculine-​­coded behaviors. Since she is labeled a “­Lucretia,” she must dress, act, and speak in what the Romans would consider to be a feminine way, or else she never would have “­deceived” the narrator. We do not see any of the ­anti-​­femininity or ­faux-​­masculinity displayed by Philaenis. Bassa seems to avoid “­masculinity” in the same way that she avoids men. Instead, Bassa seems drawn to sexual partners who are like herself. Martial does not tell us specifically about the identity or the status of the women Bassa sleeps with, but he implies, at least, that Bassa chooses them based on their similarity to herself. Bassa surrounds herself with “­a crowd of [her own] sex” (­4, turba tui sexus) and has sex that involves “­twin cunts” (­7, geminos… cunnos). Twice, then, Martial suggests that Bassa’s desire is for those who are like herself. This is alien to normative Roman sex, in which sex occurs between inherently unequal partners.4 Adult men do not have sex with adult men; boys do not have sex with boys; women do not have sex with women. Even Philaenis, a woman, has sex with ­girls—​­like a man would. But Bassa seeks out similarity. Even Bassa’s preferred sexual activity can be read through this lens: Bassa has sex as a cisgender man cannot by “­joining twin cunts together” (­7, inter se geminos audes committere cunnos), avoiding both penises and p­ enis-​­substitutes. Martial here is as explicit as possible about what Bassa does during sex, but, as Boehringer has discussed, scholarship has not always recognized this (­2007, ­322–​­323, ­333–​­334). Bassa is frequently assumed to possess a dildo or an enlarged clitoris or some “­penetrative” instrument, but the Latin specifically excludes this possibility. The cunni are gemini, t­win—​­neither of them is different from the other, and there is no dildo mentioned at all. This is ­non-​­penetrative sex or perhaps mutually penetrative sex. What it does not mean is that Bassa penetrates her (­passive) partner; this reading is partly a result of scholars mistakenly reading Philaenis’s acts onto this poem and partly, I suspect, a lingering prejudice that sex must involve penetration. In fact, in line 8, Martial seems to predict and forestall the assumption that Bassa will use a penetrative instrument in sex, writing that Bassa’s “­unnatural Venus falsely promises a man” (­mentiturque virum prodigiosa Venus). The word Venus more commonly refers to the act of sex or to desire than it does to genitalia (­cf. Adams 1982, 57, ­188–​­189).5 Furthermore, this interpretation is supported through the allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Venus occurs in close proximity to prodigiosa and explicitly refers to desire (­Metamorphoses 9.­726–​­728): Iphis, barely holding back her tears, said, “­What kind of end awaits me, who is possessed by the anxiety of a new Venus (­Venus), one known to no one, unnatural (­prodigiosa)?” For Iphis, a girl in love with another girl, her desire is “­unnatural” because it is incapable of physical fulfillment; women literally cannot have sex with women. In Iphis’s case, she does eventually manage to have sex with her ­beloved—​­but only by being physically turned into a man. This whole story is clearly in Martial’s mind. Because of Bassa’s “­unnatural desire,” she “­falsely promises” am ­ an—​­someone who has read Ovid, or someone who knows how sex “­normally” works, would expect a man to show ­up—​­either through Bassa’s becoming a man or at least through Bassa’s using some sort of phallic instrument. But this proves to be a false promise. Since Bassa does not penetrate her partners, it is particularly strange that Martial refers to her as a fututor (­6). Fututor, as we have seen, is a masculine noun meaning “­he who fucks (­a vagina).” It refers most precisely to a man who vaginally penetrates a woman with his penis. There is a 74

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feminine version of this noun, fututrix, and Boehringer argues that Martial chooses the masculine form instead in order to play on the uncertainty of Bassa’s sex (­2007, 345). But I would suggest that there are more immediate reasons for Martial to avoid the term fututrix. Kamen and ­Levin-​ ­Richardson have shown that fututrix refers to a woman who is active despite being penetrated (­2015, ­244–​­248); it means, essentially, “­a woman who fucks a penis.” Just as fututor assumes sex being done to a vagina, so fututrix assumes sex being done to a penis. Fututrix is thus an untenable word for someone like Bassa, as it would imply that she is having sex with a man.6 The only noun available for someone fucking a vagina is fututor, which is masculine on the assumption that men are the ones having sex with women. Hence the central paradox of Bassa: she must be a fututor because she has sex with vaginas, but she is not a man and she does not penetrate, and so she is not really a fututor any more than she is a Lucretia. What links Bassa to the word fututor, then, can be nothing other than her desire to have sex with ­vaginas—​­that is the action, the drive on which ­the -​­tor ending rests. Taken all together, these interpretations suggest that Bassa embraces femininity so completely that she slides into what someone like Martial would see as unfeminine ­behavior—​­after all, from a normative perspective, Bassa’s femininity should be founded on subordination and service to men, but Bassa has elided men entirely. Bassa thus creates her own kind of femininity, an impenetrable and w ­ oman-​­only space. To be impenetrable is usually considered a strictly masculine attribute (­cf. Walters 1997), and so it is telling that by being completely “­feminine,” by shutting out any hints of men or masculinity, Bassa has in fact lost what might be the key aspect of femininity for the Romans: penetrability. From the perspective of someone like Martial, this is tantamount to a reveal that Bassa is not a good woman after all, perhaps hardly a woman. But our experimental reading as if from Bassa’s perspective might suggest instead an alternative construction of what it means to be as feminine as possible. For Philaenis, the story is much the opposite. We can see Philaenis as someone driven by masculinity as powerfully as Bassa is by femininity. Near the end of 7.67, Martial reveals that Philaenis engages in oral sex with w ­ omen—​­but not with m ­ en—​­because she does not think fellatio is manly enough (­14, putat hoc parum virile). This implies that being “­manly” (­virile) is Philaenis’s chief motivation. In the spirit of trying to walk in Philaenis’s shoes for the moment, I will ignore Boehringer’s careful demonstration that none of Philaenis’s behavior is actually “­manly” according to the male standards of proper Roman manliness (­2007, ­287–​­294). But ­Philaenis—​­if we treat her as ­real—​­seems to have her own notion of what manliness is. Jack Halberstam (­1998) argues for the reality and importance of “­masculinity without men” (­1), of types of masculinity created and embodied by women and others. For example, Halberstam examines the masculinity of “­tomboys” (­­5–​­9), of butch lesbians (­­111–​­139), and of historical figures like Anne Lister (­­65–​­73). Halberstam presents female masculinity as its own important and powerful way of being, and here I will experimentally use such a model for Philaenis’s own brand of masculinity. In 7.67, Philaenis has sex with boys (­pueri) and girls (­puellae) (­­1–​­3). Both pueri and puellae are the typical erotic objects of adult Roman men, meaning that Philaenis has sex with the same types of people that a man would. Yet Philaenis has more sex than is typical, creating a masculinity built on excess rather than on restraint, while still maintaining the “­normal” masculine orientation toward boys and (­younger) women. So too with Philaenis’s nonsexual behavior: exercise, gymnasia, physical training, and symposia are key aspects of dominant male masculinity, but Philaenis engages in each of these activities to (­what Martial sees as) excess (­cf. Boehringer 2007, ­289–​­294). She engages in too much exercise, becoming dirty and unattractive (­7.67.­4–​­8). She lets her trainer beat her as if she is a slave (­8). She drinks unmixed ­wine—​­a key marker of someone lacking 75

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s­ elf-­​­­control—​­and eats ridiculous amounts of food (­­9–​­12). Philaenis’s tribad masculinity revels in abundance and a playful disregard for the boundaries of bodily autonomy and social class. Even when Philaenis merely borrows wholesale from male masculinity, she cannot help but change it. In 7.70, Martial reveals that Philaenis refers to her sexual partner as her amica, her girlfriend (­2). Amica is a normal term in ­male-​­authored poetry to refer to a female love interest. In a woman’s mouth, the word amica would usually refer to a (­nonsexual) friend.7 But Philaenis uses the word in the erotically charged way that a man would and does so recte, “­correctly,” as Martial mockingly admits (­2), since this is the woman she fucks. Martial’s reaction ­here—​­sarcastically ­approving—​­shows that even when Philaenis simply borrows a term from male masculinity, it refracts and changes when she speaks it. In a similar way, Philaenis both embodies and changes “­masculine” sexual behavior when she has intercourse. Her sexual behavior is delineated through three verbs: futuere (­7.70.2, she “­fucks” her girlfriend), pedicare (­7.67.1, she “­pegs” ­boys—​­in other words, anally penetrates them), and dolare (­7.67.3, she “­pounds” 11 girls a day). All of these verbs place Philaenis in the penetrator’s role, and all of these are verbs more commonly used with a male subject when they are in the active voice, as here. By existing as a female subject of these normally male verbs, Philaenis occupies the “­masculine” sphere while irrevocably altering it. Lacking a penis, how does Philaenis penetrate her partners? Martial does not bother to say, allowing Philaenis to momentarily fill the role of a male subject. In addition, Philaenis engages in a sexual behavior that is normally seen as distinctly unmasculine: cunnilingus. Martial laughs at Philaenis’s “­misunderstanding” ­here—​ ­that she avoids fellatio since it is not manly and then mistakenly thinks that cunnilingus is manly ­instead—​­but we might see this instead as part of Philaenis’s differing version of masculinity. In 11.61, Martial describes a man desperate for ­cunnilingus—​­so eager that his fututrix tongue reaches even the womb of the women he pleasures. Martial laughs at a man who loves cunnilingus and at a woman who sees cunnilingus as part of masculinity, yet the two poems together offer the briefest, most fleeting suggestion of a competing notion of what masculine individuals (­should) like to do. To see Philaenis in this way is to take her seriously, to pretend momentarily that she is or could be ­real—​­and to assume that what she does in the poem is as masculine as she believes it to be, simply based on a different definition of masculinity than the one under which Martial (­and most male Roman authors of the period) adhere to. As Halberstam says, “­female masculinity is generally received by h­ etero-​­and ­homo-​­normative cultures as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment, as a longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach” (­1998, 9). That is certainly how Martial reads P ­ hilaenis—​­and perhaps how he and others read the figure of the tribad in general: a kind of failed masculinity arising from failed women. In this section, I have suggested that if a woman like Philaenis did exist, perhaps she saw herself in a different way. Under such an experimental reading, Bassa and Philaenis could offer evidence that competing definitions of femininity and masculinity existed, at least in the imagination. These characters are not real, of course, and so they cannot offer real evidence of a­ nything—​­certainly not of how historical women “­really” felt or acted. But Martial as an author holds these literary figures up as ­scary-­​­­yet-​­laughable ­gender-​­defying deviants, and in so doing demonstrates that the rules of the ­sex-​­gender system could be bent and ­broken—​­in poetry, at least. Bassa shields herself with a kind of extreme femininity and ­faux-​­chastity that allows her to enjoy women without men. Philaenis enjoys a nonconforming masculinity openly and boastfully. An experimental reclamation of these characters, one that takes them seriously, demonstrates alternative interpretations of gender in a Roman context even as Martial strives to shore up the normative rules. 76

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Our Perspective When I taught an undergraduate course on women who love women in ancient Greece and Rome, I asked the students if Bassa was a lesbian. The firm consensus was “­no”—​­partly because we had read scholarship about how our ­sex-​­gender identity categories do not exist in the ancient world, and partly because Bassa lacks a sense of self; the class concluded that a person cannot be a lesbian without identifying as a lesbian. Both points are valid, and both points have been extensively discussed in scholarship. The first ­point—​­that our sex and gender categories did not exist in the ancient ­world—​­is a basic tenet of Foucault, who argues that the modern concept of “­homosexuality” came into being in the nineteenth century. Declaring Bassa to be a lesbian is tantamount to assuming that our modern, western identities are universal and ­transhistorical—​­and it assumes, also dangerously, that “­lesbian” is a stable category that someone can simply be (­cf. Sedgwick 2008, ­24–​­26). The second ­point—​­that no one can be a lesbian without identifying as ­one—​­suggests that ­self-​­identification is a key facet of our ­sex-​­gender categories, that a person cannot be a lesbian unless they personally claim the label. By extension, a culture lacking the word “­lesbian” will have no lesbians.8 For both reasons, then, Bassa is no lesbian. However, I think it is important to pose this question exactly as I have posed it, and also to discuss the ways that Bassa does and does not fit into modern, western ideas of what a lesbian is (“­modern” and “­western” only because I am writing from a modern, western perspective, and so that is the viewpoint I bring to the table). First, it is important for queer people to see queer people in h­ istory—​­for nonbinary people to look for nonbinary history (­cf. Gillies 2017), for lesbians to look for lesbians, for gay men to look for gay men, for transgender people to look for transgender people. We will not find ourselves (­Bassa is not a lesbian), but it is better to look for people like ourselves than to simply shut down the conversation from its inception. Hence Bernadette Brooten, for example, argues that ancient Greek and Latin texts should be seen as part of “­lesbian history,” even if there is no transhistorical, stable “­lesbian identity” to speak of (­1996, ­17–​­26). In fact, the lack of lesbians, at a time when women had sex with women, could be seen as part of queer ­history—​­just not in a teleological sense, as Sedgwick warns, as though our understanding of s­ame-​­sex behavior has become ever more accurate and “­true” over time (­2008, 44). Secondly, asking whether Bassa is a lesbian tells us more about our own categories and about the categories of the past than not asking at all. Judith ­Bennett—​­a scholar of medieval ­history—​­has argued that using a messy term like “­lesbian”—​­whose meaning is not agreed on even today (­cf. also Brooten 1996, 1­ 7–​­18)—​­produces a productive destabilizing of the past (­Bennett 2000, 13): Is there such a stable entity as a modern lesbian? Clearly not. Was there such a stable meaning to ‘­lesbian’ in any past time? Probably not…In short, one of our first steps toward understanding the antecedents of modern sexual identities must be to examine how well and how poorly our modern ideas of ‘­lesbians’ and ‘­heterosexual women’ and ‘­bisexuals’ and ‘­queers’ work for the past. Bennett proposes the term “­­lesbian-​­like” for ­behavior—​­always behavior and never ­identity—​­that resists heteronormative assumptions for what women of the time should do, or that aligns with behavior that we would deem l­esbian-​­like. This allows Bennett to draw connections while avoiding the problematic assumption that lesbians have always existed and can be found. In a similar way, Amy Richlin discusses the “­homophobia” of Roman literature that criticizes men for having sex with men, showing that there can be something akin to “­homophobic overtones” even in literature 77

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occurring “­before homosexuality” (­1993, 530). Halberstam (­1998, ­50–​­59) makes use of what he calls “­perverse presentism,” a method of looking at the past through the lens of the present without simply projecting modern ideas backward. Such scholarship shows that productive conclusions can be drawn simply by asking these questions, even if we know that there will not be a simple answer. ­So—​­was Bassa a lesbian? Was Philaenis a lesbian? In posing both questions together, one thing immediately becomes clear: Bassa can feel more legible to a modern, western, queer audience than does Philaenis. Bassa is a ­woman-​­identified individual who is exclusively interested in sex with other ­woman-​­identified individuals. Her seemingly secure gender and secure gender interest make her feel very neat and tidy in a way that can be appealing to a western, modern ­audience—​­yet those are the very things that make her so alien in Martial’s eyes. Sedgwick, as part of her mission to “­denaturalize the present” (­2008, 48), points out how odd our l­ aser-​­like focus on gender actually is: there are many vectors by which a person’s sexual behavior could be defined, and yet, “­precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of ‘­sexual orientation’” (­2008, 8). It is important, then, to avoid overemphasizing the exclusivity of Bassa’s gender choice simply because it happens to match up so well to a current view of sexual orientations (­cf. Boehringer 2007, 34). There is also the risk of oversimplifying what a lesbian ­is—​­falling into the easy assumption of the “­homosexuality as we know it today” that Sedgwick warns against (­2008, ­44–​­45), or of acting as though sexuality is fixed and stable across an individual’s life, a view that Halberstam critiques (­2012, 8). In asking whether Bassa is a lesbian, then, it is important to expand the conversation in both directions: what could Bassa mean to us, and what is a lesbian, in the first place? Such analysis is more useful than an easy dismissal that Bassa is of course not a ­lesbian—​­a dismissal that also runs the risk of assuming that we all know what a lesbian is and why Bassa cannot be one. If labeling Bassa feels ­easy—​­although, upon a closer examination, it is not easy at ­all—​­labeling Philaenis begins and ends with difficulty, at least for a modern, western audience. This is despite the fact that labeling Philaenis is the first and easiest thing that Martial does. Philaenis engages in what we would consider pedophilia or more strictly hebephilia: she is sexually oriented toward “­girls” (­a term that can encompass both teenage and adult women) and “­boys” (­a term that refers exclusively to boys who have not yet completed puberty). Yet in Roman terms, girls and boys both count as “­feminine,” enough so that Bennett’s “­­lesbian-​­like” still applies here: Philaenis is ­lesbian-​­like in her pursuit of traditionally male objects of affection. In fact, we could perhaps go further and consider Philaenis through the lens of a “­butch lesbian”—​­a woman with a “­manly” aesthetic or lifestyle who sleeps with feminine partners. This is somewhat legible to us and somewhat legible to the Romans as well, as this seems to approach what a tribad is. Philaenis represents a new testing ground for what we think a lesbian is: can she be a lesbian if she sleeps exclusively with feminine sex objects but not necessarily women? Can a lesbian be a pedophile? How do we define “­lesbian” again? Given the emphasis that Martial places on Philaenis’s pursuit of masculinity, another modern possibility presents itself: perhaps a modern audience could read Philaenis as a transgender man. Once again, it is true that the very concept of a transgender identity did not exist in the ancient world. Filippo ­Carlà-​­Uhink, in the volume TransAntiquity, for example, argues that “­a transgender identity has existed only since the last decades of the twentieth century” (­2016, 3) but, somewhat like Bennett, he also maintains that “­it is possible to identify forms of behaviour and action which might fall into our modern category of transgender” (­2016, 3). In TransAntiquity, the main mode of behavior examined is ­cross-​­dressing, as that is the focus of the collection. I am going in slightly a different direction by suggesting that Martial’s description of Philaenis’s mindset can be analyzed through the lens of a trans identity: if being virile (“­manly”) is Philaenis’s goal, then could we consider Philaenis to be a trans character? If so, then this may shed a new light on Philaenis’s 78

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seeming overperformance of culturally masculine actions, seeking to be as much a man as possible. At a minimum, I argue that we could identify Philaenis’s behavior as “­­trans-​­like,” as the character Philaenis deliberately and thoroughly assumes the actions, speech, and erotic modes of men, seemingly from a desire to be (­like?) a man. I would further suggest that a trans reading of tribadism is an ­as-​­yet unexplored aspect. In Phaedrus 4.16, tribads are created through a drunken mistake of Prometheus, who accidentally attaches “­mismatching” genitalia to ­already-​­gendered bodies: “­male parts” go onto women, and the “­virginal part” goes onto men (­4.16.­11–​­13). Although Phaedrus never specifies which of these two groups represents the tribad, in either case, the message is much the same: the tribad is an individual whose gender does not “­suit” their genitalia in the way that their culture expects, either by being a woman who possesses a penis or by being a man who possesses a vagina (­cf. Mann 2019, ­210–​­216 and Boehringer 2007, ­261–​­267). It is tempting to fall into the “­wrong body” narrative here, that Phaedrus is presenting the tribad as a man trapped in a woman’s body or vice versa, in a similar way to how transgender identities often used to be discussed (­cf. Halberstam 2018, ­1–​­2). But Phaedrus does not actually suggest that the tribad feels ill at ease in their ­body—​­he instead speaks of the (­perverted) joy (­4.16.14, pravo…gaudio) they feel. There is more to discuss here than can be covered in this essay, but I believe that the portrayal of tribads in Roman literature could greatly benefit from being viewed through a queer, trans ­perspective—​­it would allow us to understand what was “­trans” about the past and what “­trans” means today. I also do not want to present this as an “­either/­or” thought experiment, that we can see Philaenis’s portrayal as similar either to a butch, queer woman or to a trans man; after all, those lines are not even clear today (­cf. Halberstam 1998, 150). Perhaps there is a power in not labeling Philaenis, in recognizing that (­s)­he ultimately cannot fit neatly into ­sex-​­gender categories immediately familiar to a modern, western reader. I think it is important to consider Philaenis’s masculinity from all angles: how it is dismissed by Martial, how it is and is not similar to butch masculinity, and how it is somewhat but not entirely akin to trans masculinity. And as with Bassa, if we ask whether Philaenis is a lesbian, or a bisexual woman, or a trans man, or something else entirely, we need to simultaneously ask what those categories even mean. Sometimes, I think, classical scholarship focuses too much on the sense of ­strangeness—​­on proving that our ­sex-​­gender categories are nowhere to be found in the ancient world. And yes, fostering that sense of strangeness matters, lest western, modern audiences become convinced that our ways of sorting and being are universal. But at the same time, similarity is powerful: it is powerful to see (­or maybe to create) a queer history that stretches back before the nineteenth century. It is important to ask if Bassa counts as a lesbian or if Philaenis is trans, lest we fail to consider what those categories mean and why they matter.

Conclusion All scholarship is t­ranslation—​­we are attempting, as far as we are able, to make sense of the past in our own time and despite our own biases. Martial wrote from his own extremely prejudicial perspective, and he created Bassa and Philaenis specifically to be laughed at, to be reviled, to be feared. Yet I have suggested that there is power in attempting to reclaim Bassa and Philaenis and to consider what it would mean if they were real and if they believed in themselves and their own interpretations of gender. I have also argued that it is important to ask whether Bassa and Philaenis fit into any of the ­sex-​­gender categories familiar to a western audience today, both to see queer people in the past, and to understand what is strange, specific, and unknowable about categories that may now seem so natural. 79

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Suggestions for Further Reading Readers hoping to learn more about ancient female ­homosexuality—​­or about Martial’s poems in ­particular—​­should find Sandra Boehringer’s 2007 book particularly helpful. Other key texts that survey ancient female homosexuality include Bernadette Brooten’s 1996 and Judith Hallett’s 1997 articles. All of these works include discussions of Martial’s poetry. Deborah Kamen and Sarah ­Levin-​­Richardson (2015) is a key text for understanding the place of women in the Roman ­sex-​­gender system. Anyone wanting to learn more about n­ on-​­normative sex, in general, should explore any of the edited collections on this topic, including Before Sexuality (­1990), Roman Sexualities (­1997), and Ancient Sex: New Essays (­2015). Finally, readers looking for helpful queer theory to apply to these texts should investigate J. Halberstam (­1998, 2012, 2018) and Eve Sedgwick (2008).

Notes 1 Howell 1980, 298; Brooten 1996, ­46–​­48; Hallett 1997, ­261–​­262; Williams 2010, 184; Kamen and ­Levin-​ ­Richardson 2015, 2­ 43–​­244. 2 I have translated the end of line 6 as “­you were fucking the women!” But in the Latin, the phrase is fututor eras, “­you were a fututor.” 3 Oral sex was believed to pollute the mouth of the person who engaged in it; on this, see in particular Richlin 1992, 15, 2­ 6–​­27; Edwards 1993, ­70–​­73, Boehringer 2007, 287, and Williams 2010, 2­ 18–​­225. 4 Again, one major contribution of Boehringer (2007, 330) is her analysis of how female homosexuality often avoids the asymmetry assumed in relationships that involve men. 5 I am admittedly using Adams’s own words against him here, as Adams 1982, 98 does, I believe, misinterpret what “­Venus” means in Martial 1.90. 6 There is one possible contrary ­example—​­from Martial himself. In 11.61.10, the word fututrix is used of a man’s tongue used for cunnilingus, aka, a tongue penetrating a vagina. There, I would argue that the joke is the opposite: a man who uses his tongue to give pleasure to a woman is not a true penetrator and therefore his tongue cannot be called a fututor. Kamen and ­Levin-​­Richardson (­2015, 246) suggest instead that the term fututrix is used to signify the tongue’s movement and sexual desire in this case. 7 In fact, the TLL cites only this instance from Martial as an example of amica used romantically by a woman. 8 Halberstam (2012, ­74–​­82) discusses the issue of language by considering queerness from a global perspective; Japanese does not have a word for lesbian, nor does English have words for Japanese ­sex-​­gender categories.

Works Cited Adams, J. N. 1982. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bennett, Judith. 2000. “‘­­Lesbian-​­Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 1/­2: ­1–​­24. http://­www.jstor.org/­stable/­3704629. Berger, Adolph. 1953. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. Boehringer, Sandra. 2007. L’homosexualité Féminine dans l’Antiquité Grecque et Romaine. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Brooten, Bernadette J. 1996. Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ­Carlà-​­Uhink, Filippo. 2016. “­Between the Human and the Divine: ­Cross-​­dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the ­Graeco-​­Roman World.” In TransAntiquity: ­Cross-​­Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World, edited by Domitilla Campanile, Filippo ­Carlà-​­Uhink and Margherita Facella, ­3–​­37. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. https://­proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/­login?url=https://­search.ebscohost.com/­login.aspx?dir ect=true&db=nlebk&AN=1463413&site=­eds-​­live&scope=site. Edwards, Catharine. 1993. The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Tribad Philaenis and Lesbian Bassa Gillies, Grace. 2017. “­The Body in Question: Looking At ­Non-​­Binary Gender in the Greek and Roman World.” Eidolon, November 9, 2017. https://­eidolon.pub/­­the-­​­­body-­​­­in-­​­­question-​­d28045d23714. Halberstam, Jack. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. muse.jhu.edu/­book/­69529. —​­—​­—​­. 2012. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2018. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Oakland: University of California Press. Hallett, Judith P. 1997. “­Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in Latin Literature.” In Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith Hallett and Marilyn Skinner, ­255–​­273. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Halperin, David M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge. Halperin, David M., John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds. 1990. Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Howell, Peter. 1980. A Commentary on Book One of the Epigrams of Martial. London: Athlone Press. Kamen, Deborah, and Sarah ­Levin-​­Richardson. 2015. “­Lusty Ladies in the Roman Imaginary.” In Ancient Sex: New Essays, edited by Ruby Blondell and Kirk Ormand, ­231–​­252. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Mann, Kristin. 2019. “­Reading Gender in Phaedrus’ Fabulae.” Classical Journal 115, no. 2: ­201–​­227. Richlin, Amy. 1992. The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press. —​­—​­—​­.1993. “­Not Before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law Against Love Between Men.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 4: 5­ 23–​­573. Sedgwick, Eve. 2008. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. ACLS Humanities E ­ -​­Book. Walters, Jonathan. 1997. “­Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought.” In Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith Hallett and Marilyn Skinner, ­29–​­43. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Williams, Craig A. 2010. Roman Homosexuality. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winkler, John J. 1990. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. New York: Routledge.

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6 QUEERING DIVINE AUTHORITY AND LOGICAL CONSISTENCY IN AESCHYLUS’ ORESTEIA Giulia Maria Chesi

In the history of the genre of tragedy, Aeschylus’ Oresteia constitutes a work of paramount importance; and not merely for being the only extant Greek trilogy, but for the questions raised by its characters.1 It is in fact the first play to explicitly feature a character, Orestes, openly questioning his own course of action. Expanding on this point, I argue in this chapter that the Aeschylean Orestes is a manufactured engine of significance insofar as the tragic artifice of doubt constructs his dramatic actions. A reading of Orestes as a doubting character opens up a space to interpret this Aeschylean dramatis persona as an inherently queer subject. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, Orestes emerges as a figure that on stage appropriates for himself the deconstructive practice of undoing a fixed identity. In referring to the queer as the epistemological work of escaping any attempt of normalizing ways of knowledge and being, I rely on Sullivan’s definition (­2003, 50): “­Queer, in this sense, comes to be understood as a deconstructive practice that is not undertaken by an already constituted subject, and does not, in turn, furnish the subject with a nameable identity.” Sullivan’s definition of queer offers a particularly useful approach for tragedy. As is well known, tragic characters epitomize the human deviation from gender normativity, questioning the legitimacy of the identitarian and political strategies implied in their public and private actions (­see, for example, Zeitlin’s milestone Playing the Other).2 Orestes, of course, is certainly not the only doubting character in ancient Greek tragedy. For instance, famous examples are Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes or Agamemnon in the Agamemnon. Yet, among the extant plays, as we shall see, Orestes’ doubt marks a unique dramatic situation of hesitation insofar as it constitutes him as a character whose identity is in the process of being made through and through: a not fully coherent subject, a queer subject. It is also worth mentioning that Orestes’ doubt is not a moment of tragic ambiguity. The doubt is ­self-​­explanatory. Indeed, the question “­What shall I do?” equals the question “­Shall I kill my mother?” Rather, the certainty of the violent action ensuing from the doubt (­matricide) comes from the ambiguity of Apollo’s oracular voice (­see the discussion in the second part of this chapter). Secondly, Orestes’ doubt appears as the precondition of the human, understood as the rendering into discourse of a “­promising fatality.”3 As we shall see, as a result of his own doubt, Orestes’ deviation a) from the course of action laid out by Apollo and b) from the course of action dictated by his own internal cogitation reveals the fact that the construction of his identity is the product of pure artificiality: the theatrical artifice of doubt. Seen this way, as I will argue, Orestes’ “­promising DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-9 82

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fatality” not only concerns the tragic problematization of a secure sense of identity; perhaps even more importantly, it concerns the artificiality, the technical constructedness of a (­theatrical) subject’s identity. In order to illustrate my argument, I will discuss two points. The first explores the dream of Clytemnestra and the dramatic depiction of the figure of Orestes as the embodiment of the hyperbole of doubt in the Choephoroi. The second, closely linked to the first, examines the characterization of Orestes as a doubting character in the Eumenides. In my reading, the doubting Orestes in the last play of the trilogy is ultimately a “­textual mind” and, as such, the quintessence of queerness; in the Eumenides, the figure of the matricidal son does not just resist a fixed sense of identity, he disentangles the very possibility of the notion of identity. The expression “­textual mind” is borrowed from Bruce Kawin in The Mind of the Novel (­1982). As Kawin explains in careful detail, according to Lacan and his followers the self and personal identity as an aspect of consciousness are a function of language, and only as an absence that organizes linguistic activity can the self and identity be recognized. Kawin argues, however, that in literary works such as Beckett’s Unnamable or Melville’s Moby Dick, the self and identity exist apart from any s­ elf-​­image, projection, or symbolic category of words: what is named in these novels is the problem of naming. What Unnamable, Moby Dick, and, as I claim, the Oresteia have in common is a peculiar inward turning of the narrative, a gaze that doubles back to narrate the indescribable and to produce an image of the gazing self: the text and the readers, that is the “­textual mind,” participate in the creation of meaning and confront the limits of their levels of awareness in response to the challenge of the ineffable (­in the specific case of Orestes, the righteousness of matricide). The glimpse into the ineffable is an experience not of vacuity, but of something recognizable as irreducibly authentic. Thus, the “­textual mind” comes face to face with its own subjectivity, in the unsuccessful attempt to manifest it (­in the specific case of Orestes, it manifests itself through the artifice of doubt); what the “­textual mind” actually defines is simply its own failed attempt to name the ineffable.

The Mother’s Dream and the Son’s Doubt in the Choephoroi In the Choephoroi, Orestes openly brings into question his own conduct. With a ­well-​­known formulation of his dilemma, he casts doubt on the need for matricide. We are at the famous line 899: Πυλάδη τί δράσω; μητέρ᾽ αἰδεσθῶ κτανεῖν; Pylades, what shall I do? Shall I be ashamed to kill my mother? Nevertheless, in the end, Orestes will decide to kill his own mother, assisted by his friend Pylades who reminds him of the necessity to obey Apollo (­Choephoroi, ­900–​­902). Yet, on closer reading, Orestes’ doubt could not be possible without the interpretation of that dream of Clytemnestra that the Chorus described earlier to him in detail (­Choephoroi, ­527–​­533). The Queen dreams that she gives birth to a baby-serpent and breastfeeds him; while sucking the milk, the serpent wounds her nipple: Χο. τεκεῖν δράκοντ᾽ ἔδοξεν, ὡς αὐτὴ λέγει. Ορ. καὶ ποῖ τελευτᾷ καὶ καρανοῦται λόγος; Χο. ἐν σπαργάνοισι παιδὸς ὁρμίσαι δίκην. Ορ. τίνος βορᾶς χρῄζοντα, νεογενὲς δάκος; Χο. αὐτὴ προσέσχε μαστòν ἐν τὠνείρατι. Ορ. καὶ πῶς ἄτρωτον οὖθαρ ἦν ὑπὸ στύγους;

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Χο. ὥστ᾽ ἐν γάλακτι θρόμβον αἵματος σπάσαι. CHORUS It seemed to her that she gave birth to a snake, as she herself says... ORESTES And where does the story end then? CHORUS… and that she wrapped it in swaddling clothes as if it were a baby. ORESTES What food did it want, the newborn beast with teeth? CHORUS She herself gave it her breast in the dream. ORESTES And how was the nipple not harmed by the abominable thing? CHORUS Of course not! He drew from the udder a clot of blood in the milk. While dreaming of the ­baby-​­serpent, Clytemnestra is performing her female masculinity. She is a woman with the heart of a man (­Agamemnon, 11: γυναικὸς ἀνδρόβουλον ἐλπίζον κέαρ / “­a woman’s heart capable of male decisions and wishful”), whereas her dream of a snake is stereotypically feminine. Quoting the title of the Butchies’ cult LP Are we not femme?, we might pose the question: “­Is she not a femme?”4 About ten verses later, when Orestes proceeds with the logical interpretation of Clytemnestra’s dream, he fully identifies with the serpent (­Choephoroi, ­543–​­545).5 Just like the snake, he too has left the womb of Clytemnestra; just like the snake, he too sucked the milk from Clytemnestra’s breast: εἰ γὰρ τὸν αὐτὸν χῶρον ἐκλιπὼν ἐμοὶ οὕφις †επᾶσα σπαργανηπλείζετο† καὶ μαστὸν ἀμφέχασκ᾽ ἐμὸν θρεπτήριον In fact, if the snake left the same place I left and if it wrapped itself in swaddling clothes and kept its mouth open on the breast that nourished me In the lines immediately following (­Choephoroi, ­546–​­549), Orestes concludes that if Clytemnestra’s breastfeeding in the dream was bloody, then she must also die a violent death: θρόμβῳ τ’ ἔμειξεν αἵματος φίλον γάλα, ἡ δ᾽ ἀμφὶ τάρβει τῷδ᾽ ἐπῴμωξεν πάθει, δεῖ τοί νιν, ὡς ἔθρεψεν ἔκπαγλον τέρας, θανεῖν βιαίως [...] and if it mixed the dear milk with the blood clot, and if for fear and pain she cried aloud, then she must die a violent death, just as she fed the hideous monster[...] This is the reason ­why—​­Orestes d­ ecides—​­he has to become the snake of the dream and kill his mother Clytemnestra, as the dream suggests (­Choephoroi, ­549–​­550): [...] ἐκδρακοντωθεὶς δ’ ἐγὼ κτείνω νιν, ὡς τοὔνειρον ἐννέπει τόδε. [...] For I turn snake and I will kill her, as this dream foretells.

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It seems plausible to argue that Orestes’ interpretation of his mother’s dream makes it possible for the the plot to unfold. In order to conform to Apollo’s divine injunction (­Choephoroi, ­269–​ ­277), Orestes must appropriate the content of his mother’s unconscious, and (­metaphorically) turn into the snake she gives birth to and wraps in swaddling clothes in her ­dream—​­the snake that bites her breast. By interpreting the dream, Orestes becomes the ­baby-​­serpent (­cf. Goldhill 1984, 156). In other words, after the murder of Agamemnon, the plot expects Orestes to violently seize the maternal unconscious in order to further develop. Divine necessity in itself is not a sufficient condition for matricide to take place; Orestes’ tragic action is needed, and specifically his interpretation of his mother’s dream, by including Clytemnestra’s unconscious in the context of his existential path (­see Chesi and Giusti 2021). The narrative sequence is in fact the following: (­a) Clytemnestra dreams of a snake that wounds her breast; (­b) Orestes interprets the signs of his mother’s dream (­blood, milk, womb), identifies with the snake, and decides to kill her; (­c) before the murder, when his mother shows him her breast, he is nevertheless seized by doubt but in the end becomes a matricidal son. Orestes’ doubt is clearly the hesitating reaction that the son feels in front of his mother’s breast. However, it is ­obvious—​­at least it seems obvious to ­me—​­that without the interpretation of the dream, there would never have been the matricidal decision and therefore no moment of doubt at the sight of his mother’s breast. As we can infer from the sequence below, the source and beginning of Orestes’ doubt is Clytemnestra’s dream; this dream shapes not only the plot of Choephoroi but also Orestes’ inner life, according to a narrative movement of cogitation that goes from the logical interpretation of the maternal unconscious to doubt: • • • • • • •

Clytemnestra’s dream: Choephoroi, 5­ 27–​­533 Orestes’ interpretation of Clytemnestra’s dream: Choephoroi, ­543–​­549 Orestes’ resulting decision to kill his mother: Choephoroi, ­549–​­550 Clytemnestra shows her breast in a gesture of supplication: Choephoroi, ­896–​­898 Orestes’ doubt: Choephoroi, 899 Pylades urges Orestes to obey Apollo: Choephoroi, 9­ 00–​­902 Matricide

Now, if without the interpretation of his mother’s dream, Orestes would never have been able to kill Clytemnestra, we can safely conclude that matricide in Aeschylus is the product of Orestes’ inner cogitation and not simply a compliance to Apollo’s divine will (­pace e.g. Thumiger 2013, 207).6 To this line of interpretation, it could be objected that Orestes’ ­doubt—​­ti drasō? (“­What shall I do?”)—​­is the verbal expression of a tragic subject torn apart by an inner conflict whose genesis is completely divine: “­If Apollo orders me to kill my mother, do I have to obey the god, or not?” However, at least for two reasons, Orestes’ appropriation of his mother’s dream is a sign of an inner conflict that the order of Apollo unleashes in Clytemnestra’s son. Firstly, reading the dream, as we have just seen, Orestes finds the logical proofs that his mother must be killed. This means that the necessity to carry out Apollo’s divine order must be verified by an act of logical interpretation; Orestes’ logical thought is rooted in the oneiric signs of the mother. In this regard, we have to bear in mind that Clytemnestra’s dream is not sent by a god, and, equally, that Orestes, in his role of interpreter of his mother’s dream, avoids any reference to Apollo’s order; it is indeed Pylades who reminds him of Apollo. Secondly, Orestes’ interpretation of the dream is truly the exclusive product of his cogitation. For Clytemnestra, in fact, the dream is by no means an anticipation of her imminent death. Terrified by her dream, Clytemnestra orders the palace maidens to pour libations on the tomb of her murdered husband Agamemnon; the dream interpreters in her palace declare 85

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that the Chthonian gods are angry at Agamemnon’s assassination (­Choephoroi, ­32–​­41). As Giulio Guidorizzi similarly observes (­2013, 155), when Clytemnestra dreams of the snake, her dream represents her fear of an impending revenge for Agamemnon’s violent death. For Clytemnestra, however, matricide is simply an inconceivable act because she is the woman who has given birth to her son, that is a ­mother-​­tokeus, and has fed him with her milk, that is a ­mother-​­tropheus (­as I have argued elsewhere, Chesi 2014, ­113–​­122). Clytemnestra reminds her son of her maternal nurturing and l­ife-​­giving power when she shows him her breast in a gesture of supplication shortly before being killed (­Choephoroi, ­896–​­898): ἐπίσχες, ὦ παῖ, τόνδε δ’ αἴδεσαι, τέκνον, μαστόν, πρὸς ὧι σὺ πολλὰ δὴ βρίζων ἅμα οὔλοισιν ἐξήμελξας εὐτραφὲς γάλα Hold on, my child, have pity, my son, on this breast, on which many times you fell asleep sucking with your gums the milk that nourished you well These words of Clytemnestra deconstruct Orestes’ appropriation of his mother’s dream. As we can see from the table below, the expression εὐτραφὲς γάλα (“­nourishing milk”) takes up the expression φίλον γάλα (“­dear milk”) used by Orestes in order to explain Clytemnestra’s dream; in particular, the adjective εὐτραφές (“­nourishing”) refers to the adjective θρεπτήριον (“­nourishing”) in Orestes’ interpretation of the dream and the verb αἴδεσαι recalls the adjective φίλον (“­dear”) on the lips of Orestes. Clytemnestra: Choephoroi, 896–​­898 ἐπίσχες, ὦ παῖ, τόνδε δ’ αἴδεσαι, τέκνον, μαστόν, πρὸς ὧι σὺ πολλὰ δὴ βρίζων ἅμα οὔλοισιν ἐξήμελξας εὐτραφὲς γάλα...

Orestes: Choephoroi, 545–​­546 καὶ μαστὸν ἀμφέχασκ᾽ ἐμὸν θρεπτήριον, θρόμβῳ δ᾽ ἔμειξεν αἵματος φίλον γάλα

and kept its mouth open on the breast that nourished me, Hold on, my child, have pity, my son, and mixed the dear milk with a clot of blood on this breast, on which many times you fell asleep sucking with your gums the milk that nourished you [well…]

It is certainly no coincidence then that Clytemnestra understands the prophetic dimension of the fear aroused by the dream only toward the end of Choephoroi, at lines ­928–​­929, where she restates her role as ­mother-​­tokeus and ­mother-​­tropheus of Orestes: οἲ ‘­γὼ, τεκοῦσα τόνδ᾽ ὄφιν ἐθρεψάμην ἦ κάρτα μάντις οὑξ ὀνειράτων φόβος. Alas, this is the snake that I gave birth to and fed. The fear in my dreams was true indeed. All this confirms a reading of Orestes’ matricide as the violent result of an inner cogitation. Given that the plea Clytemnestra addresses to her son undermines Orestes’ interpretation of his mother’s dream, matricide derives from a production of meaning by the son without which it would not be possible for Orestes to obey the order of Apollo. In this light, Orestes’ interpretation of Clytemnestra’s dream shapes Orestes’ matricide first and foremost as a matricide of the logos

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(­see Lanza 1995, 142 and Chesi 2014, ­138–​­139). The quivers of abstraction, that is the doubt that assails Orestes after his scrupulous logical analysis of the signs contained in his mother’s dream, make him a queer subject: the question “­What shall I do?” withdraws the consistency of his logical analysis of Clytemnestra’s dream (­Choephoroi, 542: κρίνω δέ τοί νιν ὥστε συγκόλλως ἔχειν / “­I think my interpretation fully explains the dream”) while in turn tacitly implying the question “­Who am I?” Orestes does not know what to do and who he wants to be: Shall I obey Apollo and live as a matricidal son, or not? For despite Apollo’s order and the logical interpretation of the dream, matricide remains his own decision, and this is precisely why he doubts the necessity to murder Clytemnestra. Read as the “­infinite extracting from the depths of oneself” (­Foucault 1978, 59), then, Orestes’ doubt is queer for a twofold reason. Firstly, it traces a set of ­actions—​­from interpretation to ­hesitation—​­that disentangle the hero’s secure sense of identity: Am I Clytemnestra’s son or am I her killer or both? As Sullivan has made clear (­2003, esp. ­Chapter 3: “­Queer: A question of being or doing?”), queer names strategies of doing rather than the regime of being (­see also, more recently, Colebrook 2009). Secondly, it stands in opposition to the norm (­in the form of both the divine order and the ­truth-​­value of logical processes), denying any divine imperative and ­logical-​ ­epistemological truth the capacity to define a person’s identity. Upon withdrawing the authority of Apollo and the cogency of his logical argumentation, Orestes’ moment of hesitation ultimately is the discursive performance of matricide as the son’s own desire to kill his mother. Seen this way, Orestes’ ­matricide—​­to paraphrase Wilchins (­2004, 34)—​­reveals the impossibility of “­a ­God-​ ­centered approach, in which the world exists only in the mind of a deity.”

Orestes and the Hyperbole of Doubt in the Eumenides Following the murder of his mother, Orestes, persecuted by the Furies, loses his mind. The trial in Athens will reveal how human laws are de facto unable to establish whether or not matricide was a legitimate act. Orestes is acquitted in dubio pro reo (“­When in doubt, rule for the accused”): the jury is half in favor of him, half against him (­Eumenides, 741: κἂνἰσόψηφος κριθῆι, “­if the other votes are even” 753: ἴσον γάρ ἐστι τἀρίθμημα τῶν πάλων, “­the ballots are in equal number for each side”, ­795–​­796: ἰσόψηφος δίκη/ ἐξῆλθ᾽ ἀληθῶς, “­this was the result of a fair ballot which was even”; trans. Lattimore).7 Thus, the Areopagus cannot enforce the force of the law but rather it introduces a fracture at the very origin of the democratic system. As Loraux points out (­1990, 91), the result of Orestes’ trial reveals a division marked by rhetorical dissent. An important question arises: given that Athena and her tribunal are not the guarantee of a democratic realization of justice, how shall we speak the end of the story of the violence of Orestes and of his doubt? Here, I am asking myself the same question that Cassandra asks herself shortly before dying: pōs phrasō telos (“­How shall I tell the end?” Agamemnon, 1109). It seems that the end of the matricidal biography of Orestes remains untold: Aeschylus is silent on the fate of Orestes after the trial, and Orestes will never speak again in the pages of Aeschylus. It is up to the reader, I suggest, to write this silence. Neither innocent nor guilty for the Athenian community, Orestes is the very embodiment of the tragic. In fact, when the judgment of the human law fails, the divine law remains unshaken: we know that the Erinyes continue to be able to exercise their punitive function against murderers even after they have become Eumenides. Indeed, as has been pointed out (­Kramer 1960, ­34–​­35; Chesi 2014, ­173–​­175), they can obey Athena but do not have to. This is equivalent to saying that in the Eumenides the Erinyes remain the ministers of the violent law of Zeus, that is the “­pathein ton erxanta”, “­He who has wrought shall pay” (­Agamemnon, 1564), and the “­drasanta pathein”, “­Who acts, shall endure” (­Choephoroi, 313; trans. Lattimore). Therefore, in the Oresteia, there does not seem to be a political and democratic exit from the force, from the violence of the divine 87

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law of Zeus. For Orestes, the last resort in the face of human violence is not the law of human courts but the law of Zeus. Seen this way, the Erinyes freeze and give voice to the silence of Orestes since they project a possible question of the matricidal son whom the law of Athens has not been able to judge guilty or innocent: “­Was I right to kill my mother?” This is Orestes: a matricidal son fabricated by anguish because he met Zeus and his violence. This second doubt of O ­ restes—​ ­certainly silenced in the text but, as I suggest, encapsulated in the figure of the ­Erinyes—​­reveals the ecstasy of the matricidal son: the doubt as a theatrical artifice through which the violent grace of the gods, the daimonōn charis biaios (­Agamemnon, 182), manifests itself. Read from this perspective, Orestes’ doubt, which, as we have seen, originates with his appropriation of the maternal unconscious, that is Clytemnestra’s dream, remains unsettled: matricide does not dissipate the doubt of the murderous son. On the contrary, in the Eumenides, the initial doubt of Orestes becomes fossilized in the figure of the Erinyes, the avenging spirits of the mother, while constructing a system that functions as a literary theater of automata, interacting in a lively way with the reader’s imagination. Once the readers are in, their intuition is encouraged to precipitate and coalesce in an active wondering through that strange mirror of the world which is constituted by theater. Orestes’ tragic biography offers more than a story or a collection of stories. Orestes’ doubt encourages the reader to explore the limits of the text of the Oresteia within it (­What happens to Orestes before and after the matricide?), and outside it (­What happens to Orestes after his acquittal in dubio pro reo?) As readers of Orestes’ doubt and matricidal choice and as potential storytellers ourselves of his silence encapsulated in the figures of the Erinyes, we might feel invited to devise our own techne of identity, of confrontation, of recognition, of exploration.8 Orestes’ doubt emerges as a “­textual mind” (­Kawin 1982), a literary device flickering on the limits of language, that is on the silent interstices, but in need of the reader to try to solve its mystery. In other words, Orestes manages to give us the illusion that truth and identity are real, as part of the “­reality” of our (­human?) world. Read this way, the figure of Orestes enacts what we might call “­the queer attack on the Real”. I am relying here on Wilchins (­2004, 38) on Derrida: “­For Derrida, our naïve belief in language is the flip side of an essentially selfish need in a world that is real, present, and completely available to us at all times.” Consequently, Orestes indicates a path to become human, and that path, paradoxically, is the technology of the ­artifice—​­the theatrical artifice of doubt, which in turn engineers the anguish of violence and death through the deviation from divine and logical normativity. As readers of Orestes’ doubt, then, we might recognize that human identity at its core is artificial and ­fictitious—​­that is the product of a system of techniques (­literary, cultural, etc.)—​­transgressive and momentary. Orestes’ tragic anguish appears to be for humans a primary need to live qua human beings. This is the ecstasy, the violent grace that is granted to Orestes and his reader by the gods: to have the choice to become human. As Bataille wrote at the beginning of Inner Experience (­L’expérience intérieure): The ­anguish-​­inspiring character of death signifies the need which man has for anguish. Without this need, death would seem easy to him. Man, dying poorly, distances himself from nature, engenders an illusory, human world fashioned for art: we live in the tragic world, in the simulated atmosphere [French: l’atmosphère factice] of which tragedy is the completed form […] It is in this tragic, artificial world, that ecstasy arises. (­­p. 73, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt, slightly modified; bold mine) Understood as the discursive process of the technical, theatrical construction of an individual identity, that is of a subject, inside and outside the space of the text, Orestes’ doubt, which binds 88

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him inextricably to the unconscious of his mother Clytemnestra and to the order of Apollo, gives us the extent to which a tragedy like the Oresteia and the identity of its characters and readers is nothing but pure artifice. After all, as Vernant (­1979) has written in memorable pages on Greek tragedy, precisely because tragedy is poetry conceived as imitation (­in the precise meaning of the word “­mimesis” in Greek, from the verb “­mimesthai” that is, “­to simulate the actual presence of an absence”), for readers there can be no awareness of the tragic dimension of life, and therefore no doubt in their secure sense of identity and agency, without tragedy.

Conclusion As I hope to have shown, by questioning Apollo’s divine authority and the consistency of logical ­truth-​­value, Orestes’ doubt queers his dramaturgical identity as Clytemnestra’s matricidal son. In so doing, it creates an artificial literary ­space—​­the Oresteia—​­which reveals what Wilchins (­2004, 4) has called “­the impossibility of identity.” Thus, Orestes through a specific technology of the ­self—​­the theatrical artifice of ­doubt—​­manages to pass on to the readers the question: “­Who am I?” Beginning with Aeschylus’ trilogy, the (­theatrical) artifice of doubt engineers the constructedness of the ­Real—​­even if the form of the Real is truth, identity, or the word of God.

Suggestions for Further Reading On technologies of the self and technics of identity, see Martin, Gutman, and Hutton 1988, and Mumford 1967. On maternal authority in Greek tragedy, see Sissa 2022. On Aeschylus and, more in general, on Greek tragedy and the constructedness of the Real (­in terms of identity, divine authority, and truth), see the influential work of Simon Goldhill, in particular, Goldhill 1984 and Goldhill 1990; the groundbreaking article of Easterling 1973 and the seminal contribution of Sissa 2004. On Classics and queer theory, see the solid introduction of J. Ingleheart 2018; on queer theory and Greek tragedy in particular, see the first edited collection on Euripides, Olsen, and Telò 2022.

Notes 1 I thank Maria Serena Mirto and the editors of this volume for their generous comments on the first draft of this chapter. With gratitude and respect, I have written this piece for Simon Goldhill and Giulia ­Sissa—​ ­and their Aeschylus. The editions used are: Choephoroi, Garvie (­1986); Eumenides, Sommerstein (­1989). If not otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 2 For the same definition of queer as a useful tool to read the action of a tragic character, cf. Susanetti on Euripides’ Medea (­2014, 4): Come si vedrà, Medea reagisce alla situazione cui è posta mettendo in atto maschere e tratti identitari differenti, realizzando forme di linguaggio e di azione diversi e non riconducibili in modo univoco né al maschile né al femminile, fino al punto da manifestarsi, nel finale, come una figura divina e dunque, al di là del dato mitico, non umana e sicuramente non donna. Questa strategia attraverso la quale la sua collera si esprime e si realizza può essere accostata e compresa nell’ottica del queer poiché il ­queer—​­è bene ­ricordarlo—​­non corrisponde a una identità data in partenza né vuole produrre alcuna identità stabile: il queer è strategia, tattica politica, che mima e rappresenta le identità e i possibili incroci di esse per contraddirle e annullarle […]. [As we shall see, Medea reacts to her situation by putting in place different masks and identity traits, creating different forms of language and action that cannot be traced back uniquely to either male or female, to the point of revealing herself, in the end, as a divine figure and therefore, beyond the mythical facts, not human and certainly not woman. This strategy through which her anger is expressed and realized can be approached and understood from the point of view of queer since q­ ueer -​­it is good to remind ­it -​­does not correspond to a given identity nor does it want to produce any stable identity: queer is strategy,

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Giulia Maria Chesi political tactic, which mimics and represents identities and their possible intersections to contradict and cancel them [...].]. 3 For tragic characters as the embodiment of a “­promising fatality”, see Butler (­2000, 78) on Antigone’s queer kinship, with Susanetti (­2014, ­2–​­3). 4 On dreams of snakes in Greek culture as female gendered, cf. Guidorizzi (­2013, 157); on female masculinity, cf. the groundbreaking essay of Halberstam (­1997). 5 On the Oresteia and the inception of logical argumentation with the Aeschylean trilogy, cf. Iordanoglou and Tralau 2022. 6 Furthermore, contra e.g. Sullivan (­1997 and 2000), the inner conflict to which Clytemnestra’s dream exposes Orestes casts doubt also on the idea that the inner life of Euripidean characters display a complexity absent in the Aeschylean ones. 7 In this reading, the jurors are 10 or 12; that means that five (­or six) vote for and five (­or six) vote against Orestes, and Athena adds her vote in favor of Orestes. On the calculus Minervae, cf. e.g. Saxonhouse (­2009, ­53–​­54); Leão (­2010, 53); Lawrence (­2013, 97). 8 Cf. Barthes (­1970, 184): “­Tel le discours: s’il produit des personnages, ce n’est pas pour les faire jouer entre eux devant nous, c’est pour jouer avec eux” [‘­Such is the discourse: if it produces characters, it is not to make them play with each other in front of us, it is to play with them”].

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. 1970. S/­Z. Paris: Seuil. Bataille, Georges. 1988 [1943]. Inner Experience. Translated and with an Introduction by Leslie Anne Boldt. New York: SUNY Press. Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone’s Claim. Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. Chesi, Giulia Maria. 2014. The Play of Words. Blood Ties and Power Relations in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Berlin/­ Boston: De Gruyter. —​­—​­— ​­and Francesco Giusti. 2021. The Dreams of the Mother. https://­www.jasminereimer.com/­­she-­​­­can­​­­cook-­​­­a-­​­­potato-­​­­in-­​­­her-­​­­hand-­​­­and-­​­­make-­​­­it-​­ ­taste-­​­­like-​­chocolate. Colebrook, Claire. 2009. “­On the Very Possibility of Queer Theory.” In Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by C. Nigianni and M. Storr, 1­ 1–​­23. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Easterling, Pat. 1973. “­Presentation of Character in Aeschylus.” Greece & Rome 20: 3­ –​­19. Foucault, Michel. 1978. [1976]. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by R. Hurley. NewYork: Pantheon Books. Garvie, Alexander Femister. 1986. Aeschylus: Choephori; with Introduction and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldhill, Simon. 1984. Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 1990. “­Character and Action, Representation and Reading.” In Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature, edited by Christopher Pelling, 1­ 00–​­127. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guidorizzi, Giulio. 2013. Il compagno dell’anima. I greci e il sogno. Milano: Raffaello Cortina. Halberstam, Judith. 1997. “­Mackdaddy, Superfly, Rapper: Gender, Race, and Masculinity in the Drag King Scene.” Social Text 52/­53: ­104–​­131. Ingleheart, Jennifer. 2018. Masculine Plural: Queer Classics, Sex, and Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iordanoglou, Dimitrios, and Johan Tralau. 2022. “­Murder, Logic and Embryology: The Beginnings of Political and Moral Philosophy in Aischylos’ Oresteia.” Classical Philology 117: ­259–​­281. Kawin, Bruce. 1982. The Mind of the Novel. Reflexive Fiction and the Ineffable. Rochester, McLean, London: Dalkey Archive Press. Kramer, Frank. 1960. “­The Altar of Right: Reality and Power in Aeschylus.” Classical Journal 56: 3­ 3–​­38. Lanza, Diego. 1995. “­Clitennestra: Il femminile e la paura.” In Vicende e figure femminili in Grecia e a Roma, Atti del convegno, Pesaro ­28–​­30 Aprile, edited by R. Raffaelli, ­31–​­42. Ancona: Commissione per le pari opportunità tra uomo e donna della Regione Marche. Lawrence, Stuart. 2013. Moral Awareness in Greek Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford Uniersity Press.

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7 CATULLUS BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE Between Freud and Foucault Paul Allen Miller

Catullus notoriously makes no appearance in Foucault’s History of Sexuality (­Miller 1998), despite the multiple forms of sexual conduct on display within his corpus. The current essay argues that Catullus is, from a theoretical perspective, doubly queer. On the one hand, he offers an image of sexual conduct that cannot be comprehended within the constraints of the “­use of pleasure,” understood both as a historical concept and as the ancestor to Foucault’s utopian dream of a ­post-​ ­sexual domain of bodies and pleasures (­1978). In Catullus’s most extreme poems, he offers images of abjection, impotence, and sexual violence that are definitively beyond the pleasure principle and thus require the resources of Freud’s work by the same name. Nonetheless, Catullan subjectivity contains no secret essence, no desire hidden from the self that must be ferreted out and confessed to a therapist or director of conscience. He is not a “­sexual” subject in the Foucauldian sense and so offers a crucial proof text for Foucault’s critique of Freud’s ahistoricism. In the end, Catullus is indeed nonbinary, demanding both Freud and Foucault, a truly queer theoretical approach. I am using “­queer” here in the sense elaborated by David Halperin in Saint Foucault. Queer is not simply a synonym for “­gay” or LGBT, but it is “­whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (­1995, 62). This includes the normative within a Foucauldian queer theory itself, which, as Halperin observes, is often understood as explicitly “­antipsychoanalytic” (­1995, 121). Nonetheless, as Lee Edelman has argued, this need not be the case. A binary model of ­theory—​­queer/­straight, Foucauldian/­­psychoanalytic—​­merely recapitulates the founding inside/­ outside distinctions of heterosexual normativity (­Edelman 1994, 22). What a truly queer theory tries to imagine is not a set of prescriptions, whether Foucauldian, Freudian, or otherwise, but “­a zone of possibilities in which the embodiment of the subject might be experienced otherwise” (­Edelman 1994, 114). This is what I would argue Catullus, as read through Foucault and Freud, allows us to do. In what follows, we will first briefly recapitulate the reasons for Catullus’s exclusion both from the History of Sexuality per se and the larger rubric of the “­Use of Pleasure.” We will, then, turn to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and considers three Catullan poems (­23, 67, and 97) from the perspective of Freud’s concept of the death drive, which Foucault does not expressly admit. Lastly, we will return to the larger stakes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and his critique of Freud. Here, we will see that while Catullus is not, in fact, a sexual subject, that he resists analysis from an orthodox, psychoanalytic perspective, which presumes a core determining identity that DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-10 92

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must be surfaced, only a rigorously historicized Freudianism or an expanded Foucauldianism can fully accommodate the Catullan corpus in all its strange sublimity. These poems suggest that Catullus’ queerness resides in the intertwining of the sexual and the grotesque, in subjective dissolution and aggression, and in the fusion of death and enjoyment.

I Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality famously exclude a lot of material. This point has been made many times and in itself is of limited utility. Foucault never claims to offer a comprehensive history of sexual behaviors or erotic practices. Indeed, for any close reader of Volume 1 of the History, it is clear that this is the very opposite of his project. Sexuality for Foucault is not a transhistorical constant that manifests its identity in different ways among different peoples. It is a discourse with a specific genealogy, and the History of Sexuality is the story of how that discourse came to be (­1978, ­145–​­159). More specifically it is the history of how we came to define ourselves by a set of desires that exist within us, give us our identity, and which we must come to know and manifest to others. In the discourse of sexuality, our desires determine our being. We are ­hetero-​­ or homosexual, normal or perverse. As the discourse grew and became ramified in ­nineteenth-​­century sexology, there were vast tables and panoplies of perversions to be categorized and ­labeled—​­sadists, masochists, fetishists, voyeurs, inveterate ­masturbators—​­a place for every sexuality and every sexuality in its place. “­Sexuality” is thus not something that needs to be liberated. It is not a hidden constant that is ­re-​­pressed and needs to be ­ex-​­pressed. Indeed, Foucault claims we should refuse the obligation to identify ourselves sexually. While there may be an immediate tactical utility in claiming certain roles in specific circumstances, in vindicating a gay identity in the face of attempts to persecute, eliminate, or render invisible homosexuals and other sexual minorities, as a rule, we should refuse the obligation to play ­pre-​­assigned sexual roles and hence to assume a position within a normalized universe, whether straight, gay, or otherwise (­Foucault 1994a, 334, 1994b, 735, 739, 2012, ­254–​­255; Kelly 2014, 121). Foucault’s contention is that the world of bodies and pleasures was not always so, that sexuality and its various roles and positions have not always existed in their current form, and that some very specific things had to happen for us to arrive at this point. As has become increasingly clear with the publication of Foucault’s courses given at the Collège de France and with the ­long-​ ­awaited appearance of Volume 4 of the History of Sexuality, his general argument is that over the long arc of Western culture, there have been three essential modes of s­ elf-​­relation with respect to erotic behavior: aphrodisia or pleasures; the flesh; and sexuality (­Foucault 2014, 55, 71, 78, 102, ­152–​­153, 287, 292, 2021; Gros 2014, 316; Elden 2016; 187; Miller 2021a, 2021b). Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality examine both how pleasures and their regulation functioned as an object of concern in relation to classical structures of power in the household and polis. Where Volume 2, with its focus on regimes of dietetics and the constitution of the household in writers like Xenophon, emphasizes an isomorphic relation between the male ­head-­​­­of-​­household’s erotic pursuits and his larger social and political power relations (­1985), Volume 3 describes the growing autonomy of marital life in relation to the political sphere under the Roman empire, a consequent increased focus on reciprocal obligations of fidelity between men and women, and hence ultimately the need for the husband directly to monitor and understand his desires and impulses if he is to avoid temptation (­1986). Volume 4, Confessions of the Flesh, in turn, charts how this focus on the care of the self and the understanding of one’s desires becomes the predicate for the later Christian practice of confession, as penitents seek to open themselves to their director of conscience and 93

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reveal the snares and temptations that lie beneath what may seem even the most innocent or pious of thoughts. It was this assumption of a hidden identity, a desire that both determines who we are and yet is a secret unto ourselves, that was the logical precondition for what, beginning in the late eighteenth century, would become the discourse of sexuality and of our modern therapies of desire (­Rajchman 1991, 89). The arc of Foucault’s narrative appears to be largely correct, even if, as in all such broad genealogical projects, there are points one can quarrel with, omissions, and occasional errors. Nonetheless, if the point of the History of Sexuality is to tell the story of how the discourse of sexuality came to occupy such an important role in our lives, rather than to provide a comprehensive or encyclopedic history of sexual practices, gender relations, or varieties of erotic experience, then the omission of Catullus is neither fatal nor necessarily relevant to its ­self-​­defined goals. That does not, however, mean it is without consequences. As I argued in 1998, there is a flattening of the discursive field in Foucault’s privileging of medical and philosophical discourses in these volumes and thus of the types of ­self-​­relation they entail. This flattening leads to a vision (­one that was even more pronounced in Foucault’s earlier work), in which he often portrayed history as a succession of unified “­epistemes” or “­dispositives,” making conflict and change more difficult to explain. In particular, I argued that the Catullan lyric collection featured a complex and recursive temporality that was at odds with the more straightforward s­ elf-​­relation Foucault observes in Pliny and Seneca, one that a more satisfying account of historical change, including a genealogy of ourselves, would need to account for. Yet we need also to think more seriously about the concept of pleasure in Foucault. In many ways, he treats it as relatively unproblematic and undifferentiated from “­enjoyment” or jouissance. Pleasure is the antidote to sex as constructed in and through sexuality (­Dean 2003, ­248–​­249). In the place of a complex of identities, essences, and secrets that need to be confessed, constrained, liberated, and normalized, there is the simple fact of “­intense bodily pleasure” (­Halperin 1995, ­96–​­97): We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power, on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we ­aim—​­through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against sexuality ought not to be s­ ex-​­desire, but bodies and pleasures. (­Foucault 1978, 157) In this light, it would be the height of naïveté to see it as merely adventitious that when Foucault sought to describe a form of erotic ­self-​­relation that was prior to sexuality and the flesh, he chose the title, The Use of Pleasure. Pleasure is the before and after of sexuality. Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality outlines the ways in which the question of pleasure is problematized in f­ourth-​­century Athenian thought: how can the subject of pleasure exercise control over himself and others; how can the deleterious effects of pleasures be minimized and managed; to whom and under what circumstances should a young man consent to be the object of another’s pleasures; and finally, in the case of the Platonic Phaedrus and Symposium, what is the truth of erotic pleasure? It is not a matter of laws, codes, or interdictions, but of practices, techniques, and economies. As Alexander Nehamas observes, Foucault “­became, like Freud, supremely interested in the correct management of pleasure. But unlike Freud, he did not believe in repression [as a transhistorical constant]” (­1998, 178). These, however, are clearly not the questions that animate 94

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Catullus, nor can the erotic world of Catullus be circumscribed by the management of “­pleasure” as commonly understood. At the same time, Catullus is also ­self-​­evidently not a subject of the flesh nor a sexual subject in the Foucauldian sense. He has neither confessor nor sexual secrets. He is not in search of his true identity, of what he really desires. He does not require analysis to tell him who he is.

II In “­Unspeakable Enjoyment in Catullus (­80, 16, 11, 63)” (­Miller 2021c), I argued that there are forms of enjoyment in Catullus that cannot be understood within the norms of pleasure as opposed to pain or unpleasure. This is an enjoyment that Freud would claim is beyond the pleasure principle, and thus integrally related to aggression, violence, and death: an enjoyment that is at once abject and sublime. It is a form of enjoyment that Foucault’s genealogy, centered around the use and management of pleasure, does not per se allow us to conceptualize, but demands the resources of Freud. In this section, I want to extend my argument by examining three other poems before returning to Foucault and the concept of a nonbinary and hence queer Catullus. These are not the poems Latin students read in high school or as undergraduates: the kiss or sparrow poems, those on friendship and homecoming, or even those expressing heartbreak or rage over amorous betrayal. These are poems of an imagistic brutality that take us beyond any concept of pleasure that could be intelligibly contrasted with its opposite. The pleasure principle is not strictly a psychoanalytic concept. It is the bedrock of most psychological theories. Whether one is a behaviorist, a Freudian, or a cognitive scientist, the common assumption is that people do things that give them pleasure and avoid those that produce pain, discomfort, and anxiety. People maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This results in t­rade-​­offs as one learns to accept delayed or substitute gratifications. By giving up some pleasure here, one avoids some pain there. Freud calls these two poles of psychic ­decision-​­making, the pleasure and the reality principles. They are not so much opposites as complements. The reality principle is a limit placed on pleasure. In an ideal environment, where each of us possessed the same opportunities, the same information, and the same calculative ability, according to this model, we would make the same choices in the same situations. And yet, people engage in all sorts of behaviors that neither procure pleasure nor maximize utility. Entire swathes of culture are predicated on our fascination with violence, death, and the grotesque. We have an insatiable need for spectacles of violence: from gladiators, to mixed martial arts, to splatter films. It’s the horrific auto accident you can’t look away from. It’s the thrill of the rampaging, murderous mob. This set of phenomena, their traumatic origins, the search for control through repetition, and the ultimate inability of these compulsions to be accounted for by a rational, utilitarian calculus of pleasure are the focus of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (­1961). If we simply lump these phenomena together as pleasures, because people engage in them and therefore must like them, we produce a tautology: we do things for pleasure and therefore everything we do must be for pleasure. Pleasure itself becomes meaningless because it names the totality of our behaviors and therefore cannot be distinguished from its opposite, pain or unpleasure. It explains nothing. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is written in 1920, in the aftermath of World War 1, at the same time as Freud is composing his famed essays “­The Uncanny” and “­A Child is Being Beaten.” What all these essays ask us is how do we explain uncanny and horrific cultural productions if the imaginary is governed by the pleasure principle? “­Why would the subject repeat nightmares that show him harassed, with no recourse, the object of cruelty and abuse?” (­Braunstein 2020, 39). Freud 95

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names this force the death drive (­Todestrieb). It is not a desire in a normal sense. It cannot be satisfied. It is not like wanting a bowl of ice cream, having one, and feeling better. Nor is it a desire that remains merely empirically unsatisfied; it is an unending obsession for a fulfillment that is beyond the ­pleasure-​­pain dichotomy, a form of enjoyment that demands an imaginary plenitude that is also simultaneously the obscene annihilation of the very possibility of an autonomous subject, of the self itself (­Žižek 1992, 48; Žižek 2006, 62; Telò 2020, ­26–​­27). A world without lack is a world without desire and hence a world in which we cannot exist. Complete fulfillment is indistinguishable from death. It is a movement toward a form of dissolution and ultimate sublime reconstitution, like the moth drawn to the lamp: a threatening violation of the boundaries of the self, a form of paroxystic suffering and enjoyment that leads through looping repetition to a reconstitution of the self in its identity, when it does not result in complete annihilation (­Braunstein 2003, 103; Nasio 2019, ­36–​­38; Telò 2020, 2­ 8–​­29). This form of jouissance or “­enjoyment” beyond the pleasure principle is profoundly linked with what Kristeva terms the “­abject.” The abject designates the realm of that from which we must separate in order to constitute ourselves as autonomous beings (­Kristeva 1980, 20). It solicits, unsettles, and fascinates (­Kristeva 1980, 9). It is not the maternal in the sense of an empirical being, our mother as a person, but the flesh, the blood, sweat, excrement, and spit to which we must close ourselves off, the placenta, womb, and breast from which we must be torn if we are to exist (­Kristeva 1980, ­79–​­80). As such, the abject elicits both fascination and repulsion, a shudder of separation and dissolution. The revulsion it engenders represents the violence of grief for an object that is always already lost from the moment we come to be (­Kristeva 1980, 22). It grounds an alchemy that transforms the death drive into a surge of new life that both transcends and annihilates the old. Abjection is the massive and abrupt eruption within us of a strangeness and disgust that appears radically separate and hence repugnant, while also constituting us from within (­Kristeva 1980, 10, 12). The three Catullan poems I want to look at each demand of the reader a form of grotesque enjoyment that transcends the wit of any accompanying formal devices or framings that might serve to situate this enjoyment in a more general economy of pleasures. The ­self-​­relation we are invited to imagine in these poems cannot be understood in terms of pleasure and its limits, but rather it solicits fantasies of our dissolution and of a radical loss of identity. We begin with Catullus 23. This poem is part of the Furius and Aurelius cycle and so possesses intratextual links with poem 11’s imagery of the poet’s unmanning by Lesbia’s phallic plow, poem 16’s imagery of oral and anal rape, and with the Juventius poems connected to Catullus’s pederastic beloved (­15, 21, and 24). Nonetheless, poem 23 has received little critical attention. Since the turn of the century, there is only one full reading of the poem (­O’Bryhim 2007). Furius, it appears, has asked Catullus for a loan, which the poet refuses. His reason is that Furius has no need for Catullus’s money, not because he is wealthy, far from it, but because in his extreme poverty Furius and his family are possessed of an absolute health. They are so dry as to be lacking in noxious humors. Indeed, it turns out they are so poor that they are practically mummified: nec mirum: bene nam valetis omnes, pulcre concoquitis, nihil timetis, non incendia, non graves ruinas, non facta impia, non dolos veneni, non casus alios periculorum. atque corpora sicciora cornu 96

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aut siquid magis aridum est habetis sole et frigore et esuritione. quare non tibi sit bene ac beate? a te sudor abest, abest saliva, mucusque et mala pituita nasi. hanc ad munditiem adde mundiorem, quod culus tibi purior salillo est, nec toto decies cacas in anno; atque id durius est faba et lapillis. quod tu si manibus teras fricesque, non umquam digitum inquinare posses. And no wonder, for you all are very well, You digest beautifully, you fear nothing, not fires, collapsing buildings, impious deeds, hidden poison, nor other dangerous events. What’s more, your bodies are drier than bones, or anything you might consider serer, from sun and cold and hunger. How then are you not well and happy? Sweat and saliva are absent from you, And mucus and snot from the nose. Add to this cleanliness an even cleaner clean, your asshole is purer than a salt cellar, not more than ten turds a year! And each is harder than a bean or pebbles, if you were to grind it and rub it in your hands, you wouldn’t even dirty a finger. (­­7–​­23) The commentaries largely skirt the obscene center. While O’Bryhim has pointed out the poem’s links to the plots of New Comedy and others have speculated on the identity of Furius (­Hawkins 2011; Sharland 2018), on the possible philosophical resonances of terming Furius and his family beatus in spite of their proclaimed poverty (­O’Hearn 2020), and on the plausibility of reading the entire poem as an allegory of literary rivalry (­Stroup 2010, ­223–​­226), what is most striking and memorable about the poem is less what it is “­about” than what it directly asks us to imagine. The bodies of Furius and his clan are said to be drier than bone. The image is not simply of desiccation but of the skeletal, of bones. While the tone may be witty and wry, the imagery is abject and grotesque. In the name of good health (­valetis 7), we are invited to imagine death from starvation and exposure (­sole et frigore et esuritione): dry bones in the open air. Of course, dryness can be a sign of good health in ancient medicine. A lack of sweat could be desirable. But a lack of saliva, hardly so: the parched throat, the inability to swallow food. We may prefer our noses not be clogged with mucus and snot, but what would an absolutely dry nose mean? It evokes a corpse mummified in the sun: more rigor mortis than vigor. At the same time as the poem proclaims the absence of these substances as an ironic sign of health, it also asks to imagine each of them in their phenomenality and substance, to linger over 97

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them for a m ­ oment—​­images of death and abjection that signal the annihilation of the target of invective and our enjoyment (­jouissance) in the process. The enjoyment we receive from images of snot and sweat, as well as from their absence, and hence of death, far from affirming a ­self-​­mastery achieved in the judicious management of pleasures or validating the s­ elf-​­possession achieved through conscious forms of reflection, signals the jouissance of the subject in dissolution, the liquefying of a body without borders, a melting into death, which can only assert its integrity in a violence externalized against the other (­Kristeva 1980, 17, ­65–​­66). We are next invited to imagine Furius’s shit, to play with it, to rub our hands in it. It is miraculous, both rare and harder than stone. Go ahead, pick it up! Roll it between your fingers. No hint of brown stain. You could lick your fingers. His asshole is cleaner than clean, cleaner than your saltcellar. Of course, the disgust is part of the humor, part of the enjoyment (­cf. Fitzgerald 1995, 84; Lateiner 2007, ­266–​­267). But this is not a pleasure that can be counterposed to reality. It is not the subject of a dietetics or an economics as discussed in the Use of Pleasure (­1985). It is not an affirmation of the ego’s mastery of itself, of an aesthetics of existence, or philosophy as a spiritual practice, or any of the tropes of the late Foucault’s engagement with antiquity in texts like the Care of the Self (­1986) or Hermeneutics of the Subject (­2001). It demands another mode of interpretation. But it equally is not the expression of an unconscious desire. Poem 23 does not represent the bringing to the surface of an inner essence, of a discourse of sexuality that would determine the being of the Catullan subject, his secret ontology. Its abject enjoyment is in fact right there. It is visible, not as a transcendental signified that must be interpreted by a subject supposed to know, but directly on the level of the signifier, on the most superficial level of the poem bones, hunger, heat and cold, sweat, saliva, phlegm, and excrement. As I mentioned above, while not every Catullan poem works this way, it is hardly the lone example. Poem 67 presents the poet talking to a door in his native Verona, comically chastising it for not protecting the integrity of the household and of its most recent owner. The door claims he has been slandered, lamenting that whenever something goes wrong in a household the door is blamed although the sexual enormities committed by the mistress of the house are in no way his fault. Catullus replies that this is all well and good, but if the door expects us to believe him, he cannot simply deny the charges, he must make it so that anyone might both “­see and feel” what the case is (­67.­15–​­16). These words are not an idle formula. What follows in the heart of the poem is concrete and explicit. It is designed to make us “­see and feel”: ‘­Primum igitur, virgo quod fertur tradita nobis, falsum est. non illam vir prior attigerit, languidior tenera cui pendens sicula beta. numquam se mediam sustulit ad tunicam; sed pater illius gnati violasse cubile dicitur et miseram conscelerasse domum, sive quod impia mens caeco flagrabat amore, seu quod iners sterili semine natus erat, ut quaerendum unde foret nervosius illud, quod posset zonam solvere virgineam.’ Egregium narras mira pietate parentem, qui ipse sui gnati minxerit in gremium. (­67.­19–​­30) “­The first thing, then, it is said a maiden was entrusted to us. 98

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This is false. Her previous husband had not touched her, his curved tool hanging limper than a soft beet never rising to the middle of his tunic; but the father of that boy is said to have breached the bedroom and to have wronged this wretched house, whether because his impious mind blazed with blind lust, or because his son was impotent from sterile seed, so it was necessary to find something more sinewy to loosen her maiden girdle.” You recount a story of a father exceptional in his duty, one who ejaculated in his own son’s lap. The poem then resumes the arch and somewhat jocular tone with which it began, as the door recounts other salacious stories about the bride, ending with a clear hint at the identity of one of her numerous lovers, but whom the loquacious door fears to name, and who was presumably easy to identify by those in Verona: praeterea addebat quendam, quem dicere nolo nomine, ne tollat rubra supercilia. longus homo est, magnas cui lites intulit olim falsum mendaci ventre puerperium. (­67.­45–​­48) She added someone else, whom I do not wish to call by name, so he doesn’t raise his red eyebrows, he’s a tall man, against whom a false pregnancy from a lying belly once brought suit. The structure of the poem, then, is a witty and elaborate introduction where the poet addresses the door and makes inquiries, an equally witty and periphrastic close that brings a smile to the reader’s lips and lampoons a ­well-​­known citizen from Verona, and a grotesque center in which the door invites us to feel and see what has been going on inside (­cf. Fitzgerald 1995, ­205–​­207; Wray 2001, ­138–​­142). The outer rings of the poem present an image of sociability and culture. Yes, there might be adultery and gossip, but it all takes place within certain norms, dressed in learned allusions, addressed with a light comic tone (­cf. Quinn 1973, ­368–​­369; Wiseman 1985, 110; Grilli 1997, 307). There are pleasures, and there are transgressions in these outer rings, but nothing that threatens the subjective integrity of the speaker and reader. We remain firmly within the yin and yang of the pleasure and the reality principles. What we see and feel in the center, however, is more troubling and indeed requires this elaborate framing to contain it, to make it receivable. The bride, we are told, was not in fact a virgin, but not because her previous husband had deflowered her. He was incapable. We are asked to imagine his penis: a soft, curved beet. The image is striking. As a beet, it would be red, but also bulbous. The image of the sicula is of a curved dagger, so our bulbous red phallus also has a downward bend. Yet this is a soft beet, which is not a beet’s normal condition. A fresh beet, right out of the ground, is firm, even hard. A beet that is soft to the touch, squishy, is rotten, perhaps suppurating, like most root vegetables that have turned bad. 99

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Juxtaposed with this image is the sinewy virility of the groom’s father, who must be able to penetrate his son’s bride. An egregium father indeed, quite apart from the common herd. He has literally “­pissed” in his son’s lap, but mingere is a common euphemism for “­to ejaculate” (­Adams 1982, 142). The image is, in fact, m ­ ulti-​­layered. On the most literal level, the father has urinated in the gremium or “­lap” of the son. Yet we know that it is in fact not the gremium of the son that is in question, but that of his bride, and it is only the son’s by metonymy. Gremium is a common euphemism for vagina (­Adams 1982, 92). Yet given the impotence of the son, the father may well also be imagined as urinating in his son’s vagina, insofar as the son is not really a man, but the possessor of a soft, oozing beet. Of course, the father is neither literally urinating in his son’s lap/­vagina nor in his ­daughter-­​­­in-​­law’s but ejaculating as he deflowers both bride and groom simultaneously. Truly an extraordinary father, who both urinates and ejaculates inside his son and his ­daughter-­​­­in-​­law simultaneously, violating the boundaries that should separate him from them, while dissolving their individual separation from one another into a unity of enormity. This is what the door makes us feel and see. What we are asked to picture is not simply illicit pleasures, but a world beyond. This is not the realm of calculation and substitution, of Ovid’s cynical seducer. It is a world in which we are invited to imagine and to “­feel” realms of violation in which the reality principle no longer serves as a guard rail, in which the acts, organs, and combinations evoked reveal not deep inner secrets or forbidden fantasies that must be confessed, but moments of simultaneous enjoyment and disgust, of enjoyment in disgust that, when taken to their limit, shatter not only households (­domus) and the normative social roles within them (­father, son, husband, wife), but the very possibility of integral subjects and rational egos responsible for their own choices, and capable of caring for themselves and governing others. Far from the rational use of pleasures, from the self’s reflection on itself in Seneca and Musonius Rufus, or from the pursuit of truth through seeking love and beauty in Foucault’s reading of the Symposium, the structure and integrity of this poem, its aesthetic nature is predicated on a form of subjective dissolution that only the normative gestures of its more conventional aesthetic frame can contain. The understanding of what we see and feel in this poem, both requires and exceeds Foucault’s historicization of the subject and Freud’s analysis of a drive beyond the pleasure principle: the obscene, the abject, and death. Our final example is a poem (­97) that almost exceeds the scholar’s ability to comment on it. Fitzgerald while acknowledging the poem’s “­­hair-​­raising climax” speaks of it primarily as an example of “­ring composition and poetic closure” (­1995, ­79–​­80). Richlin briefly cites it as an exemplar of the theme of the impure mouth, a recurring obsession in Roman poetry (­1983, ­150–​ ­151). Wray acknowledges it as a poem of aggression (­2001, 113, n. 2). Quinn terms it a “­savage, if genially exuberant attack” (­1973, 434). Lateiner notes, “­The reader swims in obscenity; the only possibility is laughter” (­2007, 271), and Holzberg emphasizes that contemporaries would have found it funny (­2002, 195). But laughter is not always a positive or even a happy thing; it can also be deeply violent and aggressive. Quinn’s urge to see the poem as “­genial,” in fact, seeks to keep an aesthetic frame firmly wrapped around a poem that leaks, revolts, and closes with a final image that fuses the erotic and death without mediation. This is not the grotesquerie of Bakhtinian carnivalesque renewal, of Rabelais’s festive laughter, but of negative satire and abjection. Our enjoyment is not predicated on a rational set of substitutions that seek to manage pleasure’s relation to its opposite, but on an explosion of boundaries that seeks to reconfigure the integrity of the body and our sense of identity that is its corollary (­Bakhtin 1968, ­19–​­20 26, ­28–​­29; Bakhtin 1984, 126;

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Bakhtin 1986, 135; Miller 2009). It is this hilarity of the shiver and the shudder, not the smile of the salon or the mischievous giggle, which none of the commentators dares to explore: Non (­ita me di ament) quicquam referre putavi, utrumne os an culum olfacerem Aemilio. nilo mundius hoc, nihiloque immundius illud, verum etiam culus mundior et melior: nam sine dentibus est. hic dentis sesquipedalis, gingivas vero ploxeni habet veteris, praeterea rictum qualem diffissus in aestu meientis mulae cunnus habere solet. hic futuit multas et se facit esse venustum, et non pistrino traditur atque asino? quem siqua attingit, non illam posse putemus aegroti culum lingere carnificis? So, help me god, I did not think it made a difference, whether I sniffed Aemilius’s mouth or asshole. The one is no cleaner, the other no dirtier. Still, the asshole is better and cleaner: it has no teeth. The mouth has ­foot-­​­­and-­​­­a-­​­­half-​­long choppers, and, truthfully, the gums of an old wagon box, on top of that, once it’s opened wide, it gapes like a mule’s cunt in heat when it pisses. This guy fucks a lot of girls, and he thinks he’s sexy. How is he not bound to the mill with the ass? Any girl who would touch him, don’t you think she could lick the asshole of a diseased hangman? The poem begins with a conflation of orifices that while grotesque could be a simple lampoon of halitosis. The second couplet goes step further. It is not simply that Aemilius has bad breath, but his mouth actually has shit in it, or least it has the same amount of encrusted fecal matter as his anus, and since both of them smell, one can assume that it is not Furius’s saltcellar we are to have in mind. We are then invited to feel a certain measure of relief because while his asshole and his mouth may be otherwise indistinguishable, at least the former does not have teeth. We should pause for a moment. All such negations implicitly envision the possibility of an affirmation. However briefly, we are invited to envision the possibility of a culus dentatus (­the masculine corollary of the vagina dentata), before brushing it aside and concentrating on the actual teeth in the grotesque mouth, one and a half feet in length, with sagging gums, the color and structure of a wooden box bouncing in the back of a provincial wagon. (­Quintilian 1.5.8 tells us Catullus picked up the word in the Po valley, cf. Quinn 1973, ad loc.) We then reach the grotesque center of the poem. “­The imagery is disgusting but clinically vivid” (­Garrison 2004, ad loc). The earlier implied image of the vagina dentata momentarily ­re-​­emerges when the mouth becomes the flared and inflamed genitalia of a ­she-​­mule urinating. The enormous teeth seem to have receded, as the mule’s vagina becomes a leaking and enlarged version of Aemilius’s original culus indentatus. It is indeed hard to distinguish them, as the poet

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originally said. The phantasmagoric shift from mouth to ass to mouth to bestial cunnus almost defies commentary, and yet it has a logic and progression that leads from the possibility of the recognition of a human face to its impossible deconstruction as a kind of gaping wound that unites the sexual and the excretory with the inanimate and the inhuman. The ensuing couplet provides the reader a pause, a moment to regroup. Aemelius, apparently is a local Don Juan. For reasons hard to fathom, he fucks (­and futuo emphasizes the mechanical action as opposed to any kind of emotional or human engagement) a lot of women (­multas). Indeed, despite his manifest obscenity, he regards and presents himself as elegant (­venustus). This is a loaded word for Catullus, embodying aesthetic and social grace. It names a quality that a young poet and ­would-​­be urbanus should strive to attain, but it equally names an erotic quality (­Fitzgerald 1995, ­35–​­36; Wray 2001, 79, 202). A venustus is a person of Venus, and certainly one could argue that Aemelius is venereal on more levels than one. For a moment, though he resolves back into the form of a recognizable human being and one of whom we might even be a bit envious regarding his sexual conquests, this is the calm before the storm and before the poem’s final fusion of the erotic with the necrotic and of the mouth with the asshole. Clearly, Aemelius’s erotic success is an enormity not to be tolerated; he should be banished to the mill, like miscreant slaves in Roman comedy (­Garrison 2004, ad loc). But the focus then shifts from Aemelius to the question of just who are these people who are willing to have sex with him? The final image is of a woman with her tongue stuck in the ass of a diseased executioner. It recapitulates the structure of the poem as a whole: the conflation of oral and anal cavities, their metonymic association with the vaginal (­she is someone Aemelius futuit); images of excrement and bodily fluids (­the carnifex is aegrotus); and the final word and image is of the executioner (­carnifex) himself, the once who makes (­fex < facio) living beings into mere lumps of meat or flesh (­caro, carnis). Yet this entire imagistic structure has now shifted from Aemelius to those who would touch him, and so potentially to the larger social (­w)­hole.

III The Use of Pleasures ends with a final chapter called “­True Love,” which offers a reading of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus (­1985). The chapter is crucial to understanding Foucault’s relation to psychoanalysis. It is in part a response to Lacan’s reading of the Symposium in his 1961 seminar on transference (­1991). For Lacan, the essence of the Symposium is its exploration of the transferential relationship and the logic of substitution that relation implies between Socrates, Alcibiades, and Agathon. In his reading, Alcibiades and Agathon, while not identical, are substitutable as objects of desire, insofar as each of them is beautiful. At the same time, Socrates is the object of Alcibiades’ desire precisely because Alcibiades desires to be his object. Subject and object, desire and its tokens, all become part of an economy of substitution and pleasure in which Agathon (­literally “­Mr. Good”) and Alcibiades (­the beautiful boy par excellence) become placeholders in a dance that leads from the empirical to the transcendental through a logic of transference and c­ ounter-​­transference as all three characters play musical couches at the conclusion of Plato’s great dialogue. Foucault’s reading does not so much contest Lacan’s interpretation as historicize it, asking how is it that Love or Desire (­Eros) came to be seen as a problem of truth rather than a simple question of regime or of the “­use” of pleasures. In so doing, he offers a recontextualization of the psychoanalytic framing of desire in relation to the “­truth” of the subject. In short, he argues, and convincingly so, that the very concept of a truth residing in the subject that is expressed by its desire is made possible by the reconfiguration of the subject’s relation to truth that first appears in these dialogues. The talking cure only really makes sense in light of these presuppositions. There 102

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is a truth inside me that I must express to another to become who I am or who I desire to be. But the fact that psychoanalysis assumes and functions within a certain relation of the subject to itself, and within the history of that relationship, in no way means that, given those constraints, it has nothing to say, nor does it mean that the totality of the discourse of psychoanalysis is exhausted by those constraints. The received wisdom tells us there is an unresolvable antagonism between Foucauldian and psychoanalytic approaches to the history of sexuality (­Eribon 1994, 259; Dean 2003, 241; Leonard 2005, 88). We see this conflict played out in the early polemics surrounding David Halperin’s work (­1995, 121) and in Joan Copjec’s critique of Foucault and the “­historicists” (­Copjec 1994; Copjec 2002, ­29–​­30; compare Žižek 1992, ­123–​­124). More recently, Guilia Sissa has attacked Foucault for a simple and straightforward opposition to psychoanalysis in all forms (­2008). What our reading of Catullus has shown, however, is that the received wisdom is an oversimplification: (­a) Foucault’s work is not opposed to psychoanalysis per se but rather offers a historicization of it (­Eribon 1994, 255; Dean 2003, ­241–​­242; McGushin 2007, 13); (­b) insofar as it offers a historicization, it represents a critique of the kind of normalizing tendencies found in certain forms of psychoanalytic discourse (­­Feher-​­Gurewich 2003, ­203–​­204); (­c) the psychoanalytic response to a Foucauldian model of bodies and pleasures cannot be found in the refusal of its own discursive history, or in the assertion of ahistorical sexual norms, but precisely in terms of that which lies beyond Foucault’s model of reciprocity, of an exchange of pleasures; and (­d), the present paper observes that this beyond of the pleasure principle, which Foucault’s History finds difficult to articulate, is directly observable in the poetry of Catullus in passages such as those discussed in 23, 67, and 94. These passages are those that traditional modes of commentary have found difficult to explain or have simply passed over. While the imagistic sequences, as we have demonstrated, possess a logic and a coherence of their own, it is a logic of subjective dissolution, aggression, and the fusion of enjoyment and death. It is not predicated on a model of rational choice, the maximization of utility, or an economy of pleasure and its opposite. At the same time, what we discover in these poems is not an unconscious wish that needs to be confessed or a secret identity that needs to be brought to expression. They do not articulate Catullus’s sexual secret. Everything is right on the surface. This jouissance is part of our continuing fascination with these poems, and it is irreducible to either a normative sexual identity or to a rational reflection on the use of pleasures. It is beyond both Foucault and Freud, but only fully visible through them. Foucault’s Use of Pleasure cannot fully account for the beyond of the pleasure principle envisioned by Freud and embodied by Catullus. At the same time, Foucault’s History presents a decisive challenge to any form of psychoanalysis that would set itself up as the arbiter of truth, that would claim to be beyond history and beyond the conditions of its own birth.

Suggestions for Further Reading While there are many directions for further reading, one excellent place to begin is Richard Armstrong 2005. This is the bible for understanding Freud’s complex relation to the ancient world. Ruby Blondell and Kirk Ormand 2015 is critical for showing how Foucault’s approach to the history of sexuality remains not only productive but central. The single best concise statement of Foucault’s vision for Volumes ­2–​­4 of the History of Sexuality can be found in Subjectivity and Truth edited by Frédéric Gros, 2007. Lynn Huffer 2010 is a m ­ ust-​­read for rethinking Foucauldian queer theory unmoored from 1980s and 1990s orthodoxy. For a fuller engagement with Foucault’s relation to psychoanalysis, Kristeva, and the death drive, see Miller 2015. For a classic articulation of the relationship between Foucault and Lacan, John Rajchman 1991 remains ­thought-​­provoking and informative. 103

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Works Cited Adams, J. N. 1982. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Armstrong, Richard. 2005. A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —​­—​­—​­. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —​­—​­—​­. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Blondell, Ruby and Kirk Ormand, eds. 2015. Ancient Sex: New Essays. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Braunstein, Nestor. 2003. “­Desire and Jouissance in the Teaching of Lacan.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, edited by J­ ean-​­Michel Rabaté, 1­ 02–​­115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2020. Jouissance: A Lacanian Concept. Translated by Silvia Rosman. Albany: State University of New York Press. Copjec, Joan. 1994. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2002. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dean, Tim. 2003. “­Lacan and Queer Theory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, edited by ­Jean-​­Michel Rabaté, 2­ 38–​­252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edelman, Lee. 1994. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge. Elden, Stuart. 2016. Foucault’s Last Decade. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Eribon, Didier. 1994. Michel Foucault et ses Contemporains. Paris: Fayard. ­Feher-​­Gurewich, Judith. 2003. “­A Lacanian Approach to the Logic of Perversion.” In The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, edited by J­ ean-​­Michel Rabaté, 1­ 91–​­207. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, William. 1995. Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position. Berkeley: University of Californian Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. —​­—​­—​­. 1985. The Use of Pleasure. Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. —​­—​­—​­. 1986. The Care of the Self. Volume 3 of the History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. —​­—​­—​­. 1994a. “­Choix Sexuel, Acte Sexuel.” In Dits et Écrits, edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the collaboration of Jacques Lagrange, Vol. 4., ­320–​­335. Paris: Gallimard.. —​­—​­—​­. 1994b. “­Michel Foucault, Sexe, Pouvoir, et la Politique de L’identité.” In Dits et Écrits, edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the collaboration of Jacques Lagrange, Vol. 4., ­735–​­746. Paris: Gallimard. —​­—​­—​­. 2001. L’herméneutique du Sujet. Cours au Collège de France. ­1981–​­1982, edited by Frédéric Gros. Paris: Gallimard, Seuil. —​­—​­—​­. 2012. Mal Faire, Dire Vrai: Fonction de L’aveu en Justice, edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Louvain: UCL Presses universitaires de Louvain. —​­—​­—​­. 2014. Subjectivité et Verité. Cours au Collège de France. ­1980–​­1981, edited by Frédéric Gros. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, Seuil. —​­—​­—​­. 2017. Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the College de France ­1980–​­1981, edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave MacMillan. —​­—​­—​­. 2021. Confessions of the Flesh. The History of Sexuality Volume 4. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton. Garrison, Daniel H. 2004. The Student’s Catullus. 3rd ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Grilli, Alessandro. 1997. Gaio Valerio Catullo: Le Poesie. Roma: Einaudi. Gros, Frédéric. 2014. “­Situation du Cours.” In Michel Foucault, Subjectivité et Verité. Cours au Collège de France. 1­ 980–​­1981, edited by Frédéric Gros, 3­ 05–​­321. Paris: EHESS, Gallimard, Seuil. Halperin, David. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press. Hawkins, Shane. 2011. “­Catullus’s Furius.” Classical Philology 106: ­254–​­260.

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Catullus Beyond the Pleasure Principle Holzberg, Niklas. 2002. Catull: Der Dichter und Sein Erotisches Werk. München: C. H. Beck. Huffer, Lynn. 2010. Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Kelly, Mark E. 2014. Foucault and Politics: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Pouvoirs de L’horreur: Essais sur L’abjection. Paris: Seuil. Lacan, Jacques. 1991. Le Séminaire Livre VIII: Le Transfert, edited by J­ acques-​­Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil. Lateiner, Donald. 2007. “­Obscenity in Catullus.” In Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Catullus, edited by Julia Haig Gaisser, 2­ 61–​­281. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leonard, Miriam. 2005. Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in ­Post-​­War French Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGushin, Edward. 2007. Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Miller, Paul Allen. 1998. “­Catullan Consciousness, the ‘­Care of the Self,’ and the Force of the Negative in History.” In Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, edited by David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter, 1­ 71–​­203. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2009. “­The Bodily Grotesque in Roman Satire: Images of Sterility.” In Oxford Readings in Persius and Juvenal, edited by Maria Plaza, 3­ 27–​­348. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2015. “­Enjoyment Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Antigone, Julian of Norwich, and the Use of Pleasures.” The Comparatist 39: 4­ 7–​­63. —​­—​­—​­. 2021a. “­Confessions of the Flesh: Between Pleasure and Sexuality.” Symploke 29: ­653–​­664. —​­—​­—​­. 2021b. Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak the Truth. London: Bloomsbury. —​­—​­—​­. 2021c. “­Unspeakable Enjoyment in Catullus (­80, 16, 11, 63).” Dictynna 18. https://­journals.openedition.org/­dictynna/­2564. Nasio, Juan David. 2019. Psychoanalysis and Repetition: Why do We Keep Making the Same Mistakes? Translated by David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nehamas, Alexander. 1998. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflection s from Plato Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press. O’Bryhim, Shawn. 2007. “­Catullus 23 as Roman Comedy.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 137: 1­ 33–​­145. O’Hearn, Leah. 2020. “­Being ‘­Beatus’ in Catullus’ Poems 9, 10, 22 and 23.” Classical Quarterly N.S. 70: ­691–​­706. Quinn, Kenneth. 1973. Catullus: The Poems. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Rajchman, John. 1991. Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics. London: Routledge. Richlin, Amy. 1983. The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sharland, Suzanne. 2018. “‘­Persta Atque Obdura’: Furius in Catullus 23 and at Horace, Satires 2.5.­39–​­41.” Acta Classica 61: ­99–​­124. Sissa, Giulia. 2008. Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World. Translated by George Staunton. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stroup, Sarah Culpepper. 2010. Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Telò, Mario. 2020. Archive Feeling: A Theory of Greek Tragedy. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wiseman, T. P. 1985. Catullus and His World: A Reappraisal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wray, David. 2001. Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge. —​­—​­—​­. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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8 A MURKY UNLEARNING Sophocles and the Greek Art of Failure Francesca Spiegel

The Art of Failure in a Culture of Achievement When I fall short of expectations, what else can I become? How can someone who fails to walk the path ­pre-​­drawn for them (­by family or community), do so creatively? How does a queer subject, who fails to embody the predictable capitalistic and heteronormative idea of successful adulthood, do something inventive with that failure, and flourish? This is the question that concerns Halberstam in the 2011 book The Queer Art of Failure. “­What kinds of rewards can failure offer us?” asks Halberstam (­2011, 3). The answer begins with the statement “­failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior,” and it furthermore includes losing, letting go of, and forgetting about things that previously seemed mandatory or important. It includes the playful and deliberately unserious rethinking of power relationships, ideals for beauty, culture, and success, and starting to doubt the things you know. It also includes upset, pain, and disillusionment, a dip in a pool of darkness, obscurity, illegibility; flying under the radar of success and making that an integral part of who you are, where you are, and when. The queer art of failure excavates ­lesser-​­known and hidden histories to construct its own story, deflecting the authority of supposedly official, externally imposed narratives. It rests on a basis of “­low theory,” the opposite of “­­high-​­brow,” and points a finger at the toxic and damaging effects of the dominant culture’s official ideas of beauty, propriety, and success (­Halberstam 2011, 1­ –​­27). Although sexuality matters in this equation, the prime focus is on the twisting and rejection of norms, including, but not reduced to, sexual ones. “­Queer” covers a multitude of ­norm-​­bending or breaking outlooks on gender, the body, beauty, the meaning of success, failure, darkness, light, relationships, time, space, existence, being, performance, and manifestation of oneself as oneself in the world. “­Queer” means to experience the world around you sideways, to relate obliquely to it, to feel ill at ease. To use Halberstam’s words, Queer is the “­nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (­Halberstam 2005, 6). To be athwart in the world, or crosswise, this is also the original significance of the word “­queer” from German “­quer” (­traverse) and evolved from old high German “­twerah” (­aslant, sideways, as well as angry) from the ­proto-­​­­indo-​­european root terkw-​­(“­to twist” – ​­the Latin word torquere also stems from it), in the same family as the German word “­quirl” (­whorl or whisk), DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-11 106

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etymologically speaking. The queer art of failure, in this framing, is an art of mixing colors and smudging edges, reversing, obverting, or subverting shapes and tinkering with form, shuffling contents. The Queer Art of Failure took the concept of failure and asked exactly how queer folks have historically elevated Failure with a capital F into an art form and a style. It’s an art of the unofficial use, repurposing a treasury of lost and found. It may be partly blurry, and it may be that the blur is the whole point. Halberstam’s chosen archive of materials is prominently from children’s animation films like Chicken Run and Finding Nemo—​­films that Halberstam calls “­Pixarvolt,” a coinage of “­Pixar” and “­revolt” (­Halberstam 2011, 49). They tell stories about revolts and uprisings against oppressive villains in fictional, animal, or ­hybrid-​­creaturely societies. To preempt criticism that these materials are not “­serious” enough, Halberstam playfully assures us that irreverence is intentional, categorizing their own writing as “­low theory” for the aesthetics of m ­ ass-​­market cultural production. (­Halberstam 2011, 16) Is there a Greek art of failure? Like the Pixar movies today, Greek tragedy in its time was a popular form of entertainment that enacted dramas and transgressions of mythic, ­larger-­​­­than-​­life, and ­demi-​­divine characters. The Greek tragic festivals drew massive crowds, and audiences at the city Dionysia were larger and more diverse, with viewers traveling from far to see the performances at Athens, including from states that weren’t democracies.1 From that angle, Greek tragedy fits well into Halberstam’s archives of popular entertainment, even if in the intervening centuries, Greek tragedy has become literally antique, and reached “­high culture” status. In this chapter, we will study the case of Philoctetes, in Sophocles’ play by the same name. Kicked off his ship because of an illness, Philoctetes the warrior unbecomes a warrior, alone on a stony island with very few amenities. Philoctetes’ physical deterioration and diseducation tread a murky, muddy track of s­ elf-​­loss and s­ elf-​­reinvention. He teeters between ­all-​­consuming pain and articulate indignity so that the lines of his selfhood become at times illegible; but rather than being a smudge or a flaw, blurriness is the whole point. Philoctetes’ body is difficult, agonized, and in flux; not happily but unhappily, he moves between different states, which onlookers maliciously describe as “­monstrous;” it’s a slur, against which he claps back, inventively weaponizing his body as a ­living-​­proof exhibit to shame the Achaeans for neglecting their duty of care, and to attack their values of health, superiority, masculinity and the Greek military. Despite his dark, critical, and antagonistic stance, and from his unprepossessing position in a cave on a rocky shore, Philoctetes is able to seduce the youth Neoptolemus away from Odysseus, his rival, and able to draw him into his world of life on the margins, even in sickness. Rethinking himself as the last custodian of a g­ ilded-​­era past, Philoctetes produces his own unique and circumstantially adapted practice of Greek heroic life, more mesmerizing even than the real thing in its official incarnation, as we will see. It’s a strong example of the “­Greek art of failure,” and one which playwright Kae Tempest has also utilized in their 2021 adaptation of the play. In what follows, we will discuss the epistemic underpinnings and artistry of unlearning and failure on the Athenian stage and chisel out the queerness that looms all across the Greek tragic imaginarium at large. In the end, I hope this essay will show that the heroes of Greek tragedy are antiquity’s archetypal versions of the ­failure-​­artist, and that reading Sophocles with Halberstam brings us closer to understanding both.

Unlearning and Unbecoming Kae Tempest’s Paradise, an adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, takes place in a wasteland of environmental war damage, with Philoctetes reimagined as a b­ lue-​­collar soldier. He dreads the return 107

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home, anticipating he will gain a reputation as a sad and disruptive curiosity in the local townscape, and with little value left to add. He already knows that he will arrive there as a traumatized veteran, unrelatable, intractable, unemployable. The character exudes a sense of being cheated out of the rewards for becoming a warrior, and so, he undertakes to unbecome a warrior. First, he gives his prized bow away to a local woman, who is surprised that he no longer wants it, and tells her: There’s things I want to know that I can’t know when I’m holding that. (­Tempest 2021, 124) The gateway to unbecoming is epistemic: to be and to become is first of all to know yourself, to know who you are. We may relate this to the archaic Greek precept γνῶθι ­σεαυτόν—​­know ­thyself—​­that Delphic inscription on the temple of Apollo, encouraging the reader to introspect and search for answers within themselves, not outside, to gain first truths and certitudes about who you are (­in society, but also within the grander scheme of the universe), and only thereafter, the things that surround, cover and color you. Unbecoming that which others have made you to be, unbeing what you became: thus begins the mis/­ad/­venture into becoming ­self-​­authentic. It begins with ­un-​ ­knowing what you know, and with unlearning what you were taught. “­Learn to become such as you are” (­Pindar Pythian 2.72) is the gnomic wisdom proffered in Pindar’s second Pythian ode, an archaic exhortation not to copy other people, but to emerge in the fullness of one’s own excellence. On its flipside is an invitation to cast off learned behaviors and relinquish patterns of mimicry. For Tempest’s Philoctetes, it means letting go of his bow, a symbol of his former class and caste, creeds, and ideologies. In the Philoctetes of Sophocles, the bow is violently grabbed from the hero’s hands; a death sentence for Philoctetes, who cannot walk far, and needs the bow to shoot birds in the sky to feed himself. But he would rather die, and “­become dinner for the beasts who’ve fed me” (­Sophocles Philoctetes ­956–​­957) than ever again support the Greek war efforts or lend his bow to that purpose. Philoctetes is the bookend of Sophocles’ preserved oeuvre as we know it, it is his latest and most modern play. It was staged in 409 BCE, during the final years of the Peloponnesian war, which was a disaster for Athens. The plot revolves around Philoctetes, a g­ rand-​­disillusioned war hero, left for dead on the island of Lemnos after a snake bite injured his foot. The wound never healed. The play shows us Odysseus and Neoptolemus (­son of Achilles) coming back ten years later in hopes of fetching Philoctetes’ very precious bow. They find Philoctetes angry, and acridly rebutting their request, tearing down their character and ideologies. The refusal to comply is a function of his bitterly gained knowledge that they only want him for his bow, and do not care about his health. Philoctetes’ preference for ending his life on the rugged island, over accepting the army’s bargain (­the bow for a chance to go home and see a healer) also emanates from this understanding. Unbecoming a Greek warrior will likely trigger Philoctetes’ eventual undoing, release in the form of death; but so pessimistic, shadowed, and dark is his view of the world, he prefers it. Asked to come back to the army, it’s a “­no:” “­Never, not if it means I’d have to suffer all the ills” (­Sophocles Philoctetes ­997–​­999). Philoctetes suffers from seizures, which provide a dramatic display of his illness. In fact, dramatic displays of illness are a recurring theme in Sophocles’ work: the play that scholars consider his oldest and earliest preserved work is Ajax, which in turn dramatizes a notable mental patient, the Greek war hero Ajax, unraveling. Likely first staged in 449 BCE (­at the close of the Persian wars, a victory for Athens), in Ajax an offended Ajax retreats to his tent, where his hurt pride becomes rage, delusion, and insane behavior, that will end in suicide. The reason for it all: the ­non-​­award of a coveted prize, the arms of Achilles, which Odysseus talked his way into receiving 108

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instead. Odysseus’ perceived thievish affront materializes into real damage to Ajax’s life: the absence of Achilles’ arms on his flesh turns out to feel as physically bad as a vital organ ripped out, and he goes completely crazy.2 Parallels between these two tales are easy enough to spot: sick heroes, arguments about armor, and ­all-​­male military choruses. Both plays are set in the Trojan war, and use Troy as a remote and mythical topos to make indirect and blurry references to Athens and its own wars. But the different historical moments of their creation on the Athenian stage, and the different Athenian wars upon which each play reflects, give us a clue as to the different consensus, sentiments and appetites of their original audiences, and how, in turn, the playwright has chosen to direct the flows of sympathy and disgust.3 Both plots are set after Achilles’ demise and bathe in the afterglow of that hero’s bygone greatness, the protagonists extolling Achilles’ mythic qualities as an idealized figure of worship.4 In fact, both heroes sit on the receiving end of an official visit, involving delegates coming to a retired hero, much like the Homeric embassy scene of Iliad 9. There, Achilles retreated from the battle and told everyone that the war was stupid. Having exposed the Atreidae as despicable liars, and Odysseus as a ­self-​­serving, hustler villain, Achilles recommended to all inquiring that they should quit fighting (­Homer Iliad 9.­417–​­418). It’s a sentiment that Philoctetes shares, on Lemnos. His bitter darkness also closely resembles his Sophoclean ­character-​­cognate, Ajax in the turmoil of mental psychosis. Both Ajax and Philoctetes are caught in a similar dynamic with the Atreidae and Odysseus. Having failed to reach their highest goals, they blame it on these men who cheated, lied, and perverted the purity of their shared undertaking. Both retreat to alternative universes: Ajax with an i­ll-​­fated psychotic hallucination; Philoctetes in the art of survival, choosing to honor and revere Achilles and Ajax, but not Odysseus nor anybody from that younger, slicker crop of the “­new type of man.” In voicing that type of critique, Philoctetes’ views dovetail with late tragedy’s characteristic anxiety surrounding cultural shifts and the end of a social order, which he stands to represent. Odysseus’ scheming and planning to dupe Philoctetes gives off the impression of a conman using the art of persuasion for unjust purposes, in a portrayal that already smacks of the critiques of rhetoric that Plato will later extend in the Gorgias.5 While in the Odyssey, intelligence and trickery distinguished Odysseus and brought him triumphs and praise, now on the stage of tragedy, these same traits appear in a checkered light. The Greeks sailed away, leaving Philoctetes to realize that there was no buddy system, the camaraderie was false, his military values were hollow, and feelings of heroic belonging were misguided and ­ill-​­advised; the rhetoric of community and collective gain was misleading, and Philoctetes is not going to fall for it again. We are meant to empathize with Philoctetes, who lives alone on Lemnos, where he survives by basic means and meditates upon how disappointing it was that his regiment left him behind when he got an infection. The play thus unties the knots of cultural obligation, of necessity, and challenges audiences to appreciate other values, other goals, and other ways of being in the world (­Halberstam 2011, 88).6 In the words of Kae Tempest’s Philoctetes: Philoctetes: why are you doing this? Neoptolemus: I have to. Philoctetes: You don’t have to. You can just stop. Philoctetes’ sensibilities have shifted from the morals put forth still in Ajax, whose extreme pride and internalized toxic masculinity are supposed to take audiences aback, but as literary figures, 109

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Philoctetes and Ajax are entangled by the way they are drawn. Like a palimpsest of tragic heroes, a past image of Ajax seems to poke through Philoctetes with his stern indictment of Greek culture with its idiotic emphasis on wars and “­winning.” Philoctetes carries the torch for Ajax, it appears, as if Sophocles’ earlier figure is partly contained inside this newer one, as though lifted from an earlier sketch. The play Ajax, inviting audiences to consider the damaging consequences of having too much individualistic pride, shows first Ajax’s suicide scene, and then opens on to a conflict about his burial. The army men argue whether they should bury Ajax, whether he is still one of their own, or if he has become “­worse than a Trojan” (­Sophocles Ajax 1155). The subject matter here already presages a sentiment at large in the Athenian public opinion, that it is more important for the soldier to serve Athens than it is to pursue individual recognition. By contrast and very unlike Ajax, Philoctetes takes the hero’s illness as a lens to discover how unfairly and unjustly the tapestry of Greek achievement is woven. As an ­exile—​­for Lemnos is a form of e­ xile—​­he is holding on to a ­ten-­​­­year-​­old version of the past and a personal truth of who he is. The distance in both space and time creates a vacuum ripe for filling with storylines. The hero Philoctetes begins a process of rethinking everything he knows. His own syncretic historiography is, in itself, an act of epistemic resistance against Odysseus whose “­official” narrative threatens Philoctetes’ life with existential erasure. Here, the memory of Achilles provides solace and inspiration for s­elf-​­reinvention and even ­self-​­aggrandizement. Memory, Halberstam wrote, is also a disciplinary mechanism, which Foucault calls “­a ritual of power” (­Halberstam 2011, 15). It selects for what is important (­the histories of triumph), and forgets the rest, thus reading a continuous narrative into one that is really full of ruptures and contradictions. Philocetes’ isolated position gives a fertile ground for memorializing the rupture, a raw recall of the Achaean host’s ­not-­​­­so-​­finest hour. Official narratives might have omitted or submerged this viewpoint. With its ­conscious-­​­­that-­​­­these-­​­­are-­​­­the-­​­­end-​­times, ­no-­​­­one-­​­­can-­​­­save-­​­­me-​­now sensitivity, we can see Philoctetes qualify as, perhaps, an archetypal narrative of autotheory as critique, in Preciado’s (­2013, ­347–​­348) sense of the term. Philoctetes’ preoccupation with his own body as a signifier of society’s abysmal politics of neglect and exclusion can stand as a kind of blueprint. In the modern version, Philoctetes says: “­False cities with all their false talk of freedom and / democracy…” (­Tempest 2021, 115). Hinting at the contemporary idea of fake news, the notion acquires an Orwellian “­ministry of Truth” flavor. As he undermines the very foundations of the culture that bore him, ­Philoctetes—​­and this is true of both the Tempest and the Sophocles ­versions—​­engages with what he considers to be “­the good parts” of his heritage, engendering a new self, extolling the virtues of endurance in the face of adversity. “­Look how strong my heart is. I believe that anyone else seeing these hardships would not know how to handle or endure them. But me: I did” (­Sophocles Philoctetes ­535–​­538).7 There is a piece of Ajax buried here inside Philoctetes, who is less rigid, more flexible, and clever: Ajax, who shriveled in shame, who ­self-​­eliminated, and who committed suicide, flamed up and combusted. But Philoctetes was shrewd and went on to conserve himself by using his bow daily for hunting on the island and feeding himself. This repurposing is practical and apposite, but to Ajax, the same situation only appeared like a horrible waste of his skills and instruments (­Sophocles Ajax ­364–​­367). But the apparent “­impropriety” of this utilization, or the failure to make intended use of his assets, also conceals an artful surprise. Philoctetes’ “­perversion” of the bow becomes a way to slip out of his own p­ re-​­assumed, foretold, and predicted story, escaping the script that was written for him, rejecting his role and rewriting it, as a ­self-​­reflexive critic of Greek cultural norms. The same goes for his other assets: his elite education, illustrious lineage, erstwhile grandeur, and 110

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custodianship of Heracles’ bow all were intended for use in the art of war. But, as his life took a different turn, he was able to repurpose them for a different kind of “­art.” Aristotle (­Rhetoric 1390b) defined the gennaios anêr (“­noble man”) as the man whose nature does not degrade in the face of trying conditions, who does not become dishonorable, no matter what happens. Aristotle’s gennaioi andres are ­self-​­authentic and stand above difficult circumstances. Beyond the basic narrative of military heroism and its dependence on normative fitness, masculinity, and health, Philoctetes’ is a tale of reimagining and ­re-​­ordering what it means to be a fine human ­being—​­a true gennaios ­anêr—​­an unlearning of received values that are at times creatively replaced, and at times left darkly illegible or blank as they coalesce into a queer, murky, and unfinished act of unbecoming. Already in 1966, Penelope Biggs remarked that Philoctetes’ repurposing of the bow to secure his own survival signaled “­a triumph over his pain” (­Biggs 1966, 232), and in this triumph lies the key to Philoctetes’ reinvention of himself as a new type of man. Philoctetes’ ­self-​­accommodation in his found space, we can begin to understand, is also a creative and opportunistic form of resistance against the destructive forces of shame, pride, and cultural superciliousness that inform Greek military masculinity. Halberstam wrote that “­under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (­Halberstam 2011, 2), and in the next section, I will discuss how Philoctetes’ creatively queer mode of existence maps itself on to the sphere of queer relationships within the play. Philoctetes’ eclectic, backward, and ­old-​­fashioned teachings, criticizing the Athenian democracy from a voice of marginalization and victimhood (­as opposed to from a reactionary standpoint extolling the benefits of undemocratic tyranny), magnetically attract and seduce the youth Neoptolemus, who will readily enter this alternate universe with its different version of history, and be rapt by it and its creator, as we will discuss presently.

Queer Kinship in the Philoctetes Odysseus sent Neoptolemus to Philoctetes with a “­script” in which he is to impersonate some o­ ld-​ ­school parody of an honorable son of Achilles. Neoptolemus is to mimic Achilles and talk about his arms. In short, Neoptolemus is to play himself, or a version of himself, set to impress, but also dupe, Philoctetes. But in the moment of showing up in the world as the “­fake scripted” Neoptolemus, purposeful, ethical, and filled with heroic ideals, that previously uninhabited persona becomes available to him. It turns out, he would actually quite like to be that person. Since he never met Achilles, it is a heritage to be elected, reclaimed, discovered, studied, and s­ elf-​­appropriated, rather than passively borne. So Neoptolemus’ quest for authenticity and selfhood takes an epistemic turn. Again, we see: to be who you are, you must know who you are. You become it. For Neoptolemus, that means coming into himself as himself, resurrecting a buried possibility of himself, and “­coming out” as Achillean, if you will.8 Philoctetes props him up in that guise, tapping into Neoptolemus’ posthumous, ­second-​­hand memory of Achilles (­Kyriakou 2011, 264ff.). That mobilizes new forms of memory ­that—​­in the words of ­Halberstam—​­“­relate more to spectrality than to hard evidence, to lost genealogies than to inheritance.” The insecure, disoriented, and heretofore pliable youth, whom Odysseus could dominate and weaponize at his will, melts off as he listens to Philoctetes, the more aware he becomes of his own instrumentalization, his passivity under Odysseus’ domination. Philoctetes’ adamant refusal to bow to Odysseus’ tactics, and to let Odysseus instrumentalize him for his purposes, has a performative 111

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value that is also didactic, supposed to tell Neoptolemus: see, this is how it’s done (­son). Philoctetes’ seductive pose is that of himself as an ­Achilles-​­like elder, as Neoptolemus only deserves. “­ The other is always buried in the dominant,” Halberstam (­ 2011, 73) wrote, and this ­buriedness—​­or ­latency—​­is what enables Neoptolemus to understand and appreciate Philoctetes’ “­art” of failure. Its beauty and magnetism, its references to Achilles, succeed in drawing Neoptolemus into a new elective affinity and desire for this elder. This is in contrast to Odysseus, whose power lies not in virtue or exemplariness, but in a wholly inappropriate and narcissistic form of overpowering bossiness.9 We recognize the familiar outlines of a queer bond between daddy and boy, disciple and teacher, in its unique ancient Greek cultural configuration as we see it between Socrates and Phaedrus. The younger man learns the ropes of embodied honorable citizenship, the right attitude toward pleasure, and how to have agency without abusing freedom.10 The principle is for the elder man to pass down wisdom and knowledge. But instead of a “­noiseless transmission of wisdom across the generations” (­Willis 2010, 347), some eroticism slides into the relationship. Athens’ ­much-​­discussed homosocial eroticism arises in the master/­disciple relation and becomes increasingly more “­vulgar” and “­murky,” as Derrida once wrote;11 more and more erastes (“­lover”), less and less didaskalos (“­teacher”). This kind of education, as Plato has outlined (­in Laws and Republic), promotes cultural adjustment and training for membership to the Athenian elite. In a twisted way, Philoctetes is able to offer it to Neoptolemus, even while being an outcast. That capability is sorely amiss in Odysseus’ insensitive leadership, which is more keen on giving instructions than fostering growth. Philoctetes’ persuasive and seductive strategy is to convince Neoptolemus that, if he is looking for a father figure, Philoctetes is better suited than Odysseus to fill the void Achilles left, and will be a worthier, and better new daddy to Neoptolemus. Much like Odysseus aimed to have Neoptolemus grab the bow away from him, Philoctetes aims to “­grab” Neoptolemus as if Neoptolemus were merchandise, apt to be grabbed. In this, Philoctetes’ bid to become Neoptolemus’ new lover is entirely competitive and aggressive, and betrays “­a prehensile relation to the other” (­Telò 2018, 135). We can, I think, understand the compulsive nature of Philoctetes’ bidding even better if we also consider what he stands to gain from Neoptolemus’ acceptance. Getting accepted as more “­like” Achilles, more so than Odysseus, would validate Philoctetes’ whole autotheory, and approve his ­self-​­styled ­self-​­aggrandizement. It would slot him in with the great generation of lost heroes. Neoptolemus’ arrival, and his ­self-​­manifestation, in combination with the knowledge of his descent from Achilles, all feed Philoctetes’ dream of reviving an old crop of heroes and rekindling the spark of a generation that seemed extinct. Although he may couch his offer of a ­surrogate-​­father role as a service and a benefit to Neoptolemus, Philoctetes’ quest for that role also aims to satisfy his own wish for ­self-​­propagation, in this vision of his becoming Neoptolemus’ elective new dad. The idea of adoption fulfills Philoctetes’ desire to rear and recreate a new Achilles. Lee Edelman famously described this type of relationship pattern as “­the ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism” (­2004, 4), referring to the unreflected wish of queer couples to procreate and reproduce in exactly the same manner as a conventional straight family, and rather disappointingly aping the despicable ­cookie-­​­­cutter-​­capitalist nuclear family structure. Even if the historical ancient Greek family structure differs somewhat from today’s “­nuclear family,” we may agree that Philoctetes’ lust for Neoptolemus is imbued with a growing desire to raise a son, despite every critique he has already leveled against Greek society as a whole. In Edelman’s view, it is the very rejection of that family model which constitutes a privileged queer realm of “­resistance (...) to every social structure or form” (­Edelman 2004, 4), including a rejection of the notion of futurity through the figure of the youth. 112

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It’s certainly a thought that Sophocles seems to have written into Philoctetes also, not in such crisp theoretical jargon, but in the form of metaphor and imagery, by choosing Lemnos as the specific setting for this drama. The panic of reproductive failure and barrenness is written all over its landscape, so evocative of desertion and desertedness, and which has all but absorbed Philoctetes into its n­ on-​­human ecosystem. No women show up in this play to signal the possibility of human copulation (­the ­all-​­male cast of Philoctetes is unique, as such), and instead, the empty landscape recalls a gruesome legend: how the women of Lemnos killed all the men. In an inverse ­fertility-​­dystopia on Lemnos, humanity became extinct, 12 and the place became a wasteland. There would be no reproductive or familial, Greek social future on the cards for either of the two men as they remain as lovers on Lemnos, and their family trees would end here as if felled and left to decay. There are more literary echoes here, too, designed to further unsettle: the alien shore of Lemnos seems also partly based on Homer’s descriptions of Calypso’s island, as Schein analyzed (­2013, 116). Even more prominently, the narrative resembles that of Odysseus meeting the cyclops Polyphemus, as scholars have already discussed: in fact, the cyclops myth was already previously tethered to Philoctetes on the Athenian stage after Euripides had, some years earlier (­circa 431 BCE), presented his Philoctetes as part of a tetralogy ending with Cyclops, a ­satyr-​­play dwelling on the comedy of barbarian cave life. All four of Euripides’ plays likely used a common stage set, featuring a cave, further highlighting resemblances between the characters.13 Odysseus once stayed on the isle of Calypso, and Circe, mystic female figures full of erotic appeal. If we are to see Philoctetes as just another one of these strange island creatures, then he is not to be dallied with. Goldhill (­2011, ­34–​­36) has (­reasonably, one might say) opined that for Neoptolemus to abandon Odysseus and stay with Philoctetes on Lemnos would have been a potentially “­disastrous” outcome. He would not return home with the army and instead be stuck forever on Lemnos with Philoctetes. Therefore, the surprise ending of the play, in which Philoctetes will be swayed to sail with them after all, proves a lucky e­ scape–​­a return to the proper groove of nostos. Just as in the Odyssey, where extended island stays disrupt the a­ ll-​­important nostos, Neoptolemus’ nascent bond with Philoctetes takes on a dreamlike, human/­­non-​­human aspect. In Halberstam’s view of the “­Pixarvolt” film, a bond between human and monster is always full of vitality and in the spirit of adventure; human/­monster bonds imply a disregard for the logics of the nuclear family and patrilineal reproduction, and have a s­ elf-​­asserting, healing and emancipatory quality. Could this be one of those? But we might have to pause, and ask: is it fair to compare Philoctetes to a monster, just because he is disheveled and lives on an island? After all, he is neither a giant, nor o­ ne-​­eyed, nor ­man-​ ­eating, nor is he a son of Poseidon. This is what the next section will aim to explore.

The Torn Body as an Embodied Critique of Values Right at the start of the play, as if setting up a straw man that must end up burning, Odysseus asserts that Neoptolemus can confidently treat Philoctetes like an animal, he can lie to him, handle him by force, anything to get the bow. He calls Philoctetes a “­scary tramp from the cave” (­Soph. Phil. ­145–​­146), who is at one with the gnarly vegetation, untamed animals, and the rocky stones all around, a body “­not lived in by men,” just a shell of a human being (­we may paraphrase it that way), a human who is erēmos, “­lonesome/­lost” (­Sophocles Philoctetes 228). Odysseus suggests to “­hunt” Philoctetes for his bow (­Philoctetes ­838–​­839). These early introductory scenes raise the audience’s anxiety and worry over what Odysseus will do to Philoctetes, and how much he might hurt him. Will Odysseus really treat Philoctetes like a monster? Will he behave the way he did 113

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when he visited the Cyclops on his island, whom he pitilessly maimed with a burning beam of wood, told him he was “­­no-​­one”, and laughed?14 Odysseus’ negative portrayal of Philoctetes chimes with narratives of his travels in the Odyssey and explorations there. Perhaps Odysseus sees this infection as a form of body horror that now informs his impetus to reduce him to the bestial or monstrous. Perhaps it is a strategy, intentionally numbing himself to the horrible acts he is about to do, for the greater good of the Trojan war, to steal a wretched man’s only ­bow—​­we don’t know.15 Odysseus argues to create the belief that Philoctetes is no longer human, as it is his experience that these transformations can happen: for example, there is a fragment of another (­unnamed) Sophocles play, believed to have dramatized the Odyssean Circe episode, has Circe addressing Odysseus: “­you shall no longer talk in human fashion with this person” (­­Lloyd-​­Jones 1996, 365), a result of the actual transformation. Odysseus’ future exploits color our vision of this episode, foreshadowing his ingenious acts of violence and bullying. Odysseus will become famous for triumphing over creatures who s­ hape-​ ­shift, who may be giants, or erotic goddesses, h­ alf-​­human, sirens, hellhounds, or monsters; he will ­out-​­trick the tricksters. Thus encased in Odysseus’ negative associations, the plot of Philoctetes exists under a dome of fragility and always impending attack. But Philoctetes’ own lengthy ­self-​­explications invite our sympathy, invite audiences to read Odysseus in a colder light, and consider his cruelty. Philoctetes tells us he is “­­become-​­wild” (­ἀπηγριωμένον, Philoctetes 226) because of the neglectful abuse (­ὑβρίσθην, Philoctetes 367)­16 by the army, the very people who were supposed to take care of him. He knows what he looks like; his damaged body is unwieldy, painful and unpredictable, and Philoctetes throws its heft in their faces as graphic proof of what they have done to one of their own. What started with an illness, first a burden that hampered the hero’s progress, is now an argumentative weapon. His body in a state of flux, “­­boundary-​­dissolving” (­Worman 2020, 22), and unbecoming, flows into an embodied critique of static and unreconstructed Greek military masculinity. Philoctetes represents the ­un-​­training and diseducation of an Achaean body, an example of “­inverse kalokagathia” (­Weiler 2002, 15),17 built up by political ideologies of health, wealth, and masculinity, and undone by rhetorics of their opposite. Encased in that is a kernel of critique ­vis-­​­­à-​ ­vis the “­successful” men of his former cohort who are still physically able to embody those Greek values that he has left behind: instead of crumbling in shame that he is not like them, Philoctetes turns around, as if to tell the other men “­shame on you”—​­especially Odysseus, whose lies and trickery he despises most of all. From a state of exclusion to a site of embodied resistance and simultaneously, of defeat, Philoctetes’ outlook ­slip-​­slides from being disposable and disposed of, no longer belonging, to a principled decision never again to belong. His fall from grace led him to evolve toward a new taxonomy of life. His aphasic cries of pain, which are the climax of the play, and the unpredictable force of illness that inhabits and drives him into involuntary movements, expound the horror and panic about i­ ll-​­functioning bodies which is a larger theme in Sophocles’ oeuvre (­other examples are Ajax’s hallucinations, or withering plagues in the Theban plays), and we shall now briefly consider in more detail.

The Illegible Body in Context with Greek Tragedy Aside from Ajax, Philoctetes must also be read in parallel with Tereus, Sophocles’ tragic dramatization of Tereus’ animal transformation into a bird. Its narrated image of Tereus only able to warble and twitter away alone on a desolate rock is lodged in a landscape similar to the Lemnos of Philoctetes and the myth’s lurid treatment of the loss of a human tongue begs comparison 114

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with Philoctetes’ infamous cries of παπαῖ, / ἀπαππαπαῖ, παπαππαπαππαπαππαπαῖ (­Sophocles Philoctetes ­745–​­746). Or, in Tempest’s rendition: AHHGHGGH. KITKAGH. FFFFARGH. KAKAKAKGHGH (­Tempest 2021, 78). Scholars have already discussed Philoctetes’ loss of speech, its place within the text of Sophocles, and its philosophical and cultural interpretation.18 This slurry, screechy abandoning of mannerly articulation is the ultimate unlearning of what you were ­taught–​­language. Yet, the ­nonsense-​­cries (­I no longer think the term “­animal cries” accurate) also seem like a distraction, a loud noise (­literally) that overlays and masks some of the text’s subtler points about what it means to have a living, changing body, and to exist on the margins unseen. Tereus presents the tragic, dark, and uncouth side of psychedelia, the lament and the sorrows of spliced selfhood. Here, the body becomes a gateway to metamorphic intoxication gone wrong, a punishing absurdity, entrapment, a nightmare of a doomed escape. As literal theater of transformation, the text carries a dual trope of the human body and its transitions as drama. There is also Sophocles’ Inachus, a dramatization of Io’s metamorphosis. Barely any of it remains, except for one line with the single word: polypharmakos (­Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2369). This happens to be the Homeric epithet of Circe, that medical woman who dispenses such drugs that users experience their bodies ­shape-​­shift. Philoctetes’ tale is the obverse of that: ­drugs—​­a ­plant—​­can help him turn back from the edge of animality, where the pain drives him, to stay on the articulate side of pain. These transformations of the flesh, and escapes into alternate physicalities, ­slip-​­sliding embodied selves, ultimately remain insoluble and mysterious, murky to the analytical eye, and somewhat illegible. We may apply Halberstam’s notion of “­the Illegible”, and its power to conceal surprises, acting as a node of resistance to i­nstitutional-​­cultural structures. Becoming illegible is of course a departure from the known and the expected; but an arrival? Not always, not necessarily, and in fact, arrival is not the point so much as the seizing of autonomy. A perfect illustration of that is Philoctetes’ refusal to let the Greek army take his body under their orders, right after a dramatic seizure has displayed the extent of Philoctetes’ illness for all to see. Instead of wishing himself to be fixed and mended, Philoctetes allows pain to pierce through his consciousness and allows unintentional cries to flow through his speech. He allows himself to be caught in a state of physical difference, and his thoughts to become momentary vehicles of the flaring, ephemeral deathwish that comes with excruciating bodily pain. “­Don’t take things personally that I said while in great pain” (­Philoctetes 1195), he grunts, both explaining his ­self-​­contradiction and asserting himself, to a baffled chorus of Greek sailors who are utterly crestfallen and confused. Why doesn’t he want them to take care of him? The chorus of Philoctetes seems nearly deliberately obtuse in their failure to grasp Philoctetes’ motivations, simply qualifying his choices as flawed and “­wrong.” In truth, Philoctetes embodies the ­un-​­binarization of their preconceived normal/­pathological dichotomy, and by the same token, he embodies the unfamiliar, sketchy, and illegible. “­Illegibility,” Halberstam (­2011, 6) writes, “­has been and remains, a reliable source for political autonomy.” Halberstam stresses the umbrage, darkness, and discontent that coexist with the queer unfolding of your self into yourself as yourself, rather than into that which other people have wanted and trained you to be. “­Launched from places of darkness, experiences of hurt or exclusion; darkness is the terrain of the failed and the miserable,” Halberstam (­2011, 98) writes. There is no shortage, either, of temperamental darkness in Sophocles, no shortage of disappointments, of breakdowns and disownings, be it the camaraderie of the army (­Ajax, Philoctetes), the support of a family (­Antigone, Electra), or loss of the sense of belonging with a social top set (­Trachiniae and the Oedipus plays). Darkness itself, Halberstam posits, is a defining ingredient of queer aesthetics (­Halberstam 2011, 97). To escape the disciplinary matrix of social control, the illegible subject 115

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may choose temporariness over longevity, contingency over permanence, or a “­sideways” growth along parallel lines, rather than upward and onward. The hero’s “­choice not to choose ‘­life’ situates him in radical opposition to modes of masculine respectability but also gives him space to expose the contradictory logic of health, happiness, and justice within the ­post-​­welfare state,” Halberstam (­2011, 90) writes about Irvine Welsh’s Renton (­of Trainspotting). It’s a figure whose presence, like a textual palimpsest, we also hear in Tempest’s Philoctetes, who grimly thinks about what it would be like for him to come back to civilian society: And I’ll be sketchy as anything, (­PULSE) hear a dog bark or something and I’ll stand up fast, knock the whole table over, and they’ll say it’s all right, it’s all right, but when I’m gone they’ll laugh, (­PULSE) they’ll complain about the smell, they’ll say I frighten their wives. No rocks, no palms, no (­PULSE) no bush, just big clean cars and televisions and sitting at home in an empty/ room. (­Tempest 2021, 74) Tempest’s modern Philoctetes, like Welsh’s Renton, refuses to purchase the mandatory “­televisions” and thereby buy into a life of rotting away in domestic passivity. Sophocles’ Philoctetes stands in a kind of queer, ancestral, ­blueprint-​­like relation as structural forebear and c­ haracter-​­archetype to Tempest’s: become illegible, and you will evade the normative gaze, but a happy ending is still very far from reach. “­While failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” (­Halberstam 2011, 3). Or, to put this the other way around: queer ­self-​­reinvention, resistance, and refusal to perform toxic patterns of normative correctness certainly do contain the seeds of healing, vitality, liberation, and emancipation. Yet, as we recognize this pattern in Philoctetes, this archetypal story also demonstrates how truly hard and painful the road to unlearning received ideas can be, and how tragic.

The Greek Art of Failure Halberstam’s concept of an “­art of failure,” applied to Greek tragedy, enables us to shift the focus away from tragic endings, and, by the same token, away from the anxiety of divine wrath, away from the moral fable, the cautionary tale, and the fear of dire consequences. The notion of an art of failure trains the critical eye not on the end of tragedy but on the middle: on tragedy’s ­slip-​­sliding, muddy and moving parts, its creative processes and ­side-​­products, embodied fluxes, and the momentary emergences of new thoughts and new meanings. It’s a chance to look beyond Classics’ legacy discussions of hamartia and “­the blame for Greek tragedy.” It’s an invitation to start focusing more on the art, and less on the failure.

Suggestions for Further Reading I recommend especially ­Chapter 3 of Halberstam 2011 for an exposition of all the concepts discussed in this chapter. Willis 2010 is particularly useful for a crisp conceptual overview of topics such as filiation, descent, inheritance, the erotics and violence of generational change, and their value as metaphors in Greek cultural thought, and in modern critical theory. On illness, social exclusion, the normal and the pathological, and considerations on Philoctetes in these parameters, see Sontag 2001.

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Notes 1 The Dionysia were both ­pan-​­Hellenic (­Stewart 2017) and ­Atheno-​­centric (­Finglass 2017), in that the plays “­advertised” Athenian civic ideology (­Friedrich 1996, ­264–​­265) but at the same time subverted it (­Goldhill 1987). On Sophocles’ Philoctetes specifically, consult Woodruff 2012. 2 A discussion about weapons, body, and self in Ajax is Weiberg (­2018, ­67–​­71). On Ajax’s mental states, see Nooter 2009. On the ideology of Greek heroic masculinity in poetry, a foundational and key study is Nagy 1999 (­first ed. 1979). 3 On the flows of sympathy and disgust, and physical pain on stage: Budelmann 2007. 4 On the structural functionalities of the memory of an absent hero, cf. Michelakis 2002, 163ff. 5 For an analysis of Philoctetes and Gorgias on theatrical deception, see both Falkner (­1998) and Worman (­1999). On Odysseus in Greek tragedy, see Montiglio (­2011, ­9–​­12). 6 On creative taxonomies of masculinity and euergesia in Philoctetes is Kosak 1999, 63ff. 7 We may compare Oedipus’ ­self-​­regard as he goes about verbally recreating himself in Oedipus Coloneus, limping, blind, aged, impoverished and exiled (­Oedipus Coloneus ­8–​­9 and 590). A discussion of exile in both Oedipus Coloneus and Philoctetes (­in Italian) is Guidorizzi (­2008, 204). 8 For more on Neoptolemus’ character growth and persuasion in the play, see Billings 2021, Blundel 1988, and Beye 1970. On the ­self-​­disciplining and educated handling of pleasure, consult Foucault 2012 (­first published 1976) ­Chapter 3: “­Enkrateia,” for a classical scholarly engagement with Foucault’s Enkrateia, see Winkler 1990. A queer reading of Philoctetes is Leonardi 2011. 9 On Odysseus’ subordination of Neoptolemus, and the importance of persuasion in Philoctetes, see Billings 2021, ­134–​­144. 10 A discussion of Athenian men’s sexual behaviour and its rhetorics as it relates to notions of the model soldier and the Athenian model citizen is Winkler 1990, 1­ 76–​­179. 11 “­The story is ‘­vulgar’ and ‘­murky’ because it reads the master/­disciple relationship between Socrates and Plato (...) according to erotic codes,” writes Willis 2010, 347ff, q.v. for more detailed discussion of Derrida. 12 Compare its representation in Aeschylus Choephoroi (­Libation Bearers) ­631–​­634; Apollodorus 1.9.16; Herodotus 6.138.­1–​­4. Background and an interpretation in terms of Greek culture and spirituality in Segal 1999, ­294–​­295. 13 Euripides’ Cyclops is set on Sicily, an island associated with cyclopes and various other monstrous creatures in mythology. On this, the most u­ p-­​­­to-​­date analysis at the time of this writing is Hampson 2021. 14 Newton 1983, 139 argued that in displaying Odysseus’ brutal treatment of the giant, the Cyclopeia showed Odysseus’ own monstrous side. 15 On metamorphosis in the fragments of Sophocles, see Hahnemann 2012, 1­ 76–​­179. 16 Also see Aristotle Nichomachaean Ethics 1148 b ­19–​­31 for Aristotle’s theory of regressive brute states, and abuse as possible cause. 17 On negative kalokagathia in ­Pseudo-​­Aristotle Physiognomics, see Wrenhaven 2012, 52. 18 A succinct summary is given by Thumiger 2019, 9­ 8–​­99, and her references in note 23.

Works Cited Beye, Charles Rowan. 1970. “­Sophocles’ Philoctetes and the Homeric Embassy.” TAPA 101: 6­ 3–​­75. Biggs, Penelope. 1966. “­The Disease Theme in Sophocles’ Ajax, Philoctetes and Trachiniae.” Classical ­Philology 61: ­223–​­235. Billings, Joshua. 2021. The Philosophical Stage: Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blundel, Mary Whitlock. 1988. “­The Phusis of Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes.” Greece & Rome 35: ­137–​­148. Budelmann, Felix. 2007. “­The Reception of Sophocles’ Representation of Physical Pain.” American Journal of Philology 128: 4­ 43–​­467. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Falkner, Thomas M. 1998. “­Containing Tragedy: Rhetoric and ­Self-​­Representation in Sophocles’ “­Philoctetes”.” Classical Antiquity 17: ­25–​­58. Finglass, Patrick J. 2017. “­Sophocles’ Ajax and the Polis.” Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 34: ­306–​­317.

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Francesca Spiegel Foucault, Michel. 2012 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Friedrich, Rainer. 1996. “­Everything To Do with Dionysos? Ritualism, the Dionysiac, and the Tragic.” In Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond, edited by Michael S. Silk, ­257–​­283. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goldhill, Simon. 1987. “­Civic Ideology and the Great Dionysia.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 107: 5­ 8–​­76. Goldhill, Simon. 2011. Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guidorizzi, Giulio. 2008. Sofocle: Edipo a Colono. Milan: Mondadori. Hahnemann, Carolin. 2012. “­Sophoclean Fragments.” In A Companion to Sophocles, edited by Kirk Ormand, ­169–​­184. Malden, MA, Oxford and Chichester: ­Wiley-​­Blackwell. Halberstam, J. Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hampson, Lauren. 2021. δι᾽ ἀμφιτρῆτος αὐλίου: Thematic Parallels between Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Euripides’ Cyclops. PhD Dissertation, University of Kansas. Kosak, Jennifer Clarke. 1999. “­Therapeutic Touch and Sophokles’ Philoktetes.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 99: ­93–​­134. Kyriakou, Poulheria. 2011. The Past in Aeschylus and Sophocles. Berlin: de Gruyter. Leonardi, Gian Pietro. 2011. “­Philoctetes and Antibodies, or the Vanishing Acts of Unruly Queer Bodies”. In Fascination of Queer, edited by Stefano Ramello, 8­ 7–​­97. Leiden: Brill. ­Lloyd-​­Jones, Hugh. 1996. Sophocles, Vol. 3: Fragments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Michelakis, Pantelis. 2002. Achilles in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montiglio, Silvia. 2011. From Villain to Hero: Odysseus in Ancient Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Nagy, Gregory. 1999 (­first edition 1979). The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Newton, Rick M. 1983. “­Poor Polyphemus: Emotional Ambivalence in Odyssey 9 and 17.” Classical World 76: 1­ 37–​­142. Nooter, Sarah H. 2009. “­Uncontainable Consciousness in Sophocles’ Ajax.” Animus 13: 7­ 4–​­89. Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY. Schein, Seth L. 2013. Sophocles: Philoctetes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Segal, Charles. 1999 [1981]. Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles. Norman, OK: ­University of Oklahoma Press. Sontag, Susan. 2001 [1989]. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Stewart, Edmund. 2017. Greek Tragedy on the Move: The Birth of a Panhellenic Art Form c. 5­ 00-​­300 BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Telò, Mario. 2018. “­The Boon and the Woe.” In The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, edited by Mario Telò and Melissa Mueller, ­133–​­152. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Tempest, Kae. 2021. Paradise. London: Pan Macmillan. Thumiger, Chiara. 2019. “­Animality, Illness and Dehumanization: The Phenomenology of Illness in Sophocles’ Philoctetes.” In Classical Literature and Posthumanism, edited by Giulia Maria Chesi and Francesca Spiegel, 9­ 5–​­102. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Weiberg, Erika L. 2018. “­Weapons as Friends and Foes in Sophocles’ Ajax and Euripides’ Heracles.” In The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, edited by Mario Telò and Meillsa Mueller, 6­ 3–​­78. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Weiler, Ingomar. 2002. “­Inverted Kalokagathia.” Slavery & Abolition 23: ­9–​­28. https://­doi.org/­10.1080/ ­0144039X.2022.2063231. Willis, Ika. 2010. “­Eros in the Age of Technical Reproductibility.” In Derrida and Antiquity, edited by Miriam Leonard, ­342–​­369. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winkler, John J. 1990. “­Laying Down the Law: The Oversight of Men’s Sexual Behavior in Classical Athens.” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by Froma Zeitlin, John J. Winkler and David. M Halperin, 1­ 71–​­209. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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9 QUEER MUSICALITY IN CLASSICAL TEXTS Tom Sapsford

Much work has been done by traditional scholars to better understand the precise mechanics, acoustics, and rhythms of ancient music performances. Reconstructions of the melodies and harmonics originally an integral part of ancient poetry, but now absent from the preserved texts, have all contributed to our understanding of (­predominantly) Greek ­song-​­culture. Collections of ancient scholarship on music’s workings and receptions have additionally expanded our understanding of ancient Mediterranean sound worlds in a traditional historical and philological ­manner—​­what I would call taking a “­straight” approach. This chapter proposes in addition that it can be equally rewarding to take a “­queer” approach to studying ancient music: i.e., a contrary and unproductive one ­or—​­more ­precisely—​­a barren, ­non-​­productive, ­non-​­reproductive one. Moreover, I shall argue that the very act of listening for ancient ­Greco-​­Roman music is in itself a queer endeavor: a perverse desire to capture a ­sound-​­world now lost, but tantalizingly perceptible through meter, performance histories, and ancient musical writings. To do this, I shall first explore how queer musicologists have drawn upon familiar myths (­the Sirens’ song, Orpheus), discourses (­the dangers of music and musical innovation), and figures (­principally Sappho) from classical antiquity to formulate ideas on modern music’s queer potential. I then offer some ways for hearing queer affect in Greek and Latin poetry by using scholarship on queer temporality (­Freeman’s “­temporal drag,” Muñoz’ “­queer futurity,” Halberstam’s “­queer time and place”) to appreciate the ­non-​­normative resonances of some Sapphic, Ionic, and galliambic verses.

Hearing Queerly As Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter have noted (­2019, 1), whereas we see the sights and smell the smells, we hear sounds. This creates a linguistic turn that keeps “­sense and object distinct via a divide that can be traced all the way back to the two words’ separate ­Indo-​­European roots (*kous-​­ and *swen-​­).” Thus, for an anglophone readership at least, the desire to hear and the thing sounded are linguistically and conceptually divided, unbridgeable, unachievable. This schism between a desiring subject and its object of desire encapsulates a current present in “­queer” as a hermeneutic (­i.e., a way of perceiving beyond the bounds of normativity), and present too in Classical Studies (­i.e., the investigation of sources produced in the ­pre-​­modern Mediterranean), which may, or may not, reveal the material circumstances of the cultures that produced them. 123

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Charles Martindale points out in Redeeming the Text that even (­or perhaps especially) with the case of the historically accurate performance of “­early music” by the likes of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and others a central question remains: “­how could we know, exactly, how such music was, ‘­then,’ ‘­received’? …With music the metaphysical ‘­­text-­​­­in-​­itself’ is more evidently a mirage” (­1993, 9). To put it b­ luntly—​­can Mozart be heard in the same manner by his contemporaries as by later ears acquainted with Metallica? Furthermore, how much more imperceptible are the distant sound worlds of ancient Greece and Rome and how further diminished is our ability to hear them? The act of queer listening has the potential to liberate us from a search for authenticity and e­ ssence—​­what Martindale terms the textual m ­ irage—​­and instead proposes that it is the very process of “­hearing the sound” that, although bound to fail, can be illuminating not so much for what it can empirically tell us about antiquity, but more so in what this ­un-​­hearable music can reveal about the effect of an ancient text upon our sense of selves. But what of queer? Some further definition is helpful. Historically, the term first appears in print in Gavin Douglas’ 1513 Scottish translation of the Aeneid, where in the introduction to book 8 of the poem proper, it describes an insult hurled by an itinerant peddler to one of his horses “­the cadgear... calland the...culroun full quer” (­Æneid VIII Prologue ­42–​­43). Growing out of the early meaning as used by Douglas in the sixteenth century of “­peculiar” or “­eccentric,” the term has remained a nebulous descriptor for something n­ on-​­normative, and eventually gained connotations of perversion and (­homo)­sexuality in the United States in the 1910s and onwards. Notably, the word “­queer” was reclaimed by activists in the 1980s and 1990s as a term to ­self-​­identify in the political resistance provoked by the HIV/­AIDS crisis and subsequently engendered a field of scholarship which imagined “­queer” as a process of literary, political, and cultural analysis. The work of Sedgwick (­2008), Butler (­1990, 1993), Bersani (­2009), Halperin and Traub (­2009), and Halberstam (­2005) offers “­queer” as a way of examining the multiplicity of n­ on-​­normative meanings that a text might offer up to an audience or audiences. And as with the auditory process, a long glance backward to the linguistic roots of queer is also useful for thinking about ­non-​­normative approaches to antiquity. The term, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, also has an ancient etymology: “­The word ‘­queer’ itself means across—​­it comes from the ­Indo-​­European ­root -​­twerkw, which also yields the German quer (­transverse), Latin torquere (­to twist), English athwart” (­1993, xii). Under this formulation queer becomes relational: a positionality between reader and text in which the queer subject approaches, views, and hears the textual object obliquely, from an angle, and eccentrically. Here also lies queer theory’s key move of reading (­or listening) against the grain; what Sedgwick calls an overidentification on the queer reader’s part with some element of a text which resonates on a deeply personal level: …objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival … a visceral ­near-​ ­identification with the writing I cared for, at the level of sentence structure, metrical pattern, rhyme, was one way of trying to appropriate what seemed the numinous and resistant power of the chosen objects. (­Sedgwick 1993, 3) Our strong identification with the writing produced in classical antiquity (­either as straight or queer readers) can often lead into a false sense of familiarity with the distant cultures we study. Yet “-​­twerkw”-​­ing back on ourselves, what can be gained by acknowledging the lack of mastery, 124

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knowledge, and power we have over our own grasp of antiquity? One could rather place the entire field of Classical Studies under what Jack Halberstam posits as queer failure: The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being. (­Halberstam 2011, 88) While ranging from the vivid to the mundane the sources which Classics analyzes and forms its conclusions upon are scattered and fragmentary. This false awareness of a holistic body of information is what Page duBois has described in Sappho is Burning as, “­our need to constitute antiquity as a whole …to produce…some wholeness that resembles what we wish were our own” (­1995, 20). While duBois demonstrates that the ancient world cannot be definitively comprehended, such failure is further compounded when encountering its music. For arguably all that remains of the muses’ art are the printed words which quietly reside within modern editions of ancient authors’ works. Halberstam’s queer failure accepts loss in return for something “­other” (­e.g., the alterity so entangled within queer and queerness). How then can a queer approach bring life, love, art, and being into play? I shall now sketch out some of the ways in which the field of musicology has drawn on classical tropes in developing its own queer approaches before taking a closer listening to some classical texts through a queer theoretical ear.

Classical Notes in Queer Musicology As with many scholarly fields after the onset of the AIDS epidemic and the reclamation of the word “­queer” as a political and theoretical term, musicology examined lesbian and gay composers, musicians, and audiences seriously for the first time. Subsequently, it began to explore how certain forms of music can produce “­queer” ­affect—​­understood variously as feelings of disorientation, alienation, ­non-​­normativity, and displacement. As part of its historical work, musicology used “­queer” as a more inclusive lens for acknowledging and analyzing the contributions of composers and performers with histories of homoerotic sexuality such as Tchaikovsky, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, Ethel Smyth, and Kathleen Ferrier (­to name but a few) for whom the labels “­homosexual,” “­gay,” “­lesbian,” and “­bisexual” did not accurately suffice either culturally or personally. While such histories were sorely needed in a field in which there was a misguided and obfuscatory belief “­that music transcends ordinary life and is autonomous of social effects or expression” (­Brett and Wood 2001, 3), this scholarship at the same time drew on the postmodernist thought of Foucault, Butler, Halperin et al., to posit a framework for engaging with the ­non-​­normative desire engendered by certain sound worlds. Queer musicology in its more theoretical sense then investigates the relation between receiver and text, and furthermore asks how this relation incorporates a n­ on-​­traditional pleasure/­pain matrix. Suzanne G. Cusick frames the issue briefly but powerfully: What if ears are sex organs? What if m ­ usic-​­making is a form of sexuality in which (­as in some other forms of sexuality) the sites of giving and receiving pleasure are separated? (­Cusick 2006, 79) Yet as Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood argued in their controversial entry on “­Lesbian and Gay Music” (­2001) for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the historical and theoretical 125

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are often overlapping and entwined. In a later essay Wood, for example, draws equally on historical detail and on phenomenological analysis to identify and discuss a queer vocal quality in classical music that she terms “­Sapphonic,” which challenges binaries both of gender and sexuality. Wood opens her essay with an anecdote in which the mezzo Emma Calvé attempts to create a rapprochement between lovers Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien, by singing Gluck’s Orfeo (­itself created for the particularly queer sonic register of a castrato singer). Wood’s argument leads from the historical lives of queer individuals, such as Barney and Vivien, toward the identification of a particular timbre of sound and the affect it can engender in certain listeners: I speak of this voice metaphorically: as vessel of ­self-​­expression and identity, channel for a fluid stream that “­speaks” for desire in living human form, a lure that arouses listening desires… I call this voice Sapphonic for its resonance in sonic space as lesbian difference and desire… Its refusal of categories and the transgressive risks it takes act seductively on a lesbian listener for whom the singer serves as messenger, her voice as vessel, of desire. (­Wood 2006, 28) It is Judith Peraino, however, whose work most closely connects the fields of musicology and queer theory with ­Greco-​­Roman materials. Her 2006 monograph, Listening to the Sirens, traces a long history of queer hearings from Homer to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Peraino’s opening chapter lays out twin vectors present in sources from archaic Greece to the Italian renaissance: the dangerous power of music to engender sexual desire in its listener on the one hand, and technologies of discipline that allow for such dangers to be mitigated on the other. First comes a discussion of the musical powers associated with three divinities: the liberatory and transgressive force of Dionysus’ music; Apollo’s music as a form of regulation and control; and Pan’s less resolvable noise, which for Peraino particularly “­manifests the queer sexual potency of music” (­2006, 22). Then follows a discussion of two n­ on-​­normative musicians: Sappho, lover of other women, and Orpheus, drawing on the tradition that he instituted pederasty as a practice among the men of Thrace (­Ovid Metamorphoses 10. ­83–​­85; Phanocles fr. 1). Peraino then provides a detailed discussion of ancient philosophical and religious writings that focus on acceptable forms of music both in terms of content and appropriate means of performance by comparing Plato’s dialogues (­Laws, Republic, Timaeus) with the early Christian writers Clement of Alexandria, Arnobius, and Augustine. But it is the encounter between Odysseus and the Sirens from Odyssey book 12 that provides the central moment whereby Peraino can detail the pull between desire and discipline, and elucidate what it might mean to hear queerly. The Sirens’ song fills its listener with such a powerful desire that one would simply abandon one’s corporeal self to spend eternity listening to its ­honey-​ ­sweet magic. Odysseus, memorably, avoids such destruction through a form of corporeal discipline that entails his being bound tightly to his ship’s mast and stopping up the ears of his crew so that they might sail past the seductive sound without danger. As Peraino points out, this moment was fundamental to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s conception of the “­dialectic of enlightenment,” wherein music becomes separate from enchantment, and so an allegorical division occurs between Odysseus, the intellectual, remote from the labor performed by his unintelligent crew. According to Peraino, Odysseus may experience the Sirens’ song, but the effect of its sound is not so much as to provide straightforward knowledge (­à la Horkheimer and Adorno) but rather to engender a questioning of the self: The Siren episode… is not a story of genius, craftiness, transcendence, or authorial ­self-​­reflection. Rather, it is a story of how Odysseus, while assuming he can control his 126

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transgression, gives in to a sexualized ­self-​­curiosity and, importantly, a desire to become otherwise, to question and to be questionable, to risk s­ elf-​­obliteration in music. This is a desire to become queer to oneself. (­Peraino 2006, 18) Hearing music queerly for Peraino then stems from its etymological relation to the Latin quaerere “­to question,” which guides the aims of “­queer” in her project so as “­to refer to an unsteady state of questioning one’s sexual identity; this state of questioning implies that there might not be a conclusion, but also that ‘­identity’ might not be restricted to ‘­sexuality’” (­2006, 6). In the remainder of this essay, I turn to some classical texts and find moments where queer theory (­particularly the body of scholarship on queer temporality) can open up ancient poetry to new interpretations through listening. I begin with Sappho, leap to Euripides’ presentation of Dionysiac worship in the Bacchae, and end with Catullus’ poem on Attis’ ­self-​­castration for the Mother Goddess, Cybele. While discussing this triad I make no attempt at imagining each passage’s melody (­perhaps Attis had one, perhaps not) but rather focus on the tonality, mode, or tuning of each piece (­not present in the texts as we encounter them in the ­twenty-​­first century, but vividly described by a number of ancient sources) and their particular meters (­also vividly discussed by ancient sources), which remain, however, preserved for us through the syllable lengths of the ancient words on the modern page. Indeed, by mining these words for the sounds ­contained—​­what Shane Butler has termed the “­ancient phonograph” (­2015)—​­I shall also endeavor to follow Sedgwick’s queer call, cited earlier, to access my texts’ numinous and resistant power at the level of metrical pattern.

Hearing Sappho Backward Arguably the most explicit ­Greco-​­Roman statement on music and its values (­both affective and ethical) comes from Plato’s Republic book III, in which Socrates and Glaucon discuss which forms of song ought to be admitted into the ideal city (­398d). Handy for the analysis ahead is Plato’s division of song into three components: words (­logos), tunings (­harmonia), and rhythm (rhythmos). We have plentiful examples of the first component and moreover embedded within the song’s words are the metrical patterns which make up its third component, its rhythms. Knowledge of the second element, a song’s attunement or mode (­best conceived as a particular set of intervallic relationships), comes to us indirectly in two ways: first, via technical discussions by ancients such as Aristides Quintilianus; and second, through the associations of character that seem to get persistently, and somewhat stereotypically, attached to them by philosophers and ­such—​­we, for instance, do much the same with our two musical modes: major (­happy); minor (­sad). Aristoxenus (­fr. 81) tells us that Sappho composed in the Mixolydian mode, a tuning particularly associated with lamentation and mourning. Aristoxenus also comments that this mode was borrowed from Sappho by the tragic poets, and notably, in the Republic the Mixolydian is disallowed from Socrates’ ideal city for being ­dirge-​­like (­thrēnōdēs). Such a characteristic certainly seems in concert with the longing and ­loss-​­driven tone of much of Sappho’s remaining words. Caution, however, is needed when summoning a Sapphic soundscape to our mind’s ear. As Luigi Battezzato argues (­2021, ­129–​­130), while it is likely that the scales and harmonies of Sappho’s music were preserved across long stretches of t­ ime—​­indeed our ancient musical writings postdate her poetry ­considerably—​­it is unlikely her music itself survived in its original form even to the classical age. Moreover, just as Sappho wrote in a variety of meters in addition to her namesake (­the Aeolic stanza known as the Sapphic), likewise it is probable that different modes were employed for her different ­song-​­types. For example, just as the songs in Sapphics are most likely 127

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solos to lyre accompaniment (­perhaps in Mixolydian mode), the epithalamia, or wedding hymns, were likely sung by a chorus but to what instrumentation and in what mode precisely eludes us. Loss, mourning, and melancholia are persistent leitmotivs running through the body of queer theory and drive the thinking of Edelman (­2004), Love (­2007), Bersani (­2009), and Ahmed (­2010), among others. However, it is Elizabeth Freeman’s work on drag that opens up a useful space for exploring the queerness of Sappho’s lyrics. For Freeman “­drag” is not simply a form of disguise, play, and ­fabulocity—​­a queeny queerness which (­via Butler) has the potential to alert us to, if not actually disrupt, the continual citation process of gender. Drag can also be a force that works in the opposite direction. Thus Freeman posits a backward pulling drag with: all the associations that the word “­drag” has with retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past on the present. This kind of drag…suggests a bind for lesbians committed to feminism: the gravitational pull that “­lesbian,” and even more so “­lesbian feminist,” sometimes seems to exert on “­queer.” This deadweight effect may be felt even more strongly twenty years after the inauguration of queer theory and politics, in the wake of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, legalized s­ ame-​­sex unions, and the L Word. (­Freeman 2010, 62) Freeman’s lesbian feminist gets “­cast as the big drag,” pulling queerness back to ideas of essentialism and s­ ingle-​­issue politics. This twofold drag backward: both temporal (­as in retardation) and conceptual (­as in conservative) can be usefully applied to Classics’ big (­L/­l)­esbian, Sappho. Here is a poet who in many ways expresses conservative values in terms of social milieu, mores, and poetic conventions. Yet even as a voice heard outside of her ­sixth-​­century context, the ancients’ tenth muse can come across as a party pooper: the drudge singing her dirges (­in Mixolydian mode no less), for whom there is no transformational redesign, nor any “­it gets better” moment. Rather, we can hear, feel, and sense in Sappho’s songs her persistent, resistant loss and longing. Sappho’s longing for those lost from her immediate vicinity, such as Anaktoria (­16), Mika (­71), Atthis (­131), and other unnamed girls (­e.g., 31, 94), is echoed in our own loss of Sappho’s voice both in terms of the gaps in the songs that have survived millennia as well as the many more that have not. Yet, however much is absent in terms of detail, the weight of Sappho’s desire is paradoxically made more vivid both through these textual losses on the one hand, and the force and peculiarity of some of her word choices on the other hand. In poem ­49—​­“­I desired you, Atthis, once upon a time; a small child to me you seemed, ­un-​­charming”—​­once more we see the temporal drag back to “­once upon a time” (­palai), and then in the second line the ­non-​­normative allure of Sappho’s beloved, who is described as immature (­smikra) and graceless (­acharis)—​­a word commented upon by the ancients for its peculiarity. The backward pulling content of Sappho’s song is complemented by its rhythm. The metrical family to which the Sapphic stanza belongs, known as the Aeolic, is the most conservative metrically as it allows no change in syllable count through contraction or resolution and, as has been much remarked, most likely shows its close relation to an earlier ­Indo-​­European syllable counting system (­Lidov 2009). Thus Sappho’s ­song-​­form belongs within a traditional fixed style, itself connected to some temporally ­pre-​­historic ancestor. Yet within its conservative framework, Sappho manages to create distinct rhythmic patterns internally within her fixed cola. For instance in poem 31, Sappho’s famous description of her destructive and frustrated desire at losing her beloved to another man, the first caesura in the verse’s cola most often throughout the poem occurs after the fourth syllable: 128

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φαίνεταί μοι …phainetai moi …he seems to me (­4) ἔμμεν᾽ὤνηρ …emmen’ ōnēr …a man who is (­4) ἰσδάνει καὶ …isdanei kai …and he sitting (­4) More normally this cut, where a word ends ­mid-​­limb, occurs equally after the fourth and fifth syllable in Sappho’s Aeolic lines (­Battezzato 2021, 133). Notably, Sappho retards this more familiar interchange of limb cuts until the stanza which most deeply expresses her pain: έκαδε μ᾽ ἴδρως …ekade m’ idrōs …and sweat upon me (­5) παῖσαν ἄγρει …paisan agrei …seizes me whole (­4) ἔμμι, τεθνάκην …emmi tethnakēn …am I, I have died (­5) Much ink has been spilled on the extent to which Sappho is lesbian, ranging from the textual (­whether the participle describing the beloved in fr. 1 is indeed grammatically feminine) to the more hermeneutic (­viz. Foucault): namely, can lesbian sexuality per se be relocated to a s­ ixth-​ ­century Lesbian setting? Yet the force of Sappho’s poetry is undoubtedly amplified by its distance: whether the separation between subject and object, or that between source and its receiver. Indeed this chasm is arguably what makes Sappho’s music queer rather than solely its homoerotic content. Thus, as Melissa Mueller writes, it is the affect which Sappho’s lyrics engender that we might most usefully conceive of as “­queer:” the way that erōs as a force and a feeling captured in and created by her poetry eludes classification by inverting hierarchical relationships between self and other, human and environment, active and passive. (­Mueller 2021, 37) Sappho resonates with her audience (­us and the many past listeners drawn by her call of “­long ago”) through deep time and deep space. The brevity and visceral weight of her lyrics create affect in stereo through which we resonate erotic loss alongside Sappho, and experience a loss no less powerful for Sappho. The elemental force of eros that lies within her ­slight-​­looking words, like an undertow, unleashes an emotional pull which can confound and make us feel quite alien to ourselves. “­Eros shook my guts like a gust felling mountain oaks” (­47); did the earth move for you, too?

Out on the Mountain (­1): Fast Forward If the tuning of Sappho’s Mixolydian music is lamenting and ­dirge-​­like (­a call back to a lost life or love) the tonality we encounter in Dionysus’ music as performed by his worshippers in Euripides’ Bacchae is frenetic and orgiastic (­a call to ecstasy, life to be lost in the service of the god’s honor). Likewise, if there is a dragging temporal weight to the lesbionic that delays and distances, the temporality of the upcoming passage is the fleet ­utopia-​­oriented tempo that José Muñoz has termed “­queer futurity:” “­a modality of ecstatic time in which the temporal stranglehold …describe[d] as straight time is interrupted or stepped out of” (­2009, 32). The gaze beyond the banality of the ­present—​­toxic to queers disqualified from majoritarian ­belonging—​­toward future horizons offers a freedom and space not yet envisaged: a gaze which looks beyond the confines of LGBT 129

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assimilation and neoliberal thought. Muñoz concludes his landmark work Cruising Utopia with a final rousing call for us to step out of ourselves: We must vacate the here and now for a then and there. Individual transports are insufficient. We need to engage in a collective temporal distortion. We need to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present…Willingly we let ourselves feel queerness’s pull, knowing it as something else that we can feel, that we must feel. We must take ecstasy. (­Muñoz 2009, 185) While specifically referring to the song “­Take Ecstasy with Me” by Magnetic Fields, Muñoz (­2009, 186) grounds his discussion of ekstasis in Lacan, Heidegger, and Plotinus. Yet to queer scholars of classical texts, Muñoz’ call to action might equally bring Euripides’ Bacchae to mind with its presentation of ecstatic and ectopic worship. At the opening of Euripides’ play, the god Dionysus relates that he has struck the Theban women both out of their minds and out of their city, driving them up to the mountains, where, as two later messenger speeches inform us, the ecstatic women perform queer miracles (­the suckling of animals on their breasts and the parthenogenetic production of water, wine, milk, and honey) and queer violence (­the rending of King Pentheus’ flesh, while he is dressed as a female worshipper of Dionysus). Although the ending and ultimate significance of the Bacchae has divided ancients and moderns alike, it certainly warns of the danger of denying civic space to communal ecstatic worship. I am not so much interested in forging connections between Muñoz and Euripides in terms of space, for in the Bacchae the liminal space of Mount Cithaeron clearly becomes analogous to the public restrooms, bathhouses, dive bars, and dance clubs which form Muñoz’ landscape for cruising utopia. Rather it is queer futurity’s media, namely disco, 90s queercore, and punk by musicians of color, which provides the most useful point of juncture. With mentions of the edgy disco of LaBelle, Klaus Nomi, and Grace Jones and the music of anarchic punk bands such as X, Germs, and Gun Club, Cruising Utopia’s soundtrack has significance for its driving (­almost hypnotic) beat and for its exotic and dissonant tonality. Thus we can make some general analogies between these two genres of contemporary music and ancient Dionysiac worship: namely, the trance state created by disco dancing and that engendered by Bacchic ritual (­as discussed, for instance, by Bremmer 1984); or the similarity between the act of sparagmos (­ritual ­flesh-​­rending) and the violent handling of individual bodies by the ­revved-​­up crowd in punk rock’s mosh pit. More specifically, however, the Bacchae is a text that likewise discusses and incorporates music relevant to ecstatic worship in terms of rhythm and tone. This occurs most explicitly and interestingly in the opening chorus of the tragedy when the play’s band of Asian maenadic women enter the theater and assemble in its dancing space: From the land of Asia leaving sacred Tmolus I rush with sweet toil for the booming god and with easy exertion, y­ ee-​­ hawing for Bacchus. Her in the street, her in the street, her inside, let her be out there and proffer her tongue to no i­ll-​­omen. I shall sing of the eternal rites of Dionysus (­Bacchae ­64–​­71)

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In their opening stanza, the women’s musicality is brought to the fore as they sing about rushing and hymning, and describe performing the cry particular to their guiding divinity, Dionysus: yeehawing (­euadsomena). Yet at the same time, they also draw attention to place and affective state. Like the punk bands discussed by Muñoz, these performers are ethnically marginal, coming, as they tell us, to Thebes from ancient Lydia located on the western coast of Asia Minor. A further and significant dislocation occurs in the second stanza when the chorus exhorts the city’s women to be out of place (­ektopos) and leave their homes for the streets. This o­ ut-­​­­of-​­placeness has become a key marker of queer subjectivity both in Muñoz and in the writing of Jack Halberstam (­2005), but the concept holds a similarly eccentric force in ancient Greek, where its close cognate atopos can signify in its more figurative meaning “­out of place; strange paradoxical; unnatural, disgusting, foul” (­LSJ). In the closing antistrophe, the chorus sings of the invention of the tympanum and its relevance to the worship of both Dionysus and the Mother Goddess Rhea: Chamber of the Curetes and sacred hollows of Crete, birther of Zeus, in whose caves the t­riple-​­helmed Corybants devised for me the circle taut with ox skin, and in vehement raving mixed it with the s­ weet-​­shouting breath of Phrygian pipes and placed it in Rhea’s hands to bang to the yeehaws of the Bacchae (­Bacchae ­120–​­129) In this passage we get twin creation stories: first, Zeus’ birth in the Cretan cave hidden away from his murderous father, Kronos; second, the creation of the ­hand-​­held ­ox-​­hide drum, the tympanum, creating a sound which will drown out the divine baby’s cries threatening to reveal his location (­though in most tellings it is the clashing of the Corybants’ armor which creates this sonic smokescreen). Queer here also is the detail of Phrygian pipes, which links this Mount Ida in Crete, the birthplace of Zeus, to Mount Ida in Phrygia, associated with another Mother Goddess, Cybele, and the percussive worship of her devotees, the galli, who honor their goddess both with strikes on their tympani and strikes to, and thus castration of, their genitalia. Moreover, the tonal harmonics of Rhea’s Phrygian music are described elsewhere as a ­non-​­normative, disruptive force (­as we saw Plato consider Sappho’s Mixolydian). For example, Aristotle remarks in the Politics that Socrates was wrong to accept the Phrygian mode into his ideal city while banning the pipes this tuning is typically played on “­since both are fit for orgies (­orgiastika) and impassioned (­pathētika)” (­1342b). Whereas the tone and melodies mentioned in this passage are indirect to us, audible only in our mind’s ear through mentions of their dunamis “­force” or dynamics by Aristotle and others, the text as we have it does contain a more direct impression of the disruptive rhythms it hymns. The entry of the maenads is written in Ionics, seemingly the meter of cult hymns to Dionysus but also reflective of the ­out-­​­­of-­​­­placeness—​­usually described with the vague and troubling term “­Eastern” by ­commentators—​­associated with the god and his worshippers. E.R. Dodds describes this rhythm as having two main variations: the straight Ionic (⌄ ⌄ ⎯ ⎯ ⌄ ⌄ ⎯ ⎯) and the anaclastic or broken form (⌄ ⌄ ⎯ ⌄ ⎯ ⌄ ⎯ ⎯) which provides a “­swifter and more emotional rhythm” (­1960, 72). These Ionics 131

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also allow, through resolution, two shorts to replace a long syllable creating rhythmic units in which words rush along at breakneck speed, reflecting, I would argue, the driving tempo of queer futurity. For instance, in the lines above which mention the tympanum and Phrygian pipes, the metrical unit for “­birther of Zeus” starts with a highly unusual run of seven short syllables: Dĭ ŏg ĕn ĕt ŏr ĕs ĕn āu lōi. Moreover, in the song’s final section as the chorus describes the god upon the mountain and the various Dionysiac ­marvels—​­the eating of raw flesh, ­free-​­flowing milk, wine, and honey, spontaneous flames, and once more the sound of Phrygian cries and the ­deep-​­rumbling ­tympanum—​­the metrical rhythm becomes increasingly complex and anarchic prompting Dodds to comment that it is “­so uncertain …the beginner had better not trouble with it,” as “­glyconic rhythms lead over to the final breathless gallop of paeons and dactyls in which the rush of the maenads is described” (­1960, 73). The language in this comment nicely highlights the parallels between the rush of frenzied rhythms used by Euripides to describe ecstatic Dionysiac worship and the rush of Muñoz’ queer clubbers, mentioned earlier, as their (­pharmaceutical) ecstasy kicks in.

Out on the Mountain (­2): Jump Cut The final passage to be heard through the ear of queer musicality shares a similarity of mode with the opening chorus of the Bacchae in that it too mentions the tonalities of Phrygian harmonics; however, the more nebulous nexus of Ionic rhythms heard in the Bacchae now comes further into focus with the use of a specific meter associated with the ­gender-​­variant acolytes of the great Mother Goddess, Cybele. These male priests, who castrate themselves for their protecting deity, are called the galli; their signature meter, the galliambic, was understood by ancient metricians as being comprised of two feet of Anacreontics with the last syllable removed: ⌄⌄⎯⌄⎯⌄⎯⎯|⌄⌄⎯⌄⎯⌄⎯

The one complete and extant poem which preserves this meter and a description of the priests’ mythical leader Attis’ removal of his genitals is Catullus 63. As Attis arrives in Phrygia, Catullus describes him performing his corporeal devotion, then ruminating on the various age and sex identities which have brought them to this moment of ­self-​­castration, before Cybele the a­ ll-​­powerful goddess sets loose her fierce companion lions on her latest devotee. The connection between gender variance and musicality is made explicit within two lines of verse toward the start of the poem: etiam recente terrae sola sanguine maculans, niveis citata cepit manibus leve typanum And then staining the earth’s soil with fresh blood, roused, she grabbed the light tympanum with snowy hands (­63.­7–​­8) Here, directly after the removal of his penis which bloodies the ground, Attis’ gender transformation is mentioned for the first time with the feminine participle citata, “­roused” replacing the previously masculine participles, vectus (­1), stimulatus (­4), which are used to denote Attis in the lines just preceding. Notably, Attis’ first act after emasculating herself is to grab the tympanum, a musical instrument intrinsically connected, as we have just seen, to Phrygian music and Cybele herself. As Attis calls out to her fellow devotees, she again stresses the sonic landscape sacred to the wild mountain mother when summoning her companions to the place: 132

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ubi cymbalum sonat vox, ubi tympana reboant, tibicen ubi canit Phryx curvo grave calamo where the cymbal’s voice sounds, where the tympani bellow in reply, where the Phrygian piper sings deep with his curving reed (­63.­21–​­22) A queer eye may first be drawn to the bentness of the pipe’s reed, which flags Sedgwick’s deep etymology for queer: the ­Indo-​­European “-​­twerkw,” with its sense of athwart and to twist (­1993, xii). But a queer ear may also detect how the arrangement of the words used to describe the wild percussion actually sounds out the act itself: ŭbĭ cȳmbălūm sŏnāt vōx, | ŭbĭ tȳmpănă rĕbŏānt Thus, the second foot of this line echoes the first ‘­ŭbĭ ­cȳmbă-​­ …ŭbĭ ­tȳmpă-​­’ both through its syllabic length quantities and its close rhyme, and consequently performs a sonic bellowing back, reboant, in ­real-​­time. Moreover, the sequence of four short syllables running across tympănă rĕbŏant amplifies the quick thrumming of a drum roll made possible on this particular instrument. Indeed, the Latin Grammarian Caesius Bassus describes the cluster of short syllables in the galliambic’s second foot as specifically done to increase the sonic tremble, “­so that the verse, which is sacred to the mother of Mount Ida, vibrates more” (­Grammatici Latini 6.262). Last, and most relevant to the discussion of queer temporality, is a rhythmic feature in the galliambic’s first foot where through anaclasis (­a switch of long and short syllables) we get a swinging syncopation: two Ionics: ⌄ ⌄ ⎯ ⎯ ⌄ ⌄ ⎯ ⎯ become: ⌄ ⌄ ⎯ ⌄ ⎯ ⌄ ⎯ ⎯

Consequently, the distinction between three distinct beats (­short + short| long| long) gets blurred or swung into something more “­galloping” (­long + short + long + short), to borrow Dodds’ earlier descriptive. This metrical figure, technically known as a ditrochee, (­cȳmbălūm ­sŏ-​­in the line above), gets noted by the ancients for its wanton quality. For example, the author of On the Sublime (­41) singles out this metrical figure as broken, agitated, and degenerating into dance rhythms while Aristotle in Poetics associates it with s­ atyr-​­play and dancing (­1449a ­21–​­22; 1459b ­37–​­1460a). The relocation of these two syllables makes the Ionic metrical pattern out of place (­ectopic), resulting in the verse’s sound being ­off-​­beat and thus out of time (­extemporal). The rhythmic regularity which would be present in a “­straight” ionic tetrameter is thrown ­off-​­kilter, unsettling the division between the binary forms of syllable length (­long/­short) in a way that disrupts the clarity of the sex and gender binaries. For although from the moment of castration, Attis becomes grammatically feminine (­citata), she is described as notha mulier (­27) “­not a genuine woman” by the poet, and Cybele refers to Attis using grammatically male pronouns hunc (­78), qui (­80) toward the end of the poem. Consequently, we cannot find any neat division between bodily and grammatical gender in the poem nor much clear distinction between long or short syllable clusters as the galliambics gallop by. This rhythmic link between time and space with its long and short syllables at the poem’s ­micro-​­level can be further extended to sexuality and gender at the m ­ acro-​­level. Attis has abandoned their urban world for Cybele’s Phrygian groves, entering a new violent landscape of gender variance and choppy temporality. This environment displays some relevance to Jack Halberstam’s three key claims from In a Queer Time & Place: 133

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…first, that oppositional cultures… are not symmetrical to the authority they oppose; second, that the relations between sexuality and time and space provide immense insight into the flows of power and subversion within ­post-​­modernism; and finally, that queers use space and time in ways that challenge conventional logics of development, maturity, adulthood, and responsibility. (­Halberstam 2005, 13) For a queer audience reading/­hearing/­receiving Catullus 63 in a p­ ost-​­modern setting, this poem offers time(­s) and place(­s) to think through power and subversion. The dynamics of the soundscape described, the meter’s driving ­off-​­kilter force, and the text’s adoption of feminine pronouns all provide us with a detailed description of an envisioned gender transformation (­and one that had historical correspondence with the actual priests of Cybele) and so provide an explicit subversion of G ­ reco-​­Roman gender and power norms. Yet, drawing on Halberstam, this power is not symmetrical to the authority it opposes: the sex/­gender system apparent in ­Greco-​­Roman cultures has a hierarchy and fixity that cannot be undone by this poem or our p­ ost-​­modern reading of it. Moreover, even within the poem itself the goddess Cybele will not view Attis as she views her own self in terms of gender. Yet, to circle back to Peraino’s reception of the Sirens’ song, this poem can make us question and be questionable (­to the point of obliteration) through provoking us to investigate closer the relationship between sexuality, space, and time. Midway through poem 63 Attis collapses, and lying on the Phrygian shore recalls the life stages that have brought her to this moment: Will I be gone from forum, wrestling and running g­ rounds -​­the gymnasium? Wretched, oh wretched, must my mind still now turn this over and over? Indeed what type of form is there that I shan’t have taken on? I, a woman; I, a young man; I, a teenager; I, a boy… (­­60–​­63) In these lines, while mourning her former existence, Attis clearly articulates the linkage between normative G ­ reco-​­Roman sexualities and the particular times and locations connected with them. Previously adhering to the cultural conventions of pederasty, Attis as a beloved ephebe attracts the admiration of desiring men (­the one form notably not adopted in this list of identity genera). She is even addressed a line later as “­the flower of the gymnasium,” the bloom of youth being a common metaphor to refer to the time up until when such sexual subjectivity was considered acceptable. Notable though is that sexuality, place, and time (­specifically Attis’ age) are absolutely enmeshed in the ­Greco-​­Roman language of desire. Yet Attis has stepped out of this system, renouncing sexual desire for religious devotion. Attis should have transitioned from a desired male youth to a desiring male adult, yet instead jumps out of this narrative to another place. Attis therefore eschews what Halberstam terms “­metronormativity” (­2005, 36), namely the urban locations of homonormative/­homoerotic ­life—​­exemplified here by both the Greek gymnasium and the Roman f­orum—​­for the wilds of Phrygia; as she does so, she also steps out of what Muñoz calls “­straight time” (­2009, ­24–​­26) and Freeman “­chrononormativity” (­2010, 3). If the meter of Attis’ poem uses dislocation of time and space to create an affective state in its listener more generally, this textual moment reveals a specific syncopated temporality in particular through its vivid jump cuts between places, “­forum, wrestling and running grounds, gymnasium” (­60). Such abrupt location shifts are then emphasized further by Attis’ switch of bodily forms, sexual perspectives, and gender positions, which get piled up as an unconnected heap of pronouns and nouns: 134

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Ego mulier, ego adolescens, ego ephebus, ego puer, I, a woman; I, a young man; I, a teenager; I, a boy… (­63) Attis’ ­shore-​­side complaint both soliloquizes and interpellates us as listeners as it crucially asks: “­must this be turned over perpetually?,” querendum est etiam atque etiam (­61). Well, perhaps yes. Indeed, by using a queer theoretical framework both to view and to attempt to hear Greek and Latin poetry, a process of questioning arises which allows us to tap into and further explore the ­non-​­normative valence in three classical texts. This repeated questioning can yield a variety of answers in response to the interconnection of time, place, sex, gender, sexuality, and the subject. Euripides’ choral ode offers the thrill of losing oneself through ecstasis or sparagmos as both Dionysus’ miracle and his retribution; Sappho’s and Attis’ complaints respectively emphasize the force of the alien: not only alterity from society and authority (­the historical/­social “­queer” of the early twentieth century) but also the alterity to oneself that queer theory’s reclamation of that term entailed in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Yet, just as forcefully, such a questioning articulates precisely our r­ elationship—​­whether as “­straight” or “­queer” receivers of classical t­exts—​­to the scattered and fragmentary Greek and Latin sources. This que(­e)­ry states loudly and clearly our misguided hopes of wholly understanding ancient Mediterranean culture. Classical philology, then, is one further queer, yet potentially fruitful, art of failure.

Suggestions for Further Reading For work on what we know about ancient music and how it sounded see West (­1992) and Andrew Barker’s ­two-​­volume collection of ancient musical writings (­1989) and D’ Angour (­2019) on reconstructing ancient music. The standard works on meter are West (­1982) and Raven (­1998), but for the beginner D’Angour’s blogpost, “­mnemonics for metre” is a ­user-​­friendly and comprehensive introduction. The above works mainly focus on Greek music and poetry so for s­ ong-​­culture in the Roman world see Habinek (­2005) and the significance of meter in Latin poetry see Morgan (­2011). Butler and Nooter’s volume (­2019) on sound in antiquity offers a detailed engagement with a range of Greek and Latin sources; for the process of receiving texts see Martindale (­1993) and for the advantage of hearing over viewing antiquity and the role of theory I have found duBois (­1988) particularly useful. For work on queer musicology Brett, Wood, and Thomas’ collection Queering the Pitch (­2006) is the best place to begin; for classical topics in queer musicology see Peraino (­2006). The three works detailed in this essay on queer t­ emporality—​­Halberstam (­2005), Muñoz (­2009), and Freeman (­2010)—​­can be complemented by Dinshaw (­1999), Love (­2007), and Tongson (­2011). For a recent case study of metrical analysis through a queer theoretical lens see Youd (­2022). Last, though not drawing explicitly on queer theory, Butler (­2015) and Gurd (­2016) bring sound studies into the field of Classics and draw from much of the same scholarship as queer theorists in each of their fine studies on sound and sound effects in classical literature.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barker, Andrew. 1984. Greek Musical Writings, Volume I: The Musician and his Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Tom Sapsford Barker, Andrew. 1989. Greek Musical Writings, Volume II: Harmonic and Acoustic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Battezzato, Luigi. 2021. “­Sappho’s Music and Metres.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, edited by Patrick Finglass and Adrian Kelly, ­121–​­134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bersani, Leo. 2009. Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bremmer, Jan N. 1984. “­Greek Maenadism Reconsidered.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 55: ­267–​­286. Brett, Philip, and Wood, Elizabeth. 2001. “­Lesbian and Gay Music.” GLSG Newsletter for the Gay & Lesbian Study Group of the American Musicological Society 11: ­3–​­26. Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth, and Thomas, Gary C., eds. 2006. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge. Butler, Shane. 2015. The Ancient Phonograph. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. Butler, Shane, and Nooter, Sarah, eds. 2019. Sound and the Ancient Senses. London: Routledge. Cusick, Suzanne G. 2006. “­On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight.” In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, ­67–​­84. New York: Routledge. D’Angour, Armand. 2015. Mnemonics for Metre. Accessed January 29, 2022. https://­www.­armand-​­dangour. com/­­mnemonics-­​­­for-­​­­greek-​­metre/. D’Angour, Armand. 2019. “­Hearing Sound Through Modern Ears.” In Sound and the Ancient Senses, edited by Shane Butler and Sarah Nooter, ­31–​­43. London: Routledge. Dinshaw, Carolyn. 1999. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, ­Pre-​­and Postmodern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dodds, E. R. 1960. Bacchae. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DuBois, Page. 1988. Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DuBois, Page. 1995. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gurd, Sean Alexander. 2016. Dissonance: Auditory Aesthetics in Ancient Greece. New York: Fordham University Press. Habinek, Thomas N. 2005. The World of Roman Song: from Ritualized Speech to Social Order. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halperin, David M., and Traub, Valerie. 2009. Gay Shame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lidov, Joel. 2009. “­The Meter and Metrical Style of the New Poem.” In The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues, edited by Ellen Greene and Marilyn B. Skinner, ­103–​­117. Hellenic Studies Series 38. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. Love, Heather. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Martindale, Charles. 1993. Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, Llewelyn. 2011. Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mueller, Melissa. 2021. “­Sappho and Sexuality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, edited by Patrick Finglass and Adrian Kelly, 3­ 6–​­52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Peraino, Judith. 2006. Listening to the Sirens : Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Queer Musicality in Classical Texts Raven, David, S. 1998a. Greek Metre. London: Bristol Classical Press. Raven, David, S. 1998b. Latin Metre. London: Bristol Classical Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2008. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tongson, Karen. 2011. Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. New York: New York University Press. West, Martin L. 1982. Greek Metre. Oxford: Clarendon Press. West, Martin L. 1992. Ancient Greek Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wood, Elizabeth. 2006. “­Sapphonics.” In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas, 2­ 7–​­66. New York: Routledge. Youd, David. 2022. “­Orestes: Polymorphously ­Per-​­Verse: On Queer Metrology.” In Queer Euripides, edited by Sarah Olsen and Mario Telò, 1­ 55–​­164. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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10 ENCOUNTERING ABSENCE Queer Traces, Ghosts, and Performance Otherwise Marcus Bell

What happens when you respond to a performance? What if you were not, necessarily, there when it took place? For instance, I know you performed last week. You did something endurance based, and messy; I heard that you danced, you sang a ­poem—​­an old story ­about—​­but I was not there to see it. I know you wore very little, that you had on a lot of eyeliner, all the way up to ­your—​­but, I missed it. What was this performance doing without me? Which is to say, what of the gestures, affects, sounds, the historical, political, theoretical, and physical worlds it conjured? I am not so interested in what your performance or its constituent elements meant. Instead, I am interested in a set of poetic, ethical, and ontological concerns: what actions, affects, and situations did you perform, how did your performance subtend or provide the means to decompose certain forms and categories, what did it upset, unsettle, or break?1 I am interested because these are affective concerns: I am full of backward feelings, melancholic, nostalgic, all cut up that I didn’t see you perform, that you did this work without me. But more than anything else I am concerned that something of your performance has gotten into me, even though I wasn’t present, while it happened. In this chapter, I am going to explore the ways that some queer receptions of tragedy have an effect in the past, present (­and future) even for those who were not there to see them “­live.” When I talk about queer performance I am talking about both performances made by queer and trans ­folks—​­in warehouses, on national stages, on TikTok and Instagram, on the street, and behind closed ­doors—​­and performances that queer, that disrupt, make new worlds, or that unmake the world as it is. In many ways, then, I understand queer performance to be an acceleration of the features we might associate with performance more broadly; it would be impossible to imagine performance without queer performance, after all. But queer performances happen in a different key. Often without institutional support, hemmed in by the logic of the closet and by national ­homo-​­ and ­hetero-​­normativities, queer performance is precarious, unrecorded, un(­der)­archived. Queer performance is inflected by historical catastrophes, losses and disappearances too: the HIV/­AIDS crises led to the deaths of so many queer artists whose absence is keenly felt, and queerphobic laws still curtail and criminalize both queer forms of expression and attempts to queer or unmake the violent hierarchical systems in which we live. I focus on the queer performance of tragedy for a few reasons. Queer performances facilitate modes of knowing, recognition, and belonging among minoritarian subjects, which outlast the DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-14 138

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duration of the live event (­Muñoz 2019, 99). And tragedy often engages with the disruption and (­re)­negotiation of aesthetic forms; I wager such disruption indexes an unresolved or emergent dispute within the transforming historical conditions under which the performance is staged.2 Moreover, queer performances of tragedy articulate affective and political concerns that are knotted up with broader queer activism, study, and theory: how do we recognize one another, how do we deal with grief, and in what ways can we make demands collectively in the present for a world ordered differently? What do we do when we fail or when everything comes crumbling down around us? Throughout this chapter, I take on these questions to argue against the notion that performance is a singular event that happens in a specific place and time for a specific group of ­people—​­who needed to be there in order to feel and be affected by it. This allows queer performances of tragedy to be understood in complex relation without the need for a straight or linear model of time, not singular stable events in a “­chainmail of receptions” playing out diachronically and synchronically but shifting c­ o-​­functional assemblages that participate within broader networks of diffuse and variously situated a­ ssemblage-​­performances, events in the arts, social sciences, in history, politics, technology, p­ op-​­culture, and thought (­Ward 2019, 515). As I write, and remember acts of performance I witnessed (­rarely) or encountered in images, videos, texts, and other bodies, I render a thesis at a juncture, affecting the assemblage of those ­assemblages—​­knitting together convergent but sometimes fractious fields of study, namely, classical reception studies and queer studies. The critical apparatus and intellectual moves made in this paper are informed by Black feminist thought and queer of color critique and many of the epistemologies employed were developed through collaboration (­academic, discursive, and ­practice-​­based) with the editors of this volume, the Queer and the Classical project, and Critical Ancient World Studies.3 Three notions from queer theater and performance studies are relevant here: the trace, the ghost, and the speculative set of relations named the otherwise.4 These concepts give the chapter three interrelated sections. First, I lay out some of the debates around liveness and ephemerality from queer theater, dance, and performance studies over the last 20 years. I expand this analysis by considering both Johanna Hedva’s the Greek cycle (­­2012—​­2015) in the second and Trajal Harrell’s Antigone Jr./­Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (­2014) in the third. What I am after is not what queer performance can tell us that is different from “­normative” performance but instead, what queer performance brings to the fore and what possibilities and potentialities it opens up, i.e., what it does. My thesis is that queer theory’s understanding of ­performance—​­as an ontologically unstable, and complex, temporal “­­putting-­​­­into-​­relationship” of live and ­non-​­live ­elements—​­has shifted the ground of performance studies and so asks Classicists committed to queer engagements to reconsider that discipline’s performative turn.

Querying the Present: The Case Against Liveness In this section, I look at ephemerality. After interrogating an influential view from theater and performance studies, which has contoured the performative turn in Classics, I outline two entangled critiques of this slippery term, offered by queer theorists José Esteban Muñoz and Lauren Berlant. In the first instance I work to undo the strict ­event-​­ness and ­live-​­ness of performance and in the second query the stability of the present. In the landmark Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (­1993), Peggy Phalen theorized a fraught but seductive ontological distinction between live and ­non-​­live: writing that “­performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/­space frame can have an 139

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experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward” (­Phalen 1993, 194. See Ellis 2020, 157). As Phalen says elsewhere in the text, Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. (­Phalen 1993, 146) Consequently, Phalen wagers that performance happens live in the moment, and the things which record, document, or archive ­it—​­performances’ ­residues—​­are ontologically distinct from performance itself. These residues are not unimportant, but when we talk about them we talk about a residue: a photograph or a script, a video or a review and we are not, according to Phalen, talking about performance. A wave of performance and live art preceding Unmarked’s publication influenced this reading. Conceptual art, happenings, postmodern dance and the Judson Memorial Church, punk, FLUXUS, and the proliferation of performances in the streets, corridors, buses, offices, and warehouses all emphasized performance outside of the traditionally demarcated theater space, revealing the always already performative nature of sociality. This work very often only happened once in a specific location and left little or no physical trace. Take for example the work of Joseph Beuys, Zoe Leonard, Pope L., or Bruce Nauman which circulates through video recordings, images, or oral histories. The modes of performance they employed ­de-​­emphasized text, did away with scripts, and confronted the literary ­canon—​­preferring to use the performance score or the impulses of those gathered to generate work. This caused a crisis in the ways that academia had been handling performance: what was to be the object of knowledge production if not the live event of theater or its reconstitution from material remains? What now that those remains were severed from live performance? In this moment, performance studies began to contend with the questions that Classicists had often been worried about: what do I do about this performance which happened without me which I have some remnant(­s) of but which I did not see live. How can I write about and produce scholarship on something which I cannot hold, touch, ­re-​­construct, or check out at a library? Enter Phalen, who claims that what we engage with, when we engage with performance, is not the performance, but its documentation, it’s n­ on-​­live, ­not-​­actual echoes. This is roughly where Classics and Reception Studies gets us in the performative turn. Take for example the introduction to Theorizing Performance (­2010) where the editors write, “[m]ethods of archiving, documentation and analysis have emerged from engagement with the source material and actual performances” (­Hall and Harrop 2010, 2). This distinction between performance and its archives, documentation, and analyses makes the same ontological separation between “­actual” performance and its implied “­­non-​­actual” remains. Furthermore, consider this quotation from Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy describing an ancient performance as, A dramatic event [that] happens in a certain space, in the presence of a given audience, and in a distinctive social, political, and cultural context. In addition to the words spoken by the performers, it involves a wide range of stimuli, visual and auditory alike, which fundamentally informs the spectators’ experience. (­Renaud and Hopman 2013, 18) The echoes of Phalen’s work are evident: performance happened, and we cannot know what people did on stage because the only way we’d know is by being there to see, ­hear—​­and I would 140

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­add—​­smell, touch, propriocept, introcept, and orientate ourselves toward or away from live performance in the moment. So what we are left with is a series of detailed analyses of performances’ ­non-​­live, inert, ­non-​­actual remains. Elsewhere, Phalen holds that writing can ­re-​­animate or ­re-​­imagine performance, but she also observes that doing so would change the nature of the performance, making it, perhaps, more illusive, more lost. Think of what this means for our understanding of the reception of ancient Greek tragedy in performance. Does it really amount to a series of essays, poems, performances and monographs that are not actually concerned with ancient performance but its remnants, with every act of reception only mangling, obscuring, and changing an originary, singular performance event? I believe that this point of ­view—​­though perhaps exaggerated for argument’s ­sake—​­is a consequence of the particular way in which performance is being theorized. And I am interested in finding ways to move on from this position. I believe that Muñoz offers us the first step forward. He suggests that Phalen considers the audience to be too much of a forgetting community, suggesting instead that performance’s affects and material remains can stay with a spectator even if they are fleeting (­Muñoz 2019, ­98–​­99). This matters for queers interested in performance for, in Muñoz terms, performances’ force lies in its ability to generate modes of belonging, “­knowing and recognition,” especially among minoritarian groups (­Muñoz 2019, 99). This keeps some elements of the performance alive and viable in its residues, because part of performance’s very existence is assembled by the folks who animate it, through their participation. Take for example the work of the late producer and musician SOPHIE who, in her song Just like we never said goodbye (­2015), sings, But then you called me up the other day/­I was shocked, but what could I say?/­And your voice exactly the same/­And it makes me feel, makes me feel/­Oh, just like we never said goodbye. Listening to this song, I am struck by its expression of one of griefs’ cruel ­tricks—​­it feels as if SOPHIE herself is still alive; suddenly, for a brief moment, all that loss and the distance between then and there, here and now is erased. In the same way that SOPHIE is shocked to hear the voice of someone she once said goodbye to, when I am listening to this song, and feeling, in the tones and vibrations of the music, SOPHIE’s ­presence—​­which sits alongside my memories of her live ­performances—​­the proximity shock she describes is redoubled: ‘­your voice exactly the same/­and it makes me feel […] oh, just like we never said goodbye’. For a second it feels as if SOPHIE might still be alive, still here, like we might still be able to see her perform again. Some affective vitality from her live performance remains in the s­onic-​­embodied residue it left behind. That residue is neither inert nor entirely distinct from the live performance which produced it. This phenomenon is diffuse, as each encounter with SOPHIE’s voice and even with the ­re-​­proliferation of the queer decompositional techniques they p­ ioneered—​­i.e., the diffusion of “­hyper pop” and PC music into the m ­ ainstream—​­tricks my brain into thinking again and again that they are still making music. It is just like we never said goodbye. But with each slip, I also ­re-​­encounter her death. I felt it when JSLOIPNHIE (­2021) was posthumously released. Even now, I move through these feelings when she is played on the radio or when I hear her in other artists’ work. I encounter her but lose something of myself every time I remember she is gone (­Butler 2006, 22). This might leave us wondering: how do we understand the present tense or the present moment? Is it one thing that everyone experiences together, is it even clear while it is happening that it is the present? How much of the past and the future seep into the now? Take the work of Lauren 141

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Berlant who confronted these questions in the ­field-​­shifting Cruel Optimism (­2011). Noting that the present is not an object but first a mediate affect, they move to consider the present as a disputed ­category—​­under constant ­revision—​­a temporal genre with shifting conventions, multiple experiences, and conflicting constitutions which emerge from the personal and public filtering of events “­whose very parameters (­when did “­the present” begin?) are also always there for debate” (­Berlant 2011, 4). Consequently, Berlant suggests that an event is not a singular thing which happens, but a part of what they call “­crisis ordinariness” (­Berlant 2011, 10), where multiple competing and conflicting affects, feelings, memories, and desires gather. The event is an assemblage of things within this zone: some parts cohere, becoming articulate or a­ ctual—​­some parts are live, ­living—​­and some are not live, dead, imagined, ­non-​­actual. In tragedy, the stability of, participation in, and ability to identify elements within this zone are at stake, as affective situations, intersubjective ideas, other events, or fantasies from the past return, or a vision of the future collides with the now, generating multiple unstable ontological statuses, muddling then and now here and there.5 In these scenarios, disputatiousness and inscrutability can also become normalized. This protracted state of disorientation and bewilderment is especially possible in queer life and performance, as in my experience of continual, reiterative, and extended encounters with SOPHIE’s ­present-​­absence.6 Thus, we could still ­say—​­if we really wanted ­to—​­that performance’s only life is in the present, but we would have to understand that the present is not a stable category, it mixes past, future, live, and ­non-​­live, into itself. And if we say performance is happening in the now, we must understand that the “­now” is firstly, affectively mediated; it is comprised of multiple conflicting histories, histories tracing backward, at the same time as they look forwards (­Campt 2020). We would also have to understand the social political and cultural contexts which structure a dramatic event are not coherent unities, but multiple, fricative, actual, and ­non-​­actual coalescent relationships. In this sense performance neither happens in a stable unified moment for everyone present, it is not a singular event which happened at one time or another; it is an arrangement of different elements which gather only for as long as they are ­co-​­functioning. This arrangement is political precisely because it is up for dispute and because its form, structure, and content depend on both the situated positionalities of the participants, their agency, and the power structures that shape and inflect them. In this reading the residue left by performance is not inert; instead, it contains a vitality of feeling/­affect that is, in and of itself, capable of inhabiting/­haunting us in a way that is difficult to disentangle from the very participation in a “­live” performance. That “­residue”, even if it is ­non-​ ­actual or n­ ot-​­real, is a component of the performance’s effect.7

Queer Performance and Ghosts: The N ­ on-​­actual/­Actual, Not Live/­Live, Absent/­Present, or Dead/­Living In this section, I am less concerned with what remains and more interested in the ­non-​­actual, or the performance of ­non-­​­­actuality—​­in other words, encountering absence in performance. I wager that ­non-​­actuality is often the space and modality of, and in which, queer performance operates. In the last section, I demonstrated that the ephemeral present already contains multiple times and tenses: past, present, and future. In this section, I observe what happens as performance spills out of the present. Thus, I explore how, like a gesture, ephemeral things can reemerge, reappear, and rework ­themselves—​­documenting the ways in which performance slips out of and jumps across different times and spaces in queer studies. Consequently, I will be thinking about some other slippages, between the live, the visible, the living, the a­ ctual—​­and their entangled antitheticals. 142

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Here I bring tragedy deeper into the fold by examining Johanna Hedva’s The Greek Cycle, specifically Motherload (­2012) to answer the question I asked at the top, again, in another way: how can an absent thing touch you? Take a moment to visit their website to see video footage and images of the performance, but do be aware the webpage and this section will contain references to and discussions of miscarriage.8 Hedva tells us in the essay which archives these works, Euripides is not a Genius I am, that the cycle “­is a series of four plays, based on Ancient Greek texts, that [they] wrote and directed, which served as a ­four-​­year long cathartic thrash” (­Hedva 2020, 3) In one sense the cycle might seem traditional: it is about ­re-​­writing texts and directing them. Yet, the method of ­re-​­writing is also figured in the cycle as a process of destruction, exhaustion, and exhibition, not preservation, translation, and transmission. Thus, what they signal by the term directing has more in common with live art than theatrical or dramatic acting techniques, 15. My Motherload script is 166 pages, all of which were tacked to the walls of the gallery, visible at all times, for the ­thirty-​­hour performance and a total of 160 hours as an ­installation—​­in a hallway in CalArts. To read the 166 pages out loud took six hours: the play was performed six hours a day, for five days in a row, with the entire script read each day. The performers, of which there were twelve, including me, were asked not to memorize their lines but instead to read them out loud and note any changes they made to the text by marking the script on the walls. So that the marks of thinking would be shown. I gave the direction that, over the course of the week’s performance the performers could read any words, lines, or role, begin and end anywhere, and do with their bodies whatever they wanted. My direction to one particular performer was: ‘­you’re trying to read with your body.’ (­Hedva 2020, 7) Here, Hedva creates what fellow live artist Tino Seghal terms “­constructed situations” (­Ferretti 2021). These situations are not focused on the individual artist but instead, on a commons assembled by the performance, and the performance space. Through these constructed situations, Hecuba is not r­ e-​­enacted but discontinuously r­ e-​­membered in various durational, impermanent, and partial ­non-​­linear acts of performance, giving the work a somnambulate, spectral quality. Hedva notes “­I’d wanted to make a world separate from our world but still embedded in it, which depicted suffering and grieving as a ritualistic but unknowable kind of working” (­Hedva 2020, 9). Consequentially, in Motherload the ­dream-­​­­ghost-­​­­spectral-​­absent is not separate from but instead a constituent part of the ­waking-­​­­live-­​­­present-​­living in a sticky and ­co-​­constitutive mesh. As in other acts of performance featuring text on stage, the text is made into a thing, placed within the scene of performance; unlike other acts of performance, without scripts, Motherload figures that thing as an active element of performance through its abjection. For, as the text is shredded the effect is that Hecuba/­Hecuba is being destroyed. Each falling page and crumbled sheet indexes a destroyed body and the ruination of the text actualizes the fall of Troy, the murder of all of Hecuba’s children, and Hecuba’s disintegration through grief. In this tragic affinity between text and body, “­inanimate” matter performs as it falls, tears, rips, and gathers in piles on the floor. And animate material, the human body, is performed via inanimate objects. Thus, inanimate objects signal one another in a lively way but also radiate with the violent process of making humans into things, or of the performance of thingliness. A sheet of paper performs a 143

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corpse through a performative simile, the process of destroying a text performs the destruction of a city. To be attuned to this collusion of t­ext-​­body is to note how performance sits and is situated between live and ­non-​­live ­elements—​­bringing together things that are alive and things that are not. Take the following description of the work from Hedva, Motherload is based on the Euripides tragedy Hecuba, which is the story of an old queen who’s had fifty children who are all killed in the Trojan War. The only things that happen in Euripides’s play are that Hecuba’s last two children still alive are killed, and she beseeches and supplicates the men around her for mercy, pity and ­explanations—​­but finds none. She is told, at the end, by a seer, that she’ll turn into a dog. Anne Carson, whose translation I used, said about Hecuba in an interview, ‘­She dies and dies and dies and dies but never dies,’ which, when I heard it, filled me with a deep, reverberating sound. (­Hedva 2020, 7) Something of death and the dead, something of the n­ ot-​­real, ­not-​­actual has gotten into, or embedded itself, in the real, the living, the live. In Hedva’s performance of this situation “­matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or otherwise ‘­wrong’ animates cultural life in important ways” (­Chen 2012, 2). This phenomenon of live and n­ on-​­liveness crossing allows us, in the words of Fred Moten and Rebecca Schneider, to experience the inter(­in)­animacy at work every ­day— ​­playing out in crisis ordinariness. Moten is interested in how the “­photographic” and the “­phonographic,” “­vision and sound,” the past and present, can be said to ghost and enliven each ­other—​­to interanimate one another (­Moten 2003)—​­Schneider thinks about how, in performances in which the past returns to the present, the past and present can deaden one another, or trouble the “­immediacy of things to themselves”—​­interinanimacy (­Schneider 2011; see also Noland 2020, 2). To see how this works, let’s come away from Hedva for a moment. In the dominant “­space[s] of heteronormativity” (­Muñoz 2019, 223) some or perhaps most of queer performance is always illegible, invisibilized, or lost to those outside its circle, but even sometimes to those within it. There is sometimes good reason for this. In certain places and times, visible queer performances are (­and put their performers) at risk. So they happen surreptitiously, leaving fleeting or covert traces. Take for example, as Muñoz does, Tony Just’s photographic project which documented public ­toilets—​­which may have been the site of queer public sex, before the HIV/­AIDs crisis. By scrubbing them clean and removing the physical traces, stains, scuffs, and other marks Just thereby ­re-​­doubles and marks the systematic processes by which queer sociality, history, and “­sexual citizenship” are erased by normativity. By recording this process, the pictures also reveal and provide access to “­a hidden queer history of public sex outside of the dominant public sphere’s visible historical narratives” (­Muñoz 1996, ­5–​­6; cf. Nyong’o and ­Chambers-​ ­Letson 2020, xxvi). Here, that which is no longer visible or is made invisible, by Just’s acts of ­performance—​­scrubbing and p­ hotography—​­are the lives and sexual encounters of queer people in the past. There is, in this act of scrubbing, an emphasis on folks who were once there having sex, who are no longer anymore. This refracts a performance of absence across multiple media and times: in the ghostly past of public sex, the act of scrubbing, and the photographs, but also in Muñoz writing, and in mine. Thus, performance extends and slips out of the once present into multiple instantiations of the now, via an inter(­in)­animacy that is m ­ ulti-​­material, m ­ ulti-​­animate, and ­multi-​­temporal. 144

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This brings us to think about the idea of loss or the idea of grief in queer performance, and in queerness, more generally. Elsewhere, Muñoz articulated the idea that, we can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost. Queerness is illegible and therefore lost, in relation to the straight minds mapping of space, queerness is lost in space or lost in relation to the space of heteronormativity […] To accept loss is to accept ­queerness—​­or more accurately, to accept the loss of heteronormativity, authorization, and entitlement.9 Thus, queerness is located not in an ­anti-​­normative move but in the negation of normativity: it is lost, not here, not actual, otherwise; not concerned with being but n­ on-​­being, or unbecoming. Importantly, this becoming lost, this unbecoming does not banish grief or grieving from the mix. It might even leave us wondering, as Paul B. Preciado does, in conversation with a dead friend: “­Do I belong more to your world than I do to the world of the living?” (­Preciado, 2013, 20). Remember how something of Hecuba’s situation had gotten into Hedva, even though they were not necessarily there together. Note how it is not text, reading, or writing that fills them with this deep reverberating sound, but Carson’s poetic interpretations, her own ­re-​­performance, of the dramaturgy of Euripides’ ­Hecuba—​­as an investigation of living while dead or dying but remaining alive. Here we find an example of affect jumping or leaping across time and ­space—​­as has been theorized by Sara Ahmed in the stickiness of emotion (­2014) or by Schneider in the jumping of affect through reiterative gestures and reenactments (­2011). Constituting, what we might ­call—​­after Derrida and ­Muñoz—​­a hauntology. The appearance of a spectral being, the a­ live-​­dead Hecuba, is animated through an encounter with the affective residue, experienced by Hedva, which is itself between ontological states, neither living nor dead, nor situated solely in one time: not past, present, nor future but a ­co-​­constitutive spectral mesh of each: Hedva, Carson, Euripides, Hecuba, Homer. I wager these ghosts, or this commingling ghostliness, comprise the vibrant matter of inter(­in)­animacy. This living deathliness is how an ancient, absent tragedy affects and animates Motherload. The ancient performance is never one singular event that stays put in the past, instead, it is a sticky, ghostly network of gestures, feelings, words, situations, and sounds that is multiply situated across various historically specific places and ­times—​­in ­flux—​­some live, some not. These networks speak to one another through the voice of the ghost, the ephemerality of gesture, and the crisis ordinariness of the present, because of, and not despite, these conditions. Holding onto the presence of ghosts and situating ourselves in their realm of (­­non-​­)­being and (­­non-​­)­actuality, does not require us to deny the effect of that which does vanish, or is lost. We cannot ignore the very r­ eal-​­life absences, vanishings, and deaths which happen in, through, and around performance or that are referenced explicitly by it. The emotional loss referenced by SOPHIE in “­Just like we never said goodbye” now spectrally indexes her own loss to the listener, exacerbating the tension in the lyric: it is “­just like” but not actually the case. Yet, to find more recuperative space here we can turn to the residues of performance again. Take the photos of Motherload on Hedva’s website: in one, a face presses against a mask, lipstick smears across them both; in another, performers stand in the ruins of the text, wigs askance, mouths open. We can watch the video montage of the work too. Someone is shredding a dictionary, shredding their knees on the floor, carving the space with a repeated swing of their right leg in an arc, back and forth, back and forth, back and up, in and over. These lines of choreography function in a similar way to the moments when the performer marking the text leaves traces of their thoughts as they read. As the dancers carve, shred, motor, and unspool space they leave their own material and immaterial traces: bits of paper, the ­non-​­visible c­ hem-​­trail of a gesture, the curve of 145

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a line drawn with the body, the outline of a thought. The photographs and videos inter(­in)­animate queer ­tragedy—​­queer life, liveability, and its systematic erasures. But these practices of tracing routes off the map of heteronormative life, and being, also gather something up, the crux of the problem and its unravelling, a question: how to survive together, how to build a more liveable future, together? Consequently, Hedva’s performance is loaded with ephemeral gestures which bring the dead back into the ontologically i­n-​­determinate state of ghostliness, gestures which deaden the living, producing specters. As queer of color performance scholar Nadia ­Ellis—​­who thinks with Muñoz, and responds to ­Phalen—​­has written, “­No visible trace, of course, does not mean zero trace” (­Ellis 2020, 157). The very practices of ­trace-­​­­making–​­–​­including writing, and gestural practices, which describes the fault lines, borders, the color line, that the performers negotiate and leap ­over–​­–​­allow us to answer the conjoined questions above, while activating a further set of ethical, political and poetic questions (­Ellis 2020, 156).
We can ask them now of Motherload: what are the performers tracing in their situational endurance tragedy? What do they jump over? Hedva writes, “­You can substitute the word ‘­Greek’ for ‘­Patriarchy’ and the meaning of The Greek Cycle won’t change” (­2020, 21). They continue, If nothing else is gleaned from the Greek cycle I hope that its audience felt, even as a wordless tremor, the cruel totality of the heteronormative gender binary that traumatizes every one of us. (­Hedva 2020, 21) I wager then that the series of lines the performers trace is an attempt to gather up the “­cruel totality” of the heteronormative gender binary, which is also the gender binary of colonial racialization, the designation of human against n­ on-​­human via the analytics of gender and race (­Hartman 2019), the production of thingliness in opposition to the construction of the human. But it is also an attempt to unspool that totality. This unspooling happens as Motherload performs inter(­in)­animacy beyond these categories, by performing both ­living-­​­­death—​­Hecuba’s being deadened or being made ­non-​­articulate, ­non-​ ­legible, ­non-​­actual while she is ­alive—​­and also the ­dead-­​­­living—​­in that the bodies of her children animate the paper strewn across the gallery space: a gathering and scattering of things. But also because Hecuba does not end up actually dying, there is no release from her condition, but instead she is told that she will “­turn into a dog,” thus extending the decomposition of live/­­non-​­live, animate/­inanimate, toward human/­­non-​­human without foreclosure. Under these conditions, in the distended state of tragedy, Hecuba occupies a queer position of being lost from the map of normativity through her grief, she is unmade through the systematic erasures and violence it enacts, but she also unmakes that very map. In Motherload the n­ on-​­foreclosure between the dead and living renders some tragic affects, some sense of having too much intimacy with inter(­in)­animacy. Thus, the performance might be said to reconceptualize the hierarchy of things as they are. For this tragic feeling is not all about inactivity. It often encourages action and ­animation—​­like the ­re-​­tracing of these lines and their gathering, in order to attend to some material loss. Consequently, we are left with a set of unanswered questions: what comes out of the “­cathartic thrash”? What can we do with this absence that touches us? How can deploy our being animated by inanimate things, affects, situations, and ancestors, and move toward an understanding of queer tragedy in contemporary performance

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that goes beyond the crisis ordinariness of contemporary life, allowing queers to build alternative worlds? This I address in the final section.

Performance Otherwise The previous two sections marked turns toward and away from what remains, via queer performance. They outlined that, performance is not contained simply within the present of the ­ephemeral-​­live, it extends through other materialities, via ­non-​­humans and (­­non-​­)­agential objects which can perform animately. Performance also stays in circulation through the transmission of materials, things, visual and embodied representations, and reenactments as (­or when) they vanish or fade. So we might now say, it is not despite ephemerality but because of it that performance moves (­us). But, what do I do, now that I know some of your performance did get into me, even though I wasn’t there, and now that I know the residue of performance is an animate, tentacular thing? We can (­re)­orientate ourselves with queer dancer and (­live) artist Trajal Harrell, whose speculative performance practice and critical choreographies suggest a network of c­ o-​­ordinates for approaching absence and loss with a queer poethics. In this section, I suggest where we might go next and so bring this chapter to a close. At the beginning of one iteration of Antigone Jr./­Paris is Burning at the Judson Dance Church Harrell stands in the middle of an open studio. Black strips of sprung flooring run vertically away from the camera’s lens; the back wall is a bare gray index of a warehouse.10 Harrell is wearing black loose dance wear, signaling an American lyrical or postmodern training. Top Drawer’s Songs of a Sinner (­1969) floods the space. As the bass guitar lick kicks in, Harrell begins to step: to the left and then the right. Left, right, left right, his gait begins to widen as he imperceptibly shifts into a ­two-​­step. Right, left, he floats a hand softly, over a horizon, and back: his torso tilts off a vertical axis. Left, right, left, right. Two hands float across at waist level, and back again, while, left, right, left, right. On a third horizontal pass, one of his hands meanders, carving an “­S” shape into space and continuing, onwards, it goes up, back, over his head, and down again. Harrell’s torso echoes his hand as he beings to spiral around a vertical axis. Left, right, left, he waves one hand beside his head, as he articulates his spine. He is building a series of gestures and rhythmic articulations, he is ­re-­​­­membering—​­right, right, right, right, ­right—​­and eventually begins to describe, to fabulate, a compression of speculative worlds. Through Paris is Burning at the Judson Church, a series of works which was first conceived in 2002, Harrell makes critical gestures against normative, white, and straight conceptions of dance and theater history. “­What would have happened in 1963,” Harrell asks, “­if someone from the voguing dance tradition in Harlem had come downtown to Greenwich Village to perform alongside the early postmoderns at Judson Church?” (­Harrell 2015) Harrell’s speculative investigation is embodied. As he moves from stepping: left, right, left, right to a kinesthetic stutter: right, right, right, right he suggests a breakdown or fracturing of the normative mundane, or ephemeral (­Muñoz 2019, 148). In doing so he oscillates between the world of ­Judson—​­signaled through the investigation of mundane movement without “­narrative”—​­and the Harlem balls, signaled by Harrell’s vogue hand performance and runway hip articulations. At this moment Harrell scrambles both dance techniques. Now, his right hand is up, his palm touching his forehead; he melts into a series of shifting polyrhythms, adding variations through a gentle buck of his hips, a honeyed arch of his spine, and the curve of his arms. His feet kick out in front of one another as he walks, giving us a taste of New Wave vogue femme, soft arms spiraling and caressing space in loops around his body, as his hips

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swing fiercely, left, right, left, right. This sharp syncopated walk propels his body through space. And as he approaches the front of the dance floor, he begins to speak, Listen up! I wanna tousle your hair in the morning. I wanna lick your ass, but I don’t wanna be you. Who am I? You created me. All of you, all of Tolouse, all of Los Angeles, all of Tokyo, all of New York, all of Athens. You created me. Who am I? I am Trajal. I am Trajell, I am Trajal, I am Trajano, I am Trajal, I am Trajan. I am Antigone. Okay Thibault, let’s get this show on the road. In this opening ­section—​­as he ­re-​­performs the movement languages, exercises, and modes of relation from both dance ­techniques—​­Harrell critically joins past, present, and future tenses. We can consider this in terms of ­Afro-​­Fabulation, as laid out by Tavia Nyong’o, where, Fabulation as I mean it participates in this ‘­kind of time’ that Bergson names ‘­duration’ and that I refer to mostly as ‘­tenseless time,’ or the time of the virtual.[…] such a sense of tenseless time is of particular importance to black and minoritarian subjects, for whom the gap opened out between the possible and the potential, no matter how slight, remains crucial. (­Nyong’o 2019, 10) If we understand possibilities as routes already charted, “­ready at hand,” and potentialities as emergent routes to places, times, and arrangements of relation otherwise, then we could say Harrell layers and teases Black, queer, postmodern, contemporary, utopian, and ancient possible worlds against one another. This is his fabulation: he plays them contrapuntally to produce potentialities which resemble and diverge, so they (­are/­were/­will be) inter/­connect(­ed) by his choreography and its archives which emerge in c­ o-​­constitution through the dance: ‘­I am Antigone.’ This suggests, even through solo performance, a spectral chorality across time and place that refuses the demand for liveness produced by the history of western dance/­theater. While watching the performance you can sense the presence of the Harlem ball culture, it is as if there might be an emcee calling to a chorus who are twisting, carving space, motoring, swinging, beating their faces, and repeating gestures from the covers of magazines, the office, the sidewalk. But Harrell is alone. So the chorus is a s­ pectral-­​­­absent-​­presence which emphasizes the performance contexts of the work, situated largely in “­highly valorized venues like the Museum of Modern Art, New York Live Arts, and the Hebbel Am Ufer theater in Berlin […] against the backdrop of [vogue’s] living repertoire, even as its actual p­ articipants—​­dancers and ­announcers—​­only occasionally cross over into his shows” (­Nyong’o 2019, 33). Because the ball scene is not fully rendered by Harrell, but traced, there is a partial refusal at work: a refusal to give all of voguing up to the institution. Nyong’o describes this as an intentional refusal of the “­burden of liveness” (­Nyong’o 2019, after Muñoz). A concept that “[accounts] for and [critiques] the way in which queer, transgender, and racialized bodies are so often exceptionalized through temporary displays of liveness in the very institutions that reject them as permanent occupants or stakeholders” (­2019, 34). Emerging from this network of performance techniques and political interventions (“­I wanna lick your ass, but I don’t wanna be you”) is Harrell/­Antigone. He is seated in front of a microphone 148

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in repose or moving around the edge of the ­space—​­shrouded in black, overwhelmed by grief. Antigone’s ancient pastness interrupts the scene inaugurated by Harrell’s ­co-​­composition of Judson dance and the Harlem ball. He tells us, he “­wanted to go big, to encompass the idea of theatre, specifically the foundations of western theatre” (­Harrell 2015). Thus, Harrell’s performance of and as Antigone places her (­and western theater) in the same c­ o-​­constructed speculative world as the Harlem balls and postmodern dance, producing each as an equally available but constructed possibility. Nyong’o suggests here that by “­­de-​­dramatizing the theatrical canon, Antigone, Sr. employs the form of black queer ball culture to reshape the contents of postmodern dance’s interest in everyday life” (­2019, 41). I wager, by extension, he also reshapes the methodology of Classics by performing Antigone as speculative, lost, ghostly, ­re-​­irruptive. It is this tension between what Harrell describes as the “­imaginary possibilities” of performing Antigone and the “­imaginative practice” of scholarship on ancient ­Greece—​­combined with the unavailability or inaccessibility of the “­impetuous, the drive, and the spirit” of live ancient ­performance—​­that suggests a queer constellation of ­possibility-­​­­practice-­​­­absence-​­loss. Queer because of the ways in which queerness is defined by and operates in spaces of loss or ­non-​­becoming, queer in the way it traces l­ines-­​­­of-​­flight off the map of (­hetero)­normativity. These queer entanglements open critical possibilities for writing, and understanding the past outside of the norms this chapter began by interrogating. Ancient performance is not inaccessible, unknowable, or inert because it is lost; it is precisely because ancient performance is lost that it ­is—​­through speculative and queer encounters, responses, and p­ erformances—​­available, animate. The absence of ancient performance figures in both the circulation of its remains and the speculative attempts to incorporate it into contemporary acts of knowledge production, as a lively ­residue—​­it is just like we never said goodbye. Consequentially, ancient tragedy is performed, as in Hedva’s Greek Cycle, as grief work; as an undoing and ­re-​­choreographing of relation; and as an investigation of n­ on-​­becoming, a commitment to the otherwise (­other worlds, unmade worlds) over the normative and ­anti-​­normative dialectic. This attention to both the return of the irruptive past and the continual mundanity of crisis ­ordinariness—​­perpetrated by the racializing colonial heteronormative gender b­ inary—​­is then a constant reminder of the possibility and potentiality for things to be different. As Schneider puts it, We have to find a different future for the reiterative violences of the irruptive past […] ­so-​­called failed revolutionary actions are never wholly disappeared but lie in wait for r­e-​ ­response, ­re-​­call, or the again time of ­re-​­ignition. The logic of gesturing forth the p­ ast—­​ ­­reiterating—​­in the form of performative resurgence is the idea of making palpable the alternative futures that responses otherwise to those s­ o-​­called pasts might have realized, or, better, might yet realize.11 This is the work that I believe Harrell’s performance of Antigone—​­among the speculative ­co-​ ­constructed space between Harlem ball, ancient tragedy, and Judson ­church—​­enacts. It allows us to see the alternative futures that might yet be realized, to pick up the threads of past attempts to realize the world differently which “­failed”. In the conjunction between Antigone, the Harlem balls, and Judson, Harrell asks: what if the revolutionary acts posed in each space were not foreclosed; what if they lie in wait for r­ e-​­response? (­Harrell 2015). In summary, the residue of queer performances of tragedy provide us with the lively affects and material remains left by previous attempts to imagine a better ­future—​­perhaps also failed attempts to enact a safer and more equitable future than the one we find ourselves in. Queer performances of tragedy in the contemporary moment can refuse to accede to way things are by ­re-​­activating 149

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those remains, and by continuing to leave traces and further remains of their own: journeys backward and forwards, here and there, between the worlds of the living, the dead, the actual, and the ­non-​­actual. I want to end with this in mind, and with a quote from Muñoz, one of the many queer folks indexed by this chapter who is no longer with us today. He wrote, The performance, its documentation via video, and my writing practice become ephemeral resources for many who are drawn to the possibilities they suggest, like moths to a flame. (­Muñoz 2020, 58) I offer this sense of queer response to performance, that perhaps we missed, or that only ever existed in the realm of the speculative, as a shared practice. I hope that the moth can be a tool for others folding queer theater and performance studies into their work, a choreographic orientation toward elements that are deemed inert or not really there. Because I know by making these ­moth-​­like returns to the flames of the past we can decompose the structures and forms of its institutional colonial instantiations. We can rebuild something elsewhere, outside the Classical, for all the queers who gather around us, be they our living comrades and c­ o-​­conspirators, our ancestors, or the queers who are not yet here, but already and always on the horizon.

Suggestions for Further Reading At the heart of this chapter are a set of questions currently animating queer and trans studies: questions of identity, ontology, ethics, and their relationships to temporality. Bey 2022 is at the cutting edge of this debate arguing for a move away from understandings of queerness as a possessed and claimed ­identity—​­that is further discovered and divulged over ­time— ​­toward an understanding of queerness as a shared ­multi-​­temporal, existential, and ontological set of orientations and material conditions. Relevant here is Pereira 2019, who analyzes queerness’ relationship to colonialism; Hartman 2019 and Sharpe 2016, to the aftermath of slavery; Kapadia 2019, to the American imperial war machine; Puar 2017 to nationalism; and Chen 2012 to ableism, all of which are animating forces for Classics and its study in North America and the UK. Relevant too is a broader move in queer studies to understand queerness not entirely through a­ nti-​­normativity, divergence, or deviance but to think about it as a set of accidents, convergences, as an aesthetics and politics of collapse, undoing, unmaking, or n­ on-​­becomings, as in Halberstam 2020. These debates enhance and build on work that connects queer folk across time and place in n­ on-​­linear and politically charged ways, and so I think the best place to start with any inquiry that might deal with these themes, with ­multi-​­temporal community making, and with queer performance is Muñoz 2019.

Notes 1 On poethics, I am in conversation with Silva 2014, 90. On backwards feelings, see Love 2009. 2 See Lehmann 2019 and Quayson 2020. 3 I am especially grateful to Marchella Ward, Mathura Umachandran, Nicolette D’Angelo, Eleonora Colli, Estelle Baudou, Ella Haselswerdt, Sara Lindheim, Kirk Ormand, and my ­co-​­supervisors Felix Budelmann, Fiona Macintosh. 4 See, for example, Muñoz 2020 and Olufemi 2021. 5 Baudou 2021, 1­ 23–​­128. 6 Listen also to Ezra Furman “­Ordinary Life.”

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Queer Traces, Ghosts, and Performance Otherwise 7 Thank you Ella Haselswerdt for the wording here. 8 https://­johannahedva.com/­­the-­​­­greek-​­cycle.php 9 Muñoz 2019, ­72—​­73. Thank you to Izzy Levy who drew me back to these words during Queer and the Classical 2022. 10 See ANTIGONE JR. via Numeridanse https://­www.numeridanse.tv/­en/­­dance-​­videotheque/­­antigone-​­jr?s 11 Schneider 2017, prefiguring Schneider 2018, 305.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Second ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Baudou, Estelle. 2021. Creer le Choeur Tragique: Une Archeologie du Commun (­Allemagne, France, ­Royaume-​­Uni; ­1973–​­2010). Paris: Classiques Garnier. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bey, Marquis. 2022. Black Trans Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life the Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Campt, Tina M., and Simone White. 2020. “­In Conversation.” Vimeo. Video, 1:30:12. University of the Arts. https://­vimeo.com/­430090692?embedded=true&source=video_title&owner=20939174?. Castro, Andrés Fabián Henao. 2021. Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality, and Death in the Settler Colonial Present. Albany: SUNY Press. ­Chambers-​­Letson, Joshua, and Tavia Nyong’o. 2020. “­Editors’ Introduction. The Aesthetic Resonance of Brown.” In The Sense of Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance, edited by José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o and Joshua ­Chambers-​­Letson, ­ix–​­xxxiii, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ellis, Nadia. 2020. “­Trace a Vanishing, or Queer Performance Study.” In The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, edited by Siobhan B. Somerville, 1­ 56–​­171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferretti, Ilaria. 2021. “­Tino Seghal: Constructed Situations.” Juliet: Contemporary Art Magazine, January 6, 2021. ­Fischer-​­Lichte, Erika. 2010. “­Performance as ­Event—​­Reception as Transformation.” In Theorizing Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, edited by Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop, ­29–​­42. London: Bloomsbury. Gagné, Renaud, and Marianne Govers Hopman. 2013. Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge/­New York: Cambridge University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2020. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hall, Edith, and Stephe Harrop. 2010. “­Introduction.” In Theorizing Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice, edited by Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop, 1­ –​­9. London: Bloomsbury. Harrell, Trajal with Lauren O’­Niell-​­Butler, Anne Carson, and Simon Critchley. September 22, 2015. ‘­Freaks and ­Greeks—​­Antigone: A roundtable with Anne Carson, Simon Critchley, and Trajal Harrell’, for ARTFORUM, https://­www.artforum.com/­slant/-​­55046 [Accessed: 13.04.23] Hartman, Saidiya V. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Hedva, Johanna. 2020. Minerva: The Miscarriage of the Mind. Saratoga/­Oakland, CA: Sming Sming Books and Wolfman Books. Love, Heather. 2009. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1996. “­Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8.2: ­5–​­16. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2019. Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban, with Tavia Nyong’o, Joshua ­Chambers-​­Letson (­Eds.). 2020. The Sense of Brown: ­Ethnicity, Affect and Performance. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Marcus Bell Noland, Carrie. 2020. Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Nyong’o, Tavia. 2019. ­Afro-​­Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. New York: New York University Press. Olufemi, Lola. 2021. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. London: Hajar Press. Phalen, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Preciado, Paul B. 2013. Testo junkie: Sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York  Puar, Jasbir. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Quayson, Ato. 2021. Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge. Schneider, Rebecca. 2018. “­That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up.” Theatre Journal 70.3: 2­ 85–​­306. Schneider, Rebecca, and Lucia Ruprecht. 2017. “­In our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural ­Response-​­Ability.” Performance Philosophy 3.1: ­108–​­125. Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Silva, Denise Ferreira da. 2014. “­Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(­ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World.” The Black Scholar 44.2: ­81–​­97. Ward, Marchella. 2019. “­Assemblage Theory and the Uses of Classical Reception: The Case of Aristotle Knowsley’s Oedipus.” Classical Receptions Journal 11.4: ­508–​­523.

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11 QUEERLY BELOVED Nemesis, Credula Spes, and Queer Temporalities in Tibullus Book 2 Sara H. Lindheim

Although Quintilian singles out Tibullus for the highest praise among Latin elegists (­Institutio Oratoria 10.93.1), modern scholars do not generally follow suit.1 Moreover, even among those who do not prefer Propertius one finds a marked preference for Tibullus’ first collection of elegies, replete with fantasies of idyllic country life that the amator hopes to share with his elusive puella, Delia. The second book, shorter and certainly less dreamy, presents the reader with an altered erotic storyline; a rapacious urban puella, aptly named Nemesis, now torments the beleaguered lover. A quick glance at the scholarship reveals strikingly uniform descriptions of the new scenario. The picture is gloomy, dark, and dismal, the mood, somber and grim, the accent on futility and misery. A cruel and mercenary mistress drives Tibullus to abandon his cherished ideals and values. Perhaps, but the scholarly narrative unfolds according to suspiciously stereotypical ­hetero-​ ­romantic and misogynistic templates. In this chapter, I propose to alter the angle of approach, and therefore, ultimately, the way of reading Tibullus and Nemesis that emerges from Book 2. I shall suggest that ­time—​­in particular, an oscillating tension between stories that unfold according to chronologically linear, f­ orward-​­moving time and narratives that seem suspended in iterative temporal ­loops—​­plays a central role in Book 2 of Tibullus’ elegies. In her book on Augustan elegy (­2013), Hunter Gardner persuasively argues that the elegiac ­lover-​­poets betray an obsession with time. She suggests that Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid construct the temporal cycles of the amator, his resistance to linear movement in time and space, as an expression of anxiety in the face of contemporary social, economic, and political transformations (­especially ­pp. ­33–​­57). The proper life course of the elite, Roman (­masculine) subject in the late Republic and early Principate is carefully regulated; a linear cursus creates a blueprint for career and life advancement that progresses sequentially according to fixed temporal markers. Augustus’ marriage laws create further temporal demands, imposing legal controls on marriage and procreation. Gardner posits “­gendered” time in elegy, as the amator retreats in the face of adult civic duties into women’s time, a cyclical, repetitive tarrying. While I agree with Gardner that the elegiac pursuit of the puella in general constitutes a stepping out of linear time, I shall argue in this chapter that queer theories of temporality seem most productive for exploring the affair between Tibullan amator and Nemesis in particular. And indeed, the elegies of Book 2 themselves invite an interpretation via queer temporalities in three distinct ways that we shall discuss in detail: the deployment of queer intratexts and a queer mythological excursus to fill out our picture of the 153

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affair, the singularity within elegy of the insistently looping, stuttering narrative of the relationship, and finally the remarkable closural gambit in elegy 2.6 with its insistence on “­hope” (­spes). A consideration of how the elegist depicts his relationship to Nemesis through the lens of queer temporalities shakes up the picture of what seems, on the surface, a bleak heteronormative tale of elegiac desire and opens up instead the possibility for an alternative, utopian, queer futurity. The carefully regulated temporal blueprint for the lives of elite, masculine subjects in the late Republic and in Augustan Rome, from childhood to adolescence to manhood, from youth to married man with children, provides a nice example of what theorists of queer temporalities dub “­normative temporality.” These theorists begin with the premise that normative temporalities are linear and sequential in nature. In modern Western conceptions, time moves measurably forward, unfolds as a succession of moments, one after the other, in step with notions of forward progress. Human life follows a prescribed course, measured and regulated by significant milestones, and dominant heterosexual ideology dictates the scheme for a successful human life in time. This heteronormative narrative, argue queer theorists, celebrates life as “­good” when it progresses from birth to death at certain appropriate intervals through important stages, in particular marriage, reproduction, and parenthood. This heteronormative social narrative, in turn, remains dependent, and has an impact, on time. There is a “­respectable” time of life for marriage; reproduction is governed largely by women’s biological clocks.2 Once parents have children, “­family time” influences the daily timetable for the entire family unit, as c­ hild-​­rearing becomes the dominant activity (­Halberstam 2005, 5). The Child, as theorist Lee Edelman argues (­2004), embodies the fantasy of futurity, of continuity through time from past to present to future, an ideal around which we build our lives and ­society—​­the fantasy of heteronormative reproductive futurity. While queer theorists agree on the existence of “­straight time” (­Muñoz 2019, 22) against which one might posit queer alternatives, disagreement persists as to what queer temporalities entail. For some, like Edelman, a queer temporality loudly refuses the future, actively choosing an ­anti-​­social opting out of the Symbolic in a present full of disruptive jouissance. Others, like Halberstam, offer as a positive paradigm lives lived according to alternative milestones and life schedules “­unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and ­child-​­rearing” (­Halberstam 2005, 2). Still rejecting Edelman’s negative refusal, others dismiss linear, sequential narratives of time, defining queer temporalities positively as those that loop, repeat, ­re-​­circulate, and collapse ­past-­​ ­­present-​­future. Finally, theorists like Muñoz argue that the future is “­queerness’ domain” (­Muñoz 2019, 1), refusing to be held to the here and now with its reproductive mandate but promising with critical hopefulness “­other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is the longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present” (­Muñoz 2019, 1). Queerness is about futurity and hope, a utopian ideal that hangs suspended in time, always on the horizon, that refuses the totalizing aspect of the present but reaches back into the past for inspiration to imagine a different future. If ultimately we shall see that the amator and Nemesis inhabit a queer temporality, the opening two poems of Tibullus Book 2 (­from which Nemesis remains absent) ostentatiously participate in “­straight time.” Both emphasize linear chronological progression from past to present and enshrine ­hetero-​­reproductive family values. As elegy 2.1 begins, readers find themselves ­quasi-​­participants in a religious rite honoring rustic divinities, in particular Bacchus (­2.1.3) and Ceres (­2.1.4). Work ceases; fields and crops receive purification (­2.1.­1–​­10). This ritual cleansing ­re-​­enacts a ­long-​ ­standing tradition handed down from generation to generation a prisco . . . avo (“­from ancestors from an earlier time,” 2.1.23). Ancestral connection, biological kinship, and inheritance ­re-​­emerge as the poet proposes a toast to his absent patron, Messalla (­2.1.31ff.), whose recent victory over

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the Aquitanians sheds glorious light on his intonsis . . . avis (“­unshorn ancestors,” 2.1.34). Once again, the present generation embraces its role as contemporary representatives of past ancestors. Panning out further, the poet celebrates the gods of the countryside with a triumphalist narrative about progress through time and the development of civilization. With rustic divinities as their teachers, men migrated out of caves and developed nutritional sophistication. They built modest houses, learned agriculture, and discovered wine (­2.1.­37–​­46). With wine, of course, came song; men’s labor gave rise to the need for separate but equal women’s work, hence spinning and weaving (­2.1.­61–​­66). Cupid emerges onto the scene, and desire overcomes the puella as well as men of all ages (­2.1.­71–​­76), both the iuvenis and the senex (“­the youth” and “­the old man,” 2.1.­73–​­74) in a couplet that underscores the natural temporal progression from the former, the second word of the hexameter, to the latter, at the very end of the pentameter. The sequential temporal advancement, in addition to the emphasis on familial and communal continuity, also plays a central role in elegy 2.2. While the first poem celebrates a communal rustic ritual, the poet summons us, in poem 2.2, to a joyful private ritual commemorating Cornutus’ birthday. The poet encourages us to join 2.1 and 2.2 in our imaginations through echoes of context and image. Line 2 harkens back to the beginning of the first poem, as the poet demands silence for a new rite (­2.1.1; 2.2.2). He prays not that the country gods manifest themselves (­2.1.3 and 4), but instead that the birthday spirit, Natalis, come and join the party (­2.2.1 and ­5–​­6). The ritual accoutrements, dripping wine and garlanded heads (­2.1.8; 2.1.16; 2.1.59; 2.2.6), seem similar whatever the occasion. Cornutus’ birthday wish reveals the same fantasy of linear temporal progression that we have just observed in the benefits of increasing civilization rendered to the rustic community by the gods of the countryside, but this time on an individual scale. Cornutus, focalized through the poet, desires nothing more than a faithful, loving wife (­uxor, not puella, 2.2.11), a hope on which the poet now elaborates. “­Let Amor bring golden bonds of marriage (­flavaque coniugio vincula portet Amor, 2.2.18),” he proclaims, and not just any bonds, but those that eternally bind partners (­quae maneant semper, 2.2.19) until the pair becomes wrinkled and gray with old age (­2.2.­19–​­20). The closing couplet is less straightforward than we would like because of textual difficulties in the hexameter. Putnam (­1973, ad loc) succinctly summarizes the issue as one that springs from punctuation and the word avis (­either a nominative meaning “­bird” and thus an image for flying Amor or, more likely a dative plural, especially I would suggest, given the repetition of the word meaning “­ancestor” in poem 2.1, as we have just seen).4 If we read, as I think we should, hic veniat Natalis, avis prolemque ministret,/­ludat et ante tuos turba novella pedes (“­May Natalis come and may he deliver offspring to grandparents/­ancestors and may a crowd of young children play at your feet,” 2.2.­21–​­22) the poem concludes with a perfect fantasy of heteronormative reproductive ­futurism –​ ­marriage, children, old age, grandchildren. And even if we choose the alternative interpretation, in which Amor appears as a bird and brings offspring, we are left with a very similar concluding image (­minus one generation) of conjugal bliss and multiplying family. Poem 2.5 returns religious rites, biological reproduction, and chronologically sequential narrative to the spotlight. The elegy ostensibly celebrates the induction of Messalla’s son, Messalinus, as one of the priests in charge of the Sibylline books. But mention of the Sibyl leads the poet to consider the sweep of Roman history, from its beginnings with Aeneas settling Lavinium (­2.5.39ff). His offspring, Ascanius, departs for Alba Longa (­2.5.50), and then Romulus, whose father Mars makes an appearance (­2.5.­51–​­54), founds the city itself (­2.5.­51–​­56). (­In case we have missed the emphasis on fathers and sons, Messalla is hailed as pater at the end of the elegy, 2.5.120.) The Sibyl joins together past, present, and future sequentially as she promises: Roma, tuum nomen terris fatale regendis,/­qua sua de caelo prospicit arva Ceres,/­quaque patent ortus et qua fluitantibus

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undis/­Solis anhelantes abluit amnis equos (“­Rome, your name is destined to rule the lands where Ceres looks down over her golden fields from the sky, and where dawn spreads out, and where the Ocean washes the breathless horses of the Sun with flowing waves,” 2.5.­57–​­60). From its humble beginnings, the eternal city (­aeterna urbs, 2.5.23) will become the central point of an empire that extends from East to West. To this sweeping national narrative of fathers and sons, Tibullus carefully juxtaposes a less weighty vignette depicting a countryside ritual observance of the Palilia, in honor of Rome’s birthday (­2.5.87). The ­wide-​­ranging tale of the birth and growth of a nation and the more modest story of communal religious celebration intersect, centering on Rome but also insisting on the importance of heteronormative reproduction. A shepherd celebrant emerges, drunk, singing, rejoicing in the fertility of the land (­compare 2.1), to jump over flaming piles of straw. The results, in quick succession, are a pregnant wife, an offspring who will grab his father’s ears and plant kisses upon him, and then a grandfather (­again avus, 2.5.93) who will, in his old age, watch over his grandson and indulge in baby talk (­2.5.­91–​­94). The poet sets his relationship with Nemesis in stark contrast to these narratives, explicitly so in elegy 2.5. From the drunken revelers at the Palilia, the poet then briefly turns the spotlight onto himself. While Roman history marches in father/­son pairings ever forward and countryside inhabitants marry and have children, the amator singles himself out particularly (­mihi praecipue, 2.5.109) as suspended in time. He rejoices in his love, a sickness, he insists, whose pain brings ­pleasure—​­(­faveo morbo cum iuvat ipse dolor, 2.5.110). His suffering has rendered him out of commission annum (­2.5.109), either for an actual year, or, more likely for an extended, long but otherwise undefined period of time.5 In this temporal limbo, he has found himself in a compulsive cycle of narrative repetition with no forward momentum and no way out; “­I continuously/­ persistently sing of Nemesis,” he announces (­usque cano Nemesim, 2.5.111). The statement stands out in elegy 2.5 because, of course, he has been, and will almost immediately turn back to, discussing other topics. But I want to suggest that in fact, Tibullus here hits the nail on the head about his relationship with the puella of his second poetic collection; singing of Nemesis brings with it throughout Book 2 a sense of continually (­usque) iterative, looping narrative time. If the first two elegies of Tibullus’ second book draw us into linear temporality, forward progress, and heteronormative relationships that operate in “­straight time” culminating in the production of offspring, the amator’s affair with Nemesis, that takes over the reader’s attention in elegies 2.3 and 2.4, unfolds otherwise. Cornutus returns as the addressee of 2.3, but the relations that the poet contemplates in this elegy stand in stark contrast to Cornutus’ fantasy of a wife and a passel of children (­Murgatroyd 1994, ad ­1–​­2). The puella is absent; seemingly she has decamped for the countryside, leaving the amator behind, dreaming of the manual labor he would endure for a mere glimpse of his beloved (­2.3.­1–​­8). “­Piquant and provocative” perhaps (­Murgatroyd 1994, ad ­5–​­6), but also, as we shall see, queer. He announces a willingness to act the farmer and follow the plow as “­castrated oxen” (­steriles boves, 2.3.8) turn clods of earth. Although initially we may pass over the (­unnecessary?) emphasis on n­ on-​­reproduction, immediately thereafter the amator recalls poem 1.4, Priapus’ turn as praeceptor amoris (“­professor of love”) for queer relationships. There the god suggests that the lover welcome sunburn and exposure to the elements (­1.4.­41–​­42) or blisters on tender hands from hard work (­1.4.­47–​­48), provided that he can be with his puer (“­boyfriend”). The amator in 2.3, with clear echoes of poem 1.4, pledges “­I would not complain about the sun burning my graceful limbs or broken blisters harming my soft hands” (­nec quererer quod sol graciles exureret artus,/­laederet et teneras pussula rupta manus, 2.3.­9–​­10). The subtle, intratextual reference to the amator’s queer relationship with ­Marathus—​­queer both sexually and in its marked opposition to elegiac norms6—​­segues after line 10 into the only fairly

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lengthy mythological excursus we find in Tibullus’ elegies, a homoerotic narrative that offers itself as a rather striking parallel for the reader to consider. The poet begins the story of Apollo’s enslavement to Admetus, but we soon discover that Tibullus has drawn on the variant version in Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo (­lines ­47–​­54)­7 rather than on the traditional tale. Instead of suffering one year in thrall to the mortal king as punishment at the hands of Zeus for killing the Cyclopes,8 Tibullus’ “­beautiful” Apollo (­formosus, 2.3.11) becomes a cowherd, helpless in the face of his love for Admetus (­2.3.­11–​­14)­9. Amor (­2.3.14 and again 32) calls all the shots as unkempt Apollo pastures cattle, makes cheese, and sings in the valleys (­2.3.­15–​­24). And in this queer relationship to which the amator compares his affair with his s­ till-​­unnamed puella, linear, sequential temporal flow and the biological family so central to “­straight time” fade away. Both his mother and his sister are ashamed of Apollo’s actions (­2.3.­17–​­18 and ­23–­​­­24—​­and here note the markers of temporal repetition, quotiens, “­how often” and saepe, “­often”)—​­blushing at his shaggy locks and his willingness to carry animals through the fields. Apparently, as the commentaries are quick to point out, carrying a baby animal is an undignified task, especially for a god, but also for mortals (­Maltby 2002 and Murgatroyd 1994, ad ­17–​­18). Indeed, the Tibullan amator himself, to whom we should compare Apollo (­Bright 1978, ­194–​­198), refuses to feel shame when he carries home a lamb or a baby goat (­1.1.­31–​­32). In this instance, we get an additional piece of information, namely the reason why the baby animal requires ­transport—​­its mother has abandoned it (­oblita matre, 1.1.32). Do we attribute the same biological maternal refusal, the same familial disruption to the calf in elegy 2.3, thereby making the calf a doublet of Apollo in the midst of suffering a similar rebuff from his sister and mother? The distress of the god’s family does not persuade him to alter his behavior. He abandons his oracles, both at Delphi and at Delos, leaving time suspended in the present and cut off from the future, refusing frustrated peoples and their leaders any glimpses into things to come (­2.3.­21–​­22). In the fields, his songs break off before reaching their ends as cows disrupt (­rumpere, 2.3.2010) the teleological progression, again and again severing the iterative attempts with their mooing (­2.3.­19–​­20).11 He becomes a fabula, “­the object of scandal,” an uncommon but not extraordinary use of the word; indeed, once before in the Tibullan elegies, in poem 1.4, the lover beseeches his puer, Marathus, to prevent the amator from becoming a fabula in the eyes of his poetic audience (­1.4.83). The extended mythological excursus, full of Apollo’s queer desire for Admetus, nestled within narratives of familial rupture (­divine and animal), is simultaneously suspended in mythological time12 and interested in iterative, suspended temporal moments. Inserted to cast light on the newly introduced relationship between amator and puella, it picks up and replays the queer desire of the Priapus/­Marathus elegy 1.4 already imbricating our picture of amator and puella in 2.3 through intratexual allusion. So if the allusions and the mythological comparandum invite us to consider the relationship of amator and Nemesis in the light of queerness, the amator and Nemesis, on the surface at least, participate in a heterosexual relationship. And yet, an exploration of the affair between the amator and Nemesis as it (­does not) develop through elegies 2.3, 2.4, and 2.6 reveals iteration, interruption, looping, a general lack of the narrative movement and forward momentum belonging to “­straight time.” We should acknowledge here, however, to speak for a moment in terms of generalities, that elegy as a whole has a fraught relationship with linear and teleological narrative. At the heart of the amator’s pathology, or coming at it from another, but related, interpretative angle, at the heart of desire itself, lies a masochistic refusal to achieve satisfaction.13 A recent collection of essays attempts to tease out the ways in which one can deploy theories of narrative in elegiac works to open up new readings of a genre that, unlike, for example, epic or historiography, resists easy or

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straightforward considerations of narrative. While pointing out that elegiac stories contain temporal contradictions and narrative incongruities, the collection’s editors also note that one discovers “­­quasi-​­narratives like the ­over-​­arching ‘­story’ of Tibullus’ relationship with Delia, of Propertius’ affair with Cynthia, or of Ovid’s life in exile” (­Liveley and ­Salzman-​­Mitchell 2008, 2). We can even qualify here, with Gardner (­2013), that frequently these narratives prefer lingering to teleological thrust. It is telling that the editors single out Tibullus and Delia, rather than Tibullus and Nemesis, and we shall return to this point just below. But we should not entirely dismiss what they are saying. Indeed, “‘­story’ is a fundamental part of the elegiac textual discourse;” in elegy, we find a “­wider narrative context” (­Liveley and ­Salzman-​­Mitchell 2008, 4). It is difficult to deny that some narrative, even fragmentary and often fueled by the reader’s own desire for story and (­even slow or elusive) teleological progress, emerges from the elegiac text; the amator desires a puella, pursues her, sometimes successfully landing in her bed, more often not, frequently left alone but always fantasizing about the elusive possibility of erotic fulfillment.14 In the case of Tibullus and Delia, the narrative unfolds in fragments that we scramble to assemble in some logical, temporal fashion. In happy times the amator dreams of living in the country, clasping his puella tight as winds rage outside (­1.1.41ff.). The fantasy develops further in elegy 1.5. Delia moves to the country to manage Tibullus’ country estate, learning about wine, harvests, and herd animals, serving Messalla when the great patron comes to visit his poet (­1.5.21ff.). When the amator is compelled against his wishes to leave Rome, she beseeches all the gods for signs of a safe return (­1.3.9ff.). Coming back home, after a long absence, he finds her up late at night, spinning wool, and she rushes to him, barefoot, hair streaming (­1.3.85ff.). On his deathbed, the amator clings to Delia with his dying hand, as she weeps (­1.1.59ff.). But there are stormy times as well. If he has instructed his puella how to elude guard and vir (­husband? lover?), quite frequently he himself cannot gain access to her. Other lovers enjoy her favors (­especially 1.6) while the amator remains outside her locked door (­1.1.­55–​­56; 1.2. may take place entirely on Delia’s doorstep15). While the story proceeds in fits and spurts, and certainly requires readers to extract various fragments and put them together to create a coherent account, something happens. And the ultimate fantasy, even if never achieved, is for a recognizable, heteronormative, erotic h­ appily-­​­­ever-​­after. In stark contrast, and to an extent beyond other heterosexual elegiac liaisons, nothing happens in Tibullus’ relationship with Nemesis. One still finds fragments of a story, but unlike the affair with Delia, each fragment looks exactly the same. It is as if time and narrative simply stutter and stop. The relationship has no stages, no chronological progression, or even differentiation; it does not seem to unfold “­in time.” In a fascinating comment, Murgatroyd announces in his introductory material to poem 2.3, the poem in which Nemesis appears for the very first time, that the reader cannot discern what season or even what time it is in the poem (­Murgatroyd 1994, 80). Indeed, the same can be said for the other elegies that feature Nemesis, 2.4 and 2.6. In 2.3, his puella has gone to the country and the amator announces his willingness to submit to hard labor just for the chance to catch a glimpse of her. After comparing himself to Apollo courting Admetus and then to the Tibullus of Book 1 pursuing beautiful Marathus, and after a brief lacuna in the extant text, the amator begins a diatribe against “­loot.” For about 15 lines, the word itself keeps recurring in ­quasi-​­obsessive ­iteration—​­praeda, in the accusative case 2.3.35, as the subject 2.3.36, 37, 39, in the plural 2.3.50, and with slight variation, praedator, “­looter,” 2.3.41. At first, the amator tries to draw out a sharp dichotomy; soldiers, merchants, those who acquire large tracts of land, and wealthy ­city-​­dwellers all pursue loot, aspiring to amass boundless possessions (­2.3.­35–​­46). The images are of cessation and temporal suspension; the praedator desires a state of siege (­obsidere, 2.3.41) with regard to the fields, while the importer of foreign marble brings city traffic to a halt and his artificial pond blockades the fish from their natural environment16 (­2.3.­43–​­46). For a brief 158

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couplet the amator sets himself in opposition, stating his preference for simple rustic pleasures (­2.3.­47–​­48). But his assumption of the ethical high road is ­short-​­lived. In the very next couplet, he makes an abrupt volte face; since puellae, in general, and Nemesis, in particular, delight in wealthy men, he himself must acquire praeda—​­Coan silks, exotic enslaved attendants, rich ­dyes—​­by hook or by crook (­2.3.­49–​­60). We have looped back, both in terms of thought and in terms of language, to where we were as the diatribe began.17 The amator is on the outside, looking in. We shall see in a moment, as we make our way through two more poems, that he will not stray far from this position. More immediately, however, we should note that as elegy 2.3 comes to its conclusion, the poet constructs an image of time suspended, carefully unpicking the narrative about the progress of civilization that we saw functioning normatively in poem 2.1. In a wishful series of exclamations, he asks Ceres18 to destroy the crops in the ground, Bacchus to ruin the grape harvest, thus keeping the vats empty of wine; finally, for good measure, he hopes that all produce ceases to grow (­2.3.­61–​­67). Next, he takes us out of time altogether, still in the form of a wish, plunging his reader headlong back into a fantasy Golden Age before the introduction of the plow (­2.3.68ff.). But as the poem ends, the amator abruptly yanks us back to real time. We have looped back, however, to the temporal moment at which the poem began. The amator announces that he stands prepared to toil long hard hours at agricultural tasks, enslaved to his mistress (­2.3.­79–​­80). It should perhaps not surprise us then to discover that poem 2.4 opens at the exact point that 2.3 breaks off: love has enslaved the amator who finds himself bound in the (­metaphorical) chains (­2.4.­3–​­4) that he accepts as his fate in the last line of elegy 2.3 (­80). As we read past the opening lines, we recognize how little we have m ­ oved—​­in temporal, physical, or narrative ­terms—​­since the action of the last poem. The amator enjoys no shred of success, but rather remains locked out of the puella’s house? bedroom? heart? Poetry, the one boon the ­lover-​­poet can offer a puella to compete with the gifts provided by his rivals, is as ineffectual as it was for the courting Apollo in 2.3. And in case we did not immediately recall how the mooing cattle interrupted the god’s sweet songs (­2.3.­19–​­20), the amator focuses our minds by proclaiming: “­neither elegies, nor Apollo, source of poetry, have any worth” (­nec prosunt elegi nec carminis auctor Apollo, 2.4.13). Moreover, we should note here that elegies are the only possible type of poetry that he imagines as even potentially useful in wooing his puella. He specifically ­refuses—​ ­with the repeated refrain in the identical position at the beginning of the line, “­withdraw far off, Muses” (­ite procul, Musae, 2.4.15 and 20)—​­poetry with strong ties to chronological narrative, either epic or didactic (­here specifically about the daily path of the sun and the phases of the moon, 2.4.­16–​­18). His puella, however, “­continuously demands a reward/­fee/­high price with her cupped, empty palm” (­cava pretium flagitat usque manu, 2.4.14). “­Continuously” (­usque) linguistically reminds us that we are caught in a time loop, although the somewhat ­over-­​­­the-​­top diatribe against “­loot” in elegy 2.3 is not ­far-​­distant enough to have vanished from our memories. The situation has not changed; the story of the amator and Nemesis has not progressed. She still demands expensive gifts that he still cannot provide. As in 2.3, he finds himself in the position of needing to acquire “­by means of murder and crime” (­per caedem et facinus, 2.4.21) expensive gifts, the same sorts of trinkets we have already seen, Coan silks, dyed wool, jewels (­2.4.­27–​­30)—​­all for the chance of getting past the locked door (­2.4.­33–​­34). Perhaps surprisingly, at this juncture in poem 2.4, the poet gives up, if only temporarily, the looping, iterative presentness of the story. We flash briefly into a narrative future to contemplate grim retribution and due reward. A cruel and greedy puella, who amassed riches in return for sexual favors, finds her possessions engulfed in flames while young men stand idly by and watch. 159

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She grows old and no one mourns her death, while at the funeral of her counterpart, a bona nec avara (“­good and not greedy,” 2.4.45) old woman, weeping abounds, and old lovers bring offerings and kind remembrances (­2.4.­39–​­50). I do not think, however, that the chronological progression we see here impacts the lack of temporal and narrative movement in the story of the relationship between Nemesis and the amator; in contrast, they remain stagnantly looping at one moment in time. While time passes, and young puellae grow old, there is no indication that the aging grasping character is Nemesis rather than a generic representation of the greedy elegiac woman in general (­Murgatroyd 1994, ad ­39–​­40). Indeed, the “­good” old woman too represents a category and not a specific individual. Further, the amator does not make any appearance in this narrative flashforward so he himself does not participate in any chronological progression. Ultimately, the amator himself backs off from his arguments about the future because they are of no use to him in his current situation. “­But what good are truths to me? I must be a devotee of love according to the terms set forth by that woman [=Nemesis],” he exclaims (­sed prosunt quid mihi vera?/­illius est nobis lege colendus amor, 2.4.­51–​­52). Namely, he must return to his fantasized pursuit of “­loot” (­praeda) or “­reward” (­pretium) in the hopes of getting Nemesis to open her locked door. Elegy 2.6 opens with movement, on the surface spatial, but on closer consideration, poetic and chronological. Macer has abandoned Love to travel long distances over land and sea in pursuit of wars (­2.6.­1–​­4). At face value, the statement makes clear sense, but any reader of elegy recognizes the generic buzzwords. When Macer leaves behind Amor (­2.6.1), Venus (­2.6.9), and puellae (­2.6.9) and opts instead for castra (“­military camps” 2.6.1 and 9), we also realize that he sets aside what is normally considered a youthful poetic gambit into light and trivial elegiac poetry for the epic strains of a more mature, older artist.19 The amator confirms our suspicions that a generic conversation is unfolding, when in lines 11 and 12 he confides that he himself thought about (­growing up and) following suit into loftier genres (­magna, twice, 2.6.11 and fortia verba, 2.6.12) but the “­closed doors” (­clausae fores, 2.6.12) of his puella dictated his retrenchment in elegy. Unlike Macer, he will not embark on any p­ rogression—​­poetic, temporal, or spatial. Once again, the Tibullan amator is going nowhere. In fact, he seems not to have moved from the spot he occupied certainly in poem 2.4 and probably in 2.3 as well. Countless times (­quotiens, 2.6.13) he swore that he would no longer spend his time on Nemesis’ threshold before her locked doors, but his foot (­both anatomical and metrical, pes, 2.6.14) keeps retracing its steps. His “­heartless” puella (­dura, 2.6.28) responds to none of his pleas. Suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, he interposes a madam between Nemesis (­and her locked door) and himself. Phryne herself crosses the threshold with ease and frequency, supplying lies and excuses regarding the puella’s inaccessibility (­2.6.45ff.), but he remains outside, looking in (­and imagining “­who is having sex with my puella and in how many (­different) positions,” quisve meam teneat, quot teneatve modis, 2.6.52), his exclusion now doubly reinforced by Nemesis as well as by the madam. He curses Phryne, bringing both the poem and the entire collection to an abrupt end. While some argue about whether Book 2 is incomplete, I suggest that by examining the relationship between the Tibullan amator of Book 2 and Nemesis through the lens of queer temporalities, the conclusion, in fact, makes perfect sense. He ends exactly where he seems to have been for their entire affair, suspended on Nemesis’ (­literal and/­or metaphorical) threshold, unable to gain entry yet equally incapable of moving too far away from the door, he and their relationship stuck in an iterative, looping, moment of time. Consummation (­for the two of them together), let alone marriage and c­ hildren— ​­narrative and temporal expectations of what queer theorists designate as “­heteronormative reproductive futurity” (­Edelman 2004), “­­repro-​­time” (­Halberstam 2005), or “­straight time” (­Muñoz 2019)—​­never even appear on the horizon. 160

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Before we conclude, we should think more carefully about two rather striking and prominent moments in elegy 2.6 that overlap in fascinating ways with two different queer responses to heteronormative temporality. Lee Edelman advocates an ­anti-​­futural response, radically proclaiming that queerness must reject any notion of the future, as embodied in the heterosexual nuclear family, and most particularly in the figure of the Child (­Edelman 2004). Conversely, José Esteban Muñoz, while refusing the “­here and now” as a “­prison house,” argues that queerness belongs to the “­then and there” (­Muñoz 2019, 1); queerness “­should and could be about a desire for another way of being in the world and in time” (­Muñoz 2019, 96). For Muñoz, queer temporality rests on hope for a better future that has not yet been written. On careful consideration, the amator’s strange narrative detours in poem 2.6 to contemplate “­credulous hope” (­credula spes, 2.6.­19–​­20ff.) and Nemesis’ dead little sister (­2.6.29ff.) make sense through the theories of Muñoz and Edelman, respectively. Let us begin with the surprising and unsettling appearance of Nemesis’ dead sister as the amator makes his case on his puella’s doorstep. His deployment of “­such an extreme form of entreaty” (­Maltby 2002 ad ­29–​­40), beseeching his puella to take pity on him through an appeal to the bones of her dead sister, is dissonant enough, but he redoubles the discomfort by threatening to summon her ghost, still dripping blood from her fatal fall, to haunt Nemesis should she refuse him. The amator, while ultimately claiming that he does not wish to renew the puella’s distress over the tragic incident, seems, in fact, bent on just the opposite. He reconstructs an explicitly detailed picture of the deadly accident and its ­results – ​­she fell “­headlong/­­head-​­first” (­praeceps, 2.6.39) from a high window and ended up “­­blood-​­stained” (­sanguinolenta, 2.6.40), a vivid adjective, unusual in elegiac verse.20 To this striking picture he adds further details that underscore the young age of the sister at the time of her death; he is anxious that the earth rest gently upon her because she is but a child (­parva, 2.6.30) and calls her bones immatura, thus highlighting her premature death (­2.6.29). In sharp contrast to his fevered imaginings of life with Delia, which, in one instance, include the puella enjoying a playful and loving relationship with an enslaved child (­1.5.­25–​­26), the only child associated with the amator/­Nemesis relationship, not only is not theirs, but further, is dead. Their iterative narrative that stutters and loops in time presents us, on the one hand, with an emphatic image of no futurity that would seem to respond fairly literally to Edelman’s a­ nti-​­futural call. On the other hand, however, we have a ­ten-​­line discussion of “­hope” that immediately precedes the story of the dead sister. Let us look at the passage in full:

iam mala finissem leto, sed credula vitam spes fovet et fore cras semper ait melius. spes alit agricolas, spes sulcis credit aratis semina quae magno faenore reddat ager: haec laqueo volucres, haec captat harundine pisces, cum tenues hamos abdidit ante cibus: spes etiam valida solatur compede vinctum: crura sonant ferro, sed canit inter opus: spes facilem Nemesim spondet mihi, sed negat illa. ei mihi, ne vincas, dura puella, deam.



Now I would have put an end to my sufferings, but credulous hope cherishes life and always says that tomorrow will be better. Hope nourishes farmers, hope entrusts to plowed furrows seeds, in order that the field return them with great interest. This hope entices birds in a net and fish on the rod, 161

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when bait in front has concealed the slender hooks. Hope even brings solace to the man bound with strong restraint; his thighs make iron resound, but he sings amidst his labor. Hope promises me that Nemesis will be compliant, but she herself says no. Woe is me! Harsh puella, do not defeat a goddess. (­2.6.­19–​­28)

The extract, “­our first extant poetic excursus on hope in Latin” (­Fulkerson 2018, 60), has caught the attention of Laurel Fulkerson, who suggests that as an emotion ancient hope usually serves to foreshadow disappointment and failure, perhaps “­providing a temporary comfort that is inevitably shown to be deceptive and not worth the cost it exacts” (­Fulkerson 2018, 64). She notes that the poet attempts to elucidate his amatory situation through comparisons with farming, fowling, fishing, and slavery, all of which serve in the elegiac world as common metaphors for the elegiac relationship. As the poet works through these examples of others whose hope seems vain, Fulkerson continues, he begins to see more clearly that his own is also false, and hence Book 2 of his elegies (­and, in fact, his entire poetic oeuvre) comes to a crashing halt (­Fulkerson 2018, 62). And yet, while I certainly agree with Fulkerson’s perceptive suggestions that the discussion of hope represents a closural movement by the poet, one that neatly ties the final elegy, 2.6, back via ring composition to the opening one, 1.1,21 I do not think that the excursus demands a pessimistic reading. On the contrary, it seems rather upbeat, albeit in a qualified way. In fact, the amator’s credula spes resembles the kind of hope that José Esteban Muñoz argues belongs at the heart of queer futurity. Hope for Muñoz is fundamental, something to hold on to in order to break out of the present, a way to imagine a concrete, collective utopia, a future that “­escapes” or “­goes off” a heteronormative script. It is not uncomplicated, nor does it turn a blind eye to realities. Hope goes ­hand-­​­­in-​­hand with hopelessness; failure and disappointment sit ­cheek-­​­­to-​­jowl with possibility, as working for a better future involves acknowledging present problems (­Muñoz 2019). In the Tibullan excursus too, spes seems to receive a similar ­clear-​­eyed assessment that a better future might just emerge from the present. The present and the future are always intertwined as the farmers entrust seeds to the ground for the sake of future harvest (­even if sometimes the harvest fails to materialize) and although present fish are caught on the hook future fish continue to nibble just in case the outcome might one day differ. The same fundamental premise allows the enslaved man to ­sing—​­“­we must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there” (­Muñoz 2019, 1, emphasis his). The amator continues his iterative pursuit of Nemesis, looping back again and again to her threshold, now without the means to gain entry, but nevertheless trusting in the “­credulous hope” that someday the door might open. And what happens if/­after the door opens? Can we imagine the future? A heteronormative ­happily-­​­­ever-​­after has already been ruled out. Reading Tibullus Book 2 through the lens of queer theories, we have discovered that the amator queers his relationship with Nemesis, through the mythological exemplum of Apollo and Admetus, the intratextual allusions to queer elegiac relationships, and the affair’s absolute refusal to unfold according to patterns of “­straight time.” Looping, iterative, and lacking any narrative and chronological progress, the relationship between the amator and Nemesis inhabits a queer temporality that consists of one basic moment: the resourceless amator poised on the puella’s threshold. Only in his final poem does the amator raise the possibility of movement forward. But the death of Nemesis’ sister follows immediately after the excursus on hope, bringing to the fore the specter of “­the dead child,” Lee Edelman’s vivid image for the end of heteronormative reproductive ­futurity—​­“­the future stops here” (­Edelman 2004, 31). With this the amator signals that their future narrative precludes the heteronormative life course on 162

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display in poems 2.1 and 2.2. Instead, the very name of the puella, Nemesis, hints at an uncertain queer futurity. A threat in the present of retribution that will materialize in the future in response to a past action, Nemesis herself/­itself conjures up temporal disruption and dislocation in which past, present and future impossibly collapse in on one another. And as he unceasingly desires this “­retribution,” he yearns for something not quite yet articulated, but already looming, promised (­not necessarily altogether positive) on the horizon. As the amator stands on Nemesis’ threshold, in the repetitive stutter of queer time, spes leads us to ponder for them a different, ­as-­​­­yet-​­unscripted future narrative, that unfolds not according to the predictable blueprint of heteronormative temporality, but o­ therwise–​­–­​­­Muñoz-­​­­inspired–​­–​­according to a queerness yet to come.

Suggestions for Further Reading The approach I take in this chapter, reading a seemingly heterosexual narrative of a canonical author through the lens of queer theory to consider queerness “­both as and beyond sexuality,” takes its inspiration from Queer Euripides (­2022). GLQ’s special issue (­2007) provides a nice entrée into the theoretical debates and approaches in queer temporalities. The temporal work of Edelman (­2004), Halberstam (­2005), and Muñoz (­2019) is at the heart of this paper. See also Duggan and Muñoz (­2009) for more about queer futurity. Freeman (­2010), like Muñoz, chooses an optimistic perspective on queer temporality, although she emphasizes the present rather than opting for a ­future-​­oriented approach. Ahmed (­2006) pairs time and space to discuss queer disruption. McCallum and Tuhkanen (­2011) bring together important essays that explore diverging queer articulations of time and becoming. Gardner (­2013) persuasively reads gendered time in elegy. Drinkwater (­2012) and Nikoloutsos (­2007 and 2011) think about queerness in Tibullus’ explicitly homoerotic elegies (­1.4, 1.8, 1.9).

Notes 1 I am grateful to Michael Putnam and Mario Telò, as well as to Ella Haselswerdt and Kirk Ormand, for reading and discussing. 2 Or, in the case of the Julian Laws, time for marriage is stipulated and reproduction incentivized. 3 See Murgatroyd 1994 ad loc for the use of the singular for the plural, and for the translation of priscus. 4 See also Murgatroyd 1994 and Maltby 2002, both ad loc; the former prefers “­grandparents” and the latter opts for “­bird of good omen.” This reading requires different punctuation: hic veniat, Natalis, avis prolemque ministret (“­May he (= Amor) come, Natalis, as a bird of good omen and provide offspring.”) 5 See Murgatroyd 1994, ad loc, who cites Thesaurus Linguae Latinae II.119.79ff to suggest annum = longum tempus. For an opposing view, see Maltby 2002, ad loc. 6 Although Ovid proclaims that either puer or puella provides satisfactory fodder for an elegiac relationship (­Amores, 1.1.­19–​­20), in fact elegiac poetry in general, apart from Tibullus’ three poems that feature Marathus, opts for the puella. Indeed, Propertius 2.4.­17–​­22 claims that anyone who wants a smooth relationship devoid of p­ roblems—​­i.e., not an elegiac r­ elationship—​­should choose a boy as beloved. 7 Perhaps the story is doubly queered, both in content and in the choice of the less normative version. Burkowski 2016, ­154–​­159 suggests Apollo in 2.3 gives up embodying order and rationality, thus becoming unlike himself. 8 Hesiod fragment 54, Euripides, Alcestis 1ff., Apollodorus 3.10.4. 9 This version of the story appears first in Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo 47–54 (­see Stephens 2015 ad loc), but then subsequently in Lygdamus [Tibullus] 3.4.­67–​­72; Ovid, Heroides 5.5.­151–​­2; Ars Amatoria 2.239ff.; Metamorphoses 2.682ff.; Epistulae Ex Ponto 5.151ff; Antoninus Liberalis 23. 10 OLD sv 6a “­to sever abruptly, to cause to snap (­something having linear extent).” 11 Again Tibullus underscores repetition in time both with the adverb quotiens and the iterative imperfect subjunctive dum caneret (­both at 2.3.19). 12 Indeed, as Dinshaw 2012: 9 points out, gods “­have their own extraordinary temporalities.”

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Sara H. Lindheim 13 For example, on the masochistic amator, see Oliensis 2019; for (­narrative deferral and) desire, see Connolly 2000; and for (­Lacanian) desire, see Miller 2003. 14 Gibson 2013 focuses on the ­self-​­conscious ways in which elegiac poets construct a narrative of monogamy out of their messy erotic careers. Nemesis is the only puella for whom there are no rivals for the amator’s attention. 15 Miller 2003: 102 for the ­mise-­​­­en-​­scène of elegy 1.2. 16 Matlby 2002, ad loc discusses the verb claudit and its connotations of a military blockade. 17 On the linguistic continuity and repetition, see Murgatroyd 1994, ad ­49–​­60. 18 There is a textual problem about whether to read seges or Ceres; for a cogent argument in favor of Ceres, see Murgatroyd 1994, Critical Appendix, ad 2.3.­61–​­62. 19 There is some idea of “­normal” poetic progression for Augustan poets; consider here the poetic careers of Horace and Virgil and Ovid’s reflections on his own development in Amores, 3.1. 20 Indeed, all commentators have a note about the adjective; see Maltby 2002, Murgatroyd 1994, and Putnam 1973, ad loc. 21 Fulkerson 2018, ­60–​­62. Reeve 1984 argues that elegy 2.6 and the entire second book is incomplete. My view is shared by more recent scholarship, e.g., Murgatroyd 1989 and 1994; Maltby 2002; Gardner 2013, ­223–​­232.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bright, David F. 1978. Haec Mihi Fingebam: Tibullus in his World. Leiden: Brill. Burkowski, Jane. 2016. “­Apollo in Tibullus 2.3 and 2.5.” Ιn Augustan Poetry and the Irrational, edited by Philip Hardie, 1­ 55–​­169. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connolly, Joy. 2000. “­Asymptotes of Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Roman Erotic Elegy.” Arethusa 33: 7­ 1–​­96. Dinshaw, Carolyn. 2012. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Drinkwater, Megan O. 2012. “­His Turn to Cry: Tibullus’ Marathus Cycle (­1.4, 1.8, 1.9) and Roman Elegy.” Classical Journal 107.4: ­423–​­449. Duggan, Lisa, and Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. “­Hope and Hopelessness: A Dialogue.” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19.2: 2­ 75–​­283. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Freeman, Elizabeth, ed. 2007. “­Queer Temporalities.” GLQ 13.­2–​­3. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fulkerson, Laurel. 2018. “­Credula Spes: Tibullan Hope and the Future of Elegy.” In Intratextuality and Latin Literature, edited by Steven Harrison, Stavros Frangoulidis and Theodore Papanghelis, ­55–​­66. Berlin: De Gruyter. Gardner, Hunter. 2013. Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, Roy. 2013. “­Loves and Elegy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy, edited by Thea Thorsen, 2­ 09–​­223. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halberstam, J. Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Liveley, Genevieve, and ­Salzman-​­Mitchell, Patricia, eds. 2008. Latin Elegy and Narratology: Fragments of Story. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Maltby, Robert. 2002. Tibullus: Elegies. Text, Introduction and Commentary. Cambridge: Francis Cairns Publications. McCallum, E. L., and Tuhkanen, Mikko, eds. 2011. Queer Times, Queer Becomings. Albany: State University of New York Press. Miller, Paul Allen. 2003. Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2019. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. 10th Anniversary Edition.

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Queer Temporalities in Tibullus Book 2 Murgatroyd, Paul. 1989. “­The Genre and Unity of Tibullus 2.6.” Phoenix 43.2: ­134–​­142. Murgatroyd, Paul. 1994. Tibullus: Elegies II. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos P. 2007. “­Beyond Sex: The Poetics and Politics of Pederasty in Tibullus 1.4.” Phoenix 61: ­55–​­82. Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos P. 2011. “­The Boy as Metaphor: The Hermeneutics of Homoerotic Desire in Tibullus 1.9.” Helios 38: 2­ 7–​­57. Oliensis, Ellen. 2019. Loving Writing/­Ovid’s Amores. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olsen, Sarah, and Telò, Mario, eds. 2022. Queer Euripides: ­Re-​­Readings in Greek Tragedy. London: Bloomsbury. Putnam, Michael C. J. 1973. Tibullus: A Commentary. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Reeve, Michael D. 1984. “­Tibullus 2.6.” Phoenix 38.3: 2­ 35–​­239. Stephens, Susan A. 2015. Callimachus: The Hymns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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12 TIME AND PUNISHMENT, OR TERENCE’S QUEER PEDAGOGY David Youd

What is the pedagogy at work in Terence? A.J. Boyle considers this question in his essay “­Terence’s Mirror Stage,” a meditation on the plays’ ­long-​­standing role in consolidating Roman identity that highlights “­their systematic and repeated infantilisation in the service of pedagogy” (­2004, 3). The plays have been reduced to school texts: made to instruct, yet, on that account, made children. In large part, of course, Lacan’s essay on the “­Mirror Stage” to which Boyle’s title alludes aimed to elucidate the fragility of such ­identities—​­of the child’s identification with what he calls the “­orthopedic” image, with its evocation of the “­straight child” that the mirror thus props ­up—​ ­and emphasized the imagines of bodily fragmentation that return to haunt this newly formed self (­1977, ­1–​­7). Boyle gestures briefly to this specter with his expressive if somewhat cryptic closing remark that Terence “­displays, dismembers and reconstitutes the ‘­body’ of his time” (­9), conjuring an image he leaves us to pursue. What gets left out of the picture, then, in Terence’s objectification as Bildungsroman, as a romantic script for the child’s invariably heterosexual (­avant la lettre) ­coming-­​­­of-​­age? For like the Lacanian scenario, Terence’s formative stage outwardly presents a ­straight-​­forward “­drama,” anticipating the child’s assumption of an integrated but “­alienating” identity, faithfully reproducing the image of the father. Yet these paterfamilial and heteronormative fantasies, so vital to the Terentian corpus and its posthumous reception, might be critically dissected to expose a considerably queerer anatomy lurking beneath the surface. If there is a queer specter, in other words, secreted in Terence’s orthopedic Imaginary, how are we to locate it, how to bring it out?1 If Terence’s comedies appear to confirm the unity of the ego, that is arguably a function of their beguiling concinnity. With a specular relation of dramatic form and content, the plays achieve their semblance of artistic unity through the charming vision they offer of domestic cohesion, culminating in the child they so often end by producing. These school texts, whose purity of language has stood since Cicero as a paradigm of Latinity and a style to be replicated, in fact construct and disseminate an entire discourse of reproductive desire. Although, as David Konstan argues, each play precipitates a unique ideological “­matrix” (­1983, ­166–​­167), where the particular contours of plot map out a concrete political field, Terence’s principal ideological womb is surely a reproductive one. In a body of work more or less defined by the marriage plot (­Lape 2004; James 2020, 110), narrative time, dramatic action, and social labor are each harnessed toward the end of securing a legitimate ­marriage—​­inscribed in the conjugal dénouement—​­and the child imagined to ensue DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-16 166

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through whom paternal ego, patrimonial estate, and patriarchal social order may transmit themselves into the future. While this child of the future seldom takes center stage in propria persona, it constitutes in absentia the hidden center of virtually all social and representational meaning. A straight line may thus be said to run between the subject matter of the plays and the material subjects they engender, conditioning spectatorial desire in keeping with the reproductive fantasies they dramatize. Yet in certain fleeting moments, through the cracks of this polished surface, the otherwise obscured underside of the plays’ ostensibly wholesome familialism flashes into view. Take, for instance, the first act of the Phormio, where the slave Davus is brought on stage to deliver a money bag and a monologue on behalf of his fellow slave Geta (­­39–​­50): I hear his master’s son has married, and I presume this money’s being scraped together as a gift for her. How unfairly matters are arranged, that the poor always have to give something more to the rich! The poor guy scrimped and saved from his rations, denying himself every pleasure, but she’ll carry off the bundle, not caring what labor pains gave it birth. Then, Geta will be fleeced for another present when the mistress bears a child, and another on its birthday, and yet again when it’s initiated. The mother will take it all for herself, with the child just the pretext. In his canny soliloquy, Davus decries the fundamental injustice of a social order that shamelessly leverages the master’s child to prop itself up. Everything is channeled to the already rich, and the child is the conduit. The indictment is as artful as it is incisive, and the dovetailing asymmetries of Roman comedy’s political and reproductive ­economies—​­the disparities of rich and poor, free and enslaved, fruitful and ­barren—​­are laid bare in part through its discerning partition of metaphorical vehicle and tenor. For the enslaved, the child functions only as a metaphor for the ­ever-​ ­elusive consummation of d­ esire—​­the nest egg “­born” by “­labor” (­labore partum), the genitalizing “­pleasures” (­genium) foregone, and the vaguely sexual “­scraping” (­conraditur) that suggests a painful friction between the thrill of saving and the throes of p­ rivation—​­while, for the master, the very real child is pressed into service as a naked “­pretext” (­causa) for reproducing the status quo, with each ritual juncture in the child’s lifetime (­birth, birthday, initiation) parlayed into another occasion for a by now ritualized dispossession.2 This extractive violence scars even the lines’ aesthetic texture, as each act of fiscal expropriation is formally inscribed in a theft of poetic syllables: ­ill-­​­­univors-​­abripiet (“­she’­ll-­​­­snatch-­​­­the-​­lot”); ­muner-­​­­ub-​­era pepererit (“­­when-­​­­the-­​­­mistress-​­bears a child”); ­porr-­​­­aut-­​­­ali-­​­­ub-​­erit (“­­another-­​­­on-­​­­its-​­birthday”); ­ub-​­initiabunt (“­­when-​­it’s initiated”). More trenchantly still, by locating the master’s enrichment in these spaces of loss, indeed by evoking the “­plenitude” of the maternal “­breast” (­uber) and the suckling child’s cry for “­milk” (­bua) in the very lesions left by these elisions (­­ub-​­era… ­ub-​­erit… ub-​­initiabunt), the fecund abundance nourishing the master is unbosomed as a form of vampiric predation: an unstanchable flow of property milked by the child. In its consolidation of power in a landowning and reproductive household, in its sanction of violence through the halo of the master’s child, in its perpetual deferral of enjoyment toward the illusory future this child comes to figure, the social order described here in Terence resembles what Lee Edelman styles “­the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism” (­2004, 4): a cultural Imaginary that concretizes the fulfillment of desire, meaning, and social Good in the ­all-​­important but purely fantasmatic Child, producing and punishing queer and abjected subjects through a normative matrix of reproductive temporality. Edelman’s analysis of the modern reproductive Imaginary reactivates the familial idiom native to psychoanalysis and extends the latter’s key insight that 167

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subjection arises with subjectivity itself. The “­name/­law of the father,” internalized as ­self-​­denial through our identification with it, may thus be taken quite literally, and this introjective movement constitutes a primary axis of New Comic pedagogy through the adolescent’s assumption of the paternal part. At a formal level, the genre’s mediation between competing temporalities of desire is informed by its temporal horizon in the s­ o-​­called “­Unity of Time,” a convention whereby the action of each drama is limited to the span of a single day. Against the deferral enjoined by the father, the adolescent’s pursuit of direct enjoyment springs from the recognition that, in the world of New Comedy at least, “­tomorrow will never come; this day is the only one available for action” (­Germany 2013, 93). What would it mean, then, to read athwart this orthopedic tradition, athwart what is understandably construed at times as Terence’s “­straightforward” meaning? A Freudian suspicion: we suspect that, in Terence as in the pedagogical tradition of reading him, with its object of perpetuating a set of normative identities across generations, what gets repressed as alien to an ideal rectitude might be obliquely reflected in the sundry dangers to the child’s straightness, the fantasy of eventual wholeness belied by the unwholesome fascination with the threat of dissolution onto which a constitutive dissoluteness is d­ isplaced—​­from which both child and budding reader must be protected. We might thus, at the level of content, have recourse to the queer child and the queerly childish that people this reproductive theater. For though Terence’s plots generally center on the conflict between fathers and sons, and the mediation of generational differences toward a teleology of maturational development (­Lape 2004; Dinter 2019), they tend to foreground the failure of men, both young and old, to “­develop into true adults… unable or unwilling to fulfill the tasks, expectations, and roles of men in respectable Roman society” (­­Gellar-​­Goad 2013, 170). In terms of aesthetic form, by contrast, if both text and child show themselves queer through the “­open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning” that mark identity’s failure to “­signify monolithically” (­Sedgwick 1993, 8), we might attend to the queer, seemingly stray details which arise not as so many symptoms of deeper meaning or underlying unity, but as tokens of the rapture of fragmentation (­cf. Telò 2021, ­1–​­37). I refer to those moments when, contrary to his image as artistic disciplinarian who denies every gratuitous (­read: Plautine) impulse for the sake of pura oratio, Terence seems at second blush to dote rather too much on his work, lavishing precious attention, like an overindulgent father, on mere trifles of form at meaning’s expense, condensing “­an exasperating materiality that won’t disappear into social meaning” (­Miller 2003, 18). Taking up a psychoanalytic lens, then, shaped by queer theory, and drawing on the whole bag of tricks developed by critics of New Comedy, I turn an attentive eye to Terence’s ­Self-​­Tormentor, a play which throws the identity of name and ­self—​­and Child and ­future—​­into question. It is, as its prologue announces, a duplex comedy: duplicitous, ambiguous, double (­Goldberg 2014, ­123–​­148). Two fathers occupy its stage: Menedemus, who stubbornly works himself to death in contrition for the harsh treatment that has estranged his son Clinia, and his neighbor Chremes, who, secure in the illusion that his own son (­Clitipho) remains pliant, chides Menedemus for his severity. On Clinia’s return, reconciliation seems within reach and everything in order. But when the toney courtesan Bacchis who attends Chremes’ drinking party proves not Clinia’s girlfriend but Clitipho’­s—​­the play’s constitutive ­misprision—​­the apoplectic Chremes repeats the punitive measures he condemned in Menedemus, nearly disinheriting his son. The two sides of this diptych thus betray an inverted symmetry as both fathers struggle to turn their sons toward the future of the family estate, while the masochistic cast of Menedemus’ ­self-​­reproach is contrasted with Chremes’ more sadistic plunge into ­self-​­destruction. In what follows, I treat these in reverse. I first delineate the particular contours in this play of what Elizabeth Freeman calls “­chrononormativity,” the 168

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f­ ar-​­reaching regulation of time according to the normative ends of familial, social, and symbolic reproduction (­2010), while flagging the manifold tensions produced by a ­near-​­universal failure to measure up. I then endeavor to bring out the queer pedagogy that emerges between Menedemus and Clinia when, tutored by the child’s unseemly devotion, the despairing father adopts the queer practice of ­self-​­undoing. The play can thus be read as problematizing the normativity of social identity and inscribing in its formal rifts a striving to fragment the same self it appears to consolidate.

Time and Punishment Allow me to begin with the play’s rather queer title. In the view of John Henderson, who reminds us that stylistics and “­production values are about textualised power” (­2004, 54), the ­Self-​­Tormentor announces its “­­semiotic-­​­­cum-​­problematic” by inscribing in the syntax of its name, in the reflexive pronoun heauton and the ­medio-​­passive timorumenos, the “­complex relations between the person and the self” (­53): it previews its “­tangled logic of retaliation… as ‘­self’ and ‘­other’ align and recoil, blur and react” (­59). Indeed, in Henderson’s reading, not only does the titular grammar show up the “­dubiously ­straight-​­on transitive relations between (­­self-​­entire) subject and (­discrete) object” (­60), encapsulating the play’s scrutiny of social power relations and their internalization in the subject, but, in the resistance of the Greek middle form to Latin translation, it gives fraught voice, like an irruption of the Lacanian Real, to the queer forces that defy integration into its orderly Symbolic: “­l’innommable—​­beyond Latinity to put into words, hence the compulsion to dramatise” (­53). The title’s queer form, in a word, captures the very contradictions that lend the play its propulsive spark. Mining the same rich vein, we might discern in another formal quirk, namely the title’s troubled scansion, a vivid interface between the morphology of the self and the discipline imposed by temporal conventions. For the ­Self-​­Tormentor punishes itself when, in keeping with metrical usage, the act of s­ elf-​­naming in the iambic prologue (­hodie sum acturus Heauton timorumenon 5) requires either corrective emendation (­to the contracted hauton) or contractive enunciation by way of synizesis (he͡ auton). In this stenotic compaction inflicted on itself, inflicted on the very linguistic signifier of the “­self” (­heauton), the s­ elf-​­tormenting title audibly condenses the problem of time and punishment, telescoping the internalization of temporal norms in the process of its own ­self-​­signification. It was perhaps only a matter of time, then, before this metrical kink in the title was thought together with the thematization of temporality in the play. For without clear precedent or parallel, its dramatic action spans not one day but two, installing a “­temporal rupture” at its very center (­Germany 2013, 97; Brothers 1988, 192). In like manner, the first lines of the prologue raise the issue, in a generalizing register, of age and expectations, of life’s times and proper roles: “­Lest anyone marvel that the poet has given an old man the part properly belonging to the young…” (­quor partis seni/­poeta dederit quae sunt adulescentium… ­1–​­2). The exordium is remarkable for its ambiguity of reference: we understand, of c­ ourse—​­in good part because so many commentators have felt it necessary to ­explain—​­the purport of the lines to concern the irregularity of Terence’s selection of the aged producer Turpio to deliver the prologue, the conventional remit of an adulescens. Yet as Emily Gowers has shown, the theme of inapposite age lends structure to the prologue as a whole. When the seasoned Turpio, playing the surrogate father, mounts a defense against the defamatory remarks of a certain “­jaundiced old (­vetu’) playwright” (­22) who belittles the fledgling Terence as too young to have composed his plays without relying on the talents of his seniors (­­23–​­24), Terence leans into this characterization, posing as “­an unrepentant (­neque se pigere, 19) adolescent, a likely lad who cannot find his own voice and who needs to be trained to please the 169

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audience rather than himself, youth’s natural tendency” (­Gowers 2004, 156). The weary prologist, meanwhile, acts too old for all this, crabbing over the laborious productions regularly assigned him and asking the crowd’s indulgence in a quiet play (­statariam 36) better suited to his dotage.3 As a matter of fact, the enigmatic expression that opens the prologue, the issue of the senex playing the part of an adulescens, presently emerges as a thematic nerve center of the entire play. The senex Chremes, for one, is distinguished by his coltish antics and overreactions, a callow lack of ­self-​­awareness paired with all the zeal of a budding philosophaster, and a nigh juvenile fixation on the exploits of his youth whenever he’s in his ­cups—​­which appears to be often. With his slave Syrus we marvel (­te miror 518; cf. 1: nequoi… mirum) at this geriatric pensioner who, having played the bibulous teen at his bacchanalian kegger, still has the ephebic pep to emerge from the ­all-​­night bender without a trace of a hangover, the only whiff of lassitude aired in the rather tired old adage nil nimis (“­Oh, nothing in excess”) with which he shrugs it all off (­519). Syrus balks (“­You call that ‘­nothing’?”), and trots out an equally spavined proverb: “­you seemed, more aptly, to have ‘­the old age of an eagle’!” (­­520–​­521).4 The Dionysian mystery of new wine in old wineskins thus reveals itself in part through this traffic in w ­ armed-​­over chestnuts, through its rejuvenation of old clichés. Like the first lines of the prologue, the first lines of the play, spoken by Chremes, concern the breach in temporal propriety he forthwith commits in accosting M ­ enedemus—​­and swiftly ­kibitzing—​­despite the still recent vintage of their acquaintance (­53). On the grounds of geographic proximity and generous intent, Chremes’ scruples over social norms regulating the suitable times for things are confessed and dismissed in the selfsame breath; in the next, he sets about reproving this admitted stranger with stale truisms on the behavior proper to his years: that he labors “­contrary to his age” (­praeter aetatem tuam 59); indeed, that he must be “­sixty, or older” (­­62–​­63) by his impertinent estimate; that there is no hour so early or late but that he can be seen “­digging or plowing or hauling something” (­­67–​­69); that he is remiss in not taking time for himself (­nullum remitti’ tempu’ neque te respicis 70); that if he spent as much time working his slaves as he does himself working, he would accomplish more (­­73–​­74). In the face of such untimely micromanagement, Menedemus’ pointedly brusk ­rebuttal—​­“­do you have so much free time (­tantumne… oti) you must occupy yourself with others’ affairs?” (­75)—​­is decidedly apropos. The relish here dished up for the spectator is not so much that of smiling at the bad form of the inveterate busybody, but the amusing failure of the chronic meddler to measure up to the times he metes out. We can only laugh when, taking leave from Menedemus, he departs merely to admonish another (­­169–​­172): It’s time (­tempust) to remind my neighbor Phania to come to dinner. I’ll go see if he’s home (­si domist)… There was no need for a monitor: they say he’s already been at my house for some time now (­iamdudum domi… apud me)! I myself have been detaining my guests! His, then, is the familiar irony of one eager to correct others yet incorrigible himself, occasioning delay precisely in his officious zeal to forestall it; with Phania we are made to wait, while the iterative beat of domist… iamdudum domi… apud me sounds out the flow of time like a dripping clepsydra. Clearly, being a stickler about time is what makes Chremes tick, a symptomatic node of enjoyment we can clock through his shticky verbal tic tempus est (“­it’s time”) that, like clockwork, punctuates his lines with a running commentary on punctuality: ut diei tempus est (­168); tempust (­169); nunc tempus est (­187); ut tempus est diei (­212); nunc ita tempus est (­667).5 This humorous characterization, of course, merely underscores on a smaller scale what will transpire to be the crux of the dramatic conflict at large, revolving around the disciplinary norms of reproductive time and the nearly disastrous tensions they engender between fathers and sons. 170

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Indeed, Chremes’ objections to such ­small-​­time affairs in the opening scene soon prove germane to Menedemus’ troubles, with some portion of the latter’s tears presumably triggered by the former’s careless remarks. In hindsight, we see that the bumptious neighbor’s counsel to act his age (­aetatem tuam 59) will have brought to the mind of the forlorn father the very harangues that eventually drove his own son to enlist (“­at your age (­istuc aetati’), I did not devote myself to love, but sought glory and money as a soldier abroad” ­110–​­112), perhaps for that reason touching off, in the form of Menedemus’ snappish “­do you have so much free time…” (­tantumne… oti 75), the same ­knee-​­jerk kicking once directed at his son: “­This only happens with too much free time” (­ex nimio otio 109). The estranging potential of such temporal policing is brought home in the following scene when, with little show of conscious irony, Chremes repeats to his son the very sentiments Menedemus only moments ago deplored as having cost him his own. While the latter had contritely conjectured that his superior age (­aetate) led his son to place too much stock in his superior wisdom (­­115–​­116), Chremes forwards such uncritical deference with the leading question, “­should we expect the son to live by the father’s rules or the father by the son’s?” (­203, trans. Barsby). In the end, he upholds the paternal law by emphasizing the modesty of its demands and seeks compliance through a caricature of youthful enjoyment as a slippery slope to perdition (“­once a mind has given itself up to unsavory passions, Clitipho, it will of necessity persist in perpetual perversity (­consilia consequi consimilia)” ­208–​­209). Naturally, Clitipho will have none of this. Time and experience have exposed his old man’s pat lectures as mere hypocrites’ cant. As the aggrieved youth soliloquizes (­­213–​­216), How incongruous fathers are as judges against all young men! In their opinion, we should be born old men directly from boyhood (­nos… nasci senes|) and take no part in the things that youth has to offer (­quas fert adulescentia|). They measure according to the desires they have now, not what they once had! Clitipho’s youthful protest, evincing the ­clear-​­sighted myopia peculiar to adolescence, criticizes the undue privilege accorded to the father’s delights and, withal, the pretense of maturity that lends him his authority (“­Damnation! The exploits he divulges when he’s had a few drinks, yet now he says ‘­learn from others what’s good for you’—​­the sly dog!” ­220–​­222). With his pertly clever line that boys ought not be expected to be “­born old men,” he insists that the distinct temporalities of youth and old age each maintain their claim. By adverting, moreover, to the opening lines of the prologue (…senes|… quas fert adulescentia| ­214–​­215; cf.  …seni|… quae sunt adulescentium| ­1–​­2)—​­a reminder of the juvenile senex’s want of the maturity he ­brandishes—​­the play quietly highlights the s­ elf-​­serving nature of Chremes’ canned wisdom. As ever in New Comedy, the problem arises when Clitipho’s desire for the pleasure of the moment clashes with Chremes’ task of reproducing himself, of initiating his son into the paternal part through a legitimately procreative marriage and securing through him both the stamp of respectability and the requisite stash for retirement. Needless to say, however, the domestication of Chremes’ own inner child is only ­skin-​­deep. He instructively confides to his son that, out of consideration for the social conventions to which he feels he himself must conform, he seldom discloses the tenor of his own sexual history: “­with one, my sense of dignity prohibits me; with another, shame at the deed itself, lest I seem indecent or perverse” (­­574–​­577). In fact, he sets such great store by social standing that, courting filial alienation, he readily makes believe he will disinherit Clitipho to preserve his own good name: “­not even if you were born from my own head, as they say Minerva was from Jove’s, would I on that account allow you to sully my reputation (­non… patiar… me infamem fieri)” (­­1035–​­1037). Somewhat fittingly, the threat miscarries when, 171

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in a gambit devised by Syrus to garner sympathy, Clitipho begins to suspect his own legitimacy. To his father’s abusive tirade “­you’re an idler, bum, cheat, wastrel,/­rake, spendthrift!” (­­1033–​­1044), he pathetically despairs, “­these are not the words of a parent” (­1035). Of course, in their transparent fakery, in their obtuse immobility (­each a lapis (­831, 917): “­dumb rock”), in their mercenary motives clothed in the flimsy guise of a hollow philanthropy, no genuine doubt could attach to the legitimacy of their likeness. To the contrary, in his telling combination of misogyny and temporal rigidity, Clitipho proves but a chip off the old block.6 Like father: “­That ­woman—​­my god!—​­with a great big effort she’ll give utterance to a great big nothing!” (­ista hercle magno iam conatu magnas nugas dixerit 621); like son: “­you know how women are: while they labor, while they undertake anything, a year passes!” (­dum moliuntur, dum conantur, annus est ­239–​­240). These last lines, casting doubt on the fruit born by lengthy female labor, bear lingering on. The former, Chremes’ contemptuous grouse leveled at his wife Sostrata, decries in gravid syllables what he impatiently suspects will prove a belabored (­magno… conatu) but ultimately barren (­magnas nugas) explanation: an apparently stillborn utterance.7 Indeed, our attention is drawn to the pregnancy of his complaint by the oath “­by Heracles!” (­hercle), suggestively associating Sostrata’s elaborate ­delivery—​­circuitously wandering as though itself a herculean ­labor—​­with the protracted labor that gave Heracles birth. Of course, what the maligned mulier will endeavor to explain, with long forbearance of Chremes’ interruptions, is the birth of a child: the same child whom, circumventing Chremes’ express command to expose it some decades ago, she had entrusted to another woman, but who has now been recognized in the person of ­Antiphila—​­Clinia’s girlfriend. Chremes’ oath thus points up that very thing on which he heaps scorn, namely the efficacy of female labor and the limits of patria potestas in the face of female agency, since, in effect, Sostrata has like Hera brought off a delay of birth, on a ­decades-​­long scale.8 Confronted by this female network of care, Chremes’ attempts to abort both newborn child and stillborn utterance prove strikingly premature.9 If, in this misogynistic economy given casual expression by Clitipho and Chremes, women are represented as the bearers not of children but of the moil and toil which bears no ­fruit—​­the prodigal outlay of language, the elaborate expenditure of words and time, the inordinate fussing with nugatory adornments of body and s­ peech—​­this is made possible by the arrogation of properly (­re)­productive labor as the birthright of men.10 Hence Chremes’ threat to disown Clitipho, should he not conform, is couched in a rhetorical appropriation and devaluation of childbearing labor: “­not even if you were born from my own head…” (­­1035–​­1037). Instead, it is the product of his agrarian toil which, like his store of r­eady-​­made maxims, Chremes jealously guards: “­you seek what you have: parents. What you lack, you don’t seek: obedience to your father and effort to save what he obtained by labor (­labore)” (­­1039–​­1040). The ­self-​­interest underwriting his investment in the child is thus advertised at once in the calculating reduction of the male child to ­future-​­bearing heir and in the pure negativity of the female child whose recovery reads as a fiscal loss (­damno auctus est 628), a blight on his pecuniary harvest the miser naturally resents: “­how perverse and unreasonable the demands of social convention are! I must now drop everything and find a ­son-­​­­in-​ ­law to bestow my h­ ard-​­earned wealth on (­labore inventa mea quoi dem bona)” (­­839–​­841, trans. Barsby).

Terence’s Queer Pedagogy On the one hand, then, the ­Self-​­Tormentor foregrounds the cult of “­chrononormativity” governing entry into the free, landowning world depicted in Roman comedy, the discipline attending ritual passage from adolescence to adulthood where the former marks that “­part of a wild world that 172

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the adult human forsakes in order to be ‘­free’… [to] enter into the realm of marriage, reproduction, work, compliance, and, ultimately, docility” (­Halberstam 2020, 128). In that reproductive economy, Chremes distinguishes himself as the richest purveyor of its stock tokens and lore. On the other, as we have seen, the play’s dramatic vitality springs almost wholly from the fact that nobody quite conforms. Like the other dramatis personae, Clinia comes to life through a dynamic conflict between social role and private inclination. Despite his apprehensive desire to please his ­father—​­he is, indeed, the very picture of filial ­devotion—​­he inclines toward a contrary passion, attaching himself to the poor foreigner with whom he has fallen “­ruinously” (­perdite 97) in love. Ineligible for marriage, Antiphila can only be kept as a “­girlfriend in place of a wife” (­pro uxore 98; in uxoris loco 104), and, disqualified from producing citizen children through whom his inheritance may pass, Clinia and his stubborn attachment spell the end of the patrimonial line. Unsurprisingly, Menedemus can little abide such filial waywardness. Indeed, “­in a society where the continuation of the family in the male line was ­all-​­important, such an alliance would have been quite impossible in [his] eyes, the more so because Clinia was his only son” (­Brothers 1988, 170; compare Packman 2013). With “­daily” reproaches (­cotidie accusabam 102), the dismayed father deals out the same threats to disown and disinherit the boy in which Chremes will soon traffic (­­106–​­108, trans. Barsby): I am willing for you to be called my son (­ego te meum esse dici) only as long as your behaviour is worthy of you. If it isn’t, I will devise some action against you which is worthy of me. Yet in the face of such threats, Clinia holds fast to his attachment. In his singular refusal to grow up and move on, in his ­future-​­negating noncompliance with reproductive temporality, the timid adolescent resists domestication, his ardent cathexis becoming “­queer” not by dint of any aberrance in a gender matrix but by its refractory intransigence to the correlative matrix of transitive, straight temporality on which the social order is premised. Yet the “­queerness” of the ­non-​­conforming child manifests most vividly in this play through its effects on the father, who, taught by the boy’s persistence, elects finally to emulate rather than disown him. Ceasing to groom the child for his role in social reproduction and surrendering the future that child was meant to bear, Menedemus himself comes to inhabit a queer time in which the normative desire for the child and the f­orward-​­looking commitment to reproduction are warped into the melancholic memory of his loss. Menedemus is at a loss; he cannot account for the time of his relation, and this temporal confusion is inscribed in a vexed grammatical tense: “­I have only one son (­habeo). Ah, but why did I say ‘­I have’ (­habere me)? I had (­habui), rather, Chremes. Now it’s unclear whether I have him or not (­nunc habeam necne incertumst)” (­­93–​­95). In this melancholic instantiation, desire for the child twists and torments the self rather than consoling and consolidating it (­­420–​­425): Either I have been born with some unique nature made for suffering, or that which one hears spoken by the crowd is false: that time removes all sorrow. For my grief over my son increases by the day, and the longer he remains away, the more I desire and long for him. These ­grief-​­stricken lines, themselves decayed by the canker of time, formally register the effects of the grief they describe. For not only does “­time” here not “­remove all sorrow”—​­though its metrical counterpart “­removes” all the adage’s verbal endings (­­di-­​­­adimer-­​­­aegritudin-​­hominibus)—​ ­but in the modulating repetition of ego profecto ingenio egregio ad miserias (­420), we hear the “­self” (­ego) degrade by audible degrees into abject “­suffering” (­miserias). Indeed, Menedemus, 173

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who unlike Chremes consistently calls the validity of such bromides into question, underscores the fraudulence of the timeworn truism through the reverberant knell of die (“­day”) that tolls out time’s persistently painful passage: audio/­dici, diem adimere aegritudinem…/­quidem cotidie…/­ quanto diutius/…magis desidero. The unabating pangs of desire amassed in these lines, the raw ache of longing where time does not soothe but abrades, accentuate rather the consonance of time, grief, and desire: “­the longer I wait, the more that I long for him.” In consequence, Menedemus fills the void left by the child with the travail of planting, a travail in turn implanted in the (­e)­longing of the signifier. His labor overflows metrical lines (“­allow me to give myself no time empty/­of labor” ­90–​­91) just as his affectionate diminutives expand to leave scarcely an iota of vacant space: ­fili-­​­­unic-​­adulescentulum/­habeo (“­I have a ­singular-­​­­teenaged-​ ­youngster” ­93–​­94). With their striking plosives, grinding fricatives, and saturating liquids (­ita attente tute illorum officia fungere./­numquam tam mane… tam…/­domum ­66–​­68), his descriptions themselves bear the traces of aesthetic toil. The weight of grief encumbers the instruments of labor and speech alike, dense with h­ eaped-​­up verbs (­fodere aut arare aut aliquid ferre 69) and freighted with heavy syllables (­laborans, parcens, quaerens, illi serviens 139), such that when Chremes implores Menedemus to unburden himself of his melancholy and his mattock (­rastros)—​­an implement giving material body to his grave burden of ­sorrow—​­and snatches the latter from his hands, he too grunts the leaden line, “­Oof! These tools weigh so much?” (­hui tam gravis hos, quaeso? 92). As Menedemus plows all the intensity of his anguish into the toil of tending the earth, the wound harrowing his soul finds its outward expression in the furrows inflicted on text and soil. Menedemus’ grief in fact grows to encompass his entire estate when he seeks its liquidation: “­I sold it all and listed the house for sale” (­­144–​­145). “­I scrapped everything” (­conrasi omnia 141), he declares, not “­scraping” together (­rādere) cash or “­raking” it in, as the idiom usually goes, but taking a veritable mattock to his holdings. In contrast with Chremes’ terror of returning, beggared by the child, to the tedious drudgery of the spade (“­my son will send me back to the mattock (­vere ad rastros res redit)!” 931)—​­gesturing to his neighbor’s plight (­cf. res rediit 113) while refusing to join ­him—​­the ­lumpen-​­landholder abandons himself to this déclassé labor, readily acknowledging his readiness to forfeit everything for the lad: “­I desire to give him whatever he wants, I desire to see him now!” (­­496–​­497). In Chremes’ words, Menedemus would “­surrender his own life and all his money sooner than lose his son” (­­479–​­480). Yet even beyond trading labor in spades for little yield (­consumis… sumas ­73–​­74), the father melds his desire for the child with a bankrupting wish to destroy the ­future—​­to have his son at the cost of his patrimony and reproductive ­legacy—​­in the flat declaration, “­let him do whatever he wants; let him exhaust, expend, destroy (­faciat… sumat, consumat, perdat). I’ve decided to suffer anything so long as I have him with me” (­­464–​­466). If not productive of pleasure, then, this terrain of ­self-​­punishing labor nevertheless proves a patent seedbed of masochistic enjoyment. Even Chremes’ perspicuous negation, “­I’m certain this toil affords you no pleasure,” itself betrays a stylistic enjoyment in useless repetition (­non voluptati tibi esse sati’ certo scio 71). Commentators have often noted the distinctly masochistic color of Menedemus’ toil: Gowers, for example, dubs him “­a masochist who drives himself to work the soil on his farm as penance” (­2004, 155), and Lacan himself, in his passing notice of the play, points to Menedemus as an emblem of moral masochism, the drive that takes perverse delight in punishing the self (­1992, ­89–​­90). For our purposes, however, it is Deleuze’s reading of Masoch that provides the surest angle on the father’s ­self-​­torment when he writes (­1989, ­60–​­61), The masochist feels guilty, he asks to be beaten, he expiates, but why and for what crime? Is it not precisely the ­father-​­image in him that is thus miniaturized, beaten, ridiculed and

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humiliated? What the subject atones for is his resemblance to the father and the father’s likeness in him… Hence the father is not so much the beater as the beaten. While guilt here remains integral to the understanding of masochism, its polarity is reversed. The subject “­expiates” and “­atones,” but only for his “­resemblance to the father,” and it is expressly for his likeness to the durus pater of comedy that Menedemus beats himself up with rhythmic repetition: “­I took the rod and w ­ ell-​­trod road of fathers” (­vi et via pervolgata patrum 101). Renouncing this role, he takes on a posture of servile submission (“­I will punish myself… making myself a slave for the boy (­illi serviens)” ­138–​­139), fashioning his labor as a form of voluntary bondage under the tutelage of the child. Taught by Clinia’s unyielding devotion, and his wild haste “­to see” his beloved (­­230–​­244), this senex amator swaps the part of the stern father for that of the besotted adulescens, impatient to see Clinia and welcoming financial ruin to pay for it.11 A queer pedagogy thus crystallizes in this imitatio pueri: forming a mirror image of the child in whose thrall he now toils, Menedemus’ backbreaking labor refracts the pains taken not to cultivate the self but to fallow it, his manic tilling supplying the latent grounds for the play’s temporal setting during the Rural Dionysia (­Dionysia hic sunt hodie 162). For although he declines Chremes’ invitation to celebrate the festival, he shirks the communal rites of the agricultural calendar to ecstatically peg away at his own ritualized toil. As he says, he means to “­work himself” (­me exerceo 146) like the earth, and, unlike Chremes, Menedemus lets his good name go to seed when, in his vow to punish himself with “­no time free of labor,” that name is broken up into its linguistic elements and scattered like seeds across the textual field: sine me vocivom tempus nequod dem mihi/­ laboris (­90). For this true devotee of Dionysian cult, then, the signifier of the self comes to voice only the rapture of its maenadic dismemberment (­like Cadmus, Menedemus combines the radical acts of sowing anatomized fragments with the d­ is-​­semination of letters). Leaving not even nominal, de minimis details unturned, he plows his very name asunder, fairly spattering the track of the poetic line with the remnants of his shattered self: “­As long as the lad cultivates (­colet) a resourceless life bereft of ­father-​­land (­patria), so long will I punish myself (­usque illi de me supplicium dabo)” (­­136–​­138). Thus while his nomen properly denominates communal solidarity (­lit. “­the people abide”), heralding his humane reconciliation of Chremes’ household and his own, Menedemus’ humilis labor provisionally uproots and ­re-​­etymologizes the Greek as the Latinate declaration “­I will punish myself,” a masochistic figura etymologica that, in its very identification of the self with the titular “­­self-​­tormentor,” reconstrues it to spell identity’s decomposition by sporadically strewing it across the verse. Grubbing about in the soil with rakish abandon, crookedly bent on turning the “­name of the father” (­pater) into passive sufferance (­paterere 443), Menedemus’ indefatigable fagging in the field thus manifests as an enthusiastic embrace of ­self-​­dissolution, the queer jouissance of coming undone (­Bersani 2009). Read in this way, the ­Self-​­Tormentor temporarily inverts the normative coordinates of reproductive futurism, where reverence for the Child secures what Lacan calls “­the service of goods.”12 It unyokes the child from the Child. For while Menedemus attempts to turn his overvaluation of the child into a spade to dislodge himself from the social order, trampling his estate and desire for ­future-​­Child under poetic foot, ­Chremes—​­whose very name (­cf. Gr. chrêmata) bespeaks an identification with his “­goods”—​­spurns the actually existing child in service of the fantasmatic one of the future, safeguarding his savings and conserving the transmission of propertied inheritance through a legitimate reproductive line. Despite his (­in)­famous profession of humanist bonhomie (“­I’m a person (­homo): I deem no person’s affairs (­humani nil) alien (­alienum) to myself” 77), Chremes is quick to jettison “­humane” treatment (­inhumane 1046) by threatening to “­alienate”

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his son through disinheritance (­alienavit 979; cf. Henderson 2004, ­61–​­62). When, in the final scene, Menedemus tries to rein in Chremes’ “­inhuman” severity by recalling his own (“­Chremes tortures (­cruciat) his youngster (­adulescentulum) too heavily (­nimi’ graviter) and too inhumanely (­nimi’que inhumane)” ­1045–​­1046), the costly implications are not lost on the latter, who alludes once more to Menedemus’ ­self-​­sparagmos in his very refusal to emulate it: “­Should I wittingly give my goods to Bacchis?” (­egone mea bona ut dem Bacchidi ­1050). Chremes’ demurral, with its scrambled echo of the vocative Menedeme three lines prior (­1047), evokes the frenzied, ­well-​­nigh bacchic violence Menedemus set about perpetrating on himself and his name, while his stubborn attachment to his bona—​­his refusal to cede them to the “­Bacchis” so appositely ­named—­​­­re-​­emphasizes his commitment to the service of “­goods” betokened by his own.13 Bacchis, then, with her exorbitant tastes and habits put on spectacular display during Chremes’ bacchanalia (­­455–​­464), figures the most conspicuous threat to “­the bourgeois family matrix, with its emphasis on lineage, inheritance, and generation” (­Halberstam 2007, 318), the embodiment of a ruinous jouissance that would rend the Child like Pentheus, and the future that it bears.14 In contrast to Antiphila, whose own name gestures to the antithesis of her poor, foreign birth to the philia sanctioned by civic marriage (­before she is Symbolically redeemed by social recognition), Bacchis remains excluded, the unassimilable outside, the Dionysian menace of social and financial dissolution. To be sure, the margins in this play between the queer and the strictly normative can be r­ azor-​ ­thin. Menedemus’ labor for Clinia’s sake at times resembles little more than the compulsory subjection to the Child’s tyrannous imago. Likewise, by viewing Chremes in a uniformly harsh light, we risk acquiescing to the play’s disciplinary violence, its implicit injunction to chastise the crank whose childish enjoyment is presented as the ubiquitous index of an undue reluctance to sacrifice both self and savings to the Child. The comedy thus seems to pave a ­middle-​­way between Menedemus’ ruinous excess of feeling and Chremes’ tightfisted deficiency (­Packman 2013, 202), and Terence’s pedagogy, as elsewhere, to center on reconciling both fathers and sons to the project of “­reproducing the civic community, one family at a time” (­Lape 2017, 128). Yet while Chremes’ rejection of the child is plainly a feint aimed at advancing his unborn investment by coercive means, Menedemus’ excess acquires an appreciably queer orientation when his attachment to the boy turns him away from the future, and he divests the child of its symbolic significance through an act of ­self-​­exhausting expenditure. Although the recognition plot sanctioning Clinia’s marriage with Antiphila resolves its contradictions more by theatrical legerdemain than by any social transformation, Menedemus’ stubborn attachment to the ­non-​­conforming child looses shock waves that are not fully reabsorbed, bringing in its wake the wholesale rejection of futurism’s ­debt-​­economy for the rapturous, sometimes melancholic, devotion to the individual in its perverse particularity. Is there a queer pedagogy at work in Terence? I have attempted to show how a laborious reading of one play, ardently attentive to the refractory detail, allows us to imagine the possibility of a commitment to the other that would dissolve the self and dissever the foreknown future (­l’avenir) from a queerness yet to come (­à venir): a queer time when the child and the future come apart. Such, I have suggested, is the labor pictured in the play and mirrored in its formal register. From the very outset, the diminution of the “­self” condensed in the titular he͡ auton—​­the shade of tension preserved in the synizesis not to be exorcized through ­emendation—​­adumbrates more than the constrictive ­self-​­discipline imposed by reproductive time. In its anticipation of Menedemus’ endeavor to diminish the self, working it over with the beat of its rhythmic ictus, the title also prefigures the reduction of the ­socio-​­symbolic self, the ­father-​­image Deleuze has as “­miniaturized” and “­beaten” (­1989, 60).15 With its ­medio-​­passive syntax, its prodigious length 176

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and ponderous heft (­he͡ auton timorumenon), the cumbersome title aesthetically conveys something of the masochistic moil of s­ elf-​­undoing, implying the latter may paradoxically involve a queer sort of labor, interminable, without transitive or teleological end. The spectral figure of the he͡ auton timorumenos, divided in its reference, thus points at once to the internalization of the “­name/­law of the father”—​­namely subjectivation through the disciplinary matrix of reproductive time (­the “­service of goods” embodied by Chremes)—​­and the queer endeavor to root out this paternal law by driving a plow over the self that is its preeminent functionary. Menedemus’ willful d­ is-​­integration from the normative rhythms of the community makes room for the child to make a life outside of the social project of reproduction, but the effects of his fidelity to the queerness of the child extend further: turning the plowshare into a sword, he puts a knife to the Gordian knot of labor, reproduction, and futurity on which the paterfamilial social order depends.

Suggestions for Further Reading Some of the best work on Terence in general and the ­Self-​­Tormentor in particular remains to be found in the 2004 special edition of Ramus, including the contributions of Boyle, Gowers, Henderson, Lape, McCarthy, and Smith. Edelman (­2004) lays out the queer stakes of cultural fantasies arranging the ­ever-​­deferred fruition of desire and consummation of meaning around the future of the Child, while Sedgwick (­1993), Stockton (­2009), and Halberstam (­2020) emphasize the queerness basic to childhood. Freeman (­2010) exemplifies a large and diverse body of work elaborating the notion of queer temporalities: the ensemble of queer and/­or alternative relations to time outside of its normative organization around the rhythms and ends of the bourgeois heterosexual family. On masochism and queer s­ elf-​­shattering, see Deleuze (­1989), Bersani (­2009), and Edelman (­2004).

Notes 1 On the reproductive Imaginary of Roman comedy, see e.g. the psychoanalytic reading of Amphitruo in Oliensis 2010. 2 On the metaphorics of this monologue, see esp. McCarthy 2004, 1­ 07–​­108 and Smith 2004, 8­ 6–​­88. 3 On the Terentian prologue and its ­agenda-​­setting wont, see esp. Gowers 2004 and Sharrock 2009, ­63–​­95. 4 “‘­The eagle’s old age is as the lark’s youth’, which refers to the eagle’s (­and thus Chremes’) continued vigour,” Brothers 1988, 198. 5 On repetition and the array of iterative devices essential to Roman comedy, see Sharrock 2009, ­163–​­249. 6 Giving the lie to Chremes’ scold that only Sostrata “­could bear a child so like her” (­1022). 7 See Karakasis 2005, ­62–​­82 on the “­penchant for wordiness” and “­­long-​­winded expressions” characteristic of Terence’s elderly. 8 For a similar parapraxis in the Amphitruo, see Oliensis 2010, ­302–​­304. On patria potestas in this play, see Gowers 2004, 156 and Lape 2004, ­35–​­44. 9 See Brothers 1988, 206 on Sostrata’s “­skill in handling Chremes,” an apparent exception to the rule that, in Terence, the authority of the paterfamilias “­cannot be subverted” (­James 2013, 193). 10 See Miller 2003, 1­ 7–​­20 on style’s queer resistance to reproductive economies. 11 On (­meta)­theatricality and s­ tock-­​­­role-​­playing in Terence, see e.g. Sharrock 2009, 2­ 19–​­232. 12 Lacan 1992, 315: “­The morality of power, of the service of goods, is as follows: ‘­As far as desires are concerned, come back later. Make them wait.’” 13 So also his remonstrance at 841: labore inventa mea quoi dem bona. 14 “­The Child... compels us take our social value from our various relations to it and to make ourselves, in whatever way, the guardians of its future. A class of persons must therefore emerge to materialize the danger to that future” (­Edelman 2017, 124). 15 Compare the place of ictus in Eve Sedgwick’s masochistic poetics of spanking, 1993, 1­ 85–​­186.

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Works Cited Barsby, John ed., trans. 2001. Terence: The Woman of Andros. The S­ elf-​­Tormentor. The Eunuch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bersani, Leo. 2009. Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boyle, A.J. 2004. “­Introduction: Terence’s Mirror Stage.” Ramus 33: 1­ –​­9. Brothers, A.J. 1988. Terence: The ­Self-​­Tormentor. Haverton, PA: Aris & Phillips. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. Translated by Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books. Dinter, Martin T. 2019. “­Fathers and Sons.” In The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy, edited by Martin T. Dinter, ­173–​­187. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2017. “­Learning Nothing: Bad Education.” Differences 28, no. 1 (­May): ­124–​­173. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ­Gellar-​­Goad, T.H.M. 2013. “­Religious Ritual and Family Dynamics in Terence.” In A Companion to Terence, edited by Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill, 1­ 56–​­174. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Germany, Robert. 2013. “­The Unity of Time in Menander.” In Menander in Contexts, edited by Alan H. ­Sommerstein, 9­ 0–​­105. London and New York: Routledge. Goldberg, Sander M. 2014. Understanding Terence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gowers, Emily. 2004. “­The Plot Thickens: Hidden Outlines in Terence’s Prologues.” Ramus 33: 1­ 50–​­166. Halberstam, Jack. 2007. “­Forgetting Family: Queer Alternatives to Oedipal Relations.” In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 3­ 15–​­324. Oxford: Blackwell. —​­—​­—​­. 2020. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Henderson, John. 2004. “­Terence’s Selbstaussöhnung: Payback Time for the Self (Hautontimorumenus).” Ramus 33: ­53–​­81. James, Sharon L. 2013. “­Gender and Sexuality in Terence.” In A Companion to Terence, edited by Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill, 1­ 75–​­194. Maldon, MA: Blackwell. —​­—​­—​­. 2020. “­Plautus and the Marriage Plot.” In A Companion to Plautus, edited by George Fredric Franko and Dorota Dutsch, 1­ 09–​­121. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Karakasis, Evangelos. 2005. Terence and the Language of Roman Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Konstan, David. 1983. Roman Comedy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Ecrits. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. —​­—​­—​­. 1992. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII. Edited by ­Jacques-​ ­Alain Miller, translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Lape, Susan. 2004. “­The Terentian Marriage Plot: Reproducing Fathers and Sons.” Ramus 33: ­35–​­52. —​­—​­—​­. 2017. “­Compassion and Violence in Hellenistic New Comedy: The Case of Terence’s ­Self-​ ­Tormentor.” In Cultural Perceptions of Violence in the Hellenistic World, edited by Michael Champion and Lara O’Sullivan, 1­ 16–​­136. London: Routledge. McCarthy, Kathleen. 2004. “­The Joker in the Pack: Slaves in Terence.” Ramus 33: ­100–​­119. Miller, D.A. 2003. Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Oliensis, Ellen. 2010. “­Psychoanalysis and the Roman Imaginary.” In The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies, edited by Alessandro Barchiesi and Walter Scheidel, 2­ 95–​­308. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Packman, Z.M. 2013. “­Family and Household in the Comedies of Terence.” In A Companion to Terence, edited by Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill, 1­ 95–​­210. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharrock, Alison. 2009. Reading Roman Comedy: Poetics and Playfulness in Plautus and Terence. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Joseph A. 2004. “­Buy Young, Sell Old: Playing the Market Economies of Phormio and Terence.” Ramus 33: ­82–​­99. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Telò, Mario. 2021. Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

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13 NARCISSUS AND THE HAPPY INCH Queering Social Reproduction in the Roman House David Fredrick

Appearing first as an ­off-​­Broadway stage musical in 1998 and subsequently as a film in 2001, Hedwig and the Angry Inch follows the ­hard-​­knock tour of the genderqueer East German singer Hedwig and her grunge/­glam backing band, the eponymous Angry Inch. As the sexual interest of an American G.I. (­Luther), Hedwig (­née Hansel) endures ­sex-​­reassignment surgery in preparation for marriage to Luther and a move to Junction City, Kansas, close to Ft. Riley. The operation goes awry, and Hedwig is left with a vestigial inch “­where my penis used to be, where my vagina never was.” Hedwig is soon abandoned in her mobile home, with few options beyond songwriting and sex work. Things temporarily look up when she develops a relationship, both mentoring and erotic, with Tommy Speck, a teenage ­would-​­be rock star and Jesus freak. As they make out in the laundry, however, Tommy makes a startling discovery. “­What is that?” he asks in bewilderment. After a long silence, “­It’s what I have to work with,” replies Hedwig (­­Figure 13.1). Though merely an inch, it is decidedly too much for Tommy, and they split up. He subsequently rockets to stardom as Tommy Gnosis, appropriating the songs and a ­gender-​­edgy image Hedwig has crafted, leaving the Inch even Angrier. And yet, through the vehicle of glam rock, Hedwig, a la Diotima, seems to have begotten the beautiful offspring of her ideas in the beautiful medium of ­Tommy—​­though he has predictably written her out of the creative story.1 This piece focuses on a different kind of inch, the small erection which appears on a range of erotic figures on the walls of ancient Pompeii: Adonis, Cyparissus, Endymion, Hermaphroditus, and Narcissus. As Hedwig’s inch for Tommy, this “­happy inch” comes as a surprise to the viewer, and has certainly been understudied. Instead, scholarship on Roman art has assumed that among the many female or feminate erotic figures in Pompeian wall paintings, erections appear only on Hermaphroditus, a surprise made possible by their singular combination of male and female anatomy.2 This piece argues instead that the erect penis found in combination with eroticized feminate features is not unique to Hermaphroditus. It is, rather, a third kind of penis in the repertoire, neither the small, unaroused penis of heroic male nudity nor the exaggerated erection characteristic of satyrs or Priapus. In contrast to these defining postures of the phallic, “­manly” penis, the feminate erection found on Narcissus, Hermaphroditus, and the rest of the Happy Inch suggests a reconsideration in toto of these eroticized figures, often characterized as the penetrable objects of

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­Figure  13.1  Hedwig and the Angry Inch (­2001): “­What is that? It’s what I have to work with.” © 2001, Fine Line Features.

a possessive, penetrating male gaze.3 For instance, Elizabeth Bartman observes of the “­sexy boys” in Roman sculpture (­2002, 268), …after all, both slaves and statues have essentially the same status as possessions of a rich owner. Ganymede as an artistic subject embodies this concept succinctly; in his mythic configuration, he is the ­cup-​­bearer of Jupiter and thus the epitome of a servant; as a statuary image of a ­cup-​­bearer in the villa of a rich man, he is in a sense also his master’s servant, a figure whose age, beauty, and exotic background provided a mythic paradigm for the mortal servants who waited on their master (­who, consequently, may have fancied himself as a ­Jupiter-​­like power). As has been widely recognized, role reversal between genders (­Hylas seized by the water nymphs, Pentheus dismembered by Maenads) is common in Pompeian wall paintings. The queer potential of this challenge, however, has been neutralized by reading it as a carnivalesque holiday for elite males from the burdens of their empowered role through “­playing the Other,” a touch of Hellenistic gender complexity befitting their educated status. For instance, the story of Attis and Cybele, the Mother Goddess of Asia Minor, had considerable currency in the late Republic and early empire. We have an extant version by the poet Catullus (­late 50s BCE) and several depictions from Pompeii. A youthful object of adult male desire in the quintessentially Greek setting of the gymnasium, Attis forsakes their polis for the wild mountains of Asia Minor, where they castrate themselves in service to Cybele. Marilyn Skinner has argued that by taking on passive or feminized positions in literature or a­ rt—​­playing at Attis, Pentheus, or H ­ ylas—​­elite men could explore emotions otherwise repressed in the performance of dominant masculinity.4 As a metaphor for elite political vulnerability playing the Other can take on a serious edge, and judging from the texts of Tacitus and Suetonius, elite anxiety in the face of imperial power was 180

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immediate and tangible in Rome itself. 5 It seems less so in Pompeii, where the local elite have connections to Rome but are clearly engaged in the politics of their own city.6 Imperial patronage targeted at freed people, however, raises the question of anxiety from below, and this is relevant for the reading of the happy inch in this piece. Rose MacLean (­2018) argues that the strategies of freed people, in pursuing economic success and commemorating their life stories, exercised significant influence on Roman culture from the bottom up, as the lived practices and ­self-​­representation of the “­penetrated” were appropriated by the elite.7 On the whole, however, the approaches outlined above remain dominant, and for these approaches, erotic content in Pompeian houses has three functions: assertion of power (­indebted to ­Wallace-​­Hadrill’s “­­power-​­house”), temporary holiday from power (­playing the Other), or pressure valve for anxiety (­for the elite) about subjection to a new power from above. These approaches are linked by their focus on elite perceptions and experience, and their shared reliance on the penetration model. As a dominant interpretive framework for more than 40 years, the penetration model has become a charmed circle for reading Greek and Roman sexuality. The original charmed circle, outlined by Gayle Rubin for reading ­twentieth-​­century sexuality (­Rubin 1984), is heteronormative, while this Roman charmed circle is p­ enetration-​­normative, but both are equally binary. As David Halperin put it (­1989, 260), “­sex effectively divided and distributed its participants into radically distinct and incommensurable categories (“­penetrator” versus “­penetrated”), categories which in turn were wholly congruent with superordinate and subordinate social categories.” Amy Richlin’s summary largely agrees (­1997, 26): Sexual norms in Greek and Roman cultures, and in other contemporary cultures, depended to a large degree on ­function—​­penetrated/­penetrated. Adult males were expected to wish to penetrate two kinds of people: boys between the ages of about 12 to 18, and women. Women were expected to fulfil the role of penetrated person; their desire to do so posed a problem. Boys were expected to be conscious of their potential as sex objects and to make a clean transition from (­potential) penetrated to penetrator around the age of 20. While a number of significant pieces have added complexity by attributing a measure of agency to the “­passive” role (­the desire to be penetrated), the penetration model itself remains in place as the accepted framework for reading ancient Greek and Roman sexuality.8 But what if the feminate “­penetrated” (­Endymion, Adonis, Narcissus, or Hermaphroditus) has an erection? And what if this thematic group is the largest content category in Pompeii? This piece will argue that as marked by the happy inch this category is “­queer” in Roman terms, and points to the construction of alternative forms of power for household members who are not elite males but nonetheless have significant agency in their economic, social, and sexual lives. While it may be elided or satirized in elite texts, ­non-​­elite queer agency was an essential part of collective power as it pulsed dynamically through the house which, viewed as a spatial network, is neither very centralized nor rigidly hierarchical. As used here “­queer” applies to ancient Roman textual and visual content, life paths, and identities that do not obey the ­penetrator-​­penetrated binary, without suggesting equivalence to queer art, lives, or identities ­today—​­though of course comparisons can be made and similarities found.9 The image below (­­Figure 13.2) is a fresco of Echo and Narcissus (­Naples Museum 9380, VI 7 20 tablinum 7; Pompeii is organized into nine larger regions, each subdivided into numbered blocks with numbered doorways). Echo sits in profile at left, while Narcissus sits exposed frontally, their reflection visible in the water at lower right. Their right arm is cocked above their head in the “­come hither” pose, while the little Cupid at the bottom center with his raised right arm and 181

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­Figure  13.2  Narcissus and ­Echo -​­Naples Museum 9380, used by permission of the photographer, Stefano Bolognini.

pointing finger directs the viewer’s gaze to the iconically beautiful, mostly nude youth. Cupid’s upraised arm and finger form a visual rhyme with what rises exposed in the lap of Narcissus, in the center of the composition. We might well ask: what is that (­­Figure  13.3)? That is what Narcissus has to work with. It demonstrates that figures which combine feminate features (­light complexion, swelling hips, flowing hair, fleshy breasts, a sinuous ­S-​­curve pose, ­come-​­hither arm position) with an erect penis are not limited to Hermaphroditus.10 From the standpoint of penetration, this erection is not much. It is a different story from the standpoint of pleasure, a story of pleasure in ancient Rome not defined by penetration. In the shadow of the penetration model, this story remains largely untold. Appearing on the sexual “­object,” this happy inch appears to announce the active desire of a sexual “­subject,” whose pleasure would not entirely consist in penetrating, being penetrated, or both at the same time. Rather, the pleasures of this category fall in the shades of gray sexuality invisible to the ­penetrator-​­penetrated binary. The happy inch which is not a phallus is found again in the example of Narcissus uncovered in 2018 in Regio V 6 13.11 Echo does not appear in this version. The pointing function of Cupid’s arm and hand has been replaced here by his arrow and bow, and the head of the hunting dog at lower right gazing up intently at the lap of Narcissus. Again, the erect penis is quite small, perhaps ironically so as it is juxtaposed to the circular wreath of flowers Narcissus holds in their left hand.

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­Figure  13.3  Narcissus and Echo -​­Naples Museum 9380, detail.

The wreath prefigures their transformation into the Narcissus flower, but may also imply the sexual openings of the body, orifices clearly too large for their erection to fill. In this example from the House of the Large Altar (­VI 16 15), the juxtaposition of delicate erection to flower garland has been replaced by the mirrored bodies of Selene and Endymion, as “­passive” erotic spectacles and desiring subjects (­­Figure 13.4). Though asleep, Endymion (­at right) has their right arm cocked back over their head in the c­ ome-​­hither pose, and their penis, just now revealed as their robe slips down, is erect (­­Figure 13.5). The dog at the bottom right again directs the viewer’s attention to Endymion’s lap, while the shaft of the spear parallels their erection. Endymion’s feminate body is a match for Selene’s and is typical of male (?) youths represented as erotic spectacles. Rather than imposing a phallic difference between the two bodies, Endymion’s erection telegraphs a different, and inherently dynamic, modality of desire and sexual subjectivity than that conveyed by words like “­phallic” and “­penetration.” For this modality, the word “­queer” seems appropriate since it occupies a transgressive position relative to the elite emphasis on penetration. As feminate doubles undifferentiated by a phallus, Selene and Endymion bear comparison with compositions that feature Hermaphroditus discovered by male figures who have contrasting reactions to what they find. In the first type, represented by examples in the House of the Dioscuri (­VI 9 6) and the House of the Vettii (­VI 15 1), Hermaphroditus is discovered by a satyr who has advanced toward them from behind, intending to take this feminate “­object” by surprise (­­Figures 13.6 and 13.7). In the former fresco, from the House of the Dioscuri, Hermaphroditus has awoken just as the satyr draws near. They turn toward the satyr, whom they grasp with their outstretched right ­arm—​ p­ erhaps a visual rhyme for the delicate erection in their lap (­the erection that embraces, rather than penetrates?). The satyr, meanwhile, throws up his right arm, more clearly a rhyme for his erection, and turns his head away in apparent dismay. The satyr in the second fresco, from the House of the Vettii, also throws up his hand but does not turn his head away, and so perhaps his dismay is less absolute. In this second fresco, there is nothing about Hermaphroditus that would securely establish their identity: they virtually reproduce Endymion’s reclining, feminate pose, and their breasts are no fuller or more pronounced. The identification here thus rests on the compositional type, and on the unquestioned assumption that if a feminate “­object” in Pompeii has an erection, they must be Hermaphroditus. But in the logic of these representations, perhaps a Maenad (­or Ariadne) with

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­Figure  13.4  Selene (­left) and Endymion, Pompeii VI 16 ­15–​­17 (­House of the Large Altar), used by permission of the photographer, Tiffany Montgomery.

­Figure  13.5  Selene and Endymion, Pompeii VI 16 ­15–​­17, detail.

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­Figure  13.6  Satyr (­left) and Hermaphroditus, Pompeii VI 9 6 (­House of the Dioscuri), used by permission of the photographer, Tyler Bell.

­Figure  13.7  Satyr (­left) and Hermaphroditus, Pompeii VI 15 1 (­House of the Vettii), Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Rom 56.459, used by permission.

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an erection, if one is willing to accept the assertion that the female body includes an organ which can become erect. A second type of “­surprise” composition features Hermaphroditus discovered by Silenus, represented by examples from the House of Marcus Epidius Sabinus (­IX 1 22; ­Figure 13.8) and the House of the Vettii (­again). Silenus’ reaction to the discovery of Hermaphroditus’ erection is clearly different. Rather than an arm thrown up in shock and a head turned away in dismay, Silenus’ right arm is raised in triumph, as he grasps Hermaphroditus’ left arm and gazes eagerly down into their lap. The right arm of Silenus is a clear rhyme for Hermaphroditus’ erection, an erection that propagates across the composition. Linking up with the sweep of Silenus’ erect right arm, Hermaphroditus’ left arm reaches up to take his chin, in Latin his mentum, perhaps a pun on mentula, “­little chin” (= penis). The ritual wand of Dionysus (­the thyrsus) protrudes forward from the left hand and waist of the Maenad at right, while the naked right foot of Hermaphroditus protrudes out from beneath their yellow robe and over the edge of the base for their bench. Another set of visual puns may be at play here, as the stem ­ped-​­ (­Latin) or ­ποδ-​­(­Greek) is used in slang expressions for the penis, and the Latin verb pedicare means “­to penetrate anally” (­from the Greek stem ­παιδ-​­. “­boy”). Meanwhile, the Maenad holds up a silver wine cup, confirming the Dionysiac flavor of the entire scene. Upon careful inspection, the cup appears to be embossed with its own erection, a clever play on the duality of the hermaphroditic body, which would bring

­Figure  13.8  Hermaphroditus and Silenus, Pompeii IX 1 22 (­House of Marcus Epidius Sabinus), used by permission of the photographer, Miguel Hermoso Cuesta.

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­Figure  13.9  Hermaphroditus and Silenus, Pompeii IX 1 22, detail.

both “­halves” of that body into proximate contact with the mouth and tongue of the drinker (­­Figure  13.9). Linnea Åshede (­2015) identifies a “­master narrative” in interpretations of Hermaphroditus: a male figure discovers a beautiful and apparently female figure, is aroused and approaches from the rear, only to discover upon circling around to the front the figure’s ­erection—​­leading to surprise, shock, and apotropaic humor. Jennifer Trimble breaks with this narrative by extending interpretation of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus in the Palazzo Massimo “­beyond surprise” to include repeated encounters with the sculpture in its original architectural and social context. She provides a nuanced interpretation of the sculpture’s fluid movement between attraction and repulsion, observing (­2018, 24), “­The Sleeping Hermaphrodite in the Palazzo Massimo is also a ‘­sexy boy’ sculpture… [which] offers to the viewer both a young woman and an adolescent boy, a dual object of desire.” Trimble emphasizes the importance of exploring this duality in the context of its original display, hypothesized (­based on excavation history and stylistic dating) as the peristyle garden of an elite house on the Viminal hill in ­second-​­century CE Rome. At this point, however, Trimble resituates her interpretation within the confines of the penetration model and the ­power-​­house (­2018, 25): “­The interacting genders in this sculpture never threaten the penetrating male gaze, constructed as erotically responsive to either a boy or a woman. The sculpture’s play of neither/­nor, both/­and remains within that framework of power and desire.” Consequently, the elite owner could weave his guests’ complex reactions to the sculpture into his narrative of power, a kind of theater subordinate to his controlling gaze.12 To retain its alignment with the penetration model, Trimble’s reading maintains that the Sleeping Hermaphroditus must be passive because they are asleep. This glosses a critical detail: the viewer is not surprised to discover a breast plus a penis, but a breast plus…an erection (­­Figure  13.10)? ­Fair-​­minded experts may disagree, and a penis somewhere between flaccid and erect would fit the “­­in-​­between” logic of the composition. As Rosemary Barrow observes (­2018, 85), “­But in the Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture, the penis that is neither soft nor hard surely indicates an indefinite identity somewhere between (­Greek) ‘­self’ and (­barbarian) ‘­other’.”13 However, in the case of a different example of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus type, a sculpture from the garden of the House of Octavius Quartio in Pompeii (­II 2 2; ­Figure 13.11), there is little question: they, like the Endymion from the House of Large Altar, are both asleep and “­active” in the sense that each has an erection. 187

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­Figure  13.10  Sleeping Hermaphroditus, Rome, Palazzo Massimo Museum, author photograph.

­Figure  13.11  Sleeping Hermaphroditus, Pompeii II 2 2 (­House of Octavius Quartio), public domain.

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Åshede (­2015, 305) emphasizes that the real problem is their erection, noting of the mutual attraction and agency between Hermaphroditus and Silenus, “­Hermaphroditus’ potential to challenge Roman norms of eroticism and gendered behavior should not be sought in hir dual sexual characteristics but in hir capacity to be presented as desirable while also desiring.” This disruptive potential is there in every “­sexy boy,” as each has the “­capacity to be presented as desirable while also desiring.” This may explain why the category is so ubiquitous in Pompeian houses, and why these figures and their happy inches have occasionally been the targets of censorship. For instance, the Sleeping “­Venus” in the Liverpool Museum was once (­as a drawing from the late eighteenth century proves) a Sleeping Hermaphroditus, with an erection and a baby at their breast (­­Figures 13.12 and 13.13). Similarly, in an early photograph the fresco of Cyparissus from the House of the Vettii seems to have an erection, a feature subsequently damaged and blacked out in more recent images (­­Figures 13.14 and 13.15). In contrast to direct censorship of the offending inch, the binary logic of the penetration model simply refuses to see it. This is matched by the blindness of another significant charmed circle applied to Roman visual culture: the scopophilic lack at the center of the female body in psychoanalytic film theory. As outlined in Laura Mulvey’s “­Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (­1975), fetishistic scopophilia brings a static focus to the female body as a set of perfect, iconic parts (­eyes, lips, hair, stomach, breasts, legs) arranged around a lack it refuses to represent directly (­anatomical difference = castration). Sadistic voyeurism, on the other hand, dwells on the female character’s

­Figure  13.12  Sleeping Hermaphroditus, drawing from the Townley collection (­ca. 1790), used by permission of the British Museum.

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­Figure  13.13  Sleeping “­Venus” sculpture today, infants and erection removed, used by permission of the National Museums Liverpool, World Museum.

­Figure  13.14  Cyparissus from the House of the Vettii (­VI 15 1), Collections patrimoniales numérisées de bibliothèques de l’Université de Strasbourg inv. #11205, photograph by Giacomo Brogi, between 1890 and 1900.

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­Figure  13.15  Cyparissus from the House of the Vettii (­VI 15 1), photograph by A. Dagli Orti, used by permission of Bridgeman Images.

anatomical lack as central to the plot, which advances in linear time to forgive or punish the female lead for her difference. While critiqued for its emphasis on the male viewer and gaze, Mulvey’s analysis has been widely applied in art history, including work on wall paintings in Pompeii.14 In the example of Selene and Endymion, the play of concealment and revelation characteristic of fetishistic scopophilia is clear in the treatment of the drapery and pose of Endymion, as fabric trails across their lap and seems only just now to be slipping away to reveal their ­genitals—​­a common strategy in the representation of sexy boys (?) in Pompeii. Their male (?) gender, however, points to significant differences between the gaze(­s) in ancient Rome compared to classic Hollywood cinema.15 Selene, meanwhile, advances from the left fully nude, with no play of d­ rapery—​­a presentation that may underscore their active desire and gaze. Hollywood scopophilia teases with the always deferred revelation of what it “­knows” not to be there, and is far more fearful that this assumption will be proven wrong. Hence the earthshaking impact of Tommy’s discovery, parallel to the shock of glam rock performance as it moves beyond the secure confines of pleasure for a male heteronormative gaze. Unlike Hollywood cinema, the scopophilic strategy that shapes the presentation of male (?) erotic figures in Pompeii cannot circle around this simple assumption of lack. Roughly half the time in ancient Pompeii something is there under the sly play of drapery, inside the charmed circle that scopophilia in its t­wentieth-​­century western form assumed to be empty. But what? The word “­male” in this text has frequently been marked “­male (?)” because the answer to this question (­a penis) is less final than it seems. It cannot be captured by the either/­or logic of ­penetrator-​­penetrated, ­hard-​­soft, or ­presence-​­lack. In some examples, the genitals of the male (?) figure are not revealed. In other examples, they are revealed, and are quite small and not ­erect--​­ ​­but still, not nothing. In yet other ­examples—​­the happy ­inches—​­the penis is there, still quite small, but erect. Images of Hermaphroditus form part of this latter set. The amount of critical attention given to Hermaphroditus, that figure who physically combines the anatomy of both sexes, is striking in comparison to the n­ ear-​­total lack of critical attention given to the larger set to which they belong: those figures who conceptually combine both, and for whom the penis (?) is a tantalizingly fungible t­oken—​­no less lovely whether soft or hard. Here we turn to yet a third charmed circle. Until quite recently in the history of western medicine and gynecology, the vagina has been regarded as the primary locus of female sexual pleasure, with the clitoris coming in a distant second.16 Mazloomdoost and Pauls note that the role of vaginal penetration in female orgasm, highly controversial since its assertion by Freud, rejected by 191

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Masters and Johnson, and reasserted in the epoch of the ­G-​­Spot in the 1980s, has been consistently overemphasized without supporting scientific evidence. Meanwhile, “­clitoral influence on orgasm is undisputed” (­2015, 260). This observation connects directly with Anne Koedt’s “­The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” about which Jane Gerhard declared (­2000, 450), To break out of ­male-​­defined notions of female pleasure, Koedt and others embraced the clitoris as a potentially unsituated site of sexual expression in women. Koedt was one of the first feminists to theorize clitoral sexuality as a form of sexual expression tied neither solely to heterosexuality nor homosexuality but to a kind of female sexuality that lay beyond or beneath social designations. The “­discovery” of the clitoris as potentially unaligned to any specific sexual identity proved enormously useful to feminist sexual theories and constituted a major break in American sexual thought. On seeing the erect form of the penis (?) on eroticized, feminate male (?) figures, it is possible to theorize about a queer sexuality for ancient Rome that is not defined by penetration. It is a something that rises within the genital space that scopophilia, like Tommy Speck, had imagined to be blank, pointing to a collection of pleasures and agencies beyond the binary logic of the penetration model. As Gerhard puts it, we might “­embrace [it] as a potentially unsituated site of sexual expression,” here not delimited to women alone, but encompassing those Romans whose sexual lives we had imagined to be defined by “­passive” penetration, and therefore whose sexual loci were confined to sockets: mouth, vagina, and anus. Its visible index is the erect penis (?) on Narcissus et al., a happy inch whose conceptual implications have been dodged by imagining that Hermaphroditus, in having this penis (?), was sui generis. The happy inch thus leads us to reframe all three parts of Richlin’s assertion that (­1) the desire of women (­2) to be penetrated (­3) posed a problem. We might rephrase this: (­1) the desire of those who were thought of as “­passive” erotic objects (­2) to express sexual agency and pursue satisfaction beyond the penetration binary (­3) was inextricably entangled with their social, economic, and political agency. The erections found on sexy boys (?) pose a fundamental surprise for the interlocking charmed circles of the penetration model, film theory, and vaginocentric sexual research. If the Sleeping Hermaphroditus is both eroticized woman and feminate boy, to see their erection is to connect the dots between the erection of Endymion and (­circling back around) the clitoris of Selene. We can then connect the dots between ­non-​­binary sexual agency and the social and economic agency of the “­passive.” Ambiguous and ­tension-​­filled, this agency is also necessary and constructive. It is significantly focused around and within domestic space, to whose role in social reproduction this queer sexual and social agency made an essential contribution. As a set, the sexy boys (?) (­including Hermaphroditus) are the single most popular content category in Pompeii. The “­joke” apparently never got old, perhaps because the punchline is not known in advance. Not every instance of Adonis, Cyparissus, Endymion, Hermaphroditus, or Narcissus has an ­erection—​­only some, and sometimes it is frankly hard to tell. While the spatial distribution of this theme (­the sexy boy (?) who might have an erection) requires more careful research, it is found across a range of rooms, especially cubicula (­small rooms used for sleeping and intimate interactions), tablina (­a room usually located between the front hall [atrium] and the rear garden, used for reception of clients), and triclinia (­dining rooms, usually for parties of roughly ­6–​­20 guests). Further, they tend to cluster together, as in the House of the Large Altar (­VI 16 15), which includes two frescoes of Selene and Endymion and one Narcissus, or the House of Wounded Adonis (­VI 7 18), where the Venus and Adonis composition on the garden wall is connected visually with Hermphroditus at their toilette in room E, or the House of the Postumii (­or 192

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Holconius Rufus; VIII 4 4), whose garden triclinium (­11) has a Hermaphroditus on the east wall facing a Narcissus on the south wall, while in the tablinum of the House of the Silver Vases (­VI 7 20), a Narcissus on the north wall faces an Endymion on the south. This is far from an exhaustive list, but it is safe to say that many, if not most, houses in Pompeii have at least one example of this theme, and often two or more. They seem to have been indispensable in the repertoire. As Katharina Lorenz notes of the House of the Large Altar (­2021, 168), The depiction [of Narcissus] works with the mythological panes in room (­F) [Selene and Endymion together with Ariadne discovered by a Maenad] to create a connection across the extended area of the atrium, a decorative technique characteristic of the smaller rooms in Pompeian houses that were set aside for familiars. A careful analysis of their specific spatial and visual contexts is beyond the scope of this piece, which will conclude with a suggestion about the collective function of sexy boys (?) across Pompeian houses. At this point, we confront the last of the charmed circles, which enjoys a mutually reinforcing relationship with the other three: the reading of the Roman house as designed primarily (­if not solely) to confirm the status and power of its owner, presumed to be male and usually elite. Outlined by Andrew ­Wallace-​­Hadrill (­1988 and 1994), this reading of the house places the owner (­the dominus or paterfamilias) at the top of a carefully drawn social and spatial hierarchy articulated by the ­Grand-​­Humble and ­Public-​­Private axes. The layout and decoration of spaces along these axes served to underscore the status of their occupants: the more grandly decorated the space, the more privileged the access afforded to the dominus, who manipulated these spatial and decorative ensembles to communicate his dominant position. As ­Wallace-​­Hadrill put it (­1988, 55), “­His was a ­power-​­house.” ­Wallace-​­Hadrill’s work was rightly transformative and established a framework into which subsequent scholarship on Roman houses and domestic art has generally tried to fit. At different points throughout his work, ­Wallace-​­Hadrill pays nuanced attention to social gradations below the dominus, but perhaps through common use the argument has become simplified: on the one hand the dominus whose need to display power and status is paramount, and on the other hand everyone else. An approach to the house is put forward here which retains ­Wallace-​­Hadrill’s attention to the ability of the decoration to draw status distinctions but suggests first that this is a ­two-​­way street (­the decoration can also explore the porous nature of those distinctions), and second that power in the Roman house is not monovocally concentrated in the dominus, but ­heterogeneous—​­or queer. Not “­his was a p­ ower-​­house” but “­theirs was a p­ ower-​­house.” This is consistent with recent ­work—​­e.g. MacLean 2018; Mayer 2012; Petersen ­2006—​­that has challenged ­Wallace-​­Hadrill’s emphasis on elite house owners and culture. The very complexity of the social relations of status underscored by ­Wallace-​­Hadrill works against the image of power wielded exclusively by the dominus. At the same time, it is likely that many “­domini” (­house owners) in Pompeii were ­sub-​ ­elite freed people. The granular and interwoven hierarchies of enslaved people, children (­often multiple sets), clients, and social peers points to a complex, shifting, and porous flow of information, the lifeblood of power. This is well captured by a famous passage from Juvenal’s ninth Satire: O Corydon, Corydon, do you imagine that a rich man has even one secret? Even if his slaves keep quiet, the donkeys, the dog, the door posts and marble floors Will all talk. Close tight the windows, put cloth over the cracks, lock tight The doors, put out all the lights, and keep everyone at arm’s length, so not 193

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One reclines close by, whatever that man does at the crowing of the second cock The ­inn-​­keeper next door will know before daybreak. He’ll hear about it, plus Whatever else the pastry cook, the kitchen chef, and the meat carver make up. Why would they hesitate to simmer up slander against their owners, when that’s how They pay back each stroke of the lash? Don’t doubt that the neighborhood drunk Will run him down at the corner, intoxicating even ears that don’t want to hear it. Juvenal Satire 9.­102–​­11317 The social complexity of the household unfolds in the spatial context of the house. To move closer to understanding the construction and reproduction of power in the houses, it is useful to view their plans as a spatial network comparable to a social network, whose structure shapes the flow of information and influence among its members. In the network analysis of a structure, the rooms (­or ­more-­​­­or-​­less discrete spaces) are treated as nodes in a graph, and the places where they touch (­usually doors) are treated as edges. The network connections among the nodes can then be assessed mathematically, like the nodes in a social network, or pages on the internet. Employing a variety of measures of centrality, this allows the prediction of patterns of movement and communication among the nodes: which spaces are well connected within the network, which are comparative backwaters, and how integrated the structure is overall. The Virtual Pompeii Project (­VPP) at the University of Arkansas is engaged in a comprehensive study of space in Pompeii using network analysis. VPP’s approach updates traditional Space Syntax, associated with Hillier and Hanson’s The Social Logic of Space (­1984), in two significant ways.18 First, the idiosyncratic methodology and measurements of Space Syntax have been set aside in favor of the measurements and terminology used by social network analysis, which are widely employed in social sciences, including archaeology. Second, rooms with central features (­primarily atria and peristyles) have been resolved into two to four nodes (­depending on the number of sides) rather than one. This allows VPP to analyze each house as both a directed graph (­the visitor’s perspective from the outside in) and an undirected graph (­the inhabitant’s perspective moving among the internal spaces). It also avoids treating the atrium or peristyle as “­master nodes,” which has produced a mistaken emphasis on centralization, and therefore univocal power. In fact, traffic was likely much greater on one side or another of the central water catchment (­impluvium) or garden: the sides participate in different communication pathways, with differing purposes and likely amounts of use. This research is ongoing, but a h­ igh-​­level sense of its direction can be conveyed by a few examples. This is the plan of the House of the Prince of Naples (­VI 15 ­5–​­7; ­Figure 13.16), with the left image showing its directed betweenness scores and the right its directed eigenvector scores. Speaking roughly, this measures the importance of each node, from the standpoint of a visitor moving outside in, in terms of nodes they are likely to pass through (­betweenness) and their likely destination nodes (­eigenvector). Again speaking roughly, this indicates the nodes through which information is likely to pass, and where it is likely to land, from the o­ utside-​­in direction. These two images show the same analysis parameters applied to the much larger House of Paquius Proculus (­I 7 1; ­Figure 13.17). As in the House of the Prince of Naples, the betweenness graph captures the imbalance between different sides of the atrium and peristyle, while high eigenvector scores are found for a relatively large number of rooms, reflecting the high value of the paths that lead to them. Finally, these four images visualize undirected betweenness for three houses in Regio VI and one house in Regio I (­­Figure  13.18). As these graphs are undirected, they capture the 194

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­Figure  13.16  Pompeii VI 15 ­7–​­8 (­House of the Prince of Naples), Directed graph, betweenness centrality (­left) and eigenvector centrality (­right). Illustration provided by the author.

­Figure  13.17  Pompeii I 7 1 (­House of the Paquius Proculus), directed graph, betweenness centrality (­above), and eigenvector centrality (­below). Illustration provided by the author.

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­Figure  13.18  Pompeii VI 6 ­6–​­7 (­above, left), VI 10 6,17 (­above, right), Vi 7 ­4–​­6 (­below, left), I 2 ­17–​­19 (­below right), undirected graph, betweenness centrality. Illustration provided by the author.

nodes through which inhabitants, and therefore information, are most likely to pass and to land as they move through the structure, again with high betweenness centrality corresponding to rooms that function as hubs, and high eigenvector centrality corresponding to h­ igh-​­value destinations. These graphs are striking for their articulation by multiple significant nodes, whether as ­pass-​­through distributors (­betweenness) or destinations (­eigenvector). There is hierarchy, but it is multivocal, and if we compare these graphs to the paradigms put forward by David Grewal in Network Theories of Power (­2010; graphs adapted from Baran 1964), it is clear that they adhere most closely to the decentralized paradigm second from right (­­Figure  13.19). If the Roman house is a ­power-​­house, it is critical to recognize that its patterns of movement and information flow are multiple and relatively decentralized, suggesting that its power is not tightly concentrated in the hands of a single dominus. Decentralized power suggests an agenda for the dominus beyond the need to impress and assert status ad infinitum. We might view this agenda as the inverse of the porous flow of gossip to the ­next-​­door bar and street corner satirized by Juvenal. It may be satire, but this passage clearly points to the desire of domini (­often unsuccessful) to control the flow of information outward through the enslaved people in their households. To be successful in this competitive environment, they must also seek to maximize the flow of information inward through household members and visitors, and

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­Figure  13.19  Paradigms of network centralization. Illustration adapted from Grewal 2010, based on Baran 1964, public domain.

to have access to the information possessed by household members. As the historian James Scott puts it (­1990, 3­ –​­4), …The questionable meaning of the public transcript suggests the key roles played by disguise and surveillance in power relations. Subordinates offer a performance of deference and consent while attempting to discern, to read, the real intentions and mood of the potentially threatening powerholder. As the favorite proverb of Jamaican [enslaved people] captures it, “­Play fool, to catch wise.” The power figure, in turn, produces a performance of mastery and command while attempting to peer behind the mask of subordinates to read their real intentions. In Roman houses, this dialectic does not unfold between a simple binary consisting of ­strong-​­weak, ­superordinate-s​­ ubordinate, ­active-p​­ assive, and ­penetrator-​­penetrated. Roman status gradations are actually quite granular, producing mobile constellations of alignment and relative positions of power that could shift with each encounter, and include significant areas of gray. Moreover, Roman houses are not solely focused on expressing and extending the power of their domini. Opportunity and ambition inform the crucial roles played by its enslaved members, including the movement of some of them to freed status, with associated economic and social mobility. Sexy boys (?) and statues do not have essentially the same status as possessions: the statues will never be freed but enslaved household members often were. This outcome benefits them as well as the dominus, and produces a status that fluctuates dynamically across and between binaries: the freed person as both client of their former owner and potential owner of their own enslaved household members. Roman society does place an emphasis on active penetration as defining a sexuality that does have a connection to status and ­power—​­but it is not the only role that matters, and measured against the elite role of penetrator, the sexuality of freedpeople emerges as queer in Roman terms. At the same time, Roman culture needed these successful freed queer people, clients who had (­often) been penetrated sexually as part of their enslaved lives, and (­likely) continued to take this

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role (­but not exclusively) after being freed, but also clients with agency and the experience to use it. Roman houses needed to reproduce these people and their queer power, including its mastery of Scott’s dialectic of disguise and surveillance, the borderland between the public and private scripts. Viewed in the light of this cultural function, the category of sexy boys (?) (­including Hermaphroditus) in Pompeian wall paintings, with their narrative of erotic discovery and the happy inch, resonates with the negotiations that shaped heterogeneous power in the rooms these paintings ­decorate—​­the inch that the household’s freedpeople will have to work with. Finally, Roman houses needed to reproduce a second kind of queer power: the power of the domina. Roman wives moved from their natal households to the households of their husbands, and despite the cultural ideal of the univira (“­­one-​­man woman”), many Roman women married more than once in their lives, due to a high rate of divorce and spousal death. Children from a prior marriage remained resident in their father’s house. This undoubtedly produced divided allegiances, as women were enmeshed in complex familial, economic, and political alliances requiring careful management of property and information. In this context, it is important to note that limiting the number of children produced in any one marriage was often of more benefit to the house and family than maximizing it. At the same time, wealth that the wife brought into the household as a dowry upon marriage would need to be returned upon divorce, affording considerable leverage to the domina. Assuming a meaningful relation between sexuality and social and economic status, there would seem to be a sexuality here that is not well or completely defined by the word “­penetrated.” Constructed by a mutable and porous collective, power becomes dynamic, pulsing through multiple nodes, far more heterogeneous, multivocal, and adaptive than a ­power-​­house rigidly oriented toward the dominus. In the house plans of Pompeii, heterogeneous power is reflected in decentralized spatial networks, suggesting complex circuits of movement and information. On the frescoed walls of the houses, erotic themes predominate, not heroic, epic, or political subjects. Expressed through the happy inch, the agency of figures that are often read as objects is called queer in this piece because it does not obey the p­ enetrator-​­penetrated binary that has been posited to define social, political, and sexual identities in ancient Rome. In the competitive mix of ancient Pompeii, houses and households needed to do more than announce and reinforce the power of their dominus and reproduce themselves biologically. They needed to reproduce queer power, the meaningful agency of people who are not elite males, in the form of the life careers of their enslaved members, their female children, and their dominae, their female heads.

Suggestions for Further Reading On the political anxiety of the Roman elite, see Fredrick 2003; Gunderson 1996; Henderson 1989; King 2006; Ramsby and ­Severy-​­Hoven 2007. For continuities in Roman masculinity from republic to empire, see Goldberg 2021. On LGBTQIA identities and essentialism vs. constructionism, see Boswell 1980; Bray 1982; Burger and Kruger 2001; Kuefler 2006; LaFleur, Raskolnikov, and Klosowska 2021; Richlin 1993. On queer theory, see Hall and Jagose 2013; McCann and Monaghan 2019. For interpretations of Hermaphroditus in Roman art: Barrow 2018, Gillies 2017, Von Stackelberg 2014. Useful studies of Space Syntax and Pompeii include Anderson 2004 and 2005; Grahame 2000; Hillier and Hanson 1984; Laurence 1994; Montello 2007; Von Stackelberg 2009.

Notes 1 For a careful analysis of Hedwig in the context of New Queer Cinema, see Henry 2016. 2 The pronouns they, them, theirs are used throughout to refer to Hermaphroditus and the larger set of feminate, nominally male (?), erotic “­objects” in Pompeian art.

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Queering Social Reproduction in the Roman House 3 See Åshede (­2015, ­135–​­143) for discussion of the manly, male, and feminate penis. 4 Skinner 1998, adapting the concept of “­playing the Other” from Zeitlin 1995. 5 On the anxieties of the Roman elite in the first and second centuries CE, see Barton 1993 and the suggested additional reading. 6 See Viitanen and Nissen 2017. Slootjes (­2011) provides a useful overview (­with extensive bibliography) of the complexities involved in defining local elites in the empire, and the associated complexities of defining “­power.” 7 Mayer 2012 similarly argues for the existence of a Roman middle class, necessarily including a large number of economically successful freed people with a cultural identity distinct from the elite. 8 See ­Levin-​­Richardson and Kamen (­2015) and Richlin (­1993). For the problematic relation of the penetration model to Rome, see Fredrick (­2002). 9 Controversy about the existence across historical periods of n­ on-​­normative sexual identities (­as opposed to contemporary western heteronormativity) remains intense, and bound up with the various definitions of “­queer.” For this controversy and overviews of Queer Theory, see suggested additional reading. 10 For the use of “­feminate” to describe these features, see Åshede 2015, ­121–​­125. For further interpretations of Hermaphroditus see suggested additional reading. 11 It was not possible to obtain permission for an image of this fresco, but The Guardian article of 14/­02/­ 2019 provides a reasonably good photo: https://­www.theguardian.com/­world/­2019/­feb/­14/­­stunningly­​­­preserved-­​­­fresco-­​­­of-­​­­narcissus-­​­­discovered-­​­­in-​­pompeii. 12 Trimble 2018, 32. 13 As Åshede wonderfully puts it (­2015, 313), Hermaphroditus as ­soft-­​­­but-­​­­occasionally-­​­­hard-­​­­and-­​­­no-­​­­less-­​­­lovely-­​­­for-​­it has the capacity to confound expectations, making a potentially pleasurable mess out of categories. Hir exceptionality lies not in hir genitals but in the fact that ze can be represented as simultaneously soft and hard, simultaneously desirable and desiring. 1 4 Fredrick 1995; K ­ oloski-​­Ostrow 1997; ­Severy-​­Hoven 2012. 15­ Severy-​­Hoven (­2012, 570ff) underscores the challenges that Rome, as an enslaving society, presents to a Freudian/­Lacanian approach that assumes t­wentieth-​­century western culture. 16 Mazloomdoost and Pauls (­2015). 17 Translation by the author. 18 For a detailed overview of this methodology, see Fredrick and Vennarucci 2021. For applications of Space Syntax to Pompeii, see the suggested additional reading.

Works Cited Anderson, Michael. 2004. “­Mapping the Domestic Landscape: GIS, Visibility, and the Pompeian House.” In Beyond the Artefact: Digital Interpretation of the Past. Proceedings of CAA 2004, edited by F. Niccolucci and S. Hermon, 1­ 83–​­189. Budapest: Archaeolingua. —​­—​­—​­. 2005. “­Houses, GIS and the ­Micro-​­Typology of Pompeian Domestic Space.” In TRAC 2004: Proceedings of the 14th Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, edited by J. Bruhn et al., ­1–​­9. London: Oxbow. Åshede, Linnea. 2015. Desiring Hermaphrodites: The Relationships of Hermaphroditus in Roman Group Scenes. Doctoral Dissertation in Ancient History and Classical Archaeology, University of Gothenburg. Baran, Paul. 1964. On Distributed Communications. I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks. Santa Monica: The Rand Corporation. Barrow, Rosemary. 2018. “­The Indefinite Body: Sleeping Hermaphrodite.” In Gender, Identity, and the Body in Greek and Roman Sculpture, edited by Rosemary Barrow, ­76–​­88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartman, Elizabeth. 2002. “­Eros’s Flame: Images of Sexy Boys in Roman Ideal Sculpture.” In The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity. Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, Supplementary Volume 1, edited by Elaine K. Gazda, ­249–​ ­271. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Barton, Carlin. 1993. The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boswell, John. 1980. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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David Fredrick Bray, Alan. 1982. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. New York: Columbia University Press. Burger, Glenn, and Steven F. Kruger, eds. 2001. Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fredrick, David. 1995. “­Beyond the Atrium to Ariadne: Erotic Painting and Visual Pleasure in the Roman House.” Classical Antiquity 14: ­266–​­288. —​­—​­—​­. 2002. “­Introduction: Invisible Rome.” In The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the Body, edited by David Fredrick, 1­ –​­30. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2003. “­Architecture and Surveillance in Flavian Rome.” In Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text, edited by A. J. Boyle and W. J. Dominik, ­199–​­228. Leiden: Brill. —​­—​­— ​­and Rhodora G. Vennarucci. 2021. “­Putting Space Syntax to the Test: Digital Embodiment and Phenomenology in the Roman House.” Studies in Digital Heritage 4.2: ­185–​­224. https://­doi.org/­10.14434/­ sdh.v4i2.31521. Gerhard, Jane. 2000. “­Revisiting ‘­The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’: The Female Orgasm in American Sexual Thought and Second Wave Feminism.” Feminist Studies 26: ­449–​­476. Gillies, Grace. 2017. “­The Body in Question: Looking at ­Non-​­Binary Gender in the Greek and Roman World.” Eidolon November 9, 2017. https://­eidolon.pub/­­the-­​­­body-­​­­in-­​­­question-​­d28045d23714 Goldberg, Charles. 2021. Roman Masculinity and Politics from Republic to Empire. London: Routledge. Grahame, Mark. 2000. Reading Space: Social Interaction and Identity in the Houses of Roman Pompeii. British Archaeological Reports, International Series 886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grewal, David. 2010. Network Theories of Power. Lecture delivered at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. https://­www.youtube.com/­watch?v= 35RVa5VQ3bk&ab_channel=USCAnnenberg Gunderson, Erik. 1996. “­The Ideology of the Arena.” Classical Antiquity 15: ­113–​­151. Hall, Donald E., and Annamarie Jagose (­editors). 2013. The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Halperin, David. 1989. “­Is There a History of Sexuality?” History and Theory 28 (­3): 2­ 57–​­274. Henderson, John. 1989. “­Tacitus/­The World in Pieces.” Ramus 18: ­167–​­210. Henry, Matthew. 2016. “­A ­One-​­Inch Mound of Flesh: Troubling Queer Identity in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” The Journal of American Culture 39: 6­ 4–​­77. Hillier, Bill, and Julienne Hanson. 1984. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, Richard. 2006. Desiring Rome: Male Subjectivity and Reading Ovid’s Fasti. Columbus: The Ohio State Press. Koedt, Anne. 1970. The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. Somerville: New England Free Press. ­Koloski-​­Ostrow, Ann Olga. 1997. “­Violent Stages in Two Pompeian Houses: Imperial Taste, Aristocratic Response, and Messages of Male Control.” In Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality, and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology, edited by Ann Olga ­Koloski-​­Ostrow and Claire L. Lyons, ­243–​­266. London: Routledge. Kuefler, Mathew, ed. 2001. The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lafleur, Greta, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klasowska. 2021. Trans Historical. Gender Plurality Before the Modern. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Laurence, Ray. 1994. Roman Pompeii: Space and Society. London: Routledge. ­Levin-​­Richardson, Sarah, and Deborah Kamen. 2015. “­Revisiting Roman Sexuality: Agency and the Conceptualization of Penetrated Males.” In Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World, edited by Mark Masterson, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, and James Robson, ­449–​­460. London: Routledge. Lorenz, Katharina. 2021. “­All the World’s a Stage: On the Interplay of Decoration in Pompeian Houses.” In Principles of Decoration in the Roman World, edited by Annette Haug and M. Taylor Lauritsen, ­163–​­176. Berlin: de Gruyter. MacLean, Rose. 2018. Freed Slaves and Roman Imperial Culture: Social Integration and the Transformation of Values. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, Emanuel. 2012. The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 ­BCE-​­250 CE. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mazloomdoost, Donna, and Rachel N. Pauls. 2015. “­A Comprehensive Review of the Clitoris and Its Role in Female Sexual Function.” Sexual Medicine Reviews 3 (­4): ­245–​­263.

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14 “­HOW COULD A CITY BECOME STRAIGHT?” ARISTOPHANES AND THE TRANS FOUNDATIONS OF THE COMIC STATE Isabel Ruffell In May 2022, a small group of ­anti-​­trans activists in the UK gathered over dinner to discuss their campaign. In a breathless tweet, with a photo of the event, the participants were listed and a note added, ‘­with Athena, Goddess of wisdom in the background’. As a piece of intellectual pretension, or ‘­­Classics-​­washing’, it was unintentionally hilarious. For, if one thing can be said about the divinity in question, wise she may have been, but she was also queer. And the ancient Greeks knew it. Gender n­ on-​­conforming and asexual, birthed by her father, not her mother (­Hesiod, Theogony ­886–​­900, ­924–​­926), Athena discusses her male identification at length in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (‘­I am for the male in everything, except marriage’, 737). There, she was used to provide a foundation myth (‘­aetiology’) for the social and political dominance of men, but as an expression of the patriarchal order, Athena is deeply problematic. And the Greeks knew that too. Nowhere was this truer than in Athenian comedy of the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE. Its enactments of political and civic transformation are intertwined with a sustained engagement with gender ­diversity—​­in identity, expression, or the ­body—​­over which the city’s patron goddess presides as a figure of trans possibilities. However much that diversity might be alarming to some characters, time and again trans narratives are shown to be inescapable, at the heart of both Athenian identity and democratic politics. This chapter begins by demonstrating how Aristophanes’ comedy ­self-​­consciously foregrounds trans narratives and characters, with the god Athena and human Cleisthenes as a focus. After a pause to consider some methodological questions and to locate trans history and theory within the twin currents of feminist and queer history and theory, it will turn to consider those plays where Aristophanes presents the most challenging reconfigurations of the state, which are couched in terms of gender. Whereas other surviving Aristophanic plays reflect on contemporary politics and society by domesticating the city (­Acharnians, Knights, Wasps) or attempting some kind of escape from it (­Birds), or rescuing or healing a savior figure (­Peace, Frogs, Wealth; Knights again), initiated by a disgruntled male individual (­usually a citizen), in three instances Athenian civic institutions are confronted and reshaped within the city by Athenian women acting collectively and both claiming and enacting the right to political i­ntervention—​­a direct challenge to the foundations of Athenian politics which was based on (­at least ideological) gender segregation and g­ ender-​­exclusive citizenship. In Lysistrata (­411 BCE), the women of Athens respond to 20 years of war and, after the recent disaster in Sicily, they not only initiate a sex strike throughout Greece but also a coup in Athens DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-18 202

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which deprives the male citizens of means to continue fighting. In Thesmophoriazusae (­Women at the Thesmophoria, also probably 411 BCE), the women of Athens are running parallel institutions that take place at the ­women-​­only Thesmophoria festival, and they intend to condemn the tragic playwright Euripides to death for slandering them; Euripides ends up sending his relative (­old, hairy, male) in disguise to speak on his behalf. In Ecclesiazusae (­Women at the Assembly), the women infiltrate the sovereign male assembly and propose that the Athenian democracy hand over power to women; in the aftermath, they use this power to institute a program of economic and sexual communism. In all three cases, the political reconfigurations are rooted in trans elements within Athenian culture and society. Whereas the riot of c­ ross-​­gender activity in Thesmophoriazusae has long been recognized (­see esp. Zeitlin, 1981), even if not framed as trans narratives, the rooting of the sharper and more f­ar-​­reaching political interventions of Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae in trans figures, symbols, narratives, and practices has largely been ignored or seen as transitory or discordant. Yet the challenge that the cis women pose to the gender binary both draws on and expands the trans elements in Athenian culture that are already doing the same, and the reconfigured Athens remains a trans Athens, only more so.

Skirting Athena In Aristophanes’ Birds, two Athenians, Peisetairos and Euelpides (­­Smooth-​­Talker and Optimist) seek to get away from the political and, especially, legal constraints of Athens and establish a new life with the birds. They persuade the birds to found a city in the air (­Nephelokokkygia or C ­ loud-​ ­Cuckoo Land), and as it is being founded, the Athenians debate who should be the patron deity of this new state.  ho. The material city gleams. What god, then, C  will be its patron? For whom shall we weave the robe? Pe.Why don’t we let Athena Polias do it?  u. How could a city ever become straight in the future, E  where a god born a woman stands there equipped with  full armor and weapons, and Cleisthenes with a shuttle. Birds ­826–​­831 ­Cross-​­gender behavior and ­cross-​­gender identification here prevent a city from being eutaktos, rigid (­can be drawn up in straight ranks), and docile (­can easily take orders), which mixes military and political elements. The implication is that Athens is neither of those things, and that Athena (­and Cleisthenes) embody Athens and Athenian democracy through their behavior and identity. In the case of Athena, there is also someone who violates the norms of physical sex and sexual reproduction. Nor is Athena the only such god with such characteristics: the ­gender-​­fluid Dionysus was also brought to term by Zeus (­see esp. Euripides, Bacchae ­94–​­100) and was likewise institutionally central to Athens. The topic of the gods’ birth was even the main theme of a number of comedies at the time. While Birds here looks ahead to a more perfect patriarchy (­going on to suggest a ‘­chick of Ares’ as the patron entity), the problem is that the new order cannot escape from Athens. Even the premise of the question is framed in Athenian terms: the question is for whom they should weave (­or prepare) the robe (­peplos), which is inherently about Athena, and the use of liparos (‘­gleaming’) 203

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for the new city points straight to the Athenian s­ elf-​­image (­Acharnians ­639–​­640, Knights 1329, cf. Pindar fr. 76). In other respects too, ­Cloud-​­Cuckoo Land is already well on the way to being inherently blurred in its identity. The two humans in this dialogue have already undergone bodily reassignment, to birds. As they emerge after the parabasis they make a point of laughing at their inadequate and m ­ oth-​­eaten appearance. They clearly do not “­pass” as birds despite their transformation (­pterugoplasty?), and that is to say nothing about the fact that, though birds, they speak as humans. The chances of this regime being a model of binary identity norms is not looking promising. The second term in Euelpides’ objection is the reverse of ­Athena—​­human, not divine, and transgressing in the opposite direction (­­male-­​­­to-​­female). Cleisthenes is a recurring figure in Aristophanic comedy of the fifth century, either a character ­on-​­stage or mentioned in passing, and he is represented continually, if somewhat inconsistently, as a trans figure. He perhaps appears in the opening scene of Aristophanes’ first surviving play, Acharnians. where envoys supposedly from the Persian king include a pair of eunuchs. The main character, Dikaiopolis, inspects them closely and claims that one is Cleisthenes, the other Straton (­­117–​­22). It is unclear whether he is speaking literally, and for current purposes, it does not really matter. In Thesmophoriazusae (­Women at the Thesmophoria) Cleisthenes has an extended role on stage (­­574–​­654). He brings news to the women’s assembly that there is an infiltrator in their midst, in disguise, and he helps to uncover Euripides’ relative. Cleisthenes is here described as the women’s proxenos (­ambassador/­representative) among men and is characterized as beardless and feminine in appearance. Euripides’ relative, who is elaborately dressed, plucked, singed and arranged to “­pass,” compares himself early on to Cleisthenes (­235), a reference that sets up the latter’s arrival. Whatever the basis in reality, in the play Cleisthnes’ gender presentation is represented both as an identity and a lifestyle, similar to Athena. The weaver’s shuttle in the Birds passage quoted above, aside from riffing on the theme of Athena’s robe, is pointing in the same direction. Euripides’ relative associates ­cross-​­dressing with ­same-​­sex desire, and that is true also of Dikaiopolis’ view of Cleisthenes in Acharnians, but it is not the main focus of Cleisthenes’ appearance in the later play. Elsewhere, Cleisthenes’ femininity is parsed in terms of being an object of sexual desire, either as a substitute for women (­Lysistrata ­1000–​­1002) or as a third or fourth term, neither man nor boy nor woman (­Frogs ­52–​­57). In Pherecrates’ Petalē fr. 143, a character, perhaps the eponymous hetaira (­sex worker) addresses a pigeon as resembling Cleisthenes, as they bid it carry them to places associated with Aphrodite (­either literally, in which case it is a giant bird, or figuratively), which is drawing on similar implications. Finally, because this is comedy and physical transformation beyond the limits of ancient surgery could be envisioned, in Clouds, the chorus who have metamorphic powers, supposedly adopt the form of women in response to seeing Cleisthenes (­­355–​­356). For all that Cleisthenes is a considerably less respectable figure than Athena, nonetheless, his representation likewise implicates bodies, identity, gender expression, and sexuality, and removes them from the solely divine or symbolic sphere to something much more material and human. At the same time, in the context of city foundation of a supposed ­anti-​­Athens, it is not surprising that not only is the city’s problematic goddess invoked, but also the equally problematic namesake of the founder of Athenian democracy, or, as it seems to have been known then, equal rights (­isonomia, Herodotus 5.37, cf 3.80). Peisetairos may successfully outrun equality and law but evidently cannot avoid either the Athenian drive for activity (­polypragmosynē) or its drive for transformation, of which the trans figures of Athena and Cleisthenes are emblematic. The embedding of trans figures, narratives, and practices in comic plots of civic transformation is a phenomenon that repeats across Aristophanes.

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Trans Foundations Neither as a pair nor as individuals do Cleisthenes and Athena give a monolithic (­or even coherent) representation of gender transgressions, nor do their interactions with sexuality and ethnicity, but this surplus of ­trans-​­ness is a symptom of a strongly binary gendered system. It also hints, in a baffled and unsympathetic way, at some of the complexity of the trans experience (­and history and theory and politics) that stands at the intersection of all these elements. Trans history, theory, and experience are bound up both with feminism and queer theory. It is a truth of both that gender and sexuality are socially and culturally ­contingent—​­that is, they are dependent on their historical context and not fixed. From a historicist ­point-­​­­of-​­view, a consequence is that there are many kinds of translation involved in engaging with cultural artefacts such as Aristophanic comedy. Thus there are considerable differences between the ancient Athenian gender system and that of, for example, contemporary Britain, although they are both in their own ways patriarchal; similarly, Greek male homosexuality involved a number of norms and practices, especially around the erastēs–​­erōmenos relationship, which are no longer current. Such differences do not mean that cultural translations cannot or should not be made when interpreting texts. And while historicism is not the only lens through which to view Greek drama, it is impossible to avoid implicit translations of this ­kind—​­even if approaching a text in translation, the act of linguistic translation already involves many such cultural translations, as is evident from even a cursory glance at earlier versions of Aristophanes, and not least with reference to gender and sexuality. That said, translators of Aristophanes into English have been more concerned with the inclusion or exclusion of sexual elements in general (­Roberts, 2008) rather than with reflecting on the translation of sexuality and gender identity. And that is even as there are fierce debates about just how to frame ancient sexuality (­Davidson, 2001), a debate in which the study of Greek comedy is deeply implicated. The theorizing of trans in the modern world is both analogous to and intertwined with that of homosexuality. Both are products of the modern world’s attempts to classify, normalize, and medicalize: homosexuality in the nineteenth century (­cf. Foucault, 1978), and transvestism and transsexualism in the twentieth (­Hirschfeld, 1910 and Benjamin, 1966). The ongoing story of both has been to resist uses of these categories, however sympathetic or otherwise their original formulation, as a basis for exclusion, persecution, and genocide, to work to ­de-​­medicalize and ­de-​­pathologize these experiences and identities, and to introduce a more open and flexible understanding of both sexuality and gender identity. For trans people, a reaction both to the medicalized narrative and an essentialist/­separatist backlash (­Raymond, 1980) impelled a more encompassing approach to trans identity (­see already Stone, 1992), and resistance to the imposition of norms of sexuality, i.e. transsexuals expected to be largely asexual p­ re-​­transition and heterosexual ­post-​ ­transition.1 While mainstream psychiatry has (­more or less) accepted that one can have both a sexuality and a gender identity, that i­nter-​­relationship is one site of recent ­anti-​­trans activism, whether to deny the proposition altogether (­particularly in the UK), or to use trans identities and lives, and drag performance in its manifestation as a specifically queer ­cross-​­gender mode, as avenues for attacking LGBTQ+ people in general. Likewise, attacks on trans identity have also been used as a means to attack feminism. The move towards transgender as an overarching identity has been heavily influenced by the insights of feminism, and as trans voices have become more prominent, the relationship with feminist theory has become deeper and more explicit (­see esp. Serano, 2007)). The mainstream of feminist thought going back at least to de Beauvoir (­1988 [1949]) if not to Mary Wollstonecraft, has long recognized both that gender is a product of social norms and that social, economic, and political 205

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inequality is not a biological or structural given. The recasting of gender in poststructural terms by Butler (­1990) centered on performance, with a particular focus on drag as a performance mode, but the concern there was more about parody and deconstructing gender than on exploring trans identities in themselves. The emphasis on performance, however, which implicates both performer and audience, encapsulates much of the social dimension of gender (­which does not rely on, e.g., anatomical checks or chromosomal testing, in so far as either would be decisive). The previously compulsory “­real life test” for transsexuals was predicated on a similar idea: to live as/­be accepted in the opposite gender role for at least a year before any form of medical treatment.2 Moreover, Butler (­1993) further observes that bodies themselves are discursively framed. Thus it is clear that, for example, the ancient Greeks’ understanding of anatomy or even of reproduction was considerably different from our own. And in fact, ancient (­mis)­understandings of biology have profoundly influenced those of the modern world (­see, e.g., King, 1998). Trans experience is not, however, only about performance, but it entails a more fundamental notion of identity, as Butler (­2004) later acknowledged more clearly, and one that is, for most trans people, experienced in and through the body, and this leads them to medically and surgically transition where that is possible.3 Whether trans identity, then, is a deep and early response to gender as an ideological or discursive phenomenon, or whether it is more physically embodied, is impossible to say: there is no “­trans gene” just as there is no “­gay gene”, and as with other forms of complex human behavior and identity it may well have elements of both. But the physical experience means that there are continuities not only with feminist theory but with feminist practice, as assertions of bodily autonomy, especially where reproductive systems are concerned, are central to both. Different cultures have evolved various ways of accommodating trans people. Anthropological studies have shown that some have developed three or multiple gender (­or sex) systems (­see, e.g., Herdt, 1996). That is not a path taken by the ancient Greeks, who operated a highly binary gender system. Athens had a particularly strong version of gender ideology, which at least notionally included elements of segregation. Gender transgression, as in Acharnians, could be associated with the n­ on-​­Greek (­or, in some cases, just n­ on-​­Athenian). Nonetheless, there were areas where Athens encouraged, indeed mandated, c­ ross-​­gender expression, in the arena of religion and ritual. Festivals such as the Oschophoria involved c­ ross-​­dressing, as did other ritual contexts (­Miller, 1999). These also included the Athenian dramatic festivals themselves, sacred to the ­gender-​­fluid Dionysus, where all the roles, male and female, comic and tragic alike, were performed by men. It is quite clear that ­fifth-​­ and ­fourth-​­century Athenians could join the dots between these institutional practices and the characterization and visual representations of Dionysus. It was a feature already of Aeschylus’ Lykourgeia, which duly provides parodic priming for Aristophanes’ extensive play with theatricality and gender identity in Thesmophoriazusae (­Ruffell, 2020, with bibliography), and thence to Euripides’ Bacchae. Dionysus’ transformation in visual culture from an older, bearded figure to a younger, beardless, and more feminine form was already moving beyond conventions of dress to gender expression in and through the body, and that process would continue into the Hellenistic period where it would culminate in a Dionysus whose appearance is very adjacent to that of the famous sleeping Hermaphroditus (­now in the Louvre). In the figure of Dionysus, the fluidity of gender is physically as well as socially constructed.

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the political and social transformation of the city of Athens itself, and the fullest and most radical versions are achieved through the prism of gender and especially by exploiting the trans resources of Athenian culture. This phenomenon reaches its fullest extent in his play of the late 390s, Ecclesiazusae (­Women at the Assembly). Ecclesiazusae presents the women of Athens taking over the city and instituting economic and sexual communism. They do so democratically, by putting the case at an assembly and the Athenian people, male citizens, voting for it. Given the limitations of Athenian democracy, they are obliged to dress and act as male citizens, their leader Praxagora putting the motion and her allies acting as a supportive claque (­­86–​­87, cf. 399, ­431–​­432). (­It is not entirely clear immediately how far there is an intention to stack the assembly too, but certainly, sufficient numbers of women participate to prevent a significant number of men from attending and being paid: ­383–​­388. The country people opposed the idea (­­432–​­434), but it is also clear that other men voted for it too.) The assembly itself is not dramatized; rather, the women are presented as rehearsing for their attempt at political transformation, and the events reported by one male citizen to another, Praxagora’s husband Blepyros, and the merits of the scheme subsequently debated by Praxagora and Blepyros, before the new order is enacted in subsequent scenes. The play follows on from and draws upon earlier explorations in Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae, both of which took the apparently t­hen-​­radical step of representing Athenian c­ itizen-​­wives as major speaking parts and the focus of the action. Neither, however, goes quite as far as the later play. In Lysistrata, the intervention of the women is introduced as a temporary and specific one: they achieve their aim of ending the war, the split chorus of old women and old men reconciles, and Lysistrata herself is a notable absentee (­or notably silent) in the concluding celebrations. In the process, however, the play depends upon and highlights the constructed nature of sex, sexuality, and gender. The women’s political exclusion is questioned directly, as in the central confrontation between Lysistrata and the Proboulos, and in the ­set-​­up of the peace negotiations (­1124, via Euripides’ Melanippe the Wise), but also implicitly through the enactment of a plan that successfully exploits two points of vulnerability: the financial reserve located on the Acropolis and cisheterosexual male desire. For all that the women’s sex strike focuses attention on physical sex and on sexual desire framed as physical need, there is much attention given to the emotional complexity and socially constructed nature of sex and sexuality, particularly in and through marriage. The latter institution is the quintessential social convention and social norm, and it fundamentally shapes the characters’ sense of themselves as sexual entities, male and female alike.4 Lysistrata’s interaction with the Proboulos includes a discussion of the pain of separation and loss, (­of husbands) not just sexual need as a purely physical urge; she also attacks the unjust patriarchal association of female sexuality with reproductive capacity (­­591–​­597). Even the ­Myrrhine-​­Kinesias scene, which hinges on the wife amplifying her husband’s desire and resisting her own, at least plays with the idea of loss (­­865–​­869, leading to an erection joke), individual and specific rather than generic and mechanical desire (­­884–​­888, 954) and family (­childcare ­881–​­882, 955). The unusually frank discussion of marital rape (­­160–​­166) also turns on a recognition of rape as an expression of power and abuse, and far from being part of a normative relationship. There is a clear recognition that full and satisfying sexual expression, on both sides, is much more than a g­ oal-​­driven exercise in achieving orgasm. In stark contrast to the fetishizing of the penis that characterizes ­anti-​­trans ideology and some psychoanalytic theory, the play treats male genitalia and their symbolism with irony and scepticism. And not only is the weakness of the men expressed visually and discursively through their huge erections, but men are also far from physically dominant in the play. The male ­semi-​­chorus is repeatedly defeated by the female ­semi-​­chorus, while the Proboulos’ attempt to enforce patriarchal order through the use of Scythian archers (­what passed for Athens’ police force) is roundly 207

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defeated by women who are ­market-​­traders (­certainly low status, and probably not Athenian, ­452–​ ­460). Such male vulnerability is a repeated element in Aristophanic comedy (­Ruffell, 2013), but here it is embedded in an exploration of gender that not only questions essentialist notions of sex but does so in a thoroughly intersectional manner (­including age, class, ethnicity). Over all of this presides the figure of Athena. It is in the back chamber of the Parthenon (­temple of Athena Parthenos) that the financial reserve of the Athenian empire lies, which the women have seized. Lysistrata herself evokes the priestess of Athena Polias, the troublesome patron deity, and one of her principal henchwomen, Myrrhine, the priestess of Athena Nike (­Lewis, 1955). But beyond such associations, Lysistrata herself channels much of Athena, not least perhaps in her apparent imperviousness to the sexual desire that affects all other men and women in the play (­­705–​­780). And although Lysistrata herself disappears, or at least does not speak, Athena is there to the last in the Spartan ambassador’s second hymn (­­1296–​­1315), one which also concludes by comparing young women to maenads. He takes everyone off the stage with a concluding invitation for everyone to sing for Athena. If this is a return to normality, it is not a straightforward one. If Athena hovers over Lysistrata like a fairy godparent, Thesmophoriazusae takes an altogether more human approach to the diversity of gender expression. Yet the latter play offers a far less radical politics. Rather than tackling public policy or citizen male authority ­head-​­on and in their own terms, the Athenian women here are represented as running a parallel assembly closely modelled on the male Ecclēsia. The Thesmophoria, a ­women-​­only festival of Demeter and Kore, is a segregated space, to the extent that it is treated as if it were a separate city, or city within the city (­with the trans figure of Cleisthenes the bridge between them). In common with other narratives of invading separate gendered space, from Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae to contemporary bathroom bills and the ­anti-​­trans backlash, the cisheteronormative fantasies about such space are hardly empowering: in this case, the women are obsessed with drink and sex, and their talk is oriented wholly around their husbands; their condemnation of Euripides is for revealing this supposed truth. Nor, in common with other separate spaces under patriarchy, is it really separate space: it is policed by a male Scythian archer under the auspices of the male citizen polis, while Euripides’ relative, who has infiltrated the festival, is literally exposed. The intrusion narrative and humiliation narratives are allied here (­as often) with the compulsion narrative, as Euripides’ relative is a volunteer of last resort, and his physical and sartorial transformation is achieved in far from delicate terms. Euripides initially approaches fellow tragedian Agathon, who is presented as working with a theory that writing a character requires dressing and acting as that ­character—​­an immersive, naturalistic mimēsis (­imitation or representation). Agathon’s intellectual mimetic gender theory is played out, using his equipment and accessories, on the reluctant and unprepossessing canvas of Euripides’ relative. And yet, the failure of a mimetic/­disguise approach leads to an entirely different model of ­self-​­identification as the relative begins to assume a series of Euripidean roles, as he and latterly Euripides seek to engineer his escape by means of tragic parody. The plainly male relative asserts identities (­Andromeda, Helen), such that the audience (­in part at least) ­co-​­operate with these performances in processing the parody. Ironically the comic women who also exemplify a ­co-​­operatively and transparently constructed gender (­see esp. Stehle, 2002), do not. Euripides is forced to come to terms with the women but has to execute his own disguise as a female pimp to lure away the equally uncooperative Scythian archer. Euripides, after all, used to be like Agathon, as he himself says (­­173–​­174). Thesmophoriazusae thus has plenty to say about the gendered constructs of one set of ritual and institutional contexts, the dramatic festivals, and, beyond that, of gendered and ­cross-​­gendered performance more generally (­including in the real world). The manifold ways of performing gender, together with a resolution that is neither isolated nor ineffective, may suggest that there is nothing innate about separate spaces, but as it stands 208

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Thesmophoriazusae has rather less explicitly to say about the gendered constructs of that other ritual space and set of practices, the assembly (­Ecclesia). In Ecclesiazusae it is very different. It shares with Thesmophoriazusae the disguise/­infiltration narrative, this time of a male institution, and part of that is likewise focused on the visual dimension: the distinguishing features of a male citizen: beard, shoes (­embades or lakōnikai), cloak (­himation) and staff (­baktēria). The staff is specifically coded as the mark of an older or rural citizen (­­276–​­277). The women discuss how they have curated their bodies to pass as male: giving up depilation and growing out their body hair (­­60–​­61, ­65–​­66), and working on their tan (­­62–​­63), a key sign of normative masculinity in ancient Greece. The full dressing only takes place at the end of the prologue as they are about to head off for the actual assembly. The rehearsal itself is more limited in visual terms. The beard is the key sign: as they rehearse, it is the assumption of the beard that marks the performance as male. Indeed Praxagora says to one of the women bluntly, “­Put on your beard and become a man” (­121). The first woman is, though, unconvinced of the efficacy of the beard (­­145–​­146): there is more to performance than facial hair. So the main focus of the rehearsal in the prologue of the play is instead on the other performative codes of political masculinity: how to speak, how to act, and how to argue. These can all be acquired and learned. Although some of the humor in this scene is about the failure of the other women to adopt these codes ­flawlessly—​­swearing by typically feminine deities (­the two goddesses (­Demeter and Korē, ­147–​­160; Aphrodite, ­289–​­293)), forgetting their audience (­­163–​­167) or slipping with linguistic gender (­pronouns and otherwise, 297)—​­it is, as Praxagora stresses, a matter of practice, and the slips only serve to emphasize the arbitrary rather than essential nature of gendered performance at the assembly. And it is clear that the women do, in fact, learn (­204, 213; 285, 290; ­self-​­correction at ­298–​­299); it is also clear that they know quite a lot about the assembly and its denizens. Even the first woman’s assumption that she will have a drink before speaking, serves to undermine its own gendered stereotype and casts doubt on how separate spheres were, as she protests that for the assembly to produce such results and for it to be conducted the way it is, and given similarities of ritual accoutrements to those of the symposium, the typical male participants must be drunk (­­132–​­146). Similarly, they know all they need to know about Kephisos (­­246–​­253). Praxagora herself does demonstrate mastery of the forms, because of her time as an ­internally-​ ­displaced refugee (­­243–​­244) living near the location of the assembly on the Pnyx.5 She has thus had more ­practice—​­because of failures of male policy. Whereas in Thesmophoriazusae the women’s assembly retains the linguistic separatism or the linguistic mirror (­which is observed also by Euripides’ relative), in Ecclesiazusae the mirror is shattered. Praxagora makes her argument successfully to the city as a whole, not just to a small number of representatives (­the Proboulos; the Athenian and Spartan ambassadors). Superficially, Ecclesiazusae plays with the idea of gender as a ­zero-​­sum game, albeit an arbitrary one, where power rests with those wearing the ­trousers—​­or in this case, the cloak. Praxagora’s own preparations for the assembly entail stealing her husband Blepyros’ clothes. As the women head off to the assembly, the scene crystallizes into the road outside their house, where Blepyros has come out to relieve himself. Blepyros has been forced (­of course he has) to put on his wife’s frock in the dark. His account of this experience, as monologue (­­311–​­326, ­358–​­371) or to his neighbor (­­327–​­357) lards the humiliation narrative with added scatology. It would seem, then, that the exchange of dress implies a similar exchange of power and authority, as it does in Lysistrata when the Proboulos is given feminine accoutrements as a mark of losing the debate with Lysistrata. Blepyros is still wearing the outfit when he encounters a friend (­Khremes) who is just back from the assembly. As they swap their stories, the exchange of dress and power becomes 209

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somewhat more complicated: there is no general symbolic inversion and for the rest of the men, the ceding of authority and responsibility remains a choice on the basis of argument. There is no general inversion of a magical kind. The gendered p­ ractice—​­and ­success—​­of performing politics is something to be acquired and learned, a construct not anything innate. Certainly, when Praxagora returns from the assembly and argues the case for the new regime with her initially sceptical husband, she pitches it as for the benefit of the men. To that extent, the scheme could be said to reinscribe some gendered norms, in particular in whose interest the system works. This does not, however, bear much scrutiny. Not only does the locus of power change, the play mercilessly exposes the gender ideology of segregation. The rhetoric of care, protection and safeguarding of the subordinate gender covers the loss of political and economic control. Not only can men, it transpires, not look after the city, they cannot even look after themselves. Praxagora sells Blepyros on the promise of communal sex as well as food, but the decoupling of sex from existing economic and social structures means that Blepyros’ expectations of the pattern of exploitation continuing in its existing form are entirely misplaced. Not only does Ecclesiazusae go considerably further than deconstructing gender, but it also sets about exposing the constructed nature of sex and sexuality. The demonstration is not of older male citizens exerting opportunistic sexual dominance over children, slaves, and symbolic trophy partners (­Acharnians, Knights, Peace, Birds), but instead of a new r­ ule-​­bound system which is shown to operate in the interests (­also) of older women. The rule is that before having sex with your desired partner, you must offer sex to an older person who desires it but is not having any. A scene of two young people in love is rudely interrupted by a series of old women who demand their rights and squabble over the young man before dragging him off to face their competing rights. Clearly, neither bodily autonomy nor consent feature in this scenario, but that is precisely the point: the play flips and draws attention to not only the power dynamics underpinning Athenian sexual norms (­which in turn inform many comic fantasies), but also the way that Athenian law in fact regulates bodies and overrides consent, especially when it comes to women, property, and inheritance. This dramatic display of the contingency of sex and sexuality (­norms, expression, and sense of oneself as a sexual being), 6 including the non sequitur of grounding women’s sexuality in reproductive capacity (­with its implications for p­ ost-​­menopausal women among others) and the interconnection of their arbitrary regulation with gendered power structures is one that has unsurprisingly horrified many critics (­Ruffell, 2006). It would be comforting to some, no doubt, if the terror of acknowledging the arbitrariness of gender and sexuality could be traced back to a single piece of deviant gender expression by Praxagora and her cohorts that could and should be vigorously repressed. The problem is that the women are only drawing out and enacting the trans expression that is already there in the Athens that begins the play. The women’s argument is predicated on them being traditionalists. Indeed, in Praxagora’s rehearsed speech it is hammered home (­216, ­221–​­228), with due reference to all the favorite comic stereotypes, that they are indeed the only ones who have not changed, warts and all. That she is making this argument, and condemning male citizens’ fickleness and fondness for novelty while ­cross-​­dressed is not, in fact, a paradox (­acting radically while condemning innovation), or if it is it is a paradox that is embedded way down in Athenian culture. Praxagora’s appearance on stage dressed for the men’s assembly is explicitly enacting a plan formed at the Skira (­­17–​­18, ­58–​­59). Leaving aside male fantasies of w ­ omen-​­only festivals, the choice of the Skira rather than, notably, the Thesmophoria (­which is mentioned at a number of points of the play) is significant. Although ­cross-​­dressing has been suggested for that festival, probably without firm evidence (­Miller, 1999, 232), the festival did have a complex relationship with the Oskhophoria (­Rappold, 2015), including that the latter’s procession, led by ­cross-​­dressed youths, terminated at the sanctuary of Athena Skiras. The choice clearly draws explicitly on the ritual practices of that festival, one of the festive contexts 210

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in which Athens sought to accommodate, but contain, trans expression. The women are breaching the containing frame of the festival in temporal and environmental terms but not building on its underlying implications.7 Nor indeed is this the only festive and institutional expression of gender diversity that provides continuity between the original and reconfigured Athens. Athena Polias once again stands guarantor over this challenge to patriarchy. The establishment of the economic foundations of the new society is enacted through a version of the Panathenaic procession, where a male Athenian citizen organizes his property for handing over to the common (­­female-​­controlled) store. It is true that the scene also has another male citizen clinging to his existing privilege and seeking to game the system, but that economic and sexual privilege is shown to be destroyed in the following scene, and the protection of the disempowered men (­Blepyros) follows as the corollary in the final scene of the play. Nor is it only symbolically and institutionally that the Athens of Ecclesiazusae has always been trans. The women’s infiltration of the male assembly is set up as a binary transgression, but it turns out that this is not, in fact, the case after all. One of the reasons that they are so plausible as political speakers is their gender ambiguity as well as their appropriation of masculine dress, equipment, and modes of discourse. The incompleteness of the disguise is commented on by one of the women in the prologue (­­124–​­126), and notwithstanding their tanning, Khremes comments on the large number of pale citizens at the assembly, comparing them to shoemakers (­­385–​­387). Praxagora’s paleness is likewise commented on by Khremes, who, however, compares her to a lovely young man (­­427–​­429), which is not even suggesting that the facial hair is particularly noticed, nor that rural conservatism is being picked up (­the staff)—​­and the rural votes are indeed the ones ranged against her (­rural men, specifically, being presented as conservative in politics generally, including gender). Praxagora succeeds because she is like young, eloquent, demotic speakers, precisely those who have been characterized in the play as feminine or even female. The best at speaking are those most readily fucked (­­112–​­114), which is drawing on the same kind of intersections of gender and sexuality that were discussed above in relation to Cleisthenes. Agyrrhios, a prominent politician in the period, is targeted repeatedly in the play and described as “­only yesterday a woman” (­­102–​­104). For all the conservative stylings, Praxagora and her allies are aligned with popular politicians and (­literally and figuratively) smooth, urban operators, and succeeding precisely because they are sustaining the breaking of gender norms that are shown to be provisional at best. Gender transgression and the restless quality of Athenian politics are here mutually implicated. For although Praxagora preaches conservatism, her appeal is to the same people who support politicians like Agyrrhios, and despite the women stacking the assembly, it is only the rural vote that is against her. Praxagora’s appeal is actually to the Athenian dēmos and their craving for innovation: as Khremes notes, handing power to the women is the only thing they haven’t yet tried (­­456–​­457). The affinity, however, goes deeper. In the prologue, the second woman slips up because she spots Epigonos in the audience (­­166–​­167) and starts addressing “­women” (­gynaikes) rather than “­men” (­andres); she suggests that the entire audience is likewise female. Epigonos is not readily identified, but intriguingly a man of that name appears among a list of female cult members in a roughly contemporary inscription (­IG ii2 2346.109). Whether it is the same man or not, the implication here is that ambivalence of gender extends beyond the public speakers to Athenian culture as a whole. So while the various rehearsals and accounts of the assembly in Ecclēsiazousai could perhaps be taken as an implied condemnation both of the entire political class and of those that consume them, an alternative is looking increasingly hard to find. The women’s assault on norms of gender and sexuality in the name of traditional values is a continuation of an existing gender fluidity in institutions, symbols, and practice. In this context, the prospects for cisheteronormativity and an essentialist, s­ ex-​­based patriarchy are looking distinctly thin indeed.

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Conclusion: The State of Comedy At the time of writing, attacking the trans community and trans identities has become a feature of some, usually older male, ­stand-​­up comedians in the US and UK, an assertion of gendered norms and a personal authority and autonomy. In the Athenian democracy, comic freedom of speech (­parrhēsia) presented a rather different picture and one that was far less culturally dishonest or individually disingenuous. Comic plays enacted fiercely confrontational interrogations of Athenian culture and politics, which repeatedly acknowledge and expose the contingent nature of gender and sexuality and acknowledge specifically the integral trans elements in Athenian culture. In Birds, disavowal of such Athenian identity involves a ­self-​­conscious implausibility (­esp. ­1164–​­1167), the adoption of a hybrid humanity, and an egocentrism that has Peisetairos usurping the authority of the gods, and even so Athens still reaches out to claim him. In transforming the city of Athens, however, whether to end war or to institute economic justice, Aristophanes approaches the problems through the prism of gender, a surprising move in what is structurally a strongly binary culture. The points which afford leverage are precisely those where the limits of that binary are to be seen, the places where Athens admits analogues of modern trans identity and practice. Acknowledgment of the constructed nature of gender leads to the constructed nature of economics and politics, and sex and sexuality. The outcomes may not necessarily be to every audience member’s taste, but it appears that Athens is and always has been trans.

Suggestions for Further Reading There are a number of accounts of trans lived experience. For some examples from different decades, see Morris (­1974), Bornstein (­1994), and Jacques (­2016). For modern history, see Faye (­2022); for history and reflections on UK institutional progress, see Burns (­2019). For antiquity framed in terms of trans experience, see the essays collected by Campanile, ­Carlà-​­Uhink, and Facella (­2017). The literature on gender in Aristophanes is large, but Taaffe (­1993) is still a good starting point. Ormand (­2003) argues that gender identity remains largely stable, and is only superficially questioned in Greek drama, including comedy. For specifically trans accounts of Aristophanes, see Ruffell (­2020) and Deihr (­2022).

Notes 1 Still true in 1999. Anxieties over homosexuality led in the UK both to compulsory divorce and to the spousal veto, the latter of which is still in force. For legal, medical and political developments to the early 2010s, see Burns (­2019). 2 This has now been discontinued as a formal requirement, although on the National Health Service in the UK it has been replaced by m ­ ulti-​­year waiting lists and vaguer notions of being serious. 3 Which is not always possible, for medical or financial reasons, and some only wish to undergo social transition. UK equality law, at the time of writing, does not require any medical and surgical transition to afford protections. 4 One strand in contemporary ­anti-​­trans ideology, at least in the UK, is to reduce sexuality not just to a biological and essentialist position but to a specifically genital attraction, both in order to seek to distinguish sharply between gender and sexuality as identities, and to argue that all those assigned male at birth are governed by their penis and its uncontrollable sexual desire (­although, confusingly, this is regardless of testosterone level or actual presence of a penis) and therefore to be kept away from women. Similar notions underlie the incel phenomenon’s spaces, particularly in the US, with different conclusions. But it is absolutely vital for the plot of Lysistrata that that is not how human sexuality works.

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Aristophanes and the Trans Foundations of the Comic State 5 If this is a reference, as seems likely, to the disruptions caused by Spartan invasions or occupation of Attika during the Peloponnesian War, it would imply that Praxagora was originally a ­country-​­dweller herself; her house in the play is on a street, and reasonably proximate to the assembly, so may well be in Athens (­although time and space are very fluid and elastic in Aristophanes). There is no sense of political division among the women in urban/­rural terms as there is for the male citizens, and instead they are presented as more of a bloc. 6 This is not sexuality in the sense or orientation towards men, women, both or neither, but very much about sexual identity, especially in relation to age. 7 Although some treatments of Aristophanic comedy point to the ritual context of the Dionysia and Lenaia as a frame that limits and contains its political and cultural impact, that is certainly not how Aristophanic characters view and use ritual contexts, such that there are clear continuities between ritual space and ­non-​­ritual space.

Works Cited Benjamin, Harry S. 1966. The Transsexual Phenomenon. New York: Julian Press. Bornstein, Kate. 1994. Gender Outlaw. On Men, Women and the Rest of Us. London: Routledge. Burns, Christine, ed. 2019. Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows, Second edition. London: Unbound. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London/­New York: Routledge. —​­—​­— ​­1993. Bodies that Matter. London and New York: Routledge. —​­—​­— ​­2004. Undoing Gender. London and New York: Routledge. Campanile, Domitia, Filippo ­Carlà-​­Uhink, and Margherita Facella, eds. 2017. TransAntiquity: ­Cross-​­Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World. London and New York: Routledge. Davidson, James. 2001. “­Dover, Foucault and Greek Homosexuality: Penetration and the Truth of Sex.” Past and Present 170: 3­ –​­51. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1988 [1949]. The Second Sex. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. London: Pan. Deihr, L. 2022. “­Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria: Reality and the Egg: An Oviparody of Euripides.” In Queer Euripides, edited by Sarah Olsen and Mario Telò, 2­ 29–​­238. London: Bloomsbury. Faye, Shon. 2022. The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume one. Translated by R. Hurley. London: Penguin. Herdt, Gilbert, ed. 1996. Third Sex/­Third Gender. Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books. Hirschfeld, Magnus. 1910. Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstriel mit Umfangreichem Casuistischen und Historischen Material, first edition. Berlin: Medizinischer Verlag Alfred Pulvermacher. Jacques, Juliet. 2016. Trans: A Memoir. London: Verso. King, Helen. 1998. Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece. London and New York: Routledge. Lewis, David M. 1955. “­Notes on Attic Inscriptions (­II): XXIII. Who Was Lysistrata?” Annual of the British School at Athens 50: 1­ –​­12. Miller, Margaret C. 1999. “­Reexamining Transvestism in Archaic and Classical Athens: The Zewadski Stamnos.” American Journal of Archaeology 103 (­2): ­223–​­253. Morris, Jan. 1974. Conundrum. London: Faber. Ormand, Kirk. 2003. “­Oedipus the Queen: C ­ ross-​­Gendering Without Drag.” Theatre Journal 55: 1­ –​­28. Rappold, Adam C. 2015. The Shadow of the Polis: A Synchronic and Diacrhonic Examination of the Skira Festival in Athens. PhD Dissertation, Ohio State University. Raymond, Janice G. 1980. The Transsexual Empire. London: Women’s Press. Roberts, Deborah H. 2008. “­Translation and the ‘­Surreptitious Classic’: Obscenity and Translatability.” In Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, edited by Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko, 2­ 78–​­311. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruffell, Isabel A. 2006. “­A Little Ironic Don’t You Think? Utopian Criticism and the Problem of Aristophanes’ Last Plays.” In Playing Around Aristophanes, edited by Lynn Kozak and John Rich, ­65–​­104. Oxford: Aris & Phillips. —​­—​­— ​­2013. “­Humiliation? Voyeurism, Violence and Humor in Old Comedy.” Helios 40: 2­ 47–​­277.

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Isabel Ruffell —​­—​­— ​­2020. “­Poetics, Perversions and Passing: Approaching the Transgender Narratives of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousai.” Illinois Classical Studies 45: ­333–​­367. Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. New York: Seal Press. Stehle, Eva. 2002. “­The body and Its Representations in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousai: Where Does the Costume End?” American Journal of Philology 123: 3­ 69–​­406. Stone, Sandy. 1992. “­The Empire Strikes Back: A ­Post-​­Transsexual Manifesto.” In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, ­151–​­176. London and New York: Routledge. Taaffe, Lauren K. 1993. Aristophanes and Women. London and New York: Routledge. Zeitlin, Froma I. 1981. “­Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae.” In Reflections of Women in Antiquity, edited by Helene P. Foley, ­169–​­217. New York: Gordon Breach. Reprinted in Froma I. Zeitlin. 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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15 HIPPOCRATES THE “­FATHER”? DISTURBING ATTACHMENT GENEALOGIES IN THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT MEDICINE Nicolette D’Angelo Though ancient medicine remains an underdefined ­sub-​­field in the discipline of Classical Studies, it is always clear who is meant by “­the Father of Medicine.” The Father of Medicine, the Father of Western Medicine, the Father of Modern Medicine: these are all common epithets for Hippocrates of Kos, the figure whose corpus of 60 treatises dates from ca. 460 to 370 BCE, yet to whom no singular work can be attributed with certainty. In many ways, Hippocrates is only a placeholder, a “­name, deprived of all tangible historical reality” (­Edelstein 1935, as quoted in Pinault 1992, 2).1 Nonetheless, in popular scientific and medical discourses today, he still enjoys a singular eminence, as Helen King demonstrates in Hippocrates Now: The “­Father of Medicine” in the Internet Age (­2019). Hippocrates Now aims To explore the versions of ‘­Hippocrates’ which are dominant at present, considering why so many variations are possible, and discussing what they tell us both about how the internet does history and also about our continued need for a ‘­Father of Medicine.’ (­King 2019, 20) This phrase, “­our continued need,” reminds us that Hippocrates’ fatherhood is a choice, “­our” choice, a retroactively constructed phenomenon traceable throughout the history of medicine. His fatherhood is the calling card, as King repeatedly demonstrates in Hippocrates Now, of not only western biomedicine and the medical profession but also the ­weight-​­loss industry, ­self-​ ­care/­wellness scams, and ­anti-​­vaccination agendas. Even scholars skeptical of Hippocratic hero worship often employ the title uncritically, or even teach the history of ancient medicine as an atomized lineage of individual male physicians. But, as any queer person knows, fatherhood is not inevitable as an organizational metaphor, nor is it without baggage. “­What does it mean for anyone to be the ‘­father’ of any sort of medicine?” (­King 2019, 52). In other words, what questions can (­and cannot) be asked when the study of G ­ reco-​­Roman medicine is underpinned by a retroactively constructed string of elective paternal ­affiliations—​­beginning with, but not limited to, Hippocrates?2 This essay wants to make headway on these questions from a queer perspective, and a classical reception studies perspective as well. For questions of paternity and genealogy can equally be turned on reception as a theoretical enterprise, guilty as it is of reinscribing teleological narratives of western triumphalism using insular citational practices.3 It 217

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is a commonplace, for example, to refer superficially to the likes of Hans Robert Jauss and Charles Martindale as reception’s “­founding fathers.” Worthy interventions have been made to disrupt the historical assumptions, methods, and aims of reception studies ­itself—​­particularly, the dominant role that canonical European receptions and reception theorists play in the field, as pointed out by Emily Greenwood (­2013). When it comes to deconstructing the narrow, patriarchal species of genealogical thinking in which reception studies and ancient science have long been steeped, this essay proposes that queer theory can lend particular insight, in part because queer theorists themselves have long grappled with the complex role that genealogical concepts and methods play in their own work. The politics of genealogy, in the vein of Michel Foucault, remains a source of irresolvable methodological strife for queer studies as a field. After all, some of the most vital turns in queer studies, in positioning themselves against the violence of the familial as an organizing device, are openly ­anti-​­ and ­post-​­genealogical: to name a few, family abolition (­e.g. Griffiths and Gleeson 2015; Lewis 2019 and 2022; Weeks 2021), Black antihumanism (­e.g. Spillers 1987; Harrison 2021) and queer/­trans children’s liberation (­e.g. ­Gill-​­Peterson 2012 and 2018). What is the radical potential of a concept that has not only historically centered idealized queer subjects but also derives from idealized white European theorists who have, in turn, been credited as queer theory’s founding fathers? Some queer theorists have argued that genealogy as a concept cannot be altogether jettisoned if we are to understand the institutionalization of queer studies as a site of inquiry. To them, it is precisely because genealogy has occupied a historically privileged, and thus problematic, role in queer studies that it may today be recuperated as a ­self-​­reflexive and critical tool. Particularly important here is Kadji Amin’s “­attachment genealogy,” a queer method for theorizing the complexity of affective attachments both of and to idealized historical exempla. Employing this method in Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (­2017), Amin ­de-​­idealizes and historicizes attachments to the canonical figure of French author and activist Jean Genet (­­1910–​­1986) by excavating Genet’s unsavory affinities to pederastic kinship and racial fetishism. In turn, Amin’s attachment genealogy of Genet amounts to a broader commentary on the outmoded affinities of contemporary queer scholarship (­e.g., its overreliance on white western theorists from the 1990s, also explored in Amin 2016). In order to imagine more expansive genealogies for our scholarship, we must also reckon with the traces of our discipline’s “­discursive travels and of the intellectual genealogies that have most repetitively defined it” (­Amin 2020, 26). This essay performs an attachment genealogy of Hippocrates the father using Amin’s method. Tracking the rise of the fatherhood epithet in modernity, and reacting against scholarly attempts to sidestep the unease that the patriarchal epithet generates, I center its disturbing reliance on ­non-​ ­biological and queer forms of kinship. As a case in point, I explore the affective terrain of Hippocrates’ fatherhood in the sixteenth century as a fantasy of autogenesis ­vis-­​­­à-​­vis contemporary ­Renaissance-​­era medical and imperial imaginaries of ­male-​­only birth. In the final stages of the attachment genealogy, we are free to consider alternative queer genealogies and models for the study of ancient medicine in their full affective complexity. One such model is that of the queer chosen family, which resonates with articulations of elective affinity found in the Hippocratic Oath. While existing work on elective affinity largely originates from the ­anti-​­genealogical camp of queer unhistoricism, I argue for the reconciliation of this work with critical genealogical methods.

Performing an Attachment Genealogy of Hippocrates the Father Kadji Amin’s attachment genealogy builds primarily on Foucauldian methods of genealogy (­e.g. Foucault 2021[1971]) and Christopher Nealon’s (­1997) “­­affect-​­genealogies.” For Amin, 218

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genealogy always involves the destabilization of canonical foundations and timelines, rather than erecting new ones: Genealogy reveals the element of chance that allowed certain theoretical schools to become central to the field; it exposes the incommensurable fractures between different theories within the field and, at times, within the work of a single theorist. Perhaps most excitingly, genealogy allows for the formation of new roots to the side of those canonized for “­founding” a field. (­Amin 2020, 17) Here, genealogy becomes less about one’s ability to identify comfortably with authoritative accounts of the past and more about the queer fragmentation of p­ re-​­existing power and knowledge structures. Thus, for genealogy to operate as a distinctly critical mode of queer scholarly analysis, it must not only be historical, but affective.4 The affects of genealogy, however, can be difficult to excavate as they are often mundane, banal, and taken for granted. Hence, while a figure like Hippocrates may seem an unlikely recipient of a queer theoretical gaze, it is precisely the mundanity of his fatherhood that resonates with Amin’s cue to begin from “­bad” objects. An attachment genealogy starts with questioning the stalest and seemingly uncontestable of origin stories under the heuristic of ­de-​­idealization. Although this approach might most readily apply to the canonically queer object (­to which our genealogical attachments are disturbing), it is just as relevant to the presumably ‘­straight’ object whose disturbing genealogies are exposed to be queer. As Amin shows in his attachment genealogy of pederastic kinship, it is only when a scholar diagnoses their own attachments to the object (­often, in no small part, the product of entrenched scholarly reflexes and field dispositions) that they may fully realize the object’s complex, impure, or contradictory affects. At that point, “[t]he scholar is then freed to perform the final step of attachment genealogy, that of elaborating the alternative scholarly priorities and feeling states [that] the object generates” (­Amin 2017, 3­ 1–​­32). Amin is not primarily an historian, but his methods prioritize historical differences as an approach that must also account for linguistic and conceptual differences. In this sense, to conduct an attachment genealogy of Hippocrates the father, we must outline the contours of fatherhood as metaphor. As conceptual metaphor theorists have demonstrated, metaphor is pervasive “­not just in language but in thought and action” (­Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 3). Regardless of our notice, metaphors “­create new meaning, create similarities, and thereby define a new reality,” necessarily foreclosing other realities (­Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 211). This is especially true with regard to the questions asked and the stories told about the history of science. The power of metaphor to engender certain kinds of ­knowledge—​­yet disavow ­others—​­speaks against claims to absolute scientific truth, since scientific language can obscure at the same time that it illuminates. Hippocrates’ fatherhood is no exception.

*** In order to adequately make sense of the fatherhood metaphor, the first step of the attachment genealogy is to reckon with the degree to which it has structured both lay and scholarly scientific discourses. An indexical Wikipedia article, “­List of people considered father or mother of a scientific field,” demonstrates the metaphor’s ubiquity. Under the “­fathers of medicine,” category, Hippocrates is not the most ancient figure mentioned, nor does he stand alone: listed alongside him are Imhotep (­late ­twenty-​­seventh century BCE), Charaka (­third century BCE), and ­Ibn-​­Sina (­­980–​ ­1037 CE) in antiquity, and Sir William Osler (­­1949–​­1919) in modernity. It is not exactly clear how 219

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the authors of the list came up with their criteria. In any case, the list’s retroactive logic points to the way that Hippocrates’ legacy has patterned the history of science as a matter of fathers, fields, and ­firsts—​­in some cases, retroactively colonizing the knowledges of other ancient medical traditions, such as in Egypt, India, and the Near East, with the fatherhood metaphor. Scientists have careerist reasons to traffic in the metaphor. Here, evolutionary biologist Jan Sapp’s 1990 article on the “­founding fatherhood” of geneticist Gregor Mendel is instructive. Sapp argues that the label of Father of G ­ enetics—​­particularly for someone who wrote as comparatively little as ­Mendel—​­allowed later scientists, framing themselves as sons, to ­co-​­opt his biography and findings in service of legitimizing their own research programs and agendas. Since “­the thoughts and motivations of Mendel are often altered,” he can be “­persistently undressed and redressed in new colours of allegiance” by anyone (­Sapp 1990, 145). It is easier to imagine a straightforward story of patrilineal descent in the place of the messy reality of scientific knowledge production, even if the details of this story must constantly change to accommodate new claims of inheritance. As a result, Mendel’s fatherhood opens the door for Whiggish histories and fabulations. A notable example is what Sapp calls accounts of “­the long neglect”: revisionist myths that Mendel had uncovered several scientific truths (­e.g. a ­one-­​­­to-​­one relationship between genes and enzymes) but was cursed to die before these truths were widely recognized: a genius ahead of his time. In Hippocrates’ case, his metaphorical fatherhood implies a revision of “­his” ideas about reproduction; the concept of a fully ­self-​­sufficient paternity does not align with biological fatherhood as Hippocratic texts understand it. In texts such as On Regimen, On Generation, and The Nature of the Child, Hippocratic authors subscribe to “­­two-​­seed” theories in which both parents play an active, albeit not an equal, role in generation. (­We will return to the gendered implications of the fatherhood metaphor later on.) Ultimately, given Hippocrates’ position as the originary “­father,” we have to consider Mendel’s fatherhood as cut from a Hippocratic cloth. Sapp may blame the paucity of Mendel’s writings for the extent to which revisionist narratives authorized by Mendel’s fatherhood, such as the accounts of long neglect, seem plausible. However, turning to the Hippocratic material, we see that content, diversity, and size of the Corpus does not succeed in offering immunity from appropriation either. People quote Hippocrates “­almost always to reinforce an argument, enlisting his support for what one wants to say [...] We have always made Hippocrates in our own image” (­King 2019, 40). Even the most ­well-​­intentioned attempts to claim Hippocrates as one’s own only shore up “­the white will to power expressed in the desire to claim Daddy’s authority for oneself” (­Ranger, 2020). Attachment genealogies, in historicizing this desire, allow us to counter reception’s reclamatory impulse and choose differently.

*** Now that we have begun to unpack some of the work that ­fatherhood-­​­­as-​­metaphor does today, the next step of the attachment genealogy involves excavating how such a metaphor came into use. This involves surveying the other, earlier conceptual paradigms it supplemented and supplanted, as well as contextualizing the affective valences behind each shift. In the table below (­see ­Figure 15.1), I have assembled a series of representative snapshots that demonstrate the ways in which Hippocratic authority has been variously conceptualized, from Greek antiquity through the early modern era. In none of these (­extant) sources has the idiom of Hippocrates’ metaphorical fatherhood yet to be fully realized. It is true that in the pseudepigraphic Letter from Paitos to Artaxerxes, Hippocrates is called πάτηρ ὑγείας, “­father of health.” Yet, in the same letter, this distinction is also offered to Asclepius and Apollo (­though not Hygeia): two deities to whom I return in the next section. 220

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Figure 15.1 From the “founder” of medicine, to the “prince,” to the “father”

As the table reinforces, the first attested mention of Hippocrates as the Father of Medicine is in modernity, not antiquity. Nor is it the earliest notable Hippocratic epithet. References to Hippocrates as the “­founder” (­conditor) of medicine can be traced to the first century BCE, but “­he is not yet the father of medicine until much later” (­King 2006, 253). Seneca refers to Hippocrates as the conditor of medical science within a larger passage about how masculine and gender nonconforming women do not deserve the “­privilege of their sex” (­beneficium sexus sui, Epistulae 95.­20–​­21). Scribonius Largus, Claudius’ court physician, uses the same term. In Latin, the preferred term for Hippocrates was neither pater nor conditor, but rather princeps, “­first among equals.”5 Marco Fabio Calvi, translator of Hippocrates into Latin, calls Hippocrates “­of all physicians, the princeps.” Yet it was not just Hippocrates to whom the term referred. In his 1546 edition of the Hippocratic Corpus, philologist Janus Cornarius speaks of Hippocrates and Galen as “­the principes of the best medical sect, namely the rational sect.” To this day, Galen remains “­prince” of physicians (­King 2002). 221

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It is also in the sixteenth century that we can locate the rise of the “­Father of Medicine” theme. French Renaissance writer and physician François Rabelais (­ca. ­1483–​­1553) refers multiple times to Pere Hippocrates, for example in a 1552 letter to Cardinal Odet de Chastillon prefacing his Quart Livre. The English anatomist, medical historian, and Galenist Thomas Gale (­­1507–​­1587) famously spoke in 1586 of “­Our father Hippocrates” in his genealogical mythography of medicine’s origins. In the same sentence, Gale mentions Galen (“­Father Hippocrates, and Galen”). Disregarding the comma, Jonathan Sawday (­1995, ­40–​­41) argues that there is not one, but “­twin fathers” of Western medicine by Gale’s “­patrilineal” account: “­the originall and the foundacion.” Yet the singularity of Hippocrates’ fatherhood is already evident in Gale’s characterization: Hippocrates alone originates this role (­King 2002, ­22–​­23). And, as Sawday concedes, there are “­signs here of Oedipal struggle at work” between not two fathers, but father and son.6 This kind of genealogy demands hierarchy, mutiny, and takeover. As we will see, matters of filial succession and genealogy are of paramount concern in Renaissance culture, specifically in medical and scientific discourses.7 Rather than exploring the epithet’s historical context, many feel compelled to attempt a reparative reading of the metaphor’s gendered implications, namely its glaring omission of a maternal element. King (­2019, ­53–​­54) comments, “­I find it interesting that the fatherhood of Hippocrates dominated in the era after the discovery of ovum and sperm”: didn’t “­users [know] perfectly well that generation ‘­takes two’?” As mentioned above, Hippocratic embryological theory understood this as well. Some have tried to fill in the blanks. For Sapp (­1999, 28), founding fatherhood “­penetrate[s] Mother Nature”—​­a move that adds another loaded metaphor to the mix. Sawday (­1995, 41) goes further, rehashing ­age-​­old Orientalist tropes in positing an “­uncomfortable union” between “[t]he combination of a doubly fathered masculine western knowledge of Greek medicine married to the passive, eastern tradition of transmission.” By taking the fatherhood metaphor to (­what they believe to be) its literalist conclusions, these readings in different ways betray attachments to a motherhood that must be recovered at any cost. But must it? As Hortense Spillers reminds us in “­Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (­1987), we know that motherhood is not an inevitability; an animating feature of chattel slavery is the ungendering of Black parents. Spiller’s powerful genealogical critique of U.S. politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Black matriarchal thesis is therefore “­less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness” (­i.e., of white maternity) than it is in the making of “­a different social subject” altogether (­Spillers 1987, ­228–​­229). To attribute “­a female shadow power” to the doctrine partus sequitur ventrem would amount to, as Tavia Nyong’o (­2009) explains, “­a facile retroactive and compensatory gendering,” when in actuality “­the calculus of violence and profit by which life was merchandised and consumed in the cauldron of Atlantic slavery targeted a violated, ungendered flesh” (­emphasis original). The aim of performing an attachment genealogy, then, lies in excavating emergent symbolic orders rather than recuperating or valorizing a n­ ot-​­there maternity in service of a white feminist research program.

*** We have established that it is misguided to make sense of the emergence of Hippocrates’ fatherhood by resorting uncritically to maternity as an essentializing, reparative gendering. Instead, an attachment genealogy can interrogate which disturbing affects and affiliations made Hippocrates’ fatherhood so good to think within the sixteenth century. I conclude this section by proposing one place to start: the centrality of fantasies of m ­ ale-​­only birth to ­sixteenth-​­century medical writings and ­self-​­fashioning of the male anatomists of the Italian Renaissance. In her study of gender and human dissection in Renaissance Italy, Katharine Park (­2006, esp. ­Chapter 5) explores how anatomy as a ­discipline—​­despite the centrality of female anatomical 222

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b­ odies—​­relied on the imagery of an exclusively male genealogy of knowledge and power. This genealogy, bolstered by the importance of paternity to Habsburg imperial ideology, also relied heavily on scenes of m ­ ale-​­only birth ­Greco-​­Roman mythology. Nowhere is this clearer than in the work and milieu of ­sixteenth-​­century Italian anatomist Andreas Vesalius (­­1514–​­1564). Vesalius saw himself as “­reviving medicine as it was practiced in the ancient world,” using Hippocrates and Galen as his models (­Park 2006, 244), and specifically framing his intellectual inheritance as a matter of masculine (­re)­birth in line with Charles V’s revival of the Holy Roman Empire. The text and imagery of his 1543 Fabrica offer a case in point. In the Fabrica’s preface, Vesalius “­positioned himself as both the restorer of the lost empire of medicine and the founder of a new dynasty of great physicians, on the model of Apollo’s establishment of the Asclepian line” (­Park 2006, 247). Vesalius’ ­self-​­fashioning would have resonated strongly with the project of Habsburg imperial mythology, which framed the Habsburg rulers as successors to the Roman Empire, and more specifically as heirs to the ­Julio-​­Claudian line, which replenished itself by means of a series of male adoptions. Two of the most popular episodes from Roman mythography helped Vesalius to stake such a claim. On the Fabrica’s title page, by depicting himself standing over the uterus of a female cadaver, Vesalius evokes both the birth of Caesar from his dead mother and Nero’s legendary anatomy of his mother Agrippina (­also analyzed by Park 2006, ­Chapter 3). Each in their own way, “­both stories constitute [...] fantasies of male ­self-​­birth and a pure male lineage uncontaminated by the female principle” (­Park 2006, 234). These stories gained a new power and prestige in light of the Habsburgs’ patrilineal, absolutist rule. Furthermore, Vesalius’ appeals to Roman myths of male autogenesis were supplemented by allusions to Apollo and the birth of Asclepius. The “­Caesarian” birth themes evoked on the title page of the Fabrica, Park argues, also recall book 2 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which ­Asclepius—​­conceived by a tryst between Apollo and the nymph Coronis, whom Apollo murders out of ­jealousy—​­is cut by Apollo out of Coronis’ womb. As a result, Vesalius Asks the reader to reimagine [his title page anatomy] as Apollo’s extraction of Asclepius from the uterus of his dead lover. [...] Like Apollo, and unlike Nero, Vesalius has managed successfully to both father and deliver a child, the Fabrica, which marks the reinstatement of anatomy as a vital, progressive field of study. (­Park 2006, 248) Inevitably, these ideas about male ­self-​­birth and lineage influenced the Renaissance anatomists’ reproductive thought. In 1560, Italian physician and professor Girolamo Cardano wrote that “­the laws have established paternal, not maternal authority”; to him, “­the father is the principal agent, like seed, while the mother is the earth; and the plant owes more to the seed than the earth” (­quoted in Park 2006, 239). In doing so, Cardano makes a strikingly similar argument to Apollo’s in the trial of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, that paternal contributions to reproduction always trump maternal ones. “­The ­so-​­called mother is not a parent of the child, but the nurse of the newly sewn embryo,” Apollo declares, while “­the parent is he who mounts, while the female, like a stranger on behalf of another stranger, keeps the offspring safe” (­οὐκ ἔστι μήτηρ ἡ κεκλημένη τέκνου τοκεύς, τροφεὺς δὲ κύματος νεοσπόρου· τίκτει δ’ ὁ θρώισκων, ἡ δ’ ἅπερ ξένωι ξένη ἔσωσεν ἔρνος, Aeschylus, Eumenides ­658–​­661; see also ­736–​­738).8 Apolline attachments like these do not foment in isolation and are worth acknowledging as possible contexts for Hippocratic fatherhood. I am not, however, suggesting that the early ­modern-​­anatomists’ preoccupations with male autogenesis wholly accounts for the fatherhood metaphor’s emergence; attachment genealogies abstain from granting 223

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us the positivistic comfort of certainty, of linearity. Rather, I have sought to probe dimensions of the affective terrain in which fatherhood took hold. Namely, it seems that the fatherhood of medicine became good to think with precisely because of its biological impossibility. It authorized a ­deep-​­rooted fantasy, a l­onged-​­for alternative imaginary in which knowledge, power, and social relations are “­uncontaminated by a female principle.” Following Amin, there is no other designation for this imagined paradigm of maleness than “­queer.”

“­A Very Queer Bumptious Family”: The Hippocratic Oath and the Politics of Elective Affinities The last step of attachment genealogy, again, is to “­elaborat[e] the alternative scholarly priorities and feeling states [that] the object generates” (­Amin 2017, ­31–​­32). Now that we have historicized and deidealized the fatherhood metaphor’s fantasy of ­male-​­only birth, we are free to turn a queering eye on Hippocratic ideas of elective kinship and the feeling states that might be newly realized. In this final section, I turn to the programmatic text of Hippocratic professional ethics, the Oath, and argue for its attachment to a queer chosen family model. Unpacking the politics of this kinship model and its disturbing attachments, I show, opens the door to integrating critical genealogical methods with other, nominally a­ nti-​­genealogical methods of studying elective affinities. In the Oath, we find an emphatic analogy between father/­teacher and son/­student: ἡγήσεσθαι μὲν τὸν διδάξαντά με τὴν τέχνην ταύτην ἴσα γενέτῃσιν ἐμοῖς, καὶ βίου κοινώσεσθαι, καὶ χρεῶν χρηΐζοντι μετάδοσιν ποιήσεσθαι, καὶ γένος τὸ ἐξ αὐτοῦ ἀδελφοῖς ἴσον ἐπικρινεῖν ἄρρεσι, καὶ διδάξειν τὴν τέχνην ταύτην, ἢν χρηΐζωσι μανθάνειν, ἄνευ μισθοῦ καὶ συγγραφῆς, παραγγελίης τε καὶ ἀκροήσιος καὶ τῆς λοίπης ἁπάσης μαθήσιος μετάδοσιν ποιήσεσθαι υἱοῖς τε ἐμοῖς καὶ τοῖς τοῦ ἐμὲ διδάξαντος, καὶ μαθητῇσι συγγεγραμμένοις τε καὶ ὡρκισμένοις νόμῳ ἰητρικῷ, ἄλλῳ δὲ οὐδενί. [I vow] to consider my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to share with him my livelihood; to give him money when he is in need; and to consider his offspring equal with my own brothers; and to teach them this art without payment or contract if they desire to learn it; to share precepts, lectures, and all other forms of instruction to my own sons, to the sons of my teacher, and to students who are bound by code and have sworn the doctor’s ­oath—​­but to nobody else. (­Hippocratics, Oath ­7–​­17) The Oath is brimming with familial relations: parents, partners, family, sons, brothers. Crucially, the vast majority of these relatives in the tekhne reside outside the pupil or teacher’s blood relations, showcasing the “­embedded[ness]” of the Hippocratic physician “­within a network of social and ethical relationships with other people” (­Holmes 2013, 456). In English adaptations of the Oath sworn by medical students today, these passages have been largely omitted, with the only surviving trace of its preoccupation with family being: “­I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability.”9 The equation of teacher and student as family has been replaced here with a concern for the patient’s ­bio-​­family. In contrast, relatively few clauses of the original Oath concern patients: as King (­2014) comments, “[w]hichever group of ancient physicians came up with this document, their first concern was with their identity as a group.” As for what occasioned such concern, the Oath is believed to be reacting against a prior Asclepiad model of the medical p­ rofession—​­one wherein the teaching of the son by the father 224

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took place hereditarily, according to a strict scheme of patrilineal descent. Galen conjectures in his (­fragmentary) Commentary on the Oath that “­Hippocrates decided to make instruction available to strangers owing to an insufficient number of family members willing to carry on the medical tradition at Kos, and drafted the Oath to this effect” (­quoted in Jouanna 2001, 47). Taking Galen’s explanation seriously, Jacques Jouanna reads the Oath as an attempt to keep the tekhne “­within a family” at any cost. Thus, “­the welcoming of foreign students into the family could serve to perpetuate the family tradition” (­Jouanna 2001, ­47–​­48, emphasis original). Yet we are told this process happens “­without payment or contract” (­ἄνευ μισθοῦ καὶ συγγραφῆς). While the text does invite initiates and readers to conceptualize medicine in familial terms, it also stresses the degree to which these relations are freely chosen. The queer chosen family model is celebrated for being theoretically averse to hierarchy, and as a result, it is highly idealized. This is, however, but one (­recent) Anglophone model of queer kinship, arising in North America in the 1980s (­Weston 1997). Chosen family, moreover, channels both the longings generated by exile from the heterosexual family and the critical injunction to not repeat its hierarchies and exclusions [...] The diverse and intense affective energies it magnetizes ensure that a chosen family remains highly idealized as at once free from the contradictions of conventional kinship and uniquely capable of fulfilling the yearnings for love, care, and belonging that the romance of “­family” generates. (­Amin 2017, 113) As Amin’s genealogy of pederastic kinship shows, this romance can easily lapse into abuse; it is practically impossible to separate queer kinship’s most liberatory aspects from its most exploitative. Thus, in reading the Oath’s familial attachments as ones of queer chosen family, I am not claiming that such a reading exonerates the Hippocratics, nor dismantles a sense of patrilineal d­ escent—​­after all, this model centers on the relationships between male teachers and male students. Rather, in naming such relationships as queer, I follow Amin (­2017, 115) in seeking to upend the reflex “­to equate naming an object queer with claiming, for it, an unequivocally positive political value.” If attachments to Hippocrates are already queer in antiquity, Galen is most readily implicated. Mentioning Hippocrates thousands of times in his extant works, Galen’s attitude toward the Hippocratic Corpus has been compared to that of a commentator on opaque religious gospel (­Smith 1979, 72). But to speak of Galen as a ­self-​­professed prophet or evangelist does not capture the extent to which he attempted to gatekeep the Hippocratic tradition for himself, claiming unmediated and exclusionary access to an a­ lready-​­idealized ancestor. Describing importance of writing his commentaries by hand in On the Usefulness of Parts, Galen writes that, “­thanks to the letters written by the hand, it is now possible to be in the company of Plato and Aristotle, and with Hippocrates, and with all the other Ancients” (­καὶ σοι διά τε γράμματα καὶ χεῖρας ἔτι καὶ νῦν ὑπάρχει ὁμιλεῖν Πλάτωνί τε καὶ Ἀριστοτέλει, καὶ Ἱπποκράτει, καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις παλαιοῖς, On the Usefulness of Parts I.2, III.5 K). Is this not the chosen family described by the Oath, taking place across centuries once the ghosts of the past have received their due blood?

*** To read and write about one’s objects as Galen did is to control time, ­or—​­to borrow a metaphor from Michel Serres’ concept of liquid ­history—​­to bring two points of a handkerchief together which previously did not touch, understanding them now as temporally contiguous (­Serres and Latour 1995[1980], ­60–​­61). To close, I want to resolve some disciplinary trouble that critical genealogical 225

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perspectives invariably pose in light of recent debates about queer unhistoricism and recent unhistoricist work in classical reception. The temporal turn in queer ­studies—​­comprising concepts such as queer time, queer unhistoricism, and h­ omohistory—​­has posited alternatives to presentism and positivism by privileging the messiness of history over its seeming neatnesses. Homohistory, then, is not a history of homosexuals or of homosexuality, but a history “­invested in suspending determinate sexual and chronological differences while expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero, with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism,” as Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon propose in “­Queering History” (­2005, 1609). Following Brooke Holmes (­e.g. 2016, 2020), we can acknowledge that time in the history of science, as in reception studies, is always to some extent asynchronous, untimely, anachronistic, kairological, and contradictory. All the same, the turn to “­queer unhistoricism” ushered in by Goldberg and Menon, since it is uninterested in looking backward from the present or forwards from the past, groups genealogy with teleology as inherently straight spatializations of time. Yet as Valerie Traub (­2013, 21) points out in her incisive critique of this new unhistoricism, when “­­anti-​­teleologists challenge any such proleptic sequence as a straitjacketing of sex, time, and history,” they too position their critique as “­a decisive break from previous theories and methods of queer history (­especially Foucauldian genealogy).” For Traub, the unhistoricists have therefore gone too far in projecting and subverting historical categories for their own sake. Here lies a fundamental tension between the category of queerness and queerness’ opposition to category, with the reactive un-​­in unhistoricism doing the work of reifying perhaps the most pernicious forms of historicism. Sebastian Matzner finds more potential than problem in the tension that Traub isolates. In the essay “­Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past” (­2016), he seeks to expose and challenge the abundance of teleological approaches in Classics which risk rendering queer histories illegible and insubstantial. He aligns genealogical thinking with the logic of classicism itself, insofar as both are continua that “­conscript individual voices into a linear script of historical continuity,” whereas queer unhistoricism and a queer classical reception, in his view, offer a new space “­within which transhistorical ‘­elective affinities’ (­those of others and our own) continually surface, are explored, transformed, undone, reconfigured, and created” (­Matzner 2016, 193). Yet I would add to this analysis that, as classicists, we cannot shy away from the disturbing attachments to classicism that critical genealogical perspectives can expose. As Amin’s work shows, genealogy is an always already affective method; feeling and desire have long factored into genealogical alignments with even the most idealized figures from the ancient world. And queer academics are by no means immune to the sinister side of elective affinity either.10 Our attachments can be as disturbing as straight ones, requiring the “­re-​­ rather than de-​­historicization” of exemplary objects (­Amin 2016, 174) to keep in check “­our own anachronistic acts of ventriloquizing and embodying the classical past” (­Matzner 2016, 193). For Matzner, these ventriloquisms take place via metalepsis: the rhetorical strategy of ghosting chronology by linking two noncontiguous steps in a sequence. Drawn from the work of Carla Freccero (­2006, 2), metaleptic affinities “­could be seen to embody the spirit of queer analysis in its wilful perversion of notions of temporal propriety and the reproductive order of things.” Yet what is metalepsis but genealogy dressed in unhistoricist clothing? These affinities can just as easily be employed to reinscribe, queer though they may be, the baggage of n­ on-​­reproductive ­fatherhood—​­when subjected to attachment genealogy as a method, we can better make sense of the most uncomfortable of these affinities and turn them on their heads. As Traub reminds, “­there remain ample reasons to practice a queer historicism dedicated to showing how categories, however mythic, phantasmic, and incoherent, came to be” (­Traub 2013, 35, emphasis mine). Under this aegis, the genealogical attachments underlying the study of ancient medicine and classical reception can be recuperated for more mythic, phantasmic, and incoherent potentials. 226

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Many classical objects, myths, and figures may seem domesticated by their canonicity, but when readers outside the discipline encounter them, they find unruly messes rather than normative regimes. For Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble (­2016, 54), Hesiod’s Theogony reads as follows: “­Around 700 BCE, Hesiod imagined the Gorgons as sea demons and gave them sea deities for parents […] Hesiod’s Theogony [labors] to stabilize a very bumptious queer family.” This family is hardly egalitarian or nonhierarchical, and noticing its queerness is neither a reclamatory nor redemptive act. The project of attachment genealogy is, rather, an invitation to reflexivity, challenging us to live with the discomfiting realities of queer pasts and presents.11

Suggestions for Further Reading On attachment genealogy as method and the affective genealogies of queer theory, see Amin 2020, 2017 (­esp. ­Chapter 1), 2016, Nealon 1997; on genealogy and classical reception, see Ward (­this volume); for queer, Marxist, and Black feminist radical critiques of the family, see Lewis 2022, 2019, Weeks 2021, ­Gill-​­Peterson 2018, 2012, Griffiths and Gleeson 2015, Collins 1998, Spillers 1987; on the Anglophone chosen family model of queer kinship, see Weston 1997 and Amin 2017 (­esp. Chapter. 4); on queer unhistoricism, see Goldberg and Menon 2005; Traub 2013; Matzner 2016.

Notes 1 I use “­Hippocrates” to refer to the historical figure or construct; by “­the Hippocratics,” or “­Hippocratic Corpus,” etc., I refer to the medical texts and their authors. 2 While Cicero famously called Herodotus the “­father of history” (­Herodotum patrem historiae, On the Laws 1.5; see van der Dussen 2016), and Horace called Ennius pater Ennius (­1.19.7, see Goldschmidt 2012), the metaphor does not loom quite so large in either history or poetry. 3 On critical approaches to classical reception studies, see Ward in this volume. On citational ethics and Classics (­including reception) as a “­scholarly enclosure,” see Padilla Peralta 2020a. 4 On affect and queer genealogy, see also Love 2009, esp. 4­ 6–​­52. 5 Princeps is “­the label which Augustus had found so useful in his experiments to find a title which allowed him to rule Rome without alienating the senatorial class” (­King 2006, 258). On imperial power and (­dis)­ordering of knowledge, see e.g. Flemming 2005, 2007 and Padilla Peralta 2020b. 6 Though, per King 2002, Galen has remained princeps rather than Hippocrates’ “­son”; cf. Holmes 2012, ­60–​­70. 7 On genealogy and paternity in Rabelais and Renaissance culture, see Freccero 1991. 8 See also Medea ­561–​­575 and Hippolytus ­616–​­668; on kinship and patriarchal autochthony in Euripidean tragedy, see the 2022 volume Queer Euripides: R ­ e-​­readings in Greek Tragedy, esp. the contributions by Radcliffe and Ormand. 9 On the Oath in modern medical contexts, see Nutton 1995, 5­ 18–​­519. 10 For example, on the erotics of philology, see Billings 2010 and Harloe and Russell 2019. 11 My thanks to the many readers whose generous comments vastly improved this essay, especially Ella Haselswerdt, Sara Lindheim, Kirk Ormand and Brooke Holmes. Earlier versions of this work were first presented in 2020 and 2021, at the “­In the Shadow of Hippocrates” online congress (­University of Granada) and the O ­ xford-​­Princeton Exchange seminar.

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Nicolette D’Angelo Billings, Joshua. 2010. “­Hyperion’s Symposium: An Erotics of Reception.” Classical Receptions Journal 2, ­4–​­24. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. “­It’s all in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia 13, ­62–​­82. Flemming, Rebecca. 2005. “­Empires of Knowledge: Medicine and Health in the Hellenistic World.” In A Companion to the Hellenistic World, edited by Andrew Erskine, ­447–​­463. Malden: Blackwell. —​­—​­—​­. 2007. “­Galen’s Imperial Order of Knowledge.” In Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, edited by Jason König and Timothy Whitmarsh, 2­ 41–​­277. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 2021[1971]. “­Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, ­Counter-​­Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ­139–​­164. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Freccero, Carla. 1991. Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2006. Queer/Early/Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2011. “­Queer Times.” In After Sex?: On Writing Since Queer Theory, edited by Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, 1­ 7–​­26. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gale, Thomas. 1586. Certaine Workes of Galens, called Methodus Medendi, with a Briefe Declaration of the Worthie art of Medicine, the Office of a Chirurgion, and an Epitome of the Third Booke of Galen, of Naturall Faculties. London: Thomas East. ­Gill-​­Peterson, Jules. 2012. “­Virtual(­ly) Queer: ­Anti-​­Genealogy and ­Obsessive-​­Compulsion in Bechdels’ Fun Home.” UCLA Thinking Gender. https://­escholarship.org/­uc/­item/­2qb5c1qk (­accessed 7.18.22). —​­—​­—​­. 2018. Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goldberg, Jonathan and Madhavi Menon. 2005. “­Queering History.” PMLA 120, 1­ 608–​­1617. Goldschmidt, Nora. 2012. “­Absent Presence: pater Ennius in Renaissance Europe.” Classical Receptions Journal 4(­1), ­1–​­19. Greenwood, Emily. 2013. “­Afterword: ­Omni-​­Local Classical Receptions.” Classical Receptions Journal 5(­3), ­354–​­361. Griffiths, Kade Doyle, and Jules Joanne Gleeson. 2015. ­Kinderkommunismus: A Feminist Analysis of the 21st Century Family and a Communist Proposal for its Abolition. Subversion Press. https://subversionpress. wordpress.com/2015/06/30/kinderkommunismus/ (accessed 7.18.22). Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harloe, Katherine and Lucy Russell. 2019. “­Life and (­Love) Letters: Looking in on Winckelmann’s Correspondence.” Publications of the English Goethe Society 88(­1), ­1–​­20. Harrison, Da’Shaun. 2021. Belly of the Beast: The Politics of ­Anti-​­fatness as ­Anti-​­blackness. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Holmes, Brooke. 2012. Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2013. “­In Strange Lands: Disembodied Authority and the Physician Role in the Hippocratic Corpus and Beyond.” In Writing Science: Medical and Mathematical Authorship in Ancient Greece, edited by Markus Asper, 4­ 31–​­472. Berlin: De Gruyter. —​­—​­—​­. 2016. “­Michel Serres’s ­Non-​­Modern Lucretius: Manifold Reason and the Temporality of Reception.” In Lucretius and Modernity: Epicurean Encounters Across Time and Disciplines, The New Antiquity, edited by Jacques Lezra and Liza Blake, 2­ 1–​­37. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. —​­—​­—​­. 2020. “­At the End of the Line: On Kairological History.” Classical Receptions Journal 12, ­62–​­90. Jouanna, Jacques. 2001. Hippocrates. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. King, Helen. 2002. “­The Power of Paternity: The Father of Medicine Meets the Prince of Physicians.” In Reinventing Hippocrates, edited by David Cantor, ­21–​­36. Aldershot: Ashgate. —​­—​­—​­. 2006. “­The Origins of Medicine in the Second Century AD.” In Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece, edited by Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, ­246–​­263. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2014. “­Hippocrates Didn’t Write the Oath, So Why Is he the Father of Medicine?” The Conversation. http://­theconversation.com/­­hippocrates-­​­­didnt-­​­­write-­​­­the-­​­­oath-­​­­so-­​­­why-­​­­is-­​­­he-­​­­the-­​­­father-­​­­of-­​­­medicine-​­32334 (­accessed 5.18.20). —​­—​­—​­. 2019. Hippocrates Now: The “­Father of Medicine” in the Internet Age. London: Bloomsbury Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago/­London: University of Chicago Press.

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Hippocrates the ‘Father’? Lewis, Sophie. 2019. Full Surrogacy Now. London: Verso Books. —​­—​­—​­. 2022. Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. London: Verso Books. “­List of People Considered Father or Mother of a Scientific Field.” Wikipedia. https://­en.wikipedia.org/­ wiki/­List_of_people_considered_father_or_mother_of_a_scientific_field (­accessed 7.18.22). Love, Heather. 2009. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Matzner, Sebastian. 2016. “­Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past.” In Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, edited by Shane Butler, ­179–​­202. London: Bloomsbury Press. Nealon, Christopher. 1997. “­­Affect-​­Genealogy: Feeling and Affiliation in Willa Cather.” American Literature 69, ­5–​­37. Nutton, Vivian. 1995. “­What’s in an Oath?” Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London 29, ­518–​­524. Nyong’o, Tavia. 2009. “­Barack Hussein Obama, or, the Name of the Father.” Scholar & Feminist Online 7, 2. Olsen, Sarah and Mario Telò, eds. 2022. Queer Euripides: R ­ e-​­readings in Greek Tragedy. New York: Bloomsbury. Padilla Peralta, ­Dan-​­el. 2020a. “­Darkness Visible: The Haunted House of Classics.” Talk presented All This Rising: The Humanities in the Next Ten Years, Stanford University. —​­—​­—​­. 2020b. “­Epistemicide: The Roman Case.” ­Classica -​­Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos 33, ­151–​­186. Park, Katharine. 2006. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York/­Cambridge: Zone Books. Pinault, Jody Rubin. 1992. Hippocratic Lives and Legends. Leiden: Brill. Rabelais, François. 1734[1552]. Les Oeuvres de M. François Rabelais Docteur en Medecine, Augmentées de la Vie de L’auteur, & de Quelques Remarques Sur sa vie & sur L’histoire. Avec la clef & L’explication de tous les mots Difficiles. Tome Premier [-​­second], edited by Nicolas Langlois. Charleston: Nabu Press. Ranger, Holly. 2020. Critical Reception Studies: The White Feminism of Feminist Reception Studies. Paper presented at The Case for Critical Ancient World Studies, University of Kluwer Academic Publishers. Sapp, Jan. 1999. Where the Truth Lies: Franz Moewus and the Origins of Molecular Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sawday, Jonathan. 1995. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London/­New York: Routledge. Serres, Michel and Latour, Bruno. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Smith, Wesley D. 1979. The Hippocratic Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 1990. Pseudepigraphic Writings. Leiden: Brill. Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “­Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17(­2), ­65–​­81. “­ The Hippocratic Oath Today.” PBS. https://­www.pbs.org/­wgbh/­nova/­article/­­hippocratic-­​­­oath-​­today/ (­accessed 5.18.20). Traub, Valerie. 2013. “­The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies.” PMLA 128, ­21–​­39. van der Dussen, Jan. 2016. “­Herodotus as Pater Historiae.” In Studies on Collingwood, History and Civilization, edited by Jan van der Dussen, 1­ 55–​­168. New York: Springer. Weeks, Kathi. 2021. “­Abolition of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal.” Feminist Theory (­May 2021), 1­ –​­21. Weston, Kath. 1997. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

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16 TAMQUAM FAVUS Queer Kinship and Monetary Value in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis Elliott Piros

One disturbing aspect of the pederasty between freedmen and enslaved boy favorites in the cena Trimalchionis, “­Dinner of Trimalchio,” of Petronius’ Satyrica, is the way in which such attachments resemble bonds of kinship.1 Trimalchio and others speak of attending to the education and future of young male slaves, pueri. The beginning of these slaves’ lives resembles that of the freedmen themselves, and the freedmen single out favorites, pueri delicati, who are good at turning a profit as they have. Trimalchio praises the frugality of an unnamed puer  —​­not the ­bleary-​­eyed Croesus, himself another object of q­ uasi-​­parental ­affection—​­before segueing into recollections of his youth (­Satyrica 75.­4–​­5). Echion the quilt dealer, centonarius, speaks proudly of training a young servile boy, cicaro, in preparation for a career as a barber, praeco, or lawyer, causidicus, vocations seen as lucrative (­Satyrica 46). Habinnas kisses and gives boots in approval to the enslaved boy Massa sitting at his feet who bursts into a stilted recitation of Vergil. Massa, circumcised and with a Semitic name, lacks schooling, but Habinnas has sent him to learn from circulatores, street entertainers (­Satyrica 68.­4–​­69.2). Trimalchio defends him from Scintilla, seeing in Massa’s business savvy and sexual prowess a direct parallel to his own early situation. The possibility of owners to exploit sexually such pueri, here fictional but paralleled in reality, is made explicit or is subtext in these passages. Yet the boys seem also to hold the position of illegitimate sons for the freedmen. The resemblance is clearer for Trimalchio and Habinnas who, not unlike the recently deceased Chrysanthus, are in childless marriages. Echion for his part does not mention a wife. Epigraphical evidence corroborates in practice the informal adoption of sexually favored young male slaves, delicia (­Bodel 1994, 220). I argue here that we find in the pronouncements of Trimalchio and his commensals the articulation of a desire for personhood to endure via investment in the future of pueri delicati. This desire can be interpreted as subtending fantasies of a sort of queer kinship, following recent critical elaboration of the concept. Elizabeth Freeman uses two meanings of the word belong to access the drive for intergenerational extension that propels efforts to reproduce without normative methods such as childbirth or adoption into a family organized around a dyadic heterosexual union producing legitimate heirs. The phrase queer belonging can name a longing to be connected, to belong to people who are kin. It can also refer to the goal of being around for a long time, of enduring in corporeal form through projects that oppose themselves to normative procreation or are indifferent to it (­Freeman 2007, 299). Trimalchio’s training of boys who grew up under the same regime of exploitation and within the same parameters of opportunity DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-21 230

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as himself, forms of power about which he is memorably candid, marks a will to extend himself into the future. Echion seems to want something similar but with an emphasis on belonging to ­male-​­dominated social clusters. His forays into autobiography avoid mentioning relations of marriage or blood, asserting instead the closeness of his ties to magistrates named Titus and Mammea (­Satyrica 45).2 He promises Agamemnon that the properly educated child will make a diligent little slave, servulum, airing to his fellow guest hopes that could be taken variously as paternal, profitable, and erotic (­Satyrica 46.3). What are we to make of these efforts to establish enduring selfhood and kinship bonds on a nexus of enslavement, pederastic desire, and careers that, however great the wealth they could reap, nevertheless confirm Paul Veyne’s characterization of Petronius’ freedmen as members of a group blocked from proper integration into Roman society (­Veyne 1961)? Past decades have seen successful academic and political movements to define, idealize, and gain legal recognition for queer kinship bonds, the “­families we choose” of Kath Weston for example (­Weston 1991). Such movements have benefited from firmly rejecting valorizations of pederasty by earlier, ­now-​ ­reviled voices in gay rights movements. Prominent queer families and other nurturing intergenerational structures present a challenge to homophobic stereotypes about s­ ame-​­sex orientations and children. The history of ancient pederasty, however, contains space to describe the sexual and other violence found in the intergenerational social dynamics of the cena Trimalchionis. There is a complex personhood to Petronius’ fictional freedmen and historical examples of pueri who passed through commodification and sex slavery to perpetuate abuse they had themselves survived. I intend in this chapter neither simply to assert the problematic nature of such biographies nor to search in them for glimmers of queer kinships to come, forms of queer sociality that could be championed in ovo if not in fact. As Kadji Amin observes, “­idealism, which neatly inverts the historical denigration of queer bonds, has been one of the powerful redemptive impulses of Queer Studies” (­Amin 2017, 6). And yet, we seem to have reached a position of security from which it is possible to write histories of how Queer intimacies, taxed with the burdens of pathologization, criminalization, and social abjection and with the precarity and psychic duress these conditions engender, are as likely to produce abuse, exploitation, and the renunciation of care as more loving, sexually liberated, and just alternatives to heteronormative social forms. (­Amin 2017, 7) This chapter inhabits the unease that arises from encounters with queer bonds in the Satyrica that are not ideal, probing the ambiguity of social aspirations “­in which it is difficult to distinguish kinship from domination, coercion from care” (­Amin 2017, 139). I connect these ambiguities to an object that recurs as an obsession in the cena: money. Some might see Petronius’ constant return to the bluntness of financial matters as a device to ground fiction in quotidian reality or as a node in a condescending portrayal of men and women for whom glittering wealth is not a means of achieving acceptance into the upper echelons of Roman life but rather a mirror of insurmountable barriers in a hierarchy of social status wherein other f­ actors—​­ancestry, learning, occupation, purity from the stain of enslavement, macula servitutis—​­matter more. I focus on the way in which the commodity form of value in Petronius informs worldviews that are not exclusively intended to be objects of ridicule. Beyond producing wealth, the economic functions of money suggest to certain freedmen a model of social reproduction that dispenses with biological reproduction through dyadic sexual unions. Money put to profit in trade or lending at interest promises an alternative to the normative creation of progeny in fantasies of establishing oneself and perpetuating oneself 231

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in the future. Money is conceived of as parthenogenic, most clearly in three instances when it is said to grow “­just as honeycomb,” tamquam favus. The men who describe it as such have personal knowledge of being a commodity valued in terms of a price made high by their age and physical features, qualities that marked them out in the slave market. Fascination with money in the cena is often very directly biographical: money is understood as substantially part of the life force of freedmen. Trimalchio and others have felt money’s growth in their own bodies, as it were. Their attention to an aesthetic dimension of monetary value discloses an understanding of themselves but also of the alignments that money has brought about in the trajectory of their lives. These freedmen’s futures are mediated by the phantasmatic image of a youth whose operation as an eroticized avatar of monetary wealth becomes ­self-​­motivated through the inculcation of ­profit-​­making skills. Through servile agency money acquires a life of its own growing sideways to normative society, flourishing “­just as honeycomb” in the bodies of enslaved pueri delicati and in biographies that reposition former slaves as capable of motivating and directing such flourishing. Continuity in the face of death is a vexed preoccupation for attendees at Petronius’ cena Trimalchionis. On the one hand, themes of mortality, precarity, reproduction, inheritance, familial continuity, and the acquisition of wealth revolve around a general ambivalence toward the future. It has been shown that the underworld imagery of the cena expresses the mentality of Trimalchio and his fellow freedmen, colliberti, a symptom of their stigmatized and legally restricted civil status (­Veyne 1961; Bodel 1994; Bodel 2003; Andreau 2009). These are colliberti who can seem uninterested in perpetuating the normative, if the normative means the reproduction of mos maiorum, the way of the ancestors, through biologically productive and legally or socially sanctified marriages. Ambivalence resounds in aphorisms that sententiously punctuate the rambling stories of dinner guests. Clichés variously urge to live in the moment and to take stock of the future. Biographies recounted at table give substance to these clichés. The recent death of Chrysanthus, lamented meagerly, maligne, by his widow in contrast to the effusive grief of some of his manumitted slaves, prompts Seleucus to comment, “­we are worth no more than bubbles,” nos non pluris sumus quam bullae (­Satyrica 42.4). Seleucus rounds out his memories by gesturing to the sterility of Chrysanthus’ marriage in a vividly misogynistic diatribe (­Satyrica 42.7). In describing the end of Chrysanthus, Seleucus leans on childlessness to delineate a horizon of existence extendable perhaps through the lives of those slaves manumitted on his deathbed. But there were children in Chrysanthus’ life, the nameless young slaves who endured his sexual rapacity. On the other hand, freedmen do demonstrate concerted efforts to project themselves into the future, looking beyond the exploitative pleasures of the moment. The scene from the end of the cena wherein Trimalchio directs the construction of his funerary monument makes this edifice coextensive with his life after death. As a result of Habinnas’ service, the tomb and its decorations will grant Trimalchio some sort of access to an afterlife (­Satyrica 71.6: ut mihi contingat tuo beneficio post mortem vivere, “­so that it befalls me, through your support, to live after death”). Trimalchio’s planned funerary monument would supplement Fortunata’s inability to become pregnant with the pederastic desire attaching to a boy favorite. Just before launching into his instructions, Trimalchio notes that Fortunata will be his principal heir (­Satyrica 71.3). Then, later, after he provokes her anger and insults by kissing the not unattractive boy, puer non inspeciosus, Trimalchio brings up a time when Agatho the perfume dealer, unguentarius, advised him to have children (­Satyrica 74.­15–​­16): And I, a guy worth only two asses, I could have gotten ten million [from marrying an heiress]. You know I am not lying. Agatho the perfume salesman took me aside just the other 232

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day and said, ‘­I’m urging you not to let your line die out.’ But because I was doing the right thing and didn’t want to seem fickle, I stuck the proverbial axe into my own leg. et ego, homo dipundiarius, sestertium centies accipere potui. scis tu me non mentiri. Agatho unguentarius here proxime seduxit me et: “­suadeo, inquit, non patiaris genus tuum interire.” at ego dum bonatus ago et nolo videri levis, ipse mihi asciam in crus impegi. Trimalchio underscores the inability of Fortunata to provide him with a legitimate heir. He contrasts their life together with another possible trajectory in which he secured an heir by marrying a wealthy and not servile spouse. In keeping with the situation that did unfold, the child Trimalchio envisions included as a statue on his tomb is therefore not their offspring but his boy favorite, cicaronem meum (­Satyrica 71.11). Whether we are to identify Croesus or the puer non inspeciosus, the boy’s statue along with Fortunata’s would reside next to a representation of Trimalchio as sevir Augustalis “­pouring out bags of coins in imitation of a public distribution”: et nummos in publico de sacculo effundentem (­Satyrica 71.9). The tomb would join an image of Trimalchio’s financial largesse with one of the objects of his sexual desire, with Fortunata jammed in the middle. The cicaro appears in the elaboration of Trimalchio’s wish to realize immediately the emotion he supposes his slaves will feel toward him after death: ut familia mea iam nunc sic me amet tamquam mortuum, “­so that my household love me even now as if I were dead” (­Satyrica 71.3). He thus features in Trimalchio’s fantasy of his future self, the self around which he anticipates the organization of his legacy. As I will proceed to demonstrate, the iconography displayed on Trimalchio’s planned monument contains elements with a revealing relationship of proximity. Rather than being a meaningless jumble of interests, habits, and relationships set down in stone, this monument is part of a broader awareness Trimalchio and his commensals express of a capacity for money to be a vehicle for endurance of the self beyond death. In the context of Petronius’ fragmentary novel, this capacity is integral to an anticipated kinship in which the durable substance of the family is neither genetic material nor a name secured for n­ on-​­biological progeny via adoption or even ownership. The recurring emphasis on the sterility of freedwomen in the cena Trimalchionis gives rise to questions about the ­extra-​­literary experiences of manumitted women and their capacity to become pregnant after, for example, increased exposure to sexual violence or sexual misuse, repeated induced abortions, dietary deprivation, and myriad other stressors. I do not have the space here to address these questions adequately. For Petronius, female sterility is the counterpoint to a masculine prerogative to induce or capture a metaphorical fertility latent in monetized zones of Roman life. Both Trimalchio and Habinnas make it plain that they view their enslaved boy favorites in direct contrast with their wives when it comes to financial liability. As is true for Trimalchio and Fortunata, Habinnas and Scintilla are without biological or adoptive children. When Scintilla displays two earrings, Habinnas insults her on account of their price (­Satyrica 67.10): “­by all means if I had a daughter, I would cut her ears off. If there were no women, we would consider everything as cheap as mud; now we piss out hot what we drink cold,” plane si filiam haberem, auriculas illi praeciderem. mulieres si non essent, omnia pro luto haberemus; nunc hoc est caldum meiere et frigidum potare. This pronouncement is followed by mention of complaints Fortunata and Scintilla lodge against their husbands’ delicia (­Satyrica 67.11). The episode with Massa occurs immediately afterward, once Trimalchio has ordered the following course, secundae mensae, brought in. The tension between wife and puer recurs after Ascyltus, Encolpius, and Giton return from their unpleasant bath. Trimalchio urges a toast on behalf of one of his slaves, a boy who has just celebrated his depositio barbae, first shave, the very rite of puberty that the three guests saw memorialized on the wall upon entering the cena (­Satyrica 29.8). 233

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It is in this context that Trimalchio lavishes praise on the slave for his careful handling of money (­Satyrica 73.6): “­today my slave celebrated his first shave, this frugal and superstitiously industrious fellow. So let us drink and dine until dawn,” hodie servus meus barbatoriam fecit, homo praefiscini frugi et micarius. itaque tangomenas faciamus et usque in lucem cenemus. Similarly, a moment earlier, Trimalchio had praised the puer non inspecious in similar words (­Satyrica 75.­4–​­5): I kissed this very thrifty boy not because he’s pretty but because he’s frugal! He says his ten times table, he reads a book on sight, he got himself a little gladiator costume with his allowance, he bought a lounge chair and two ladles with his own money. puerum basiavi frugalissimum, non propter formam, sed quia frugi est: decem partes dicit, librum ab oculo legit, thraecium sibi de diariis fecit, arcisellium de suo paravit et duas trullas. The fondness felt toward slaves such as the unnamed servus here, accords with the atmosphere of lavish indulgence pressed upon attendees by their host. Interactions with wives by contrast grate upon the guests and send Habinnas and Trimalchio into awkward fits of rage. Visions of futures imagined by the freedmen are predicated on a divergence between biological reproduction, taken for granted as an impossibility, and fiscal savvy, assumed by male commensals to be cultivable in boys but not girls or adult women. If kinship is to be defined in some primary way according to a rubric of durability, what emerges from the pointed opposition of childless marriages and pederastic attachments is a decidedly queer form of kinship that is inextricably combined with monetary matters, a kinship that is queer precisely because it supplants normative modes of reproduction with money making as a vehicle for the projection and continuance of the self. Money in this context has a human dimension. The Roman institution of slavery structures the aesthetic perceptions of money we find elaborated in the cena Trimalchionis as well as the appropriation at work more narrowly in Trimalchio’s relationship with Fortunata. It is toward the end of the dinner that we find the fullest expression of this confluence of ideas. As he rambles his way into boastful autobiography, Trimalchio somewhat belies his presentation of himself as a s­ elf-​­made man, ex se natus, by including a detail explaining how he got his fortune back after an initial loss. It turns out that while she has not born him children, Fortunata has provided a very necessary investment (­Satyrica 76.­5–​­9): This loss was just a taste for me, I swear, as if nothing had happened. I built other boats, bigger and better and more fortunate, so that no one could say I was not a brave man. You know, a big boat inspires great confidence. I loaded them once more with wine, bacon fat, beans, perfume, slaves. In this venture Fortunata did the right thing; she sold all her gold jewelry, all her clothes, and put ten thousand gold coins in my hand. This was the yeast for my savings; What the gods want happens quickly. In one circuit I rounded out 10 million sesterces. I immediately bought back all the estates which had belonged to my old master. I build a house, I purchase slaves, I invest in draught animals; whatever I would touch grew just as honeycomb. Once I reached the point of owning more than this whole country of mine, I took my hand from the account book: I retired myself from commerce and began lending money at interest through my freedmen. Non mehercules mi haec iactura gusti fuit, tamquam nihil facti. alteras feci maiores et meliores et feliciores, ut nemo non me virum fortem diceret. scis, magna navis magnam 234

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fortitudinem habet. oneravi rursus vinum, lardum, fabam, seplasium, mancipia. hoc loco Fortunata rem piam fecit: omne enim aurum suum, omnia vestimenta vendidit et mi centum aureos in manu posuit. hoc fuit peculii mei fermentum. cito fit quod di volunt. uno cursu centies sestertium corrotundavi. statim redemi fundos omnes, qui patroni mei fuerant. aedifico domum, venalicia coemo, iumenta; quicquid tangebam, crescebat tamquam favus. postquam coepi plus habere quam tota patria mea habet, manum de tabula: sustuli me de negotiatione et coepi libertos fenerare. By his own admission, Fortunata has proven quite fruitful for Trimalchio’s finances. It was she who bankrolled his second, more diversified trading venture after a shipwreck swallowed up his inherited fortune, valued at the proverbially large amount of 30 million sesterces. Fortunata provided the yeast from which Trimalchio’s fortune rises: hoc fuit peculii mei fermentum. Her fulfillment of a duty to finance her husband, here presented as pietas, becomes quickly submerged under a wave of ­first-​­person verbs. Trimalchio becomes what she cannot, a lender of money at interest, faenerator, through his freedmen, operating at a stage of remove from commerce and usury. Trimalchio’s subsumption of the agency and gifts of others into his own ­self-​­praise is to be expected in the autobiographical sketch. It cuts multiple ways. Along with an illustration of the spots in which Trimalchio’s pretensions could be punctured, we can find in this passage a depiction of life as relation to wealth production. The relation flourishes not as part of a marriage bent on producing legitimate heirs but instead of one. Trimalchio’s efforts to reproduce this form of life consist of directing the agencies of his own freedmen but also of training boy favorites to take on the same comportment in regard to money making upon which he prides himself. The phrase tamquam favus in the passage just quoted at length elides the financial contributions of Fortunata. In shifting the metaphor from the collaborative making of bread to the transmutation of nectar into honey, a transmutation catalyzed by Trimalchio alone, the deployment of this phrase operates as another method to diminish or even deny the potential of Fortunata to contribute to the extension of kinship across generations, cutting her out of a lineage that would run from Trimalchio’s former masters through Trimalchio himself and down to one or more of his matured boy favorites, resemblances of a self that he glimpses in the future. This would be a lineage of sexual attachments as well as shared affinities for profiteering. The phrase tamquam favus carries with it associations made in an earlier scene wherein Trimalchio connected honeycomb to the fertility of the earth. Explaining the zodiac made from food, he had noted the symbolism of earth’s ­self-​ ­sufficiency (­Satyrica 39.­14–​­15): And indeed, what you see in the middle, the piece of turf, and on the turf the ­honeycomb—​ ­none of this do I do without good reason. It’s mother earth in the middle, rounded just like an egg, having all goods within herself just as honeycomb. quod autem in medio caespitem videtis et super caespitem. favum, nihil sine ratione facio. terra mater est in medio quasi ovum corrotundata, et omnia bona in se habet tamquam favus. The earth is egg is honeycomb. Trimalchio’s use of imagery is not the cleanest. But with his literalization of the honeycomb metaphor, Trimalchio displays the earth as potential. His philosophy centers around honeycomb as the oozing image of life itself, from which all good things arise. When he later uses the phrase to describe how his investments in slaves and herds saw an increase, honeycomb by contrast signifies the growth of property value. Trimalchio’s relation to 235

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what is meant by honeycomb in each passage is one of adjacency. Trimalchio’s own sign is not the honeycomb but the crab, the sign of merchants. The grasp that brought about parthenogenesis and teeming life in the gooey phantom of his wealth relaxed as Trimalchio delegated management of his estate to freedmen. In buying back the estates owned by his former master, given to him with the emperor as ­co-​ ­heir, and lost in the first, failed trading venture, Trimalchio bears out his attachment to holdings that once included himself as a piece of property. His awareness of having passed through what Arjun Appadurai has dubbed a commodity phase is on display in Encolpius’ narration as he enters the cena (­Appadurai 1986: 13ff). Encolpius views the famous depiction of Trimalchio’s sale and manumission, his apotheosis as it were (­Satyrica 29.­3–​­4): “­There was moreover a slave market painted with price tags, and a l­ong-​­haired Trimalchio himself was holding the caduceus and entering Rome, led by Minerva,” erat autem venalicium cum titulis pictum, et ipseTrimalchio capillatus caduceum tenebat Minervaque ducente Romam intrabat. The placards, tituli, carried by slaves for sale in the market would describe their price, origin, habits seen as f­ault-​­worthy, and their abilities. The information on such placards would demonstrate the rendering of values held by slave owners into a number, price. What makes Trimalchio’s mural so remarkable is the candor with which it treats what centuries later James William Charles Pennington, himself a survivor of antebellum slavery, would term the chattel principle. This principle refers to a slave’s acute awareness that his or her personal identity could be displaced by a number recorded in a ledger as just that: a number on a piece of paper, next to other numbers, both disinterested in and invested in human life (­Johnson 1999). The nature of Roman slavery is for Trimalchio a question of the abstraction of price registering his singular appeal as a slave valued for sexual use among other abilities. Sandra Joshel notes generally that slaves in Rome embodied “­the paradox of the coexistence of human agency and chattel fungibility” (­Joshel 2011, 222). The commercial logic of slavery subjected humans to numerical commensurability, but differences in the purchase price of slaves reflected the singularity of humans. The favoritism attached to enslaved pueri in the cena Trimalchionis is a result of their being esteemed as irreplaceable, at least to an extent. Sale and purchase also have rendered them into countable units. As Habinnas says of Massa, well within earshot (­Satyrica 68.8), “­I bought him for three hundred denarii,” illum emi trecentis denariis. Trimalchio and Phileros have in mind the increase of wealth invested as loans or in commercial ventures when they use the phrase tamquam favus. The successful businessman, Trimalchio or Chrysanthus, can instigate a sort of fertility in property so that over time it grows just as a honeycomb. With the pricing of slaves, however, we find money acquiring vitality with different temporal parameters. This vitality is more akin to the way Eumolpus speaks of his inheritance in the lie he tells to Lichas and Tryphaena (­Satyrica 105.3): “­Among other things they consumed my money on a girl they shared between themselves, from whom I dragged them last night besotted in wine and perfumes. Indeed, even now they smell of what’s left of my inheritance,” inter cetera apud communem amicam consumpserunt pecuniam meam, a qua illos proxima nocte extraxi mero unguentisque perfusos. ad summam, adhuc patrimonii mei reliquias olent. In Eumolpus’ expression, the patrimony takes on sensible qualities of the wine on which it was allegedly spent. It smells, olent, of yesterday’s booze. So too does the 300 denarii paid for Massa appear as a strange abstract body that could shadow the slave, passing through him and taking onto itself his person. If a human can be exchanged for an amount of coinage, it becomes possible for money to be spoken of in terms that color its abstractions with a certain human warmth. The corporealization of monetary value is a larger theme in Petronius. One thinks of Eumolpus urging his ­would-​­be heirs to eat his dead body (­Satyrica 141.7): “­just close your eyes and imagine you are eating not human guts but one million sesterces,” operi modo oculos, et finge te

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non humana viscera, sed centies sestertium comesse. Eumolpus himself would become the body enduring in his heirs not through birth but through cannibalism, a queer sort of recreation. He cites the exotic precedent of certain other known peoples who eat their deceased kinfolk (­Satyrica 141.3): a propinquis suis consumantur defuncti. As the hunters after inheritances, captatores, of Croton close in on their obligatory meal, “­the massive reputation of his money blinded their eyes,” excaecabat pecuniae ingens fama oculos (­Satyrica 141.5). The command melds Eumolpus’ own body with his alleged fortune and invokes for them a gleaming phenomenon. The entire episode at Croton with Eumolpus reconfigures the same elements that are drawn together in the freedmen’s aspirations for the future in the cena Trimalchionis. The people of Croton have avoided having children because children in this situation are cause for ostracism and not social integration. Anyone with legitimate heirs is shunned as a fruitless target for captatio testamenti, inheritance hunting (­Satyrica 116.­7–​­9). There is of course one person with children, the matrona Philomela who, no longer able to use her own youth to secure legacies, pushes her son and daughter on Eumolpus in the hope of obtaining his fictitious fortune. Transfer of property to heirs is not the central preoccupation of freedmen at the cena Trimalchionis. The fragmentary episode at Croton nevertheless makes explicit the associations found in the cena between sexual attachments to youth as a practice in distinct opposition to procreative sex in legitimate marriages and the endurance not just of wealth that becomes coextensive with the bodies of its owners but of a particular relation to wealth and its potential for growth. The pursuit of profit, which emerges as an effect of slavery’s domination of the bodies of young, sexualized pueri, queers the lives of these pueri as they grow into freed owners seeking to extend themselves into the future by the acquisition, training, and sexual enjoyment of other pueri, future versions of themselves. The ­thrice-​­repeated phrase tamquam favus—​­we will explore the third instance ­momentarily—​­does indeed evoke a field of ancient conventional erotic imagery, pederastic and otherwise (­e.g., Richlin 1992: 150; Williams 1999: 79). In the cena, these connotations are attached to fantasies of invested wealth. In other encapsulations, this wealth is human, the boys themselves. Honeycomb, favus, is thus charged with different aspects of a conception of parthenogenic life. But the assertion of parthenogenesis is predicated on the deracination accomplished by slavery. Trimalchio and others are to their former owners as kin to whom bonds that were forged in part through sexual contact can be subtended possibly only through recapturing the ownership of holdings to which they formerly belonged. Money does then hold a promise of a kinship that is queer insofar as it grows sideways or obliquely in regard to normative procreation. The sadness that emerges from the ambivalence of Trimalchio toward the delights of honey is thus felt in the following passage not as a simple observation of pain but as a far more profound understanding of the way his life has been shaped (­Satyrica 56.6): “­Consider bees: I think they are divine creatures that vomit honey, although people say they get it from Jove. But they also sting, since wherever there is the sweet, there you will also find the bitter,” apes enim ego divinas bestias puto, quae mel vomunt, etiam si dicuntur illud a Iove afferre; ideo autem pungunt, quia ubicumque dulce est, ibi et acidum invenies. Apart from the various conventional topoi that are worked into this sentiment, it is difficult not to associate the ambivalence Trimalchio feels toward ­honey—​­something sweet, something ­bitter—​­with his passage from enslavement to freedom, from sexual service to sexual dominance. Let us return now to Chrysanthus and attend in more detail to his eulogy. Phileros, the more optimistic speaker who follows Seleucus, describes how Chrysanthus was fecund in his own way. His biography is summarized as a fortune sprouted from a distinctly earthy manifestation of the stuff of life (­Satyrica 43.­1–​­2):

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What does he have to complain about? He grew up from a dollar and was ready to pick a quarter out of shit with his teeth. Whatever he touched grew in the same way, just as honeycomb. I swear he left behind a solid one hundred thousand sesterces, and he had it all in liquid assets. quid habet quod queratur? ab asse crevit et paratus fuit quadrantem de stercore mordicus tollere. itaque crevit, quicquid tetigit, tamquam favus. puto mehercules illum reliquisse solida centum, et omnia in nummis habuit. Chrysanthus effectively grows up with money as kin, as the unit that defines for him a horizon of growth. His legacy is more financial than familial, consisting of money lent at interest, omnia in nummis. The eulogy of Phileros emphasizes not just the perfunctory connection to his wife but also a brother who is cut out of his will in favor of some anonymous n­ on-​­relative (­Satyrica 43.4). Normative kinship bonds are made strained or severed by Chrysanthus, a point Phileros hammers home (­Satyrica 43.5): “­and that idiot, angry at his own brother, bequeathed away his patrimony to some nobody. The man who flees his own kin flees far,” et ille stips, dum fratri suo irascitur, nescio cui terrae filio patrimonium elegavit. longe fugit, quisquis suos fugit. Phileros ends his praise by finding resourcefulness in the sexual propensities for children that Chrysanthus maintained practically to his death (­Satyrica 43.8): “­He was a chicken hawk big time, a jack of all trades. Can’t blame him. This was all he could take with him,” immo etiam pullarius erat, omnis minervae homo. nec improbo, hoc solum enim secum tulit. This last sentiment is echoed elsewhere by Trimalchio (­Satyrica 34.10; Satyrica 69.2). The implied exhortation that wealth is to be enjoyed during life gathers its rhetorical force in Phileros’ telling from the importance Chrysanthus set on having sex with presumably enslaved children. In displacing any regard for biological or adoptive heirs, the sexual license afforded to Chrysanthus pairs with his acumen in business. The pursuits of profit and young sexual partners ran for him at ­cross-​­purposes to normative avenues of perpetuating a family. We find in Chrysanthus’ life glimpses of another tension, one between dependency and autonomy. This same tension had come to the fore more clearly in Trimalchio’s fixation on autarkeia, ­self-​­sufficiency, and in his relationship with Fortunata and his slaves and freedmen. Chrysanthus evidently benefitted from the advice of enslaved people with knowledge of financial matters to guide his loans and dealings. And yet, unsurprisingly, he is the one to whom the credit accrues, according to Phileros. His hand turns to lead into gold, his touch converts nectar and pollen into honeycombs. Because of the anonymity of the freed slaves and the recipient of Chrysanthus’ bequest, it is hard to flesh out any efforts by him to establish durable, ­non-​­normative kinship ties, let alone ones we could call queer. Moreover, unlike with Echion or Trimalchio, we can only speculate as to whether Chrysanthus patronized the nobody, literally a “­son of the earth,” terrae filius, in a paternal fashion, seeing in him a future version of himself. By queer, I do not mean a stable essence found in certain historical subjectivities, sex acts, or comportments. If we look at the hints about Chrysanthus’ sex life, we find but the familiar figure of the empowered, aggressively penetrative Roman male, able to exercise his prerogatives, drawn to smooth, young bodies, and hardly in breach of normative strictures on sexuality. Rather, I suggest that what is queer about ­Chrysanthus—​­what persists in opposition or in indifference to the ­normative—​­is not his financial mastery per se but, more precisely, the relation of pecuniary success to his life and social network. Chrysanthus’ monetary ­auto-​­fecundity is not a means to an end but an expression of his life’s trajectory. With this relation in mind, another thing said by Phileros takes on a curious, lopsided twist. Chrysanthus

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relied heavily on the advice of his slaves, not a good practice for a businessman, homo negotians, and yet he enjoyed himself and came out ahead (­Satyrica 43.7): “­Evidently a child of fortune: in his hand lead would turn into gold. But it’s easy when everything runs squarely,” plane Fortunae filius. in manu illius plumbum aurum fiebat. facile est autem, ubi omnia quadrata currunt. On its own, the modifier quadrata fits with the notion of squaring account books.3 But it jars somewhat in combination with the verb currunt. Unlike ledgers, wheels should not be squared. As easily and fortuitously as wealth had come to Chrysanthus, it did so with odd jolts. In and of itself a mixed metaphor such as this one would not seem to betoken a queer departure from the normative. But given the central displacement of biological progeny by the stuff of money in Chrysanthus’ life, indeed by the harmonizing of his life force with the growth of his investments, the ease of this chicken hawk, pullarius, could be said to run squarely, not a bad phrase for getting at what is queer in recollections of him by his fellow freedmen. I have hoped to show with this chapter that two recent developments in queer theory can elucidate queer longings for kinship in the cena Trimalchionis. One is the accommodation of kinship theory to n­ on-​­normative efforts to endure, to belong but also to be long. The other is a responsible reconsideration of the possible presence of both care and coercion in intergenerational ­same-​­sex dynamics, an effort to dwell with forms of queer reproduction that are not ideal without falling into a binary trap of embarrassed denunciation or myopic amelioration. From a contemporary and from a historical perspective, just how queer are the forms of kinship intended by Trimalchio and his commensals? This question brings us inevitably to the ways in which slavery shaped lives in the Roman world, and the paradoxes emerging from Roman money as an institution that both dehumanized enslaved people, rendering them into prices, and also provided opportunities for social advancement for some of those very people, with Trimalchio being one of the most memorable exemplars of the embodiment of this paradox. It is also possible to think of other, sometimes childless Romans who, though very different from Trimalchio, nevertheless would seem to have found in investing money a means to extend some aspect of their selfhood beyond biological limits to life. I have in mind, for example, the endowment funds set up by individuals such as the younger Pliny, emperors such as Nerva and Trajan, or by collegia (­e.g., Liu 2008; Hoyer 2018, ­19–​­53). Kinship could be perpetuated in the Roman world by the transference of nomina, names, between generations, a transference effected through legal means and arguably parallel to bloodlines in importance (­Saller 1994, ­79–​­80; Mouritsen 2011, ­36–​­40). The Latin word nomina can also denote an entry of a loan in a ledger book, with the name of creditor or debtor beginning such a record, or, more directly, a debt or a loan.4 If registers of debt or the means to profit from lending endured across generations, perhaps there are grounds to characterize these projects as a broader part of kinship ties in diverse segments of Roman life. What then of queerness and normativity? It remains for the reader to decide if indeed there must be a balancing act between allowing queerness as opposition or indifference to the normative to reveal what is queer in the normative and allowing the term queer to become so diffuse in its meanings that it loses its desired purchase, whatever that may be. I wish to return in conclusion to notions of proximity. For both Trimalchio and Chrysanthus, the mode of inducing profit is characterized as touch. As Trimalchio says, quicquid tangebam, crescebat tamquam favus (­Satyrica 76.8). His words echo from what Phileros had said about Chrysanthus: itaque crevit, quicquid tetigit, tamquam favus (­Satyrica 43.2). These men have found themselves next to finance and put a hand to it. Somehow, in doing so, they have come to acquire visions of themselves in the future, and aspirations to endure through ties of kinship. Even in Rome, money can form the basis for encounters with the impersonal, although, as previously described, these encounters are located in asymmetrical relationships populated by named and

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unnamed liberti and servi; they are r­ e-​­coded in human networks. One possible path forward for the ideas explored here is to draw out a connection between the language of touch in these honeycomb metaphors and the sizeable bibliography on contingencies, chance encounters, and proximities in contemporary but also historical queer life, if the latter is such a thing (­e.g., Edelman 2004; Muñoz 2009; Rohy 2019; Sanyal, Telò, Ross Young 2022). The possibility or lack thereof for queer kinship formations to emerge from impersonal forms of intimacy remains a subject of debate, often because of the extent to which kinship norms operate even in queer lives. Of the ­centuries-​­old practice of cruising for gay sex, for example, Leo Bersani noted that “­cruising, like sociability, can be a training in impersonal intimacy… in ­cruising—​­at least in ideal c­ ruising—​­we leave our selves behind” (­Bersani 2009, 60). Can, paradoxically, a scene in which the self is temporarily relinquished form the basis for its endurance after death? In the same idiom, we might ask if the partial dissolution of selfhood and sociability brought about by slavery nevertheless presented in the Roman world a model for kinship, one that departed sharply from the normative as it was lived by ­free-​­born people, ingenui, but also grasped at in Trimalchio’s memories of his early life and in his marriage to Fortunata.

Suggestions for Further Reading Kinship in Rome is the subject of ­well-​­known studies, e.g., Bettini 1991; Corbier 1991; Saller 1997; Bernstein 2007; Short 2007; Hemelrijk 2010. From a legal perspective, the various types of marriages in the Roman world imply a range of normal scenarios for wealth to be a constitutive part of families. There are key points of convergence between these bibliographies and anthropological inquiries into how societies conceive of the substance of kinship, e.g., Scheider 1980 [1968]; Scheider 1984; Carsten 1995; Carsten 2004, esp. ­109–​­137. It is also pertinent to consider here the ontology of norms in Roman society. Most contemporary definitions positing queerness as a relational identity nevertheless seem to assume that the normative is more often an operative fiction (­if not several competing operative fictions) than actuality, a kind of normativity that may be queered in its very assumption by n­ on-​­normative subjects, e.g., Butler 1987, 1990, 1993; Colebrook 2009. For Trimalchio and his commensals, however, kinship is not at base an issue of dowries, agnatic and cognatic relationships, legal recognition, or the partition of wealth between heirs. We find instead an enfolded dynamic whereby the commodified person could be said to queer the normative functioning of property ownership in assertively occupying a generative relation to wealth that once included himself and now extends into enslaved boy favorites whose bodies and habits are supposed to anticipate the durability of himself. While pains must be taken to differentiate the linkage between contemporary capitalism and queer lives from interactions between ancient identity formation and the n­ on-​­capitalist political economy of the Roman world, the reader may find additional and applicable insights in scholarship on the development of queer identities under capitalism, e.g., Bond Stockton 2009; Rosenberg and Villarejo 2012; Rosenberg 2014.

Notes 1 As anticipated by Skinner 2018, 49: “­male homoerotic bonding thus repeats itself from one generation to the next as a skewed form of social reproduction.” 2 At Satyrica 45.10 Echion speaks of “­me and mine,” mihi et meis, an expression taken by Schmeling and Setaioli in their commentary likely to refer to members of an association, collegium, of centonarii. 3 Oxford Latin Dictionary s.v. “­quadro” 4. 4 Oxford Latin Dictionary s.v. “­nomen” 22, 23.

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17 NONBINARY MERCURY AND THE QUEER ARTS OF ASTROLOGY Hannah Silverblank

Introduction: Queer Astrology Modern astrological practice functions as a complex site of Classical reception in which ancient Greek deities and concepts are activated into matrices of personal and collective meaning. For professional and amateur astrologers and their clients, Classical mythology comprises a grammar upon which meditations concerning time, biography, self, and community are made possible and rendered in cosmic terms. This essay considers how the practice of Hellenistic astrology, in modern queer communities, engages in a mercurial activation of Classical figures, myths, and concepts: astrology offers a form of Classical reception where G ­ reco-​­Roman deities are set into a constant cosmic drama that plays out in infinite subjective experiences. For example, when the planetary bodies Mars and Venus “­conjunct,” eroticized tensions may arise, because the two mythical lovers find themselves in close quarters, sharing a celestial topos, or place. The conventional trope of Mercury retrograde is that chaos ensues as if the trickster god is sporting his backward sandals during a cosmic cattle heist. How this affects an individual life is dependent on the planetary configurations at the moment of each individual’s birth. In what follows, I argue that astrology is an overlooked but abundant form of Classical reception, in which time, celestial bodies, mythic language, and personal biographies function as the media of reception. I discuss two branches of modern astrological practice that emerge from Hellenistic astrology, natal and universal astrology, to demonstrate how contemporary queer practitioners of astrology engage in a practice of queer time that is oriented toward individual and collective healing. This essay concludes with a discussion of Mercury’s astrological attributes and the doctrine of planetary gender in order to shed light on how modern queer astrologers perform a uniquely mercurial praxis in the process of queering ancient astrology. My goal is to articulate the ways in which queer astrology operates as an efflorescent and prismatic form of Classical reception, and to read the work of the queer astrologer as a kind of mercurial performance. The arguments in this essay therefore focus on: (­1) astrology as Classical reception, (­2) how queer astrologers engage in practices of queering time, and (­3) how queer astrologers perform a mercurial, queer, and unruly reading of ancient astrological texts, with Mercury as the patron deity of this process. It is through the dual processes of facilitating cosmic complexity and queering time that astrologers build alternative temporal communities and pathways toward healing for queer subjectivities. 243

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-22

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­Astro-​­logos: The Language of the Stars I begin with some clarifications about the types of astrology considered in this essay: natal and universal astrology. The astrological practice of genethlialogy, or natal chart interpretation, is the analysis of the planetary and luminary placements on the day of an individual’s birth. As a major branch of Hellenistic astrology, genethlialogy explores the interactions between the larger cosmic narratives and individuals’ own lived experiences (­Beck 2007, ­9–​­10). Genethlialogy is a manifestation of katarchic astrology (< katarche, καταρχή: inception, beginning), which is predicated on the notion that the outcomes (­apotelesmata, ἀποτελέσματα) of situations or events can be determined by analysis of their points of origin or inception. Genethlialogical interpretation is thus predicated upon the belief in a mutual receptivity of divine influence in the macrocosm and microcosm, in the ­more-­​­­than-​­human collective and on the individual level; it is thus an expression of the alchemical adage “­as above, so below.” The wandering stars and luminaries (­Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) are all situated in relationship to one another, in different conditions of strength or debility, to manifest their archetypal associations. When a person is born, crucial features of their life can be interpreted and predicted with reference to the planetary relationships and conditions of that foundational moment. Thus the ­god-​­planets of Hellenistic astrology play different roles in every human’s life, as a result of the planets’ dynamic and shifting relationships. Universal astrology, so called in reference to its ancient Greek designation, katholikos (­καθολικός, “­general”), focuses less on individual biography and more on collective earthly phenomena. Universal astrology is applied to collectives and nonhumans: kingdoms, geographical regions, weather, and ecological phenomena (­Brennan 2017, ­54–​­55). Natal and universal astrology are but two of multiple branches of the modern practice of Hellenistic astrology. Other branches, such as inceptional (­now usually called “­electional”), interrogational (“­horary”), medical, and locational astrology draw from both Hellenistic and modern psychological traditions, but will not be considered in this essay. As a system of meaning, astrology is the study of the story told in and by the stars, authored by a combination of human and nonhuman factors. These factors include but are not limited to: planetary movements, human ability to perceive and chart those movements, language that seeks to describe those movements and patterns, and the unfolding of cosmic events that then lend meaning back to the planetary interactions. Thus astrologers often consider themselves ­star-​­talkers, fluent in the system, language, and logic (­logos) of the stars (­­astro-​­); astrologers translate a c­ onstantly-​ ­shifting cosmic array into billions of different contexts and individual subjectivities. Francesca Rochberg has written on the conceptual framework of Babylonian astrology, which informs the system of Hellenistic astrology, as “­heavenly writing”: To the ancient Mesopotamian literati of the middle of the first millennium B.C., the patterns of stars covering the sky were a celestial script. The “­heavenly writing” (­šiṭir šamê or šiṭirti šamāmī) was a poetic metaphor occasionally used in Babylonian royal inscriptions to refer to temples made beautiful “­like the stars” (­kīma šiṭir šamê, literally, “­like the heavenly writing”). In these Babylonian inscriptions, the metaphor is not used explicitly for astrology or celestial divination, but the notion of the stars as a heavenly script implies their capacity to be read and interpreted. Representing the work of the divine, the stars, “­written” in the sky as they were conceived to be, could convey a sense of the eternal. (­Rochberg 2004, 1) Rochberg thus emphasizes how celestial phenomena are considered signs or omens, and thus situates astrologers as the interpreters of the sky script. If the sky is a tablet of divine semiotics, 244

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in which constellations serve as “­astral pictographs” and therefore behave like “­cuneiform signs” and “­written messages… encoded in celestial phenomena” (­Rochberg 2004, 2), macrocosmic and planetary movements take on particular significance for all the individuals, places, and events in the sublunar sphere (­that is, the area between the moon and the earth). As a system of contemplating and relating to the universe, astrology stages an ongoing cosmic drama that has mythologically loaded ramifications within collective and individual humans’ lives. Astrological inquiry situates all human experiences as unique, unfolding sites of Classical reception, filled with dynamic interactions of characters and mythological narratives. The characters include the deities associated with the planets and luminaries as well as the characters of constellation myths, such as Ganymede (­the ­water-​­bearer, or Aquarius) and Io (­in some accounts, catasterized as Taurus; see Hard 2015 for constellation myths from Eratosthenes, Hyginus, and Aratus). All of these characters and more take on varying degrees of presence in individual astrological experiences of time, cosmos, and self. Most of the surviving Greek and Latin astrological source material is didactic and technical in nature, with some poetic texts amidst a majority of prose works. In Greek, key authors and texts include Aratus’ Phaenomena (­third century BC), Dorotheus of Sidon’s Carmen Astrologicum (­first century AD), Vettius Valens, Anthologia (­second century AD), Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos and Almagest (­second century AD), and Hephaestio of Thebes’ Apotelesmatika (­fifth century AD). Several anonymous or spuriously attributed Greek texts appear, as yet untranslated into English, in the Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, which was collected from 1898 to 1953 by Franz Cumont and Franz Boll. Less astrological writing in Latin survives, but of great cultural importance were Manilius’ Astronomica (­first century AD) and Firmicus Maternus’ Mathesis (­fourth century AD).1 Many more canonical poetic works, like the Homeric epics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, feature constellations and catasterisms, although these have irregular bearing on astrological interpretation in ancient and modern practice. Astrology as a practice was crucially integrated into myriad aspects of ancient life, as a ­decision-​­making tool in areas as w ­ ide-​­ranging as politics, navigation, agriculture, weather, calendrical time, ritual, medicine, and philosophy, in different regions and time periods. One important example of the symbolic role of astrology in the Roman Empire is the fact that a silver denarius of Augustus minted in the first century BC featured an image of Capricorn, the ­sea-​­goat, an important zodiac sign in Augustus’ birth chart. Capricorn’s symbolic function on the denarius was “­to proudly proclaim [Augustus’] association with the start of a bright new order, like the return of the sun after the winter solstice in Capricorn” (­Edmonds 2019, ­243–​­244; see also Barton 1995). In the medical context, astrological techniques for medical treatment appear in the texts of Ptolemy, Vettius Valens, Dorotheus of Sidon, and Hephaestio of Thebes. Some ancient ­Greco-​ ­Roman physicians utilized the concept of “­decumbiture,” in which the healer examined the astrological chart of the moment in which a patient went to bed with an illness in order to treat the patient. Additionally, Hippocratic humors were thought to correspond with different planets and luminaries, and astrological considerations and seasonal techniques were crucial to the physician’s balancing of these humors (­Greenbaum 2021).

Astrology: Queer Classical Reception This essay’s modern source material draws from oral and written works of queer astrologers, contemporary with the composition of this essay, who work with Hellenistic techniques. The work of Rhea Wolf (­2014), Chani Nicholas (­2020), Alice Sparkly Kat (­2021), Daniel Bernal, Drew 245

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Levanti, and Michael J. Morris (­2019) provides a small but rich sample. Most of the astrologers considered here are based in North America and conduct astrological interpretation and analysis in the English language. This essay will not attempt to articulate a history of Hellenistic astrology,2 nor that of the ­twentieth-​­and ­twenty-­​­­first-​­century revival of Hellenistic astrology in North America. However, it is important to note the fact that many of these practitioners’ astrological knowledge base shares a common underpinning, from the work done by astrologers Demetra George and Chris Brennan, whose foundational textbooks (­Brennan 2017; George 2019; 2022) and teachings on the reconstruction of Hellenistic astrological practice serve as canonical reading for contemporary practitioners. The texts and teachings of Brennan and George have shaped the way that t­wenty-­​ ­­first-​­century Hellenistic practitioners relate to their craft, particularly for the vast majority of astrologers who do not have reading fluency in ancient Greek.3 That said, ­twenty-­​­­first-​­century practitioners of Hellenistic astrology work within myriad complex systems of m ­ eaning-​­making, beyond what is taught in the manuals of Brennan and George. Both the ancient materials and the modern practices thereof blend the history of science, mythology, and psychology from Babylonian, Egyptian, Hellenistic, Arabic, Vedic, and medieval European knowledge traditions (­to name a few, without attempting an exhaustive list of cultural inputs). Because of astrology’s recent exclusion from academic discourse, astrological practitioners develop and share knowledge in a way that queers disciplinarity, tradition, and epistemic subjectivities. Within conventional academic contexts, astrology has largely been rendered an esoteric and derided form of knowledge, worthy of study in the history of science, religion, and divination, but rarely worth interpretation in its own right. Astrology’s exclusion from formal academic and religious traditions in the past few centuries has made it a site of queer k­ nowledge-​­making and ­subjectivity-​­shaping that draws from ancient Greek source material (­as well as myriad of intersecting and disparate geographical sources) in ways not possible within traditional academic spaces. Indeed, astrology’s epistemic queerness comes from its status as a form of knowledge that involves academic study but rarely is limited by its institutional dictates. For astrologers, textual analysis and application also incorporate intuition, conceptual correspondences, oral communication, subjective resonances, and mysticism, in ways not subject to standards of peer review. Thus, astrology’s recent exclusion from the academy results in forms of knowledge production that differ from the kinds of thoughts that are thinkable within i­ nstitutionally-​­sanctioned disciplinary work (­on histories of Hellenistic astrology in European and American intellectual culture, see Campion 2009b). Astrology is a sprawling field of study that has been largely ignored by scholars of Classical reception, despite the fact that it involves the evolving lives of ancient textual, mythical, and cultural concepts. As an instance of Classical reception, the modern practice of astrology cannot be summarized monolithically: there are countless ways in which astrologers and astrology engage with ancient literature, culture, and history, and I do not claim to offer a comprehensive assessment here. However, I draw attention to the work of certain queer astrologers whose engagement with Classical reception blends scholarly study with practical implementation in personalized encounters of oral storytelling, and intuitive reinvention of source material. These astrologers as a whole demonstrate an interest in studying the ancient textual manuals as a means to praxis, or practical application, as well as an enthusiastic willingness to queer those sources, for the sake of using them in the healing journey that astrology as a language can provide for queer and marginalized people. This kind of work makes the interpretation of ancient texts a tool of s­ elf-​­formation, s­ elf-​­help, and personalized, biographical 246

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reception (­on astrology’s use as a ­self-​­help tool from the perspective of a queer astrologer, see Nicholas 2020). The symbolic and practical integration of astrology into ancient life was extremely complex (­unlike the modern phenomenon of mainstream horoscope columns that look at solar placement or “­Sun sign” alone). Radcliffe Edmonds’ description of the complexity of ancient astrology situates it as a language, and the astrologer as a kind of translator: The sign system in astrology is not limited to the simple placement of individual elements (­the planets, constellations, etc.) but includes the complex layers of the interrelation of these signs to one another that determine their meaning, just as letters or even words in linguistic sign systems derive their meaning from their positioning with regard to one another. (­Edmonds 2019, ­237–​­238) The astrologer is thus a translator of this complex “­linguistic sign system,” with all of its intersecting factors and interpretive techniques, that make the birth chart a condensed symbolic tapestry of Classical reception in lived experience. Part of what makes the modern practice of revived Hellenistic astrology particularly useful in queer communities is the complexity that natal astrology opens up for individual subjective experiences of selfhood and time. In addition to the complexity involved in interpreting and processing the significations of an individual birth chart, Hellenistic astrology also provides a complex form of Classical reception insofar as it emphatically dislocates the G ­ reco-​­Roman as a point of “­origin.” Although the “­origins” of Hellenistic astrology are beyond the scope of this paper, the way that the Hellenistic system understands its own origination is important to astrology’s manifestation of Classical reception. First of all, the archetypal energies that are named for Roman gods are always already translated interpretations and syncretizations of older archetypal associations. The Roman names replaced the Greek names, which themselves were translations of the Babylonian deities whose names were attached to the planets by Mesopotamian astrologers (­Edmonds 2019, 240). Hellenistic astrology is thus a multicultural and multidirectional form of Classical reception, where the idea of the ‘­Classical’ itself is troubled by its ­non-​­originality. Beyond its syncretism with Babylonian (­and other) cultural sources, Hellenistic astrology obscures the historicity of its origins. Many astrological texts written in Greek do not attribute their theoretical bases to any biographically attested author, but rather claim that they were inspired by mythological sage figures, including Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, Petosiris, and Nechepso. As in Orphism and hermetic philosophy more generally, the astrological source material mystifies its own authorial origination and the reality of its own beginnings, replacing the claim toward original authorship with divine inspiration. Thus, the texts situate themselves, as well as all astrological human experience, as receptions of divinity. I have named but a few features that make Hellenistic astrology a tremendously complex site for Classical receptions. From the fact that its origins are an elusive, mythical blend of cultural inputs from Babylonian, Chaldean, Pythagorean, Stoic, and other frameworks, to the fact that heavenly bodies are still being explored and incorporated into a Roman naming scheme, the cultural syncretism at work is profound and poses much of theoretical interest to the field of Classical reception. Entire volumes and scholarly careers could be dedicated to exploring astrology as a site of Classical reception, but our focus here lies with one particular manifestation of the phenomenon, which is the ­twenty-­​­­first-​­century queer astrologer’s use of astrology, and by extension Classical material, toward the nourishment of queer subjectivity. 247

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Queer Astrology, Queer Storytelling Loaded with complexity and dynamic archetypal signification, the birth chart serves in many queer communities as an effective tool toward healing from queer experiences of cultural trauma. Reading one’s birth chart, or receiving a reading from an astrologer, allows the native to tune into resonant mythological language that can describe the native’s lived experiences in a cosmic context. A recorded dialogue on the Queer Skies podcast between queer astrologers Daniel Bernal, Drew Levanti, and Michael J. Morris explores how the birth chart is a text which facilitates access to the native’s complex subjectivity in the past, present, and future. This complexity is a feature of all astrological charts, but according to Morris, has particular significance for queer subjects: the birth chart’s “­permission for complexity is something that we as queer people crave, desire, long for, in a world that is constantly trying to fit us into available categories that are highly reductionist” (­Bernal, Levanti, and Morris 2019). The chart therefore allows reintegration of fragmented queer selfhood, both within and beyond “­sexualities, our genders, or our sense of…what it means to be in community with others” (­Bernal, Levanti, and Morris 2019). Queer astrologers translate this layer of interrelations into language in order to verbalize the complexity of lived experience to clients, whereby this linguistic interpretation of time and mythology can offer tools for personal empowerment and healing. Astrology provides a unique language for describing time in terms of the visual dynamics between planets and constellations, which a­ re—​­as we have seen already, via R ­ ochberg—​­structural and conceptual narratives imposed on stars. Morris articulates the idea that, for queer people, astrology serves as a “­tool” in ongoing processes of healing amidst societal trauma, and as such, astrology offers a spiralic queer temporality. For Bernal, astrological temporality offers the subject alternative and queer relationships with time: “­Capitalism really relies on linear time,” he notes, and astrological temporality “­allows you to… peek outside of the system” (­Bernal, Levanti, and Morris 2019). Attunement to astrological time, with its spirality and dynamism, provides pathways to resisting normative and capitalist conceptions of time. Astrological gnosis offers access to cosmic temporal phases that coalesce with socially accepted understandings of time (­e.g., birthdays), as well as phases that are outside of the conventional or mainstream experiences of time, and in turn, allow for subcultures of time to facilitate bonding among people versed in astrological transits. Rochberg has called astrology a “­heavenly script,” and Sparkly Kat has called astrology an “­identity language” (­Sparkly Kat 2021, 13). Upon these concepts, I layer the idea that astrology is a time language, in which fluency offers access to a particular temporal subculture. Universal astrology bonds people together in a temporal language of shared experiences, while natal astrology demonstrates the unique particularity of subjective experience within the collective transit. People with astrological fluency, or who seek translations from astrologers, are bonded in community with those who decide to mark this as a meaningful poetic signature for a collective temporality. Such bonding might manifest as rejoicing at Jupiter’s ingress into Pisces or flinching at Saturn’s square to Uranus. Anyone attuned to astrological transits experiences an alternative layer of time to the punishing calendar of ­twenty-­​­­first-​­century capitalist life, and the intersection of queer subjectivity and astrological time produces a queer temporality that is marked by the way it provides a community of cosmic feeling in time. Morris speaks of astrology as a tool toward practicing an a­ nti-​­capitalist slowness and a politicized, plural temporality: “­Nothing in the sky happens as fast as the relentless acceleration that we are conditioned to expect of ourselves and one another in a capitalist world” (­2019). Building on this idea of celestial slowness, Morris claims that astrology invites us to ponder, 248

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‘­How do we live into a different mode of temporality?’ … Astrology is predicated on not only a slower temporality, but many slower temporalities. What does it mean to live in consciousness of that every day, to track, ‘­Where’s the moon now? Where is Mercury now? Where is Venus? And Saturn?’ And so on. To track those [celestial movements], and to live our lives with an awareness of this much slower temporality… has profound possibilities for us. (­Bernal, Levanti, and Morris 2019) Astrological time can thus be experienced as a political reorientation in time and in subjective experience, insofar as it issues an invitation into an intentional collective while allowing prismatic subjectivities to experience universal time signatures in their own narratives. Drew Levanti describes the astrologer’s role as a storyteller and thus a sculptor of time. For Levanti, the ­astrologer-​­client dyad constructs a narrative where psychic biography and cosmic cycles are set in dialogue. Through the act of storytelling, the astrologer and client gain the ability to “­narrate where we come from, in a way that actually produces different conditions” (­2019). This dyadic narrative does not hover around reality, but actually constitutes reality, Levanti says: When we tell a story, we are creating new conditions for the future by reorienting ourselves to where we’ve come from… [T]hat’s one of the things that’s so powerful about ­story-​ ­telling: is that we’re actually… ­re-​­narrativizing our past, in order to create a different future. (­Bernal, Levanti, and Morris 2019) This narrative takes the form of an oral exchange between the astrologer and the client, where the signatures in the individual’s birth chart take on meaning relative to a particular theme or query from the client’s life. This is a personalized and subjective incarnation of Classical reception, because every individual’s birth chart is populated by a unique pattern of planetary presences named for the Roman gods. The astrologer interprets the planets as archetypal energies associated with (­but not limited by) those gods, and describes the location of the planets in terms of the zodiac and in terms of topoi, or places (­called “­houses” in modern astrology). The astrologer assesses the condition of those planets, in terms of how their archetypal energy can manifest in a given sign and topos, and also in terms of the angles the planets form relative to one another. Those angles, called “­aspects,” gain their significance for Hellenistic astrologers from ancient Greek optical theory,4 and in turn, characterize the dynamics present between the archetypal energies in the native’s life. In his attempts to reconstruct ancient astrological practice, Chris Brennan has spoken about the dangers of o­ ver-​­imposing Classical Greek and/­or Roman mythological narratives onto the planets. Because many queer astrologers are interested in the potential of astrology to offer alternative narratives, many of them use mythological narratives as sources for poetic inspiration in their readings, regardless of whether this method would be the most aligned with ancient Hellenistic practices. Rhea Wolf describes the usefulness of emphasizing Classical mythological narratives in their interpretive work: In my practice, the use of mythological figures has often helped illuminate the circumstances, challenges, and potentials of current transits for my clients. Rather than being penned into mundane, conventional versions of self, identifying with a myth can raise awareness of self to another level, invite questions, and further us on our individual quests. (­Wolf 2014, 67) 249

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Through the oral, dyadic storytelling process at work in modern astrology, astrologers and their clients situate Classical (­and other) mythologies as tools for reshaping subjective experiences of the native’s life and for working toward healing, which is emphasized by queer astrologers because of the inherent dangers and damages that their queer clients experience in heteronormative and patriarchal societies.

Mercury: Versatile and Queer God of Astrology The ancient astrological story told about the planet Mercury has proven a fertile source of inspiration for the work of queer practitioners of Hellenistic astrology. This section of the chapter argues that Mercury’s nonbinary character in astrological source material has shaped later queer astrologers’ relationship to the art of astrology itself in queer subjectivity. The relationship between the ­mythical-​­literary Mercury and his astrological counterpart is complex, as is the case with all the mythic and religious figures of note among the astrological planets, luminaries, and constellations. Within both ­Greco-​­Roman literature and Hellenistic astrology, Mercury is consistently associated with communication, travel between realms (­as psychopomp and messenger), and play (­from tricks to musical instruments). The astrological source texts emphasize the impact of a ­god-​­planet in human and worldly life, such that Mercury is felt as an effect rather than described as a character. The ­second-​­century astrologer Vettius Valens lists Mercury’s astrological significations in Book 1 of his Anthology, which include interpretation (­hermēneia, ἑρμηνεία, a term which echoes the planet’s Greek name, Hermes), communication (­angelia, ἀγγελία), versatility (­poikileuesthai, ποικιλεύεσθαι), and commonality (­koinotēs, κοινότης), all of which are key themes for this chapter’s consideration of the mercurial behavior of the queer astrologer in particular. In Hellenistic astrology more generally, birth charts with prominent Mercury placements indicate themes relating to intellect, interpretation, contests, commerce, and art. Astrology falls within the domain of Mercury as a subcategory of interpretation and translation more generally, and Vettius Valens and Firmicus Maternus state that strong Mercury placements in a birth chart can signify professional astrologers.5 The way that mercurial themes manifest in an astrological chart is entirely contingent on Mercury’s relationship to other planets, luminaries, and stars at the given time. As a mythological trickster and liminal figure, the astrological archetype for Mercury is characterized by versatility and shiftiness. Of this variability, Valens writes, For this star [Mercury] has the power of much trickiness, and it yields varied practical outcomes depending on the interchanges of the signs of the zodiac and the interactions of the stars. For some people, Mercury results in forms of knowledge, whereas for others, brokerage or service, and for others, Mercury acquires commerce or teaching, while for some others, [Mercury can also indicate] farmers, temple wardens, or community , and for others dominion, rentals, work contracts, performance of verse, the management of public service, or Mercury can also bestow bodyguards, the sacred temple linens, or the vanity of rulers. Mercury will make all men inconsistent in their fates and seriously tossed around in outcomes. (­Vettius Valens, Anthologia 1.1) Although the impact of all the planets and luminaries is contingent on contextual relationships with one another, Mercury is the planet most versatile in its manifestation. In ancient Greek and Latin 250

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astrological writings, Mercury is routinely characterized as marked by variety (­poikileuesthai, ποικιλεύεσθαι, Vettius Valens Anthologia 1.39) and mutability, including but not limited to their planetary gender. In many astrological doctrines, binaries organize planetary qualities, and whenever this is the case, Mercury is characterized as versatile or mutable, never adhering to one pole of a binary scheme. This sits in contrast to the way that most planets and luminaries are organized according to other major binary schemes. Whereas Venus is considered a “­benefic” (­­good-​­doer) and Mars a “­malefic” (­­evil-​­doer) in a chart, Mercury’s influence can be characterized as doing “­good” or “­bad” in a native’s life, based on how Mercury relates to the rest of the birth chart’s configurations. In addition to collapsing the benefic and malefic binary, Mercury is the only planet that is not thought to belong to a “­sect” of day or night planets; Mercury can join either the day team or the night team, depending on particular context. In all instances where binaries organize and construct astrological meaning, Mercury’s influence is portrayed as malleable and contingent on the placement and geometry of relationality among the planets, houses, and signs; Mercury’s fidelity to one aspect of a dyad is never granted. Of particular interest to queer astrologers is the fact that this interstitial, transitional quality ascribed to Mercury also extends to its planetary gender. The first book of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos discusses the assigned “­genders” of the astrological planets and luminaries. Ptolemy articulates a planetary gender binary that corresponds to another binary, that of wetness and dryness, qualities which ­are—​­in Aristotelian philosophical ­frameworks—​­associated with femininity and masculinity, respectively.6 Since Mercury is “­equally productive” of both dryness and wetness, Ptolemy extrapolates that the planet’s gender is mutable and fluctuating, or “­common to both genders” (­epikoinos, ἐπίκοινος; see also Hephaistio of Thebes’ Apotelesmatika 1.2).7 Thus we may read Mercury’s common gender as a further extension of two of Mercury’s astrological traits, that of “­versatility” (­poikileuesthai) and that of “­commonality” (­koinotēs). For astrologers who do not share Ptolemy’s causative conception of astrological mechanics, Mercury’s common gender connects with the planet’s general qualitative mutability, through which its properties are always contingent on circumstantial ­co-​­relation. Mercury is then associated with a gender always in flux, always adapting to the individual situation. The other ­god-​­planets and luminaries are assigned specific genders that align with the mythological and grammatical genders typically assigned to the planets in the literary tradition: Venus and the Moon are considered feminine, whereas the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are considered masculine. The constellations are also classified as masculine or feminine, in alternating zodiacal order, where the s­ o-​­called masculine signs are Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius, Aquarius, and the feminine signs are Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn, and Pisces (­Rhetorius, Compendium 1.1). But the mercurial nature of astrology itself, in its infinite complexity, adds nuance and modification to the binary gender scheme of the planets and luminaries. Gender (­and other conceptual) binaries organize astrological meaning, and yet, the fixity of these binaries is regularly challenged in ancient sources. In his Compendium (­1.1), Rhetorius argues that planets and luminaries “­become masculine” or “­become feminine,” despite their assigned gender, as a result of various placement conditions.8 This articulation of planetary genderqueering and fluidity is indicative of the way the mercurial art of astrology both insists upon and queers the binary through which much of its interpretive potential is constituted. In the ancient source texts, this phenomenon of genderqueering actually enforces hierarchical and patriarchal conceptions of gender; planets whose ­gender-​­related conditions affirm their assigned gender, or align with the gender of the native, are thought to bring about more beneficial experiences and outcomes, and those that do not have gender affirmation have a socially negative, queering effect on the native. For example, 251

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Rhetorius argues that planets that are masculinized in the birth charts of women “­make women ignoble, shameless, bold, reckless, disagreeable, and masculinized in sexual intercourse, or even lesbians” (­Rhetorius, Compendium 1.1). Ancient astrological manuals have plentiful discussions of astrological signatures that result in various forms of queerness, and these signatures are usually described with disdain and rendered bad outcomes for natives, as in Rhetorius’ treatment. Modern queer astrologers who work with Hellenistic techniques and texts are faced with the task of responding to the patriarchal assumptions underlying astrological binaries, as well as the queerphobic violence of ancient astrological interpretation regarding sexualities deemed nonnormative by ancient authors. ­Twenty-­​­­first-​­century astrologers are typically committed to updating and reconceptualizing Hellenistic models in order to align with their own personal politics and the social contexts of their clients. Wolf writes: It was actually when I went back to the ancient roots of astrological lineage that I was able to find insight into the modern, changing perception of gender and how I could tease out more fluid and accurate representations within mythological and astrological discussion. (­Wolf 2014, 69) I consider this revisionist practice of ­twenty-­​­­first-​­century queer astrologers as a mercurial kind of behavior: a tricky and subversive mode of interpretation befitting the patron god of astrology, Mercury. Mercury’s astrological significations are activated by the astrologer more generally. Within astrological consultations, Mercury’s rulership of communication takes on a dyadism via the interpretive act itself: in a receptive capacity, the astrologer reads the chart and listens to the client, and in an active capacity, the astrologer crafts an interpretation and responds to the client’s queries. The astrologer communicates their interpretation, ­which—​­for astrologers working in the Hellenistic ­tradition—​­is predicated on ancient archetypal conceptions of the gods, and thus astrological reading functions a form of Classical reception, bespoke to the subjectivities of the client and the astrologer. Mercury is regularly claimed as a “­queer icon” in queer astrological communities (­Kelly 2017; Levanti 2020). In a 2017 talk called “­Mercury and the Alchemy of Gender ­Non-​­Conformity,” astrologer Laural Kelly situated Mercury as a crucial presence in the development of their own queer subjectivity. Calling upon “­Mercury’s role as a bender and a breaker and a bender and a dissolver,” Kelly described how Mercury’s position in different solar return charts (­i.e., charts of their birthdays over a series of years) shaped their experiences regarding trauma and explorations of gender identity. Kelly situated “­Mercury as the agent that… takes us on the call” of alchemical transformation, with particular attention to the alchemical symbolism of androgyny, and binary and ego dissolution (­solutio): Mercury issued an invitation into ongoing mutability in Kelly’s own gender, and worked as a numinous guide toward experiencing inner, personalized alchemical transformation of masculinity and femininity in the self. It was Mercury’s status as patron of astrology and nonbinary planet, alongside their tricky mutability in the astrological imagination, that facilitated this kind of subjectivity shift in Kelly’s experience. In a talk on Mercury at the 2020 Queer Astrology conference, Drew Levanti also described Mercury as a “­queer icon” who provides an opportunity to think through astrological epistemology and reception: Mercury exposes the chinks in the armor of claims to know. Even though we might think about Mercury as a ‘­knowing’ planet, what I have learned is that Mercury is much more 252

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invested in the contestation of knowledge, and the resistance to easy answers. So, for astrologers and students of astrology…Mercury… calls [to] us as carriers of an art, astrology, that is mercurial, to beware of astrologers that seem to grant access to knowing everything… without first asking questions, and hesitating even when we do ask questions… Mercury models a commitment to the particular, and a resistance to the prison of language, and the gross reductions of categorical identifications, including but not limited to, race, class, and gender. (­Levanti 2020) For both Kelly and Levanti, Mercury’s trickiness and versatility are essential to how queer astrologers can adapt and mutate astrological gnosis, such that it can provide liberatory frameworks for queer astrologers and queer clients. Mercury’s queer refutation of the binaries upon which astrological meaning is built in the ancient source material is situated in uneasy contrast with Mercury’s status as the god associated with the art that sets up those very binaries. This tricky mercurial tension is what makes the planet so useful as an icon of queer revisionism and queer astrology. Because astrology is characterized as a mercurial phenomenon within Greek and Roman texts, then astrology itself may be considered equally endowed with Mercury’s notable versatility: astrology lends itself to transformation and translation, as we have seen. Like Mercury, astrology’s qualities are dependent on and relative to the practitioner’s application of astrological concepts. Taking Mercury as a “­queer icon,” as a beacon of subversion and interpretation, as a guide in how to shapeshift and mutate, queer astrologers have risen to the challenge of adapting the ancient astrological source material using a hermetic hermeneutic. Queer astrologers invested in queering Hellenistic astrological concepts apply Mercury’s versatility to the act of adaptation and Classical reception. As a mode of reception, queer astrology involves active revision of ancient texts’ frameworks, language, and structures, in the pursuit of heightened inclusivity that facilitates personal and collective forms of healing. Astrologer Rhea Wolf has described the task of the queer astrologer as a translator of ancient astrological concepts into frameworks that can provide psychic support for queer clients, the recipients of the astrological data: [T]here are ways that ancient and even modern uses of astrological language will feel at odds with the energy of inclusivity and specificity that queer and feminist language requires. By playing with the language and entertaining changes, I feel that rather than losing the accuracy and precision of astrological delineation, we will uncover better ways of understanding and supporting people. (­Wolf 2014, ­66–​­67) Here ­Wolf—​­one of the organizers of 2013’s Queer Astrology conference in San ­Francisco—​­is responding to the fact that astrology can be and has been used as a tool of heteronormativity, capitalism, and concomitant harms. Common philosophical features of ancient astrological manuals, like determinist approaches to personal fate, as well as gender essentialism, pose problems for queer astrologers. Astrologer and writer Alice Sparkly Kat sees astrology’s potential as a subculture in terms of practitioners’ willingness to “­destroy” the Hellenistic tradition and recreate something else out of it, in a way evocative of how Hermes killed a tortoise to make a new instrument out of its shell (­Homeric Hymn to Hermes). Sparkly Kat writes: [A]strology is not what offers healing to astrology fans. The history of astrology developed out of white supremacy and capitalism and patriarchy. The ways that we see Venus and 253

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Mars and gender… have served power rather than working against it. Astrology, as we have inherited it, does not offer us authentic identity. Astrology offers us Roman identity, Roman belonging, and Roman humanity. This is why we must continually work to destroy astrology as we practice it: because we look for identity from it. The reason why astrology, as a subculture, creates beautiful community and spiritual validation is not because there is anything special about such an occult language or because it has the ability to glimpse into one’s being in a way that’s different from other identity languages; it’s because astrology’s practitioners and fans have made it our own. It works not because there is anything magical about the language itself but because the act of not believing readily, of believing where belief has been earned, of listening waywardly, and of owning the magic of illusion making collectively is magic. Astrology is not magic. The community that recreates it in the contemporary era is. (­Sparkly Kat 2021, 1­ 2–​­13) If astrology is an “­identity language,” then it is one that gains its healing and liberatory potential for queer subjectivities through a combination of destruction and revitalization of ancient concepts. Sparkly Kat’s emphasis on the reclamation of ­astrology—​­“­because [we] have made it our own,” against the grain of “­Roman identity”—​­is complemented by Wolf’s sense that the ancient material can offer liberatory frameworks that have gotten lost in the thick reception history of astrology. In this process, astrology becomes a site of queer temporal community formation, where the language of astrological time signatures put queer astrologers, clients, and students into a shared tempo of mercurial commonality (­evocative of Mercury’s “­common” gender). On the role of astrology as a “­healing” practice in queer communities, Alice Sparkly Kat notes that astrology’s usefulness comes mainly in the form of the subjectivity of the astrologer, not astrology as a field in abstraction. They write: Those seeking astrological counseling trust that their astrologer will not diagnose their problems with the individualized and biological framework offered by the modern psychiatric industry. They understand that the lack of standardization within astrology means that no two astrology readings from different astrologers will be the same. People choose astrologers for their subjectivities. (­Sparkly Kat 2021, 10) Within Sparkly Kat’s conception of astrology, the astrologer is an artist and a translator whose medium is a complex weave of language, celestial bodies, personal biography, and subjectivity. It is this ­capacity—​­to do the tricky work with and against tradition and sources, in order to refashion subjective experiences of time and c­ ommunity—​­that makes the queer astrologer a mercurial operator.

Suggestions for Further Reading A concise and clear introduction to ancient astrology in Greece and Rome can be found in von Stuckrad 2016. For more detailed histories of Hellenistic astrology, see Campion 2009a and 2009b, and also Bowen and Rochberg 2020, which focuses on astronomy and history of science. For extensive modern manuals of Hellenistic astrological technique, see Brennan 2017; George 254

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2019, 2022. See Nicholas 2020 and Sparkly Kat 2021 for astrological writings by queer astrologers. Tarnas 2006 discusses archetypal correspondences between cultural history, mythology, and astrological transits. Foundational interdisciplinary approaches to queer time can be found in Edelman 2004; Freeman 2010; Kafer 2013; Rifkin 2017; ­Piepzna-​­Samarasinha 2018; Keeling 2019; and Kafer 2021.

Notes 1 For a survey of astrological source material and cultural impact outside of Greek and Latin material, see Campion 2012. For an introductory discussion of the astronomical source material in Greek, Latin, and demotic Egyptian, as well as archaeological evidence, see Jones 2018, 3­ 74–​­378. 2 For histories of Hellenistic astrology, see Holden 1996; Schmidt 2005; Campion 2009a and 2009b; Holden and Riske 2013; Brennan 2017, 1­ –​­164; George 2019, ­11–​­20; Bowen and Rochberg 2020. 3 To learn more about the Hellenistic astrology revival initiatives of Project Hindsight and Kepler College, visit https://­www.projecthindsight.com and https://­keplercollege.org. 4 See George 2019, ­389–​­390, for an overview of aspect doctrine in different eras and cultures, and ­391–​­393 for discussion of the optical theory underlying aspect doctrine. 5 Vettius Valens 1.39; Firmicus Maternus Mathesis 3.7.6, 3.7.19, 3.8.3, 3.12.16, 4.9.8, 4.19.25, 4.21.9, 5.2.15. 6 Other astrologers vary in the degree to which they sympathize with or diverge from Ptolemy’s causative model. In the Great Introduction to Astrology of the ninth century CE, Abu Ma’šar repeats elements of Ptolemy’s position on wetness, dryness, coolness, and heat (­4.8.2), but takes a different stance on the gender implications for Saturn and Mercury. According to Abu Ma’šar, Saturn’s masculinity is weaker than that of Jupiter, Mars, and the Sun, and so Saturn “­sometimes indicates within the range of masculinity eunuchs, bisexuals, and males who do not have intercourse with women, to whom children are not born, and who do not have semen” (­8.2). Mercury is gendered as masculine due to its “­dryness,” but “­because its nature is not heat, it indicates youths who do not attain puberty, and eunuchs” (­4.8.3). Furthermore, Mercury retains some gender fluidity: “­Because dryness is a passive element, it indicates that it receives the nature of the planets in masculinity and femininity” (­4.8.3). 7 Those interested in the relationship between grammatical gender and planetary gender should note that Mercury is not gendered as neuter, but instead, common: for the grammatical gender neuter, the term oudeteros, -​­a, -​­on (­οὐδέτερος, -​­α, -​­ον) is used, whereas for common grammatical gender, epikoinos, -​­on (­ἐπίκοινος, -​­ον) is used. 8 For the modifying factors and their application in twenty ­first-​­century techniques based on ancient Hellenistic astrological practice, see George 2019, 6­ 1–​­71.

Works Cited Barton, Tamsyn. 1995. “­Augustus and Capricorn: Astrological Polyvalency and Imperial Rhetoric.” The Journal of Roman Studies 85: ­33–​­51. Beck, Roger. 2007. A Brief History of Ancient Astrology. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Bernal, Daniel, Drew Levanti, and Michael J. Morris. 2019. “­Episode ­4  – ​­Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, & C ­ ross-​­Pollination with Astrology.” Produced by Daniel Bernal and Drew Levanti. Queer Skies, October 20, 2019. Podcast, MP3 audio, 1:28:45. https://­­divine-​­orbit.com/­podcast/­­feminist-­​­­theory­​­­queer-­​­­theory-­​­­cross-­​­­pollination-­​­­with-­​­­astrology-­​­­queer-­​­­skies-­​­­ep-​­4/ Boll, Franz. 1898. Codices Florentini: Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum 1. Brussels: Lamertin, ­142–​­164. Bowen, Alan C., and Francesca Rochberg, eds. 2020. Hellenistic Astronomy: The Science in its Contexts. Leiden: Brill. Brennan, Chris. 2017. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune. Denver: Amor Fati Publications. Campion, Nicholas. 2009a. A History of Western Astrology, Volume 1: The Ancient and Classical Worlds. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Campion, Nicholas. 2009b. A History of Western Astrology, Volume 2: The Medieval and Modern Worlds. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Hannah Silverblank Campion, Nicholas. 2012. Astrology and Cosmology in the World’s Religions. New York and London: New York University Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Edmonds III, Radcliffe. 2019. Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient ­Greco-​­Roman World. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. George, Demetra. 2019. Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice. A Manual of Traditional Techniques. Volume One: Assessing Planetary Condition. Auckland: Rubedo Press. George, Demetra. 2022. Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice. A Manual of Traditional Techniques. Volume Two: Delineating Planetary Meaning. Auckland: Rubedo Press. Greenbaum, Dorian G. 2021. “­Divination and Decumbiture: Katarchic Astrology and Greek Medicine.” In Divination and Knowledge in G ­ reco-​­Roman Antiquity, edited by Crystal Addey, ­109–​­137. London: Routledge. Hard, Robin. 2015. Eratosthenes and Hyginus: Constellation Myths. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holden, James H. 1996. A History of Horoscopic Astrology. Tempe, AZ: American Federation of Astrologers. Holden, James H., and Kris B. Riske. 2013. Biographical Dictionary of Western Astrologers. Tempe, AZ: American Federation of Astrologers. Jones, Alexander. 2016. Time and Cosmos in ­Greco-​­Roman Antiquity. New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. Jones, Alexander. 2018. “­­Greco-​­Roman Astronomy and Astrology.” In The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 1, edited by Alexander Jones and Liba Taub, 3­ 74–​­401. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kafer, Alison. 2021. “­After Crip, Crip Afters.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (­April): ­415–​­434. Keeling, Kara. 2019. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York: New York University Press. Kelly, Laural. 2017. Mercury and the Alchemy of Gender N ­ on-​­Conformity. Paper presented at Queer Astrology Conference, New York City, 2017. https://­qac.queerastrology.com/­product/­­audios-­​­­from-­​­­first-­​­­four-​­qacs/ Levanti, Drew. 2020. “­Twist, Trick, Terror: Abiding in Mercury’s Mystery.” Queer Astrology Conference, Zoom, 2020. Accessed via personal communication (­2021). Nicholas, Chani. 2020. You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical ­Self-​­Acceptance. New York: HarperOne. ­Piepzna-​­Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. “­Crip Lineages, Crip Futures: A Conversation with Stacey ­Milbern.” In Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, ­240–​­256. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous S­ elf-​­Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rochberg, Francesca. 2004. The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmidt, Robert. 2005. Sourcebook of Hellenistic Astrological Texts: Translations and Commentary. Cumberland, MD: Phaser Foundation. Sparkly Kat, Alice. 2021. Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Tarnas, Richard. 2006. Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. New York: Plume. von Stuckrad, Kocku. 2016. “­Astrology.” In A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome, Vol. 1, edited by Georgia Irby, ­114–​­129. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Wolf, Rhea. 2014. “­Myths of Gender, Gender in Myth.” In Queer Astrology: Presentations from the Queer Astrology Conference, San Francisco, July 2013, edited by Ian Waisler and Rhea Wolf, ­65–​­74. San Francisco, CA: Queer Astrology.

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18 QUEERING KINSHIP AGAINST GENEALOGY Crip Ancestorship, Chosen Families, Alternative Intimacies and Other Ways of Refusing the Classical Tradition Marchella Ward Dear Science: An Introduction At various points in history, classicists have attempted to curate for their discipline a privileged relationship with science.1 In her recent book Constanze Güthenke (­2020) describes Altertumswissenschaft as a particular way of knowing antiquity that was framed around a claim to scientific objectivity. And Caroline Winterer in The Culture of Classicism (­2004) reads the presentation of the study of antiquity as a science within an institutional context that set the humanities against the sciences in a race for funding and resources.2 It is clear, within this context, why the discipline of Classics has so frequently fallen back on a constructed relationship with science in order to make the case for its utility. But this desire to seek a closeness between the natural sciences and the study of the ancient world has important consequences: the adoption of epistemological models drawn from biology into Classics, and in particular, classical reception’s reliance on genealogy and inheritance as its organizing principle. At his presidential address to the Classical Association on January 6, 1922 (­a lecture entitled ‘­Classics and Science’), the classicist and colonial administrator Lord Milner remarked that All modern science has its roots in the Classics, and, on the other hand, no man imbued with the spirit of the great classical writers could be lacking in respect for science or fail to recognize its supreme importance to the progress of mankind. (­Milner 1922) Milner’s desire to procure for Classics a place in the history of science is expressed in the language of roots, and of inheritance (“­our own intellectual culture is unquestionably of Greek origin”, he pronounced later in the lecture).3 The notion that culture is inherited is a frequent theme of many defenses of the discipline of Classics (­not just in 1922, but ever since). But for readers of Milner’s speech in the Nature journal in which it was published, these references to inheritance and phylogenetic roots were not simply metaphorical. The article that follows Milner’s in the journal issue is a review of Joseph Thomas Cunningham’s 1921 book Hormones and Heredity: A Discussion of the Evolution of Adaptations and the Evolution of Species. Milner’s ­assumption—​­that the most important cultural influence arises through ­inheritance—​­remains at the heart of the study of the 257

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ancient world, perhaps nowhere more obviously than in the chains and traditions that structure classical reception studies. In this attachment to biological and genetic metaphors of heritability, Classics stands in opposition to the activist disciplines that arose in the wake of the civil rights movements. Such disciplines have since their very beginnings fought for renewed attention to the social constructions of race, ability, gender, and culture, and refused the totalizing notion that identity could be explained by biological notions of inheritance. Opposition to the o­ ver-​­biologizing of disability, for instance, is a frequent theme of disability studies and disability justice ­organizing—​­and has in recent years crystallized around opposition to Human Gene Editing. In 2020, the year of the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, the Disabled Oracle Society launched with their first (­virtual) meeting. At her opening address to the society, Alice Wong imagined herself in 2029, reflecting on the society’s foundation, citing as its catalyst an article in the New York Times by Katie Hafner entitled “­Once Science Fiction, Gene Editing is Now a Looming Reality” (­2020). In Wong’s dystopian 2029, Human Gene Editing had become a way to eradicate the existence of disabled people, in a world where excitement around the science and possibilities of eliminating disease outweighed any questions about the underlying assumptions about health, disability, and difference. (­Wong 2020) The popularity and power (­social, commercial, and militaristic) of Human Gene Editing in Wong’s imagined 2029 validated the pronouncement that Jaipreet Virdi made in an interview in 2020 about her book Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History. In that interview, Virdi addressed the way that Human Gene Editing amounted, in her assessment, to a genocidal practice disguised under the rhetoric of biology: Moreover, this is essentially at the core a form of cultural genocide… to argue that this [d/­Deafness] needs to be avoided at the level of genetics is an affront to the generations of Deaf people who do not perceive themselves to be genetic defects. (­Cited in Wong 2020) And although Wong’s lecture was a work of science fiction, she made reference to a ­real-​­life example of the possibility in the recent past: the use of the genome editing technology known as ­CRISPR-​­Cas9 by scientist He Jiankui in 2018 (­see Greely 2019). Wong spoke with a renewed urgency, reminding members of the society that the ­COVID-​ ­19 pandemic had not only had a disproportionate effect on the lives of disabled people but had also popularized eugenicist conversations that positioned disabled, sick, and older people as less deserving of medical care (­see Barbarin 2021). But the logic of her i­ntervention—​­that it is both incorrect and dangerous to assume that disability is purely a biological ­phenomenon—​­was not at all new. The ableist assumption that it is desirable to eradicate all disability via Human Gene Editing relies on the medical model of disability, in opposition to which the discipline of disability studies arose. The medical model, which “­situates disability exclusively in individual bodies and strives to cure them by particular treatment, isolating the patient as diseased or defective” (­Siebers 2006, 173) is opposed to the social model, which focuses on the ways that discriminatory societies and inaccessible environments enable certain minds and bodies and disable others. Human Gene Editing is anathema to the social model because it focuses on “­curing” bodyminds positioned as aberrant, unhealthy, unusual, or disabled, rather than on abolishing hostile social and institutional structures and inaccessible environments. 258

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Disability studies is not alone among these activist disciplines in querying what is at stake in an ­over-​­reliance on biology. In her book Dear Science and Other Stories (­2021), Katherine McKittrick draws on the methodologies of Black studies and anticolonial thought to offer a critique of systems of knowledge and relationality. Like Wong and Virdi, McKittrick sees an ­over-​­reliance on biology in popular ways of theorizing identity: Identity is often conflated with flesh. Identity has biologic traces. Identity is corporeal. Studying identity so often involves demonstrating that biology is socially constructed, not displacing biology but, rather, empowering ­biology—​­the ­flesh—​­as the primary way to study identity. Race (­including whiteness) galvanizes the biologics of identity… If identity is ­biologic—​­or, to be more specific, narratively ­biologized—​­are the identities that make and produce and uphold disciplinary categories not, also, biologizing disciplines? If so, all disciplinary thinking is laden with colonial logics and all disciplines are enfleshed (­as gendered, raced, sexed and so on). (­McKittrick 2021, 40) In her analysis, McKittrick is building on the unseating of biology as the defining feature of identity that is evident, for instance, in Dorothy E. Roberts’ insistence that medicine ought to understand race properly as a social category: Race is not a biological category that naturally produces these health disparities because of genetic difference. Race is a social category that has staggering biological consequences but because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health. (­Roberts 2018, 414)­4 But McKittrick is a professor of gender studies, not a medical researcher, and the subject of her book is not whether identities really are biologically or socially produced, but an investigation into the role of narrative in the construction of identity. McKittrick is interested in the role of disciplines in what she calls “­narratively biologiz[ing],” and her work encourages us to ask the cui bono question: who does it serve to tell a story about identity as one that starts and ends with biology? My formulation of this question is not in any sense new, and McKittrick situates her own research within the history of biopolitical emancipation from oppressive structurings of knowledge that she sees most clearly crystallizing in the writing of the cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter.5 Throughout her work Wynter, drawing on Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, in particular, has reminded us repeatedly of the need for both “­an entirely new knowledge order” and a renewed understanding of the role of biological narratives in the sustaining of unjust systems.6 But McKittrick’s book offers not only a critique of biology or the narrative biologizing of identity but of the disciplines that sustain and permit it.7 Throughout the book, she positions herself not just in conversation with Wynter but also draws heavily on Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (­first published in French in 1990). Disciplines and the metaphors of relation that they employ structure the way we know the world, and as McKittrick points out, the colonial foundations of many academic disciplines have the effect of naturalizing connections and disconnections that rely on imperial categories, metaphors, and geographies: If we are committed to anticolonial thought our starting point must be one of disobedient relationality that always questions, and thus is not beholden to normative academic logics. (­McKittrick 2021, 45) 259

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The coloniality of the discipline of Classics has already been ­well-​­established, and this chapter will not need therefore to prove McKittrick’s core assumption that “­discipline is empire” (­2021, 36).8 But insofar as classical reception studies constitutes the s­ub-​­discipline to which the study of antiquity looks for models of relationality, it has a particular responsibility to take McKittrick’s warnings about narrative biologizing seriously. Alternative models of ­relationality—​ ­“­disobedient relationality,” in McKittrick’s ­terms—​­are available, many of them resulting from these activist disciplines that I have gestured towards above. The field stands at an ethical crossroads: it can lend legitimacy to the kind of o­ ver-​­reliance on biology that is so frightening to justice activists like Wong, Virdi, and Roberts, by continuing to structure itself around metaphors of inheritance, genealogy, and tradition; or it can find new ways to imagine “­disobedient relationality”—​­to queer and crip its understanding of relation. I am going to argue that the field should do the latter.

Against Genealogy A recurring theme in McKittrick’s book is a concern about the ethics of ­tradition-​­building. “­The demonstrated knowledge of Jürgen Habermas texts requires the refusal of W.E.B. Du Bois and can in no way ­imagine—​­even in ­refusal—​­Ida B. Wells” (­McKittrick 2021, 36) she notes, characterizing the way that the notion of a dominant tradition or a particular genealogy of knowledge serves to discredit other voices. In the example that McKittrick gives, the prioritizing of a critical tradition of white philosophers has the effect of distancing Black thought, and in particular the philosophies of Black women thinkers and activists. We do not need to look very far to find the ­so-​­called ‘­classical tradition’ performing the role that McKittrick sees performed by the Habermasian tradition of critical ­theory—working to exclude particular voices. In 2010, Harvard University Press published a ­much-​­celebrated volume edited by classicists Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most and Salvatore Settis entitled The Classical Tradition.9 In the opening lines of the book, the editors delineated what they understood this classical tradition to include: This book aims to provide a reliable and w ­ ide-​­ranging guide to the reception of classical ­Graeco-​­Roman antiquity in all its dimensions in later cultures. Understandings and misunderstandings of ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, art, architecture, history, politics, religion, science and public and private life have shaped the cultures of medieval and modern Europe and of the nations that derived from ­them—​­and they have helped to shape other cultural traditions as well, Jewish, Islamic, and Slavic, to name only these. (­Grafton, Most and Settis 2010, vii) These short lines attempt to pass as neutral a number of assumptions that are deeply ideological. The list of later cultures that “­classical ­Graeco-​­Roman antiquity” has apparently shaped masquerades as a neutral description of classical ­influence—​­but in fact amounts to a carefully curated exclusion of “­Jewish, Islamic and Slavic” cultures from the most classically proximate cultural group, “­the cultures of medieval and modern Europe and of the nations that derived from them.” To take only what Grafton, Most, and Settis call “­Islamic…cultures” as a representative example, it is clear that their exclusion of Muslims from Europeanness in the world narrative they construct here is an Islamophobic fiction. There are multiple ­Muslim-​­majority countries in Europe and about 44 million Muslims; Islam has never been “­other” to Europe, except in Islamophobic and more

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broadly Orientalizing and racist discourses (­nor has it, for that matter, been any less proximate to the texts and artifacts of ancient Greece and Rome). Grafton, Most, and Settis are attempting a process of ­kin-​­making here: Europeans (­though crucially not Jewish or Muslim or Slavic Europeans, in their assessment) are made into one group, their kinship confirmed by the mythical ­pre-​­history that their imagined classical proximity provides for them. The inheritance of the ­classical—​­figured, falsely, as a ­natural-​ ­biological ­process—​­confirms who we think of as our kin. Outside of the field of Classics, however, ­de-​­essentializing k­ in-​­making through the rejection of normative family structures has been a firm fixture of queer thought for some time. The messiness of relation is cherished and celebrated ­in—​­for ­instance—​­Kath Weston’s (­1991) “­chosen families,”, Lulu Le Vay’s (­2019) “­alternative intimacies,”, as well as forming part of the political critique of nuclear family structures in Sophie Lewis’ Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family (­2019). And it has in recent years played a key role in disability justice movements too, as Stacey Park Milbern’s (­2019) “­crip ancestorship” model shows. This rejection of familial ­kin-​­making has larger ramifications than ­inter-​­personal ­relationships—​­the personal is, unsurprisingly, political.10 In an article she wrote for The New Inquiry in 2016, the scholar of English and Black studies Christina Sharpe called for the ­de-​­naturalizing of kin relations, remarking that “­kinship relations structure the nation” and demanding that we: Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative. Imagine otherwise. Remake the world. Some of us have never had any other choice. (­Sharpe 2016) Imagined kinship, in Sharpe’s reading, plays a key role in the sustaining of white supremacy, and in her analysis, she unpacks the way that the Jim Crow laws in the United States reified white familial relations as kinship while refusing to recognize Black kinship of any kind. Saidiya Hartman makes a similar point in Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (­2007) when she reminds her readers of the chained enslaved figure on Josiah Wedgwood’s famous abolition medallion (­see ­Figure 18.1) pleading with his white enslavers to recognize his humanity via his kinship relations: “­Am I not”, reads the text of the medallion, “­a man and a brother?” (­Hartman 2007, 167). Practices of ­kin-​­making that rely on presuming genealogies can be used to exclude, enslave, ­dehumanize—​­and this is as evident from the history of the enslavement of people as it is from the history of the ­so-​­called classical tradition (­on kinship and enslavement see Brooks 2001 and Morgan 2021). A number of voices working at the intersection of biology and philosophy have responded to Sharpe’s call, offering messier and more contingent models of kinship. In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (­2016), Donna Haraway devotes much of her attention to the process of “­making generative oddkin”, and the question is also taken up by the developmental biologist Andreas Hejnol in Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson and Nils Bubandt’s edited volume Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (­2017). For Hejnol, genealogic metaphors are no longer accurate to the “­new biologies” that are “­forcing us to tell very different stories with dramatically different metaphors” (­Hejnol 2017, G87): “­Put simply, molecular data uproot the phylogenetic tree” (­Hejnol 2017, G91). But more than inaccurate at the molecular level, metaphors that suggest linear d­ escent—​­which Hejnol terms

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­Figure  18.1  Medallion modeled by William H. Hackwood for Josiah Wedgewood, c. 1787.  Brooklyn Museum, New York. Made available under Creative Commons by CC0 1.0  Universal Public Domain Dedication.

“­­ladder-​­thinking”—​­restrict the ways in which we can think about relation in m ­ ulti-​­species ecologies.11 Hejnol continues: Ladders and ­trees—​­structured around the idea of human superiority and linked to problematic ideas of complexity and h­ ierarchy—​­have proved particularly discouraging of curiosity. (­Hejnol 2017, G100) Hierarchical metaphors of tree and ladder thinking, in other words, are unhelpful to the structuring of relationships because they discourage a more varied landscape of ways of knowing. In their place, Hejnol offers rhizomatic understandings of biological relation, “­meshlike” metaphors like the image of branched coral, or at the very least “­tree metaphors, read nonteleologically” (­Hejnol 2017, G100). For classicists, the genealogical model so strongly rejected by these biologists has a familiar feel to it. While Gan, Tsing, Swanson, and Bubant hold up the idea of organizing life forms according to a Great Chain of Being as an anthropocentric shift of the Renaissance, the image of the chain is most familiar to students of classical reception from Charles Martindale’s articulation of the chain of receptions in Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (­1993). From Hejnol’s perspective in biology, the chain came about in evolutionary thought, which was mapped onto the ladder model (­the scala naturae) celebrated as Aristotle’s. And while Charles 262

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Darwin and his cousin, the eugenicist Francis Galton, were perhaps the most famous proponents of these methods, they were, as Hejnol points out, far from alone. The moment to which Hejnol dates the arrival of the chain in the history of biology was also the moment at which the idea of a classical tradition came into use (­see Silk, Gildenhard, and Barrow 2013, 3 on this moment).

Chains, Trees, and Traditions: Classical Reception’s Commitment to Teleology These metaphors of chains that structured both the natural sciences and the study of antiquity unsurprisingly legitimized literal chains. The enslavement of people required an ongoing justification, and that justification was sought in a ­faux-​­biological hierarchy of races, constructed in no small part from the practice of craniometry popularized by, among others, the Egyptologists Josiah Nott and George Gliddon. Along with the physician Samuel Morton, these classicists spent much of their lives using the ­pseudo-​­science of craniometry to racialize the ancient Egyptians as “­Caucasian” so as to enter them into false kin relations with those who had already been designated as the ancestors of white Europeans (­the ancient Greeks and Romans).12 Their abhorrent practice relied on a genealogical model popularized by Darwin and others (­they imagined a chain of humanity ascending through evolutionary stages from a chimpanzee to a white man, represented in the Egyptologists’ drawings by the head of the statue of Apollo Belvedere), but also on an idea of the classical tradition that positioned the classical as the inheritance of white Europeans specifically. Both classical antiquity and racism were “­narratively biologized,” to use McKittrick’s term. That the classical tradition shared its f­ aux-​­biological structure with n­ ineteenth-​­century science has not gone unnoticed. In the introduction to his edited volume Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (­2016), Shane Butler addresses the Darwinian logic of classical inheritance, giving as an example of “­Deep Time” “­evolutionary time, which leaves pieces of the genetic code for our ­pre-​­human ancestors embedded in the DNA in our own bodies” (­Butler 2016, 4). Butler compares the shape of Darwin’s tree metaphors to the stemma illustrations of textual criticism, though he rejects genetic code as the structuring metaphor for his own project (­Butler 2016, ­7–​­8). But although he remarks on the fact that the phrase “­classical tradition” became meaningful in tandem with these scientific metaphors in the nineteenth century, Butler does not make explicit the specific dangers of this relationship that I am pointing to here. More recently than 2016, classicists and classical reception scholars have remarked on the limitations of classical reception’s imagined linear tradition.13 The authors of the Postclassicisms (­2020) volume note that “­direct linear descent from antiquity to the present is recognized as a teleological idealization” (­The Postclassicisms Collective 2020, 26)—​­but stop short of naming the specific “­political… fantasy” that it represents, perhaps because, by 2020, members of the Postclassicisms Collective had already raised the problem of linearity elsewhere. Brooke Holmes had opposed “­likeness” with “­paternal descent” in the Deep Classics volume and had, together with Constanze Güthenke, offered coral reefs as a metaphor of relationality (­Holmes 2016, 274).14 In fact, Holmes’ argument in her 2016 chapter is positioned specifically as a critique of the classical tradition that is outlined in Michael Silk, Ingo Gildenhard, and Rosemary Barrow’s The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought (­2013). Their book, she argues, is: … A pretty picture obviously limited by the interest, expertise, and knowledge of its authors, a picture whose omissions are conveniently forgotten so that it can be offered up as a totality to reground the unity of ‘­the classical’ as ‘­Western.’ (­Holmes 2016, 279)­15 263

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Like Grafton, Most, and Settis, the authors of The Classical Tradition three years later seem at pains to insist upon a particular ideological aspect of Classical inheritance: “­the classical tradition, on any reading, is European at the outset and Western, through and through” (­Gildenhard, Silk, and Barrow 2013, 245). For Holmes, this false narrative of inheritance results from “­defensive fantasises of epistemic mastery and elite judgement” (­Holmes 2016, 279) rather than from a structurally racist form of ­kin-­​­­making—​­but reading it alongside McKittrick’s critique of genealogical ­tradition-​­building makes clear the ideology of such fantasies. The logic of inheritance does something specific and deeply ideological: it narratively biologizes the white supremacist notion that white Europeans are closer in their relation to classical antiquity than those positioned outside of this category. It may be more constructive for classical reception studies to historicize the arrival of these two volumes on the scene in the early 2010s even further. In the years leading up to 2010, classical reception scholars had begun to question the essentialism of classical reception’s linearity. Martindale himself had remarked that “­it is worth asking if the concept of reception today serves any useful purpose, now that the word’s power to provoke has largely subsided” (­Martindale 2006, 11); Martin Revermann had, in a review article for the Journal of Hellenic Studies, listed “­subterranean receptions” (­Revermann 2008, 178), an idea arising from the work of Fiona Macintosh and Edith Hall, as an area for future growth in classical reception studies; and Emily Greenwood (­2009) had labeled receptions of the classical in the literature of the Anglophone Caribbean as “­frail connections” bolstered to a position of strength not by any real genealogical connection but by the narrativizing drive of colonialism. In this context, the revival of the inheritance logic of the classical tradition appears not as the neutral description of a special relationship between the classical and modern Europeans that actually exists, but as a way of narrativizing the privileged position of white Europeans as if it were a biological superiority. And it is reanimated at this moment in the 2010s specifically in order to protect that privileged position from being undermined by the more complex notions of relationality that were beginning to emerge in classical reception studies. Conceiving of the linear metaphor of the classical tradition as a reactionary discourse that leans on metaphors of biological and genealogical relation to legitimate this white supremacist and Eurocentric ordering of the world is therefore an important starting point for a classical reception studies that wants to queer ­relationality—​­and make possible the “­disobedient relationality” that McKittrick advocates.16

Britain’s Imperialist ­Kin-​­Making The danger of this classical tradition is not abstract, and it has been especially harmful in the hands of those who have been empowered to write its world narrative into law. Here I want to focus on one specific example: the role of a classical education at Oxford University in the architecture of Britain’s hostile environment.17 British Classics has been less well equipped to engage productively with critiques of its white supremacist structuring than its North American counterpart, and this is unsurprising: the desire to unravel the epistemological thread of genealogy has been driven in a large part by Black studies, a discipline that became institutionalized as a part of the British Higher Education landscape much later than it did in North America (­the first Black studies undergraduate program in a European university opened at Birmingham City University in 2017). The argument is often made that racism in Britain does not exist or is not comparable with North American racism.18 But not only is racism sustained by an inheritance model of identity not not a British problem, it in fact has a huge role to play in the definition of Britishness itself.

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In 1971, as Nadine ­El-​­Enany details in her Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (­2020), the Immigration Act replaced the British Nationality Act of 1948. The Act legalized the narrative biologizing of British identity, inventing a new term and a new ­pseudo-​­genetic ­concept—​ ­“­patriality”—​­to distinguish, as Kathleen Paul explains, Between the familial community of Britishness composed of the truly ­British—​­those descended from white ­colonizers—​­and the political community of Britishness composed of people who had become British through conquest or domination. (­Paul 1997, 181) The very notion of a “­patrial” reified a ­pseudo-​­genealogical connection with Britain for white British people, while denying citizenship to many of the people of color who had held it under the 1948 Act because they were from territories colonized under the British empire. A false inheritance logic was constructed and racialized: white British people had “­inherited” Britishness through their patriality, whereas British people of color had not. The violence of this 1971 Act is still ongoing, and the equating of Britishness to whiteness was a key factor in the 2018 Windrush scandal, as ­El-​­Enany points out (­­El-​­Enany 2020, 120). But even at the time of its conception, the fact that this Act constituted a racist narrative biologizing of nationality so as to exclude people of color from the protections of citizenship was not lost on those who debated it in the House of Commons. The Home Secretary in 1971, Reginald Maudling, introduced the Act with an attempt to counter assertions that patriality was racist in nature: Patriality has been attacked as a racial concept, an argument which I wholly reject… I see no reason why a country should not accord to those who have a family connection with it a particular and special status. […] It is said that most of the people with patrial status will be white. Most of us are white, and it is completely turning racial discrimination on its head to say that it is wrong for any country to accord those with a family relationship to it a special position in the law of that country. (­8 March 1971, Hansard 813, 4­ 2–​­172) Maudling’s attempt here to separate out racism from hereditarianism falters, and his rejection of the characterization of patriality as racist amounts to little more than a reassertion of the presumption that whiteness and Britishness are interchangeable. The Act’s racism was not accidental, and it was passed not in spite of it, but because of it. In response to the argument that the provision should be amended to grant “­old Commonwealth” citizens the right of abode in Britain, Maudling explained to the Prime Minister that such a practice would result in “­a great increase of colored immigration,” and the Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend reminded the House that the key motivating factor of the Act was “­to avoid the risk of renewed ‘­swamping’ by immigrants from the new Commonwealth”, and to remove the right of abode from the ­so-​­called “­hordes of ­Anglo-​­Indians” (­Travis 2002). Political and ideological motivations for Maudling’s racist desire to strip British people of color of their Britishness abound: Maudling had been in the early 1960s Secretary of State for the Colonies, and had succeeded Enoch Powell in his post as Shadow Secretary of State for Defence in 1968 after Powell was sacked for his violently racist “­Rivers of Blood” speech. And the rise in public awareness of the possibilities of genetic engineering no doubt also had a role to play in Maudling’s reliance on false ideas about genealogy. But these biologizing narratives were already a part of his

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classical education. Maudling matriculated to study for a degree in Classics (Literae Humaniores) at Merton College, Oxford in 1933. What precisely those who studied Literae Humaniores at Oxford might have learned at that time is the subject of a 2007 book edited by Christopher Stray, Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning, 1­ 800–​­2000, and need not be repeated here. But the fact that a Classics degree trained Maudling in the genealogical logic that rendered the invention of “­patriality” possible is apparent from the recollections of Donald Russell, who arrived at Balliol College to study Classics not long after Reginald Maudling had taken his ­first-​­class degree from Merton College. “­I have always felt somehow, since I first learned the declensions,” Russell recalled that the vocabulary and syntax of Greek and Latin (­whether we like it or not) cannot help being important determinants of the ways in which Europeans still talk and think. (­Nisbet and Russell 2007, 220) Reminiscing over his first visit to Balliol College in 1938, to sit the scholarship examination, Russell provides the following detail (­after a brief aside on the stickiness of Balliol dining hall’s doughnuts): [o]ne of the things we had to do was to write a ­three-​­hour essay on the Noble Savage. There was no choice of subject... As I rack my memory about this, I convince myself that Rousseau and the ninetieth letter of Seneca, and probably also campestris Melius Scythae were present in my mind; and I suspect that my thoughts about the continuousness of our culture with the classical were already not unlike what they still remain. (­Nisbet and Russell 2007, 200) The idea that Europeans were of a particular culture inherited from antiquity and that, in this, they were distinct from ­non-​­Europeans, was no doubt just as apparent to Maudling from his classical education as it was to Russell from his. In his attempts to justify the racism of the Act of 1971, Maudling argued that ­non-​­white British people were of an irreconcilably different culture, arguing that “­those wishing to come here to work from the Commonwealth” were “­from a different cultural background” with the result that “­the task of a­ ssimilation—​­as experience so bitterly s­hows—​­is all but impossible.” (­Travis 2002) It was already commonplace for Athenian law to be evoked by eugenicists in defense of racism and x­ enophobia—​­in 1909, Galton had defended endogamy in his address to the Eugenics Education Society on the grounds that “­it was penal for a Greek to marry a barbarian.” (­Galton 1909, 47) And in her book Immigrant Women in Athens (­2014), Rebecca Futo Kennedy notes that the ethnonationalist Periklean citizenship law of 451 BCE may have been aimed at reducing immigration (­Kennedy 2014, 15)—​­much like the 1971 Act. Whether it derived from any genuine scholarly engagement with Athenian citizenship reforms or was simply the result of the facile claims to cultural continuity that have long been the currency of the public face of Classics as a discipline, it is clear that the logic of genealogy and privileged inheritance learned from the study of the ancient world was reflected in Maudling’s racism in defense of the Act of 1971.

Towards Disobedient Relationality: Some Conclusions Humans are, for Wynter, a storytelling species (­Homo narrans), and it is therefore unsurprising that what McKittrick calls “­narratively biologizing” has been such a powerful force in the way that empire has structured identity. But classical reception can reconceptualize its systems of knowledge production beyond these genealogical ­reflexes—​­it can queer relation. Relations need not be 266

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obedient to power structures, or to any kind of “­commonsense belief system” as McKittrick puts it (­McKittrick 2021, 50). New models of relation are emerging, often drawing on new materialisms, which have been alert to the kaleidoscopic effects of different models of relationality for some time. Describing the logic of ­Actor-​­Network Theory, Bruno Latour writes: I can be one metre away from someone in the next telephone booth, and nevertheless be more closely connected to my mother 6,000 miles away. (­Latour 1996, 371) But whereas new materialist philosophy presented alternative modes of relationality as abstract theoretical provocations, for McKittrick, Wynter, Hejnol, Sharpe, and others who have sought to undermine the narrative force of biology, this work has both an ethical and a political urgency. Writing of crip ancestorship, Milbern describes how it is rooted in an experience of marginalization: I think about crip ancestorship often. It is tied to crip eldership for me, a related but different topic. So many disabled people live short lives, largely because of social determinants of health like lack of healthcare, housing, clean air and water, or having basic needs met. […] I do not know a lot about spirituality or what happens when we die, but my crip queer Korean life makes me believe that our earthly bodyminds is but a fraction, and not considering our ancestors is electing only to see a glimpse of who we are. (­Milbern 2019) Crip ancestorship crucially creates relationships that are disobedient to biology: People sometimes assume ancestorship is reserved for those of biological relation, but a queered and cripped understanding of ancestorship holds that, such as in flesh, our deepest relationships are with people we choose to be connected to and honor day after day. Ancestorship, like love, is expansive and breaks manmade boundaries cast upon it, like the nuclear family model or artificial nation state borders. (­Milbern 2019) Crip ­ancestorship—​­like the classical ­tradition—​­is a chosen family structure. But unlike the classical tradition it does not claim for itself any kind of reality styled as biological. Our crip ancestors are those we choose, just as our classical forebears are chosen t­ oo—​­though they often masquerade as inherited via some kind of ­natural-​­biological process. Crip ancestorship celebrates and foregrounds the role of social construction in kin relations (­and on the political role of drawing attention to social construction, see Haslanger 2012). This emphasis on the deliberate choosing and crafting of kin is politically important because the notion that kinship is chosen or constructed disempowers those supremacist logics (­like Maudling’s racializing of citizenship through “­patriality”) that rely on false claims of biological relation. And these models of kinship beyond biological relation are beginning to find their way into adaptations of ancient texts that are critical of the hostile environments created by classicists like Maudling, too. In October of 2021, Kamal Kaan’s Aaliyah (­After Antigone) premiered at Impact Hub, Bradford. The ­play—​­directed by Alex Chisolm and Dermot D ­ aly—​­radically reframed Sophocles’ Antigone, setting it in a local authority office building in Bradford where two sisters, Aaliyah and Imaani plot to save their brother Syeed from deportation.19 Syeed is threatened equally by two long arms of the British empire: risking deportation to Bangladesh as a result of 267

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the government’s hostile environment policies, and life imprisonment under Section 377, a British colonial law criminalizing sexual activity between men that still operates in Bangladesh. Kaan’s Aaliyah (­After Antigone) explicitly queered relation throughout, with characters refusing the centrality of the biological in their repeated refrain that “­water is thicker than blood.”20 In this version, it is Aaliyah’s marriage to Hussain (­Haemon) that takes center stage, with Hussain severing his relationship with his mother Parveen (­Creon)—​­who is in this version Britain’s Home ­Secretary—​­in order to go against both her wishes and the legal architecture of the hostile environment to rescue Syeed. By modeling kinship around a kind of chosen solidarity, rather than on the presumption of genealogical or familial proximity, Kaan is able to critique the hostile environment and its invention of “­patriality” as a false justification for its racism. Kaan’s queer model of kinship also demands a new language for classical reception. Rather than imagining himself within any kind of chain, phylogenetic tree, or other ­ladder-​­thinking model of relation with the classical, Kaan sees his work instead “­breaking Antigone’s bones to sculpt Aaliyah from it” (­Kaan, in conversation with me). Inverting the methodology of those Egyptologists whose craniometric practices enlisted ancient bones in service of ­faux-​­biological hierarchies, Kaan’s goal is instead to break these bones and with them the racist inequalities they legitimized. Kaan’s play is an experiment with these alternative models of relation and it is clear what the stakes are for classical reception in this experiment: acknowledging that any familial resemblance imagined to exist between the classical and the modern European is the result of a chosen family structure, not a n­ atural-​­biological one asks the cui bono question of this choice. Who gains and who loses in the choice to position the classical as Europe’s ancestor? Queer and crip models of disobedient relationality carry with them the possibility of being transformative for classical reception studies not only because they undermine the way that genealogy was pressed into the service of naturalizing inequality, as we have seen, but also because they restore the agency of the reader that was at the center of classical reception’s theoretical beginnings in reader response theory. Since kinship, in these models, and in Kaan’s play, is established through solidarity rather than inherited through phylogenetic similarity (“­fashion yourself into an ancestor to strangers untold,” as Lewis 2019, 157 suggests), it brings with it an explicit ethical responsibility for the world its narrative legitimates. Kinship with the Greeks and Romans, under these models of disobedient relationality, is not an accident of inheritance or biology but a networked solidarity actively sought. And those who seek it are responsible for the world they fashion from the broken bones of antiquity.

Suggestions for Further Reading On Britain’s hostile environment, see Cowan 2021 and ­El-​­Enany 2020, and on the way that it reflects narratives about European identity, see Walia ­2021—​­though Walia does not dwell on the role of the Classical in these narratives. Gillborn 2016 gives another example of the way false “­geneism” functions in defense of racism. For critiques of the Classical tradition, see Holmes 2016 and Umachandran 2021. Together with Mathura Umachandran, I am ­co-​­editing a forthcoming volume, Critical Ancient World Studies that will address many of the injustices brought about by the disciplinary formation of Classics.

Notes 1 I had the opportunity to explore the themes of this paper at multiple virtual conferences, including those organized by the Queer and the Classical collective (­2021), and Res Difficiles (­2022). Thank you to the organizers and attendees, as well as to all of the justice activists to whom this chapter owes so much of its

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Queering Kinship against Genealogy thinking, and to Qasim, who has read every word. And ­last—​­but by all means ­most—​­thank you Kamal, for Aaliyah and for everything. 2 See also Midgley 2001 on the relationship between science and literary studies. 3 For a more recent take on the connection between Classics and science, see FitzGerald 2017. 4 See also Chadha, Lim, Kane and Rowland 2020. 5­ ­Foucault—​­better known in Classics than either Fanon or ­Wynter—​­is of course not irrelevant here, but a clear distinction between his conception of biopouvoir and the formulation of biopolitics that Wynter reads in Fanon’s 1952 concept of “­sociogenesis” is drawn by Denise Ferreira da Silva 2015. 6 Wynter made this point most recently in an interview with Bedour Alagraa 2021. See also Wynter 2003 and McKittrick 2015. Wynter’s “­sociogenic principle” adapted from Fanon’s concept of “­sociogenesis” had the explicit aim, she explains, of standing in contrast to “­the genomic principle”—​­see Wynter 2001 and Fanon 1952. 7 See also Santos 2018. 8 On empire and Classics, see for instance Greenwood 2009; Bradley 2010; Goff 2013; Vasunia 2013. 9 The volume won numerous awards including the Washington Post’s “­Best Nonfiction Book of 2010.” 10 This phrase is usually said to have been coined by the activist Carole Hanisch in 1968. See Rosen 2000, 196 and hooks 1984, ­Chapter 4. 11 The points that Hejnol makes here have been anticipated in many ways by Indigenous thinkers, see for instance Kimmerer 2013. 12 For the assertion that the Egyptians were “­Caucasians” see Gliddon 1843, 45. See also Bernasconi 2007 and Saini 2019 on Egyptology and race science. 13 I proposed, in Ward 2019, a n­ on-​­hierarchical alternative in a­ ssemblage-​­thinking. 14 Further, for mycelial networks as an image of relationality see Umachandran 2021 and Berne in Kafai 2021. 15 And this inheritance logic is absolutely not a thing of the past for the ­discipline—​­see Butterfield 2020 for the Greeks and Romans as “­the intellectual inheritance of the modern West”. 16 The Classical tradition is, in this reading, an example of what Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, 9 call an “­invented tradition,” a key purpose of which is the curation of false ­kin-​­relations and “­artificial communities” in order to protect colonial hegemony. 17 See ­García-​­Jurado 2016 for a less ­Anglo-​­centric reading of the idea of tradition. 18 See for instance the Commission for Race and Ethnic Disparities 2021, with Marmot 2021 on the report’s ­inadequacies—​­and Olusoga 2020. 19 See Ward 2021 on this play. 20 There is no published edition of this text. I cite here from the October 2021 performance.

Works Cited Alagraa, Bedour. 2021. “­What Will Be The Cure? A Conversation with Sylvia Wynter,” Offshoot, 7 January 2021. Appiah, Kwame. 2016. “­There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilisation.” The Guardian, 9 November 2016. Bernasconi, Robert. 2007. “­Black Skin, White Skulls: The Nineteenth Century Debate over the Racial Identity of the Ancient Egyptians.” Parallax, 13: 2, 6­ –​­20. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bradley, Mark. 2010. Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brooks, James F. 2001.Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Butler, Shane, ed. 2016. Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Butterfield, David. 2020. “­What Would it Mean to Decolonise the Classics?” The Spectator, 18 July 2020. Chadha, Noor, Bernadette Lim, Madelein Kane and Brenly Rowland. 2020. “­Towards the Abolition of Biological Race in Medicine: Transforming Clinical Education, Research and Practice.” Report by the Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine, https://­www.instituteforhealingandjustice.org/. Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. 2021. The Report, https://­assets.publishing.service.gov. uk/­government/­uploads/­system/­uploads/­attachment_data/­file/­974507/­­20210331_-­​­­_CRED_Report_-­​­­_ FINAL_-​­_Web_Accessible.pdf. Cowan, Leah. 2021. Border Nation: A Story of Migration. London: Pluto Press.

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Marchella Ward Di Maio, Alessandra. 2013. “­The Mediterranean, or Where Africa Does Not Meet Italy.” In The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives, edited by S. Schrader, and D. Winkler, ­41–​­52. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ­El-​­Enany, Nadine. 2020. Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fanon, Franz. 1952. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 2015. “­Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme.” In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKintrick, ­91–​­105. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fertik, Harriet, and Mathias Hanses. 2019. “­Above the Veil: Revisiting the Classicism of W.E.B. Du Bois.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 26: 1­ –​­9. Fisher, Gary. 2017. “­Enoch Powell and the Classics.” Argonauts and Emperors, a blog from the University of Nottingham, https://­blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/­argonautsandemperors/­2017/­11/­22/­­enoch-­​­­powell-​­classics. Galton, Francis. 1909. Essays on Eugenics, Eugenics Education Society. Gan, Elaine, Anna Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, and Nils Bubant. eds. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ­García-​­Jurado, Francisco. 2016. Teoría de la Tradición Classica: Concept, Historia y Méthodos. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Gebrial, Dalia. 2018. “­Rhodes Must Fall: Oxford and Movements for Change.” In Decolonising the University, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, ­19–​­36. London: Pluto Press. Gillborn, David. 2016. “­Softly, Softly: Genetics, Intelligence and the Hidden Racism of the New Geneism.” Journal of Education Policy, 31.4: 3­ 65–​­388. Gillroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso Books. Glissant, Edouard. 1990. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard. Goff, Barbara. 2013. Your Secret Language: Classics in the British Colonies of West Africa. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Grafton, Anthony, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis. 2010. The Classical Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greely, Henry T. 2019. “­CRISPR’d Babies: Human Germline Genome Editing in the He Jiankui Affair.” Journal of Law and the Biosciences, 6.1: 1­ 11–​­183. Greenwood, Emily. 2009. ­Afro-​­Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Güthenke, Constanze. 2020. Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in German Scholarship, ­1770–​­1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hafner, Katie. 2020. “­Once Science Fiction, Gene Editing is Now a Looming Reality.” New York Times, 22 July 2020. Hall, Edith and Fiona Macintosh. 2005. Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre ­1660—​­1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hansard. 1971. Commons Sitting of 8 March 1971, Series 5, Volume 813, non pag. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Haslanger, Sally. 2012. Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique. New York: Oxford University Press. HC Deb (­8 March 1971), Vol. 813, https://­api.parliament.uk/­­historic-​­hansard/­commons/­1971/­mar/­08/ ­­immigration-​­bill. Hejnol, Andreas. 2017. “­Ladders, Trees, Complexity and Other Metaphors in Evolutionary Thinking.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by E. Gan, A. Tsing,, H. Swanson, and N. Bubant, G ­ 87–​­G103. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Highet, Gilbert. 1949. The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Queering Kinship against Genealogy Holmes, Brooke. 2016. “­Cosmopoeisis in the Field of ‘­The Classical’.” In Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, edited by Shane Butler, ­269–​­290. London: Bloomsbury Publishing,. Holmes, Brooke., and Güthenke, Constanze. 2018. “­Hyperinclusivity, Hypercanonicity and the Future of the Field.” In Marginality, Canonicity, Passion, edited by M. Formisano, and C. Shuttleworth Kraus, ­56–​­73. New York: Oxford University Press. hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press. Kafai, Shadya. 2021. Crip Kinship: Disability Justice and Art Activism of Sins Invalid. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Kennedy, Rebecca Futo 2014. Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City. New York: Routledge. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. New York: Penguin. Latour, Bruno. 1996. ‘”On ­Actor-​­network Theory. A Few Clarifications Plus More than a Few Complications.” Soziale Welt, 47: ­369–​­381. Le Vay, Lulu. 2019. Surrogacy and the Reproduction of Normative Family on TV. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lewis, Sophie. 2019. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family. London: Verso Press. Lorde, Audre. 1981. “­The Uses of Anger.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 9.3: 7­ –​­10. Marmot, Michael. 2021. “­The Sewell Report Cited My ­Work—​­Just Not the Parts Highlighting Structural Racism.” The Guardian, 7 April. Martindale, Charles. 1993. Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martindale, Charles, and Richard F. Thomas. 2006. Classics and the Uses of Reception. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Mbembe, Achille. 2018. “­The Idea of a Borderless World.” Africa Is a Country, 8 November 2018, https://­ africasacountry.com/­2018/­11/­­the-­​­­idea-­​­­of-­​­­a-­​­­borderless-​­world. McKittrick, Katherine ed. 2015. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press. McKittrick, Katherine. 2021. Dear Science and Other Stories. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press. Midgley, Mary. 2001. Science and Poetry. New York: Routledge. Milbern, Stacey P. 2019. “­On the Ancestral Plane: Crip Hand Me Downs and the Legacy of Our Movements.” Disability Visibility, https://­disabilityvisibilityproject.com/­2019/­03/­10/­­on-­​­­the-­​­­ancestral-­​­­plane-­​­­crip-­​­­hand-­​­­me­​­­downs-­​­­and-­​­­the-­​­­legacy-­​­­of-­​­­our-​­movements/. Milner, Alfred. 1922. “­Classics and Science.” Nature, 109: ­33–​­35. Morgan, Jennifer L. 2021. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press. Morse, Chuck. 1999. “­Capitalism, Marxism and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with Cedric Robinson.” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, 3.1, non pag. Nisbet, Robin and Donald Russell. 2007. “­The Study of Classical Literature at Oxford, ­1936–​­1988.” In Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning, ­1800—​­2000 edited by Christopher Stray, ­219-​­238. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Olusoga, David. 2020. “­Britain Is Not America. But We Too Are Disfigured by Deep and Pervasive Racism.” The Guardian, 7 June 2020. Paul, Kathleen. 1997. Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Revermann, Martin. 2008. “­Reception Studies of Greek Drama.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 128: ­175–​­178. Roberts, Dorothy E. 2018. “­The Problem with ­Race-​­Based Medicine.” In Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics, edited by, M. Darnovskyand O. K. Obasogie, ­410–​­414. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rosen, Ruth. 2000. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking Books. Saini, Angela. 2019. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2018. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the Global South. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. “­Lose Your Kin.” The New Inquiry, 16 November 2016.

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Marchella Ward Siebers, Tobin. 2006. “­Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Materialism of the Body.” In The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 1­ 73–​­184. New York: Routledge. Silk, Michael, Rosemary Barrow, and Ingo Gildenhard. 2013. The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought. Malden, MA: ­Wiley-​­Blackwell. Smythe, SA. 2018. “­The Black Mediterranean and the Politics of the Imagination.” Middle East Report 286, non pag. Stray, Christopher. ed. 2007. Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning, ­1800—​­2000. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. The Postclassicisms Collective. 2020. Postclassicisms. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Travis, Alan. 2002. “­Ministers Say Law’s Racism Is Defensible.” The Guardian, 1 January 2002. Umachandran, Mathura 2021. “­Carrier Bag Theory of Queer Theory, or Coming to Critique.” Keynote ­address at The Queer and the Classical: Critical Futures, Critical Feelings Conference, 20 February. Vasunia, Phiroze. 2013. The Classics and Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Virdi, Jaipreet. 2020. Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walia, Harsha. 2021. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Ward, Marchella. 2021. “­An Ancient Play of the Moment.” Times Literary Supplement, 29 October. Weston, Kath. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press. Winterer, Caroline. 2004. The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life ­1780—​­1910. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wong, Alice. 2020. “­The Last Disabled Oracle.” Address at The Assembly for the Future, 6 August 2020, https://­bleedonline.net/­program/­­assembly-­​­­for-­​­­the-​­future/­­the-­​­­last-­​­­disabled-​­oracle/. Wynter, Sylvia. 2001. “­Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be Black.” In National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, edited by Antonio G ­ omez-​­Moriana and Mercedes D ­ uran-​­Cogan, ­30–​­66. New York: Routledge. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “­Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/­Power/­Truth/­Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its ­Over-­​­­representation—​­an Argument.” The New Centennial Review, 3.3: ­257–​­237.

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19 QUEER KINSHIP IN ANCIENT LITERATURE Jay Oliver

At the beginning of her 1992 monograph on the Roman family, Suzanne Dixon suggests that the modern meaning of the word “­family” differs according to context and circumstance. In her words: Everybody has personal experience of the family, so it seems almost wilful to take up time defining a word in such common use, but it is not just academic pedantry. Even in everyday situations the meaning varies... This variety does not usually cause difficulty because the situation makes the particular meaning clear, but discussion of ‘­the Roman family’ requires a common reference point. (­Dixon 1992, 1) Dixon’s examples of this variance, however, are restricted to relationships formed by either blood or marriage: children, husbands, parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Any discussion of family in antiquity, as Dixon recognizes, must be based on a solid foundation of what exactly we mean by “­family,” but providing such a definition, 30 years after Dixon’s book, is a fraught matter. The term is no longer ­self-​­evident. In the first quarter of the ­twenty-​­first century, a profusion of familial forms has emerged. New reproductive technologies, increasing cultural acceptance of s­ ame-​­sex relationships, greater visibility of trans/­­non-​­binary, polyamorous, and asexual people, and a movement away from the traditional nuclear family, for sociocultural and economic reasons, are just some of the factors rendering “­family” an increasingly amorphous term. Indeed, recent data suggest less than 20 percent of households in the US conform to the model of the traditional nuclear family, a married couple and their children (­Widiss 2021). A ­self-​­defined family might consist of several friends buying a house together to afford a ­twenty-­​­­first-​­century mortgage; a gay polyamorous triad; a childfree woman and her cats and houseplants; a trans man carrying his husband’s baby; a trio of asexual people raising a child together, and almost anything else you can possibly imagine. Even where these constellations of individuals are not legally recognized as “­families,” they nonetheless experience love and intimacy (­whether romantic or not), at times raise children, and establish mutual financial and/­or emotional support, characteristics associated with “­traditional” families. For queer people, especially, the existence of a relationship with one’s natal family cannot be taken for granted. For many queer people, “­family” is synonymous with rejection and trauma. 273

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-24

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Reactionary rhetoric has for decades derided queer people as a threat to “­the [heterosexual, nuclear] family,” wielding a veiled ideological construction of “­family” to imply that those who live outside its bounds have no families. Similarly, equating “­starting a family” with “­having a child” reduces “­family” to the demands of reproductive futurism.1 It has only been in the past few decades that ­same-​­sex marriage, an institution officially “­allowing” queer people to participate in the most hallowed of k­ inship-​­making practices, has had legal recognition, and such recognition is at any rate restricted to relatively few jurisdictions globally. Many queer people, further, do not desire marriage at all. Rejecting assimilation into heterosexual paradigms and the selective legitimization provided by marriage, they forge a new culture with its own forms of relationality (­Warner 1999). Experiencing forms of connection for which there is no precise cultural vocabulary, they frequently appropriate the terminology of culturally legitimated families to describe these intimacies, drawing upon kin terms like mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister. Queer kinship has emerged as one of the most significant themes in recent queer theory. The concept, like queerness itself, tends to be rather loose and fluid, ranging from the incorporation of LGBTQ people into originally heteronormative institutions like marriage (­or dyadic partnerships more generally) and ­child-​­rearing (­including adoption, IVF, and surrogacy), to a more thoroughgoing, radical redefinition of kinship on the part of queer people, not necessarily dependent upon ­pre-​­existing social institutions. Kath Weston’s classic anthropological study, Families We Choose (­1991), published at a time when s­ tate-​­sanctioned s­ ame-​­sex marriage was far in the future, began to conceptualize family as a matter of choice rather than biological fiat. Pushing well beyond the bounds of what is conventionally called “­family,” queer communities exhibit phenomena such as, to give only a few examples, the support networks formed within ballroom culture, in which queer and trans people of color, unrelated by blood, “­mother” each other in “­houses” against the background of the HIV/­AIDS epidemic (­Arnold and Bailey 2009), “­mother/­daughter” relationships of mentorship among trans sex workers (­Çalışkan 2019), and Sir/­boy bonds within kink communities, where gifts of leather create continuity between generations (­Van Doorn 2016). A vast range of other configurations enable, in addition to sheer survival in the face of social hostility and state violence, extensibility across generations not tied to reproductive futurism, and intimacy with others incapable of accessing either “­traditional” families or the newly “­­gay-​­accepting” homonormative extension of the traditional family, which constitutively excludes those who are “­too queer.”2 Given that variations upon family and kinship have departed the realm of biology so drastically, even to the extent that some jurisdictions legally recognize “­chosen family” in certain contexts (­Widiss 2021), it makes good sense to ­re-​­examine ancient texts with a more flexible conception of family in mind than has previously been available, rather than essentializing or reifying the term. What I intend to do in this chapter is demonstrate some ways in which we might recognize the existence of “­­family-​­like” alternatives to the normative household in ancient literature. In antiquity, households most frequently consisted of those related by blood, marriage, or other forms of legal kinship like adoption, a fact so often taken for granted in secondary scholarship that it is rarely explicitly stated. In fictional literature, however, a repository for collective fantasy, numerous characters emerge who are uninterested in, or cannot access, the conventional ­household-​­forming mechanisms of heterosexual marriage and childbearing. “­Kinship,” very broadly speaking and without getting into the anthropological weeds, is traditionally a way of labeling relationships formed either by blood (­consanguinity) or marriage (­affinity). “­Queer,” in the sense that it is commonly used by queer theorists, refers not exclusively to homoerotic sexual behavior, but a more general divergence from the normative.3 I would define queer kinship in the context of this chapter as the modes of sociality formed by those whose primary emotional bonds 274

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and domestic arrangements exceed the boundaries of affinity, consanguinity, and normative familial configurations. The question that immediately arises is that, if kinship is not circumscribed by affinity and consanguinity, what is it then, and how does it differ from other social bonds? Judith Butler (­2002, ­14–​­15) defines kinship practices as “­those that emerge to address fundamental forms of human dependency, which may include birth, ­child-​­rearing, relations of emotional dependency and support, generational ties, illness, dying, and death.” In the context of this chapter, it is “­dependency and support” which constitutes the core of queer kinship, especially emotional and/­or physical dependency that is necessitated by some kind of rupture from normative familial forms, often occasioned by ­non-​­normative expressions of gender, sexuality, or both. Queer kinship here is usually legible via some combination of the rejection of/­exclusion from normative family structures, the appropriation of kinship terminology to describe relationships not consanguineous or affinal, and the creation of novel forms of sociality, often in exclusively homosocial settings. Although homoerotic desire will play a considerable part in my discussion, another cause of rupture is rejection of heterosexual bonds (­ often expressed, in the absence of a “­homosexual/­heterosexual” dichotomy, as a rejection of men, women, or marriage). These two impulses, homoerotic desire and the rejection of heterosexual marriage, should not be conflated. Regardless of what someone did with their genitals and with whom, the rejection of marriage remained potentially problematic in G ­ reco-​­Roman culture. The Augustan marriage legislation punished the unmarried by restricting their right to inherit, barring them from certain public festivals, and increasing their taxation. Although the compulsion to marry is strongest for women, men who had no interest in sex with women, or no interest in sex at all, were frequently viewed as at least eccentric, or even perverse.4 To give only one example, the myth of Hippolytus features a male devotee of Artemis who repudiates sex and women altogether. Aphrodite spurned would rather Hippolytus die than refuse sex, in a violent manifestation of “­compulsory sexuality.”5 The avoidance of sex, what we might now label asexuality, is figured as a kind of queerness, barring Hippolytus from a viable life. “­Queerness,” a suppler hermeneutic than “­homosexuality,” addresses a range of individuals expelled from normative social structures for a range of reasons broadly related to gender and sexuality. The examination of primary sources that follows is divided into three parts. Firstly, I discuss Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans 5 as an illustrative instance of queer family formation, in which the protagonists adopt the familiar institution of marriage to structure ­non-​­normative sexual practices and gendered embodiments. Secondly, I address two disparate textual contexts in which the language of siblinghood is used to refer to n­ on-​­consanguineous relationships. The brothers are the protagonists of Petronius’ Satyrica, and the sisters are the huntresses and warriors associated with Diana. These two groups share a lack of interest in marriage, childbearing, and the formation of domestic households, elevating the significance of their appropriation of sibling terminology beyond its standard metaphorical usages. Finally, I examine the sociality of one economically and socially marginalized group in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the bandits, who form a homosocial criminal subculture in place of the normative family. My discussion of all these sources is selective and provisional, designed to provoke questions rather than provide final answers. The framework of queer kinship is flexible and might be applied to a range of other sources. In general, I am concerned with two related and not entirely separable phenomena: the use of kinship terms to define explicitly homoerotic relationships (­Lucian, Petronius), and the creation of alternative family structures, not affinal or consanguineous, implicating a series of homosocial relationships within a specific community that may or may not be interpreted as homoerotic (­the bandits and the huntresses). 275

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The texts I discuss are fictional, and most are “­comic/­satirical” in tone and literary texture, the Roman novels in particular creating uncanny refractions of imperial Rome in which social relations are turned upside down. We are often told we are supposed to laugh at these characters and summarily dismiss them as inferior failures (­Conte 1996, for Petronius). But I am not especially concerned here with the authors’ intentions. Privileging the perspective of the characters themselves, I read between the lines for imaginative forays into queer kinship structures. These are not the voices of real people, but demonstrations of the ways in which elite authors, casting hegemonic masculinity and conventional femininity aside for a moment, create marginal characters who live differently. It is for us to speculate whether readers of these texts, too, might have glimpsed another, queerer way of life.

Husband and Wife My first example of queer kinship is the relationship between Megillus and Demonassa in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans 5. One of the protagonists, an individual assigned female at birth, publicly presents as a woman named Megilla, performing femininity with the aid of a wig, but in private he lives as a man named Megillus. He cohabits with Demonassa, whom he calls his wife. The dialogue relates a sexual encounter Megillus and Demonassa have with Leaena, a naive hetaera (­courtesan), who, in telling the story to another hetaera, Clonarion, reveals that she cannot comprehend the idea of a man who does not have a penis. Megillus, rejecting Leaena’s consecutive hypotheses, patiently explains that he is not a c­ ross-​­dressed man, an individual with both sets of genitalia, or a victim of ­divinely-​­enacted sex change, but someone who, although “­born like the rest of you women,” has the “­mind and the desires and everything else of a man” (­5.4). He persuades Leaena to have sex with him, claiming he has a substitute for a penis; however, Leaena refuses to divulge the details, since they are “­shameful” (­a judgment on the part of the character, not necessarily the author). Frequently scholars refer to the character as “­Megilla/­Megillus” or just “­Megilla,” using she/­her pronouns, despite the character’s exhortation to “­not make a woman” out of him (­5.3). For Leaena as for some contemporary scholars, the unassailable “­truth” of Megillus lies in his anatomy. However, in modern terms, Megillus is unequivocally not a butch lesbian, but a trans man.6 That there is something about him that exceeds “­lesbianism” is suggested by the dialogue itself. Clonarion cites the hetaeristriae of Lesbos,7 who are “­unwilling to take it from men, but have sex with women, as though they themselves were men” (­5.2). Leaena responds that Megillus’ situation is “­something like that” (­5.2): Megillus, to her mind, has “­something” in common with a masculine woman, but cannot be equated with one. He has succeeded in decoupling sex and gender, several centuries before his time. Although his body resembles a woman’s, his mind, he unambiguously states, is male. Megillus represents a mode of gendered embodiment for which there is no precise category in antiquity; Leaena struggles to define him, citing every variety of ­gender-​­crossing she is aware of, but all these approximations fall short. In scholarly discussions of the dialogue, Megillus’ marriage to Demonassa is often treated as somehow derivative or inauthentic.8 Megillus could never have made Demonassa his legal wife. But this does not mean that his marriage is any less authentic than a legally sanctioned marriage. For time immemorial before the (­still limited and precarious) legalization of s­ ame-​­sex marriage, queer couples referred to each other as spouses, performing commitment ceremonies unrecognized by the state (­Hull 2006). To the spouses thus married, their marriage is as real as any other. Demonassa is not Megillus’ “­wife.” She is simply his wife, the characters having agreed to an informal creation of kinship. Marriage is traditionally a vehicle for the production of legitimate 276

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children.9 By Lucian’s time, however, the discourse of marriage had become increasingly romanticized, frequently associated with love and commitment rather than simply political alliance or citizen production.10 It is apparently this kind of love, commitment, and mutual interdependence that Megillus and Demonassa take from the concept of marriage. It is only privately with Demonassa that Megillus finds the safety to present and refer to himself as male. Megillus and Demonassa borrow the language of marriage, but they resignify it. Traditional marriage is strongly ­gender-​­dichotomized, consisting of an “­active,” penetrating, masculine husband, and a “­passive,” penetrated, feminine wife over whom he has sovereignty. In the sexual encounter narrated, the characters do not maintain ­clear-​­cut “­active/­passive” or “­penetrator/­penetrated” roles. Demonassa kisses and gropes Leaena along with Megillus, and bites Leaena’s lip, renouncing any passivity implied by the position of “­wife.” The kisses are described as resembling those given by men (­5.3). It is unclear, anatomically, what Megillus does to Leaena, this lack of clarity being the punchline. It is something that Megillus does as Leaena (­actively) embraces him “­like a man” (­5.4), something that causes him pleasure.11 The dialogue wants us to try to solve the “­riddle,” but simultaneously denies closure. I am relatively unconcerned here with the specifics of what they did in bed. The apparent riddle is a concern for Leaena, Clonarion, and (­some of) the audience, but not for Megillus and Demonassa. Megillus needs no penis to have a good time. The couple has unanchored the terms “­wife” and “­husband” from their dichotomous roots, making marriage their own. Demonassa is a wife, but “­wife” here does not equate to submissiveness, meekness, passivity, or any other conventional wifely virtue. Megillus uses the terminology of young manhood (“­handsome young man,” καλὸν νεανίσκον, 5.3) to describe himself. In the ancient context, such terminology may evoke pederasty (­Boehringer 2015, ­273–​­274),12 and there is one level on which it is possible to playfully read Megillus as the younger pederastic partner of Demonassa, who then takes on the role of erastes (­in addition to the role of ­wife –​ ­unprecedented!). Indeed, both Megillus and Demonassa exhibit “­masculine” behavior: hosting symposia, drinking heavily, hiring hetaerae, living independently without husbands, and acting as sexual aggressors. The couple shows no interest in children, and significantly, their marriage is not a monogamous one. Although in a traditional ­Greco-​­Roman marriage female fidelity is emphasized far more than male fidelity, Megillus and Demonassa participate equally in extramarital sexual activity of a type very familiar in antiquity, a man having sex with a courtesan at a symposium. It is unclear, though, whether they engage in ­full-​­scale relationships with others outside the marriage, or simply enjoy extramarital group sex. The text suggests that Megillus and Leaena have an ongoing relationship (­Boehringer 2015, ­262–​­263), although Leaena is cagey on the matter. Insofar as there is an urge to speculate past the edges of what is specifically narrated in the text, perhaps Demonassa and Megillus’ marriage is a more fruitful site for speculation than anatomical details. In this context as elsewhere, focusing on the relational context within which sexual acts are performed rather than just the sexual acts themselves results in new angles of analysis.

Brothers and Sisters While Megillus and Demonassa use the language of marriage (­affinity) to structure their sociality, other characters in ancient texts use instead the terminology of siblinghood (­consanguinity). I proceed now to discuss two instances of the use of this terminology. The most overt can be found in Petronius’ Satyrica, in which the word “­brother,” Latin frater, is retooled to describe unconventional homoerotic relationships among men. A more subtle use of sibling terminology is evident in sources featuring huntresses and warrior companions of Diana. The huntresses are not explicitly 277

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described as having erotic relationships with each other, although this is certainly one possible interpretation (­Oliver 2015). Regardless of the presence or absence of sexual relationships, however, these women undertake a dramatic rejection of the protocols of femininity and a marked embrace of homosociality. I have extensively discussed the queer sociality of Petronius’ protagonists elsewhere (­Oliver 2022); I will not reproduce that argument in full here, but simply delineate its outlines. In place of conjugal relationships and reproductive households, Petronius’ slackers wander aimlessly, driven by poverty and gossip, reformulating normative sociality. They fail by all the metrics of hegemonic Roman masculinity: they do not marry or reproduce; they are insufficiently invested in maintaining the penetrative role at all costs; they engage in sex work; their homoerotic relationships frequently cannot be fully incorporated into the pederastic paradigm with its restrictions regarding age, sexual role, and social status, and so on. Instead of an endpoint, however, failure becomes a beginning and an opportunity.13 Their itinerant lifestyle necessitates the forging of bonds of dependence that are intermittently sexual; in particular, Encolpius and Ascyltos are men of a similar age who have some sexual past (­Satyrica 9), but end up ­co-​­existing as something between erotic rivals and a quarreling married couple. Giton flirts with both in turn, as well as almost anyone else he comes across. Rather than faithful, enduring couples in the mold of the Greek novel, we have a series of shifting ­male-​­male relationships, all involving some degree of sexualization. Sexual fidelity is a rhetorical tool; nobody seems committed to it in any serious way. Nonetheless, the protagonists require comradeship in order to survive in a hostile world, and collectively execute a series of p­ etty-​­criminal and parasitic schemes with varying degrees of success. The word “­brother,” used in the text so frequently and at such pivotal points that is almost impossible to overlook, 14 comes to name a kind of relationship that falls outside the normative canons of sexuality, remarkably unconcerned with penetrative roles. Encolpius’ description of his relationship with Giton focuses not on penetration, but on emotional commitment. Encolpius’ poem at Satyrica 79, obliquely describing his sex with Giton, suggests a mutual exchange rather than a scene of dominance and submission (“­we clung to each other, heated, and poured our wandering souls back and forth on our lips”). Brotherhood is (­in the ideal) a relationship of equality, implying the absence of the strict hierarchy central to much Roman discourse on male sexuality. Lacking the cultural vocabulary to describe the kinds of relationships in which they engage, the protagonists appropriate the language of fraternity so consistently that it is clear the term “­brother” is in the process of being redeployed. However, the characters cannot reach agreement on what it connotes. Encolpius consistently describes Giton as his frater; Ascyltos, in turn, calls Encolpius frater, though Encolpius does not reciprocate.15 To Encolpius, frater seems to mean something like “­boyfriend:” it is a loving relationship with a foundation of commitment and fidelity. As he tells it, his relationship with Giton has transmuted into a bond of blood; he goes so far as to attempt to literalize the brother metaphor. At Satyrica 80.6 he states: “­I thought that such ­long-​­lasting intimacy (­vetustissimam consuetudinem) had crossed over into a pledge of blood (­in sanguinis pignus transisse).” To Ascyltos, frater is apparently a sexualized term, but does not necessarily imply exclusivity; he seems to suggest that he and Encolpius, whom he views as his frater, should share Giton. On one memorable occasion, as he beats Encolpius, whom he has pulled out of bed from beside Giton, Ascyltos gloats, “­that’ll teach you to share with your brother” (­Satyrica 11.4). Similarly, Circe, in trying to seduce Encolpius, suggests he “­adopt” a sister as well as a brother, manipulating the “­natural” ­non-​­exclusivity of siblinghood (­one can have multiple siblings, so why not multiple lovers too, if lovers are described in the idiom of siblinghood?). In her words: “­you have a brother (­fratrem)... 278

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but what’s to stop you adopting a sister (­sororem) as well” (­Satyrica 127.1)? Meanwhile, Giton describes Encolpius and Ascyltos as a potential “­Theban pair” (­Satyrica 80.3) of warring brothers as he is in the process of “­choosing a brother” for himself (­i.e., deciding whether to accompany Ascyltos or Encolpius when the two older men “­divorce”). Of course, you cannot choose your blood brother. But you can choose the lover, whether “­brother” or “­sister,” to whom you are devoted in a relationship of dependence. The primary significance of the Satyrica here is to demonstrate the way in which queer kinship is a perpetual work in progress. Lacking the familiar and ­well-​­established definitions that constitute the primary signification of kin terms like “­brother,” the characters initiate a prolonged, contested process of resignification. While Megillus and Demonassa redefine marriage in a way that appears harmonious, Petronius’ protagonists quarrel incessantly about what a frater is now, if it no longer simply means “­a man with the same parent(­s) as you,” and what a relationship with one’s frater should entail. Even though they throw around frater as though its meaning is obvious, this is clearly not the case. Encolpius seeks to ­re-​­reify the term as “­boyfriend,” while Ascyltos and Circe treat it more expansively. We might view queer kinship, then, as a dynamic and fluid process of redefinition, in which the signifier “­brother” is sometimes unanchored from its consanguineous roots, and sometimes floats back to them (­according to Encolpius). Elsewhere, sibling terminology is used to structure the homosociality of unmarried women. Bands of huntresses and female warriors appear with relative frequency in Latin epic poetry (­and elsewhere, but here my focus is Latin epic). The texts dwell upon their rejection of conventional femininity, legible in their appearance, sociality, and chosen pursuits (­primarily hunting and warfare). They refuse domestic labor: repeatedly we are told that these women reject weaving, a persistent metonymy for feminine domestic labor.16 Some Amazons and huntresses have sex with men, whether consensual or coerced, and sometimes even marry, though almost always against their will. Most of these wild huntresses, however, reject marriage and conventional forms of motherhood; the narratives dwell on their “­virginal” status, signifying an unwillingness to submit to the subjection of marriage. Like Megillus and Demonassa, Diana’s huntresses renounce normative kinship structures, according to which a woman must serve as a token to solidify male alliances and provide progeny. In place of marriage, they cultivate alternative forms of kinship, centered around the exclusion of men and the embrace of homosocial companionship. Unlike Megillus and Demonassa, they form entire communities, grouping together against a textual world that perpetually threatens male violence (­much of which savors of corrective rape, punishing a deviation from feminine norms). As I have argued elsewhere (­Oliver 2015), scholarship on female homoeroticism in antiquity has frequently taken a rather narrow view of s­ ame-​­sex intimacy, focusing on explicit representations of ­female-​­female sex rather than more ambiguous manifestations of homosocial companionship. Intimacy between women was not often a topic of great interest to ancient authors. Given this fact, we must approach the sources cautiously and obliquely. While Petronius’ novel notoriously elevates male homoeroticism to a place of central prominence, the relationships among huntresses gravitate to the margins of the texts in which they feature. It is a common mythical trope that women renounce marriage and men in order to join Diana. It seems that there is never a lack of women eager to do so. Diana’s bands are perpetually replenished, although it is infrequent that it is related exactly how a woman initially joins the band. In some cases, however, “­fleeing to Diana” is a pointed action a wife takes when disillusioned by her husband. Consider Procris. In Ovid’s version, after her husband Cephalus attempted to test her fidelity, Procris immediately, almost on reflex, fled to become a companion of Diana, leading an undomesticated life in the woods. According to Cephalus: “­Deeply hurt by me, and hating the 279

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whole race of men (­genus omne… virorum), she wandered the mountains, following the ways of Diana” (­Metamorphoses 7.­745–​­746). For a wife disgruntled with her husband, the intuitive choice is Diana. Diana’s companionship is represented here as the structural opposition to heterosexual marriage, and indeed the entire “­race of men.” In the aftermath of fleeing marriage, a new community must be created. Huntresses form ­quasi-​­Amazonian sisterhoods, appropriating kinship terminology. The term “­sister,” soror in Latin, is used to describe homosocial bonds among huntresses (­Aeneid 11.823; Punica 2.120). A bond of friendship and sodality, rooted in emotional investment and interdependence, is rewritten as a kinship relationship. Women in antiquity were defined primarily in relation to their parents, husbands or lovers, and children. The cultural lexicon, then, does not have a precise word for this kind of homosocial relationality (­just as it cannot precisely encompass Megillus or the Petronian fratres); the kin term “­sister” is the closest the characters can get. Huntress homosociality is lightly legible in the case of Vergil’s Camilla, perhaps the most famous ­Amazon-​­huntress composite in ancient literature. Although Camilla is introduced in book 7 of the Aeneid, it is not until book 11 that we get an account of the circumstances under which she became a warrior and huntress. This account comes from Diana herself, as she instructs Opis to take vengeance on anyone who harms Camilla. As Diana describes her own relationship with Camilla: “­this is not a new love (­amor) that has come upon Diana, nor does it stir her heart with a sudden sweetness” (­11.­537–​­538). The language here is ­non-​­specific and ambiguous, harboring the potential for a homoerotic reading. Whatever the nature of this love, Diana expresses a deep investment in Camilla and a longstanding affection for her. Camilla’s tyrant father, Diana explains, took his infant daughter with him into exile. We are not told what happened to Camilla’s mother Casmilla; she leaves only a name. The ostracism of the father and the erasure of the mother leads to the daughter’s upbringing under the protection of Diana, who becomes another parent, or perhaps even a kind of spouse. Camilla declines a profusion of marriage prospects, “­content with Diana alone” (­11.581). “­Diana” is a symbol standing in direct opposition to men and marriage, almost a metaphor for a certain kind of female homosociality. Camilla surrounds herself with a group of female comrades, “­servants in peace and war” (­11.457), and Vergil explicitly compares the entire regiment to Amazons (­11.­659–​­660). Camilla herself is analogized to the Amazon queens Hippolyte and Penthesilea (­11.­661–​­662). Comparisons to Amazons connote an entire society formed upon the absence of men. Larina is labeled a “­maiden” (­virgo, 11.654), implying probably that others are too, but Vergil never specifies exactly how Camilla formed her troop. Her parents have vanished from the narrative, and she has no interest in marriage; in place of these conventional kin relationships, Camilla has handpicked other women like herself. Camilla, extraordinary as she is, is not a ­one-​­off anomaly. Her lifestyle clearly has wider appeal. Upon Camilla’s death, we are given hints toward another significant relationship in her life. Struck by a fatal blow, she summons Acca, who is described as “­loyal to Camilla beyond all the others, sole sharer of her cares” (­11.­821–​­822). She addresses Acca as soror, “­sister” (­11.823). It is not uncommon for Roman women to address their female friends as “­sister,” or for men to address their male friends as “­brother” (­Williams 2012, ­156–​­173), but for a woman who lacks other familial relationships, the term takes on particular force as a resignification of kinship terminology. While Camilla’s ­sister-­​­­by-​­choice Acca echoes Dido’s ­sister-­​­­by-​­blood Anna, Camilla apparently has no blood siblings, and no interest in handsome yet perfidious foreigners, although plenty of potential ­mothers-­​­­in-​­law yearn for her to marry their sons (­11.­581–​­582; to domesticate her, or to embrace her appealing wildness?). There is the implication of exclusivity in their relationship

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(“­beyond all others”); is Acca Camilla’s soror in the same way Giton is Encolpius’ frater? How did they meet? Did Acca also dwell in the woods, a fellow Amazon huntress? The details of the network of homosocial intimacies undergirding the huntress band are not divulged directly in the text. We can nonetheless perceive their outlines faintly, a tantalizing glimmer just outside the boundaries of the text itself. There is something reproductive about the huntress lifestyle, if only by virtue of its persistence across a plethora of literary texts as a perpetual object of fascination. The texts seem to recognize an enduring impulse on the part of women to evade marriage and live free from patriarchal control, even as those same texts simultaneously seek to quash this impulse by filling the woods with predators.

An Enterprising Leader in Your Pleasures A final context in which one might queer familial formulation is the sociality of marginalized, subcultural groups. I will discuss one instance from the Roman novel, but marginalized groups of various kinds abound elsewhere as well.17 Petronius’ scholastici do form a kind of “­group,” but it is small, fluctuating, and quarrelsome, not united on the basis of shared tenets. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the tale of a man, Lucius, turned into an ass, in which guise he wanders the lawless outskirts of the Roman empire, features several larger, more cohesive groups, consisting of individuals drawn together out of some commitment to a cause. One of these groups, the priest(­esse)­s of the Syrian Goddess or the galli, who perform femininity in a mendicant spectacle and refer to themselves in feminine terms, has recently come under scrutiny as a potential source of alternative, indeed queer, kinship. In the words of Christian Blood, they are a “­­self-​­selecting group of gender nonconformists and sexual minorities who have entered into an alternate kinship system, in part to deal with limited economic opportunities” (­Blood 2015, expanded 2019). Blood further suggests that at least some of the galli are better read as trans women than as effeminate men. Given that the galli are receiving intensified attention in recent scholarship, I will not discuss them in detail. Instead, I will address another criminal subculture in the Metamorphoses, namely the bandits, with whom the ass spends a large portion of books ­4–​­7. Neither the bandits nor the galli marry or procreate: poverty, inclination, or both have driven them from the position of paterfamilias. Apuleius’ bandits, like the huntresses and scholastici, live an itinerant existence. Both the galli and the bandits are reliant upon each other for survival and sustenance, live together in a ­household-​­like arrangement, and use i­n-​­group terminology to refer to each other and the mission of their group. The bandits are not as visibly ­gender-​­deviant as the galli, but nonetheless, they demur from marriage, avoid the company of women, and function narratively as a block to reproductive futurism. Additionally, certain details in the text hint at a homoerotic component to their association. Queer kinship in this case is demonstrated less by the appropriation and resignification of kin terminology (­although such appropriation does occur) than by the conscious way in which the bandits, like the galli, form familial alternatives out of a combination of choice and compulsion. The bandits enter Apuleius’ novel as a blocking mechanism for the idealized heterosexual couple, Charite and Tlepolemus, after they capture Charite for ransom. In a miniature Greek novel, the lovers face bandits on the way to marriage. The Greek novel tropes futurity in the form of the newly married aristocratic couple and their progeny. Apuleius’ novel similarly foregrounds the ­future-​ ­making potential of Charite and Tlepolemos’ marriage. Charite tells the old woman, the bandits’ sole slave, that she was literally torn from her mother’s arms amidst wedding preparations, just at

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the moment when her mother was “­planting hope of future children (­spem futuram liberorum) with anxious prayers” (­4.26). The death of the bandits, symbols of resistance to the normative family, ought to guarantee a utopian future for Charite and Tlepolemos. But the realization of the normative familial unit is impossible in Apuleius’ novel. Following the machinations of Thrasyllus, a rival for Charite, both Charite and Tlepolemos end up dead, their future shattered. Reproductive futurism dies along with the young lovers. Within their m ­ ock-​­heroic tales, the bandits make constant reference to virtus.18 The ­culturally-​ ­freighted word literally means “­manliness,” but its primary referent is corporeal or mental excellence. However, the hypermasculine gender performance of the bandits is not totally watertight. The disguised Tlepolemus, who, in his scheme to rescue his fiancée Charite, succeeds spectacularly in embodying the ideal bandit, creates an archetype, “­Haemus,” which reflects on the whole troop. Since his performance gains nothing but approval, the phantasmic “­perfect leader” he invents is telling for bandit sociality more generally, including the role of pleasure in the bandit lifestyle. Haemus’ fictionalized tale highlights the appeal of banditry to those of limited economic means. They tell Charite they are “­men whom the constraint of poverty has driven into this profession” (­4.23). Later, the recruitment of Haemus figures banditry as a means of dealing with the disempowerment wrought by poverty. Many who live in poverty, one of the bandits insists, “­would renounce a lowly and servile life and prefer to change their profession for the equivalent of a tyrant’s power” (­7.8). Masculine ­re-​­empowerment supersedes mendicant passivity. The bandit has persuaded Haemus “­instead of stretching out his strong hand to beg for pennies, to exercise it scooping up gold” (­7.8). Banditry enables a man to preserve his masculinity in abject circumstances, utilizing physical strength. Poverty marginalizes, but simultaneously forges collectives. Individual beggars are swept up into the bandit enterprise as a matter of both survival and masculine pride. Economic disempowerment necessitates alternative familial structures. Unable to head a household, a beggar becomes a bandit instead. The story Haemus tells about his upbringing reveals a perversion of kinship. Haemus was, he says, “­nursed on human blood and raised among the squadrons of our troop as heir and rival to my father’s valour” (­7.5). Mother’s milk is effaced; the bestial boy was nursed on blood, and human blood at that. Breast milk, a substance capable of creating legitimate kinship in Roman cultural discourse (­Bradley 1991, ­149–​­154), is replaced by human blood in a rewriting of the act of nursing. For Haemus, banditry is not only a matter of economic necessity, but a birthright. He is heir not to his father’s property and bloodline, but to his literal bloodletting, rewritten as virtus. Instead of children, Haemus’ progeny is the perpetuation of banditry. Significant here is the fact that the ­mercy-​­killing of Lamachus is described as “­parricide” (­parricidium, 4.11). Lamachus is a superior officer, but he is also a father figure, taking the same place in the lives of the young bandits as Haemus’ father Theron as a model of virtus, in accordance with the traditional Roman discourse of exemplarity and imitation of the father. The motherless transmission of the bandit creed suggests that there is a more thoroughgoing rejection of women going on here. Although ­hyper-​­invested in virtus, the bandits seem remarkably unconcerned with the sexual aspects of hegemonic masculinity. Their disposition is in marked contrast to the Greek novel, where bandits are characteristically enslaved by their appetites for food, drink, sex, and loot (­Hopwood 1998). Given the propensity of novelistic bandits toward violent lust, it is noteworthy that Apuleius’ bandits appear to live an almost asexual life. Their boundless gustatory appetites seem unaccompanied by boundless sexual appetites. They assure Charite that they will not harm her, an assurance that the ass labels “­blathering” (­4.24); ironically, however, the bandits appear to

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be true to their word, at least insofar as they pose no threat to her chastity. Lucius is scandalized by Charite’s desire for the disguised Tlepolemus, but does not mention any of the other bandits attempting to sexually assault her. There is no indication, either, that the bandits sexually assault the old woman who meets all their other physical needs. The old woman seems to represent on some level the displaced mother, and this mother figure is treated with nothing but contempt, despite her devotion to the troop. The bandits’ attitude toward women combines indifference and brutal misogyny. The figure of the young Haemus, however, raises the specter of homoeroticism within the bandit troop. Although buff, he is young enough that “­a beard was just beginning to overspread his cheeks” (­7.5). In his invented narrative, he describes himself as androgynous enough to pass easily as a woman: “­my beardless cheeks glistened with the smoothness of boyhood” (­7.8). The ideal object of pederastic desire is a boy who has entered puberty, marked by the appearance of down on the cheeks, but has not yet reached maturity, signified by the growth of a full beard. Haemus plays up his own boyish beauty. He specifically chooses to invent a story of transvestism, emphasizing his ability to pass as a woman. Haemus’ transvestism, however, poses no threat to the bandits’ conception of him as a perfect embodiment of virtus. Banditry requires one to do what one must, to play an animal, a ghost, or even a woman. However, Tlepolemus continues to play the female part after his tale is done. He refers to his monetary gift to the bandits as a sportula, a donation, or rather, he corrects himself, his dowry (­sportulam, immo vero dotem, 7.8). He comes as a bride to all these vigorous young men, a doublet of his actual fiancée Charite. Soon after, he offers himself up as “­an enterprising leader not only in your campaigns and raids, but in your pleasures (­voluptatum) as well” (­7.11). Haemus proceeds to play the part of a slave, sweeping, setting the table, cooking, and serving both meat and wine. Prior to his arrival, the old woman is the only one who cooks for and serves the bandits. Haemus has taken over her role, undertaking another performance, and a feminine, servile one at that. Eating and drinking are certainly “­pleasures,” but, given that Haemus has just offered himself up as essentially a wife to the bandits, sexual pleasure is equally a possible referent of the term voluptas. With the invocation of voluptas, he subtly tempts the bandits with his sexual allure. What is also particularly queer about the bandits is their failure to grow up. Marriage is one important means of transition to fully mature manhood. The bandits refuse this transition. Queerness is often troped as a space of arrested development. Kathryn Bond Stockton formulates the tortuous process of children’s deferred “­growth” toward adulthood as “­growing sideways,” where “­growing up” signifies a linear movement toward the milestones of heteronormativity and reproductive futurism (­Stockton 2009). In this sense, there is something “­childish” about those who refuse such milestones. Instead of individual households of their own, the bandits unite in one collective household, existing permanently in a suspended temporality, stuck between boy and man. Their ephebic withdrawal from society and flight into the mountains defers indefinitely their reintegration and maturation. The only woman in their lives is a superannuated slave, whom they treat with none of the respect owed to a parent. Their leaders are simultaneously father figures and youths like themselves; generational gaps are scrambled. Homosocial comradeship is “­stained” by the faint temptation of homoeroticism. Whether uninterested in sex with women or interested in sex with each other, or both, the bandits have left the domestic household behind, an obsolete vestige of a world that cannot incorporate them except on its outskirts. Poverty has forced them together, like Petronius’ scholastici, but it is the new kinship they forge that keeps them together. But again, their lives are not livable. In a single stroke, they are summarily executed when the novel no longer needs them.

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The readings of primary sources in this chapter, as I have mentioned, are intended to constitute initial forays into the worlds of those who demur from standard k­ inship-​­making mechanisms. I hope to have demonstrated that a flexible interpretation of the concept of queer kinship, accompanied by an awareness of historical context, has productive applications for antiquity. Although the scholarship on ancient sexuality has done an admirable job of categorizing how various sexual acts were perceived in antiquity, there has been less interest in the n­ on-​­normative sociality in which ­non-​­normative sexual acts are often embedded. Queer kinship, at any rate, does not require n­ on-​­normative sexual acts, or any sexual acts at all; all that is needed is a rejection of the normative household, and a willingness to look beyond unexamined reifications of what a family is.

Suggestions for Further Reading Queer kinship is something of a cause célèbre in queer theory, and references to it can be found in a range of divergent ­queer-​­theoretical texts. For a solid overview of kinship theory in relation to queer theory, with ample citations, see Freeman (­2007). The theory surrounding queer kinship has not often been applied to classical literature, but Broder’s PhD dissertation (­2010) fruitfully reads Juvenal’s ninth satire from the perspective of queer kinship. Taylor’s treatment of “­homosexual subcultures” at Rome (­Taylor 1997) is a kind of precursor to queer kinship, despite his (­to some) problematic reification of “­homosexuality.”

Notes 1 Reproductive futurism” is queer theorist Lee Edelman’s term for an ideology that posits reproduction and the figure of the Child (­not real children, who are often not an object of concern once born) as constituting the only viable manifestation of futurity. If there is no baby, there is no future. See Edelman 2004. 2 The classic text for homonormativity and neoliberalism is Duggan 2003. 3 Representative is the definition of Halperin 1995, 62: Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘­Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality v­ is-­​­­à-​­vis the normative. 4 For an account, based on ­Ps-​­Lucian’s Erotes, of the way in which men who exclusively desire either women or men are viewed as eccentric, see Halperin 2002, 8­ 1–​­103. 5 Euripides’ Hippolytus makes Aphrodite’s agency explicit by having her appear in the prologue. For the term “­compulsory sexuality,” which has recently gained popularity in the literature on asexuality, see Gupta 2015. 6 Although there is historical overlap between butch and transmasculine identities, few lesbians would claim to be “­all man.” I do not intend, in this context, to address the question of how to historicize the category “­transgender;” it is a highly complex issue I cannot do justice to here. I am not implying that trans identity exists in antiquity in the same way it does today, but it seems commonsensical that, whenever there is any kind of binary, there will be individuals who do not fit neatly within it, or who fit best in the “­opposite” category. Some sources invoke “­gender dysphoria” or “­transgenderism” in relation to Megillus (­e.g., Bissa 2013, 94), but usually in a rather clinical way (­according to Bissa it is “­a known condition in modern psychology”). Megillus, being a fictional character, has no skin in the game, but the constant casual misgendering of a character like Megillus suggests a lack of belief, even if not fully conscious, in the legitimacy of trans identity. See Maisel 2019. Perhaps gender euphoria is a better prism for Megillus than dysphoria; his male identity clearly brings him pleasure. Within the trans community there has been a movement away from medicalized definitions of trans identity, which tend to focus on intense distress as a necessary criterion for trans existence. Insofar as one is concerned with “­anachronism,” at any rate, reading ancient characters in light of the DSM is certainly anachronistic.

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Queer Kinship in Ancient Literature 7 Nobody (­perhaps including Lucian himself) knows exactly what hetaeristriae are, the term being used only here and in Plato’s Symposium. For discussion, see Blondell and Boehringer 2014. 8 Blondell and Boehringer 2014, for example, refer to Megillus and Demonassa’s marriage as a “­marriage,” in scare quotes. I do not suggest that these scholars necessarily intend to denigrate the legitimacy of Megillus’ marriage, but the quotation marks do seem to imply the marriage is not quite “­real.” 9 The legal formula is liberorum quaerundorum causa (“­for the sake of producing children”). See Treggiari 1991, 8 for citations. 10 The ancient novel reveals particularly clearly this shift in the ideology of marriage. See, for instance, Konstan 1993. 11 The usual (­and obvious) interpretation is that the penis substitute is a dildo; see Boehringer 2015, ­270–​­273. 12 Boehringer suggests that the term neaniskos alone is enough to invoke the pederastic discourse, given that young men’s feminine beauty is so prevalent in the discourse. That Megillus describes himself as a “­young man” perhaps reflects the fact that, although he views himself as male, he cannot develop the secondary sex characteristics of a mature man (­unlike modern trans men with access to testosterone). In modern terms, neaniskos becomes here a kind of transmasculine identity (­compare the modern term boi). 13 On the queer productivity of failure, see Halberstam 2011. 14 Uses of frater in the Satyrica, referring to Ascyltos, Encolpius, and Giton: 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.10, 10.7, 11.1, 11.2, 11.4, 13.3, 24.6, 25.7, 79.9, 80.6 (­twice), 91.2, 97.6, 101.8, 101.9, 127.2, 127.4, 127.8, 129.1 (­twice), 131.1, 133.1. 15 Encolpius calls Giton frater at Satyrica 9.2, 9.3, 11.2, 24.5, 25.7, 79.9, 97.6, 127.4, 129.1, 133.1. He never calls Ascyltos frater in the extant text. Ascyltos calls Encolpius frater at Satyrica 9.10, 11.1, 11.4, 13.3. 16 See, for example, Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.­411–​­412 (­Callisto), Vergil, Aeneid 7.­805–​­806 (­Camilla), Silius Italicus, Punica 2.­68–​­84 (­Asbyte). 17 One possible area of exploration here is the bands of conspirators comprised of socially marginalized individuals, excoriated in historiography for the danger they supposedly pose to, among other things, the normative family and sexual morality. See, for instance, Cicero, In Catilinam 2.7 (­Catiline’s followers include parricides, those who squander their patrimonies, the sexually profligate, etc); Livy 39.13 (­there are so many supposedly sexually perverse Bacchanalian conspirators that they almost constitute a “­second state”). These accounts betray deep anxieties about the socially marginalized banding together and overthrowing “­us.” 18 Uses of virtus in the bandit episode: 4.8 (­twice), 4.10, 4.11, 4.12, 4.20, 7.5 (­twice), 7.8.

Works Cited Arnold, Emily A., and Marlon M. Bailey. 2009. “­Constructing Home and Family: How the Ballroom Community Supports African American GLBTQ Youth in the Face of HIV/­AIDS.” Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services 21 (­­2–​­3): ­171–​­188. Bissa, Errietta M. A. 2013. “­Man, Woman or Myth? ­Gender-​­Bending in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans.” Materiali e Discussioni per L’analisi Dei Testi Classici 70: ­79–​­100. Blondell, Ruby, and Sandra Boehringer. 2014. “­Revenge of the Hetairistria: The Reception of Plato’s Symposium in Lucian’s Fifth Dialogue of the Courtesans.” Arethusa 47 (­2): ­231–​­264. Blood, H. Christian. 2015. “­Apuleius’s Book of ­Trans-​­formations.” Eidolon. https://­eidolon.pub/­­apuleius-­​­­s-­​­ ­book-­​­­of-­​­­trans-­​­­formations-​­b98140d11482 —​­—​­—​­. 2019. “­Sed Illae Puellae: Transgender Studies and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass.” Helios 46: ­163–​­188. Boehringer, Sandra. 2015. “­The Illusion of Sexual Identity in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans 5.” In Ancient Sex: New Essays, edited by Ruby Blondell and Kirk Ormand, ­253–​­284. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Bradley, Keith. 1991. Discovering the Roman Family: Studies in Roman Social History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broder, Michael. 2010. Mensura Incognita: Queer Kinship, Camp Aesthetics, and Juvenal’s Ninth Satire. PhD Dissertation, City University of New York. Butler, Judith. 2002. “­Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences 13 (­1): 1­ 4–​­44. Çalışkan, Dilara. 2019. “­Queer Postmemory.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 26 (­3): ­261–​­273. Conte, Gian Biagio. 1996. The Hidden Author: An Interpretation of Petronius’ Satyricon. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Jay Oliver Dixon, Suzanne. 1992. The Roman Family. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Duggan, Lisa. 2003. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2007. “­Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory.” In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George Haggerty and Molly McGarry, ­293–​­314. New York: Wiley. Gupta, Kristina. 2015. “­Compulsory Sexuality: Evaluating an Emerging Concept,” Signs 41 (­1): ­131–​­154. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halperin, David M. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2002. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hopwood, Keith. 1998. “­All That May Become a Man: The Bandit in the Ancient Novel.” In When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power, and Identity in Classical Antiquity, edited by Lin Foxhall and John Salmon, ­195–​­204. London: Routledge. Hull, Kathleen. 2006. Same Sex Marriage: The Cultural Politics of Love and Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Konstan, David. 1993. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Maisel, L. K. M. 2019. “­Women Are Made, But From What? Modern and Ancient Trans Antagonism.” Eidolon. https://­eidolon.pub/­­women-­​­­are-­​­­made-­​­­but-­​­­from-­​­­what-­​­­modern-­​­­and-­​­­ancient-­​­­trans-­​­­antagonism-​ ­17512e3987ff Oliver, Jay. 2015. “­Oscula Iungit Nec Moderata Satis Nec Sic a Virgine Danda: Ovid’s Callisto Episode, Female Homoeroticism, and the Study of Ancient Sexuality.” AJP 136 (­2): ­281–​­312. —​­—​­—​­. 2022. “­Queer Sociality and Petronian Fraternity.” Ramus 51: ­224–​­240. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Rabun. 1997. “­Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7: ­319–​­371. Treggiari, Susan. 1993. Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Van Doorn, Niels. 2016. “­The Fabric of our Memories: Leather, Kinship, and Queer Material History.” Memory Studies 9 (­1): ­85–​­98. Warner, Michael. 1999. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weston, Kath. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press. Widiss, Deborah A. 2021. “­Chosen Family, Care, and the Workplace.” Yale Law Journal 131. https://­www. yalelawjournal.org/­forum/­­chosen-­​­­family-­​­­care-­​­­and-­​­­the-​­workplace. Williams, Craig A. 2012. Reading Roman Friendship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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20 THE GREATEST GENERATION Golden Age, Spontaneous Generation, and Queer Kinship in Vergil’s Georgics Martin Devecka

This is a chapter about Vergil’s Georgics, and through the Georgics the ancient didactic tradition, and through that the very idea of didacticism, which is where the queerness gets in. Reading the Georgics made me think about didacticism, about teaching, as a form of n­ on-​­heterosexual reproduction, since the work of reproduction is not completed by giving birth: the thing born still needs to be trained into a socius, to be taught what kind of a thing it is in what kind of society, work which didactic poetry arrogates to itself. Didactic poetry reproduces subjects in a way that produces principles of kinship fundamentally different from those engendered by heteronormative family structures. Thinking about this kind of kinship made me look at didactic poetry differently, and it made me reread the Georgics in particular for the forms of reproduction that it, in particular, represented. I saw that the Georgics actually represented a range of different reproductive forms, including plant growth and the spontaneous generation of animals (­including people) that, by way of a kind of lush abundant growth, pushed heteronormative reproductive logics to the margin of the poem. I thought that this might be a feature of farms that didactic poetry happens to highlight because, in a formal way, the kinship patterns generated by spontaneous reproduction happen to resemble those resulting from didactic poetry (­Fradenburg and Freccero 1995, 3­ 72–​­374). One way of looking at farming is as a way of recruiting nonhuman resources for the reproduction of human family units (­Goody 1976, ­1–​­8). Another, which has come into prominence as more of us feel unable to enforce our own insulation from a “­nature” that surrounds us, would see farms as assemblages of different things reproducing in different ways without anyone, or anything, necessarily being in control (­Scott 2017, ­87–​­90). I think that ancient didactic, and in particular the Georgics, pushes us to adopt the latter of these perspectives. More to the point, it stages an imaginary scene in which plant and animal patterns of reproduction start to entangle with, and influence, the way that humans reproduce. I start by briefly showing how that entanglement arises in Hesiod’s Works and Days, since this was a major source of material and topoi for Vergil’s Ascraean song, the Georgics. As for the Georgics itself, I discuss at greater length how this poem foregrounds forms of queer kinship for which animals and plants serve as exempla. That discussion will commit us to detours into Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Varro’s De Re Rustica, and other landmarks of the Roman didactic tradition. I’ll close by r­ e-​­examining how didactic, by concerning itself with social reproduction, creates kinship. 287

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There will be a coda about desire, with which, as it happens, I also begin.

I Didactic poetry is among other things a technique for forming certain types of subjects, for “­reproducing” a c­ ulture—​­intellectual or o­ therwise—​­to which, whether by birth or by choice, the poet himself has allegiance. I put this metaphorical “­reproducing” in scare quotes here because, as it happens, didactic poetry tends to be concerned with biological reproduction as well, including (­but not limited to) human reproduction. So, from the g­ et-​­go, with Hesiod: ὡραῖος δὲ γυναῖκα τεὸν ποτὶ οἶκον ἄγεσθαι, μήτε τριηκόντων ἐτέων μάλα πόλλ᾽ ἀπολείπων μήτ᾽ ἐπιθεὶς μάλα πολλά: γάμος δέ τοι ὥριος οὗτος: ἡ δὲ γυνὴ τέτορ᾽ ἡβώοι, πέμπτῳ δὲ γαμοῖτο. (­Works and Days ­695–​­698) In due season bring a wife into your house, when you are neither many years short of thirty nor many beyond it: this is your seasonable marriage. As for the woman, she should have four years of ripeness and be married in the fifth. (­trans. West) The promise of the Works and Days is to give us a kind of farmer’s calendar that will enable us to thrive by doing the right things at the right times. Hesiod incorporates his instructions for marriage and reproduction into this framework: here too it is a question of “­seasonality” (­horaios). The grammatical gender of that adjective interpellates a male audience, as of course the whole poem also does. Hesiod treats the desire of that male audience for a female “­partner” as something given in advance, something taken for granted, which the job of didactic is to regulate and restrain for the desiring agent’s own protection. For it is very possible that this desire can “­go wrong” in a way that destroys the desirer: οὐ μὲν γάρ τι γυναικὸς ἀνὴρ ληίζετ᾽ ἄμεινον τῆς ἀγαθῆς, τῆς δ᾽ αὖτε κακῆς οὐ ῥίγιον ἄλλο, δειπνολόχης: ἥτ᾽ ἄνδρα καὶ ἴφθιμόν περ ἐόντα εὕει ἄτερ δαλοῖο καὶ ὠμῷ γήραϊ δῶκεν. (­Works and Days ­702–​­705) A man acquires nothing better than a good wife, and nothing worse than the bad one, the foodskulk, who singes a man without a brand, strong though he be, and consigns him to a premature old age. (­trans. West) Woman exists as it were as a doubled being, two different types of animal hiding beneath the same skin. The bad one is a parasite that cooks her husband even as she hands him over to raw old age. The good woman is a thing, a cipher, seemingly without any character of her own. Man’s desire, says Hesiod, should properly address itself to that emptiness, because it can be taught: παρθενικὴν δὲ γαμεῖν, ὥς κ᾽ ἤθεα κεδνὰ διδάξῃς. (­Works and Days 699) 288

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Marry a virgin, so that you may teach her good ways. (­trans. West) You must marry an inexperienced woman, says Hesiod, so that you can teach her to follow certain intimate (­but nonetheless socially imposed) norms of behavior (­ethea kedna). Heterosexual intimacy appears here not only as a subject of didaxis on Hesiod’s part, but as the site of didaxis par excellence within the world of the poem. At the origin of the genre, didactic appears committed to reproducing the scene of heterosexual human reproduction. For human beings, at least. But Hesiod is more than aware that not all life reproduces that way. Of special importance in this connection are the plant crops that constitute the basis of life and the source of wealth for Hesiod’s heterosexual farming ­couples—​­the route, in fact, by which the bios or life force that Zeus has hidden underground finds its way into human bellies and sponsors the reproduction of human life (­Vernant 1989, ­36–​­37). A major didactic theme of Works and Days would surely be transmitting techniques for making these crops reproduce, but that then paints a queerer picture of how reproduction might happen. For Hesiod, as for many Greek and Roman writers, plants just come out of the ground; for all that the Earth may be framed as a mother, plants stand outside the norms of sexual reproduction and the kinship patterns they generate (­Totelin 2018). In animals and humans, the ­plant-​­like pattern of birth and growth has come to be called “­spontaneous generation,” a convention I follow here, despite its anachronistic and retrospective character, because I find it useful to have a name for behavior that strikes us as strange, unnatural, and “­unscientific” in humans and animals, but normal and natural (­if from a contemporary standpoint equally “­unscientific”) in plants. The modern relegation of spontaneous generation to the dustbin of outdated concepts corresponds, at its point of origin, to a major conceptual advance in the construction of biology as a field with an object of its own, discrete and immune to invasion from geology or chemistry (­Bartlett and Wong 2020, 6­ –​­7). A further consequence of this conceptual closure, of this constitution of the “­living” as primarily that which sexually reproduces, has been to render population legible as an object of study, political intervention, multiplication, and extermination. Michelle Murphy, recoiling at the harm done to life by forcing it to follow the conceptual model of population, has tasked us instead with studying such ensembles through the lens of “­distributed reproduction,” a method that asks us to pick apart the uniformity of “­population” and find out who reproduces, how, and where (­Murphy 2017, ­143–​­144). I believe that ancient didactic depicts one such “­distributed reproduction” precisely because it represents forms of spontaneous generation that are compatible neither with modern definitions of life nor with the notions of population that follow from those. In that way, the texts under consideration here provide one model for queering life that may be of political use as well as antiquarian interest. Even from an ancient perspective, however, spontaneous generation represents a confusion of forms of life and a transgression of their boundaries. It ­can—​­and in the poems I’ll be discussing, ­should—​­be understood as a kind of infection of animal life by plant life. Under the agricultural episteme that defines the horizons of the Hesiodic tradition, plant life puts its roots in everywhere. Once they get you onto the farm, you can’t get off again. That’s clear from the way that Hesiod, to start with, imagines life before farming. Even here, plants and people are all tangled up. In the golden age, before Zeus ruins everything, people live like ­gods—​­that is, without doing any labor, which, in the Hesiodic context, primarily means agricultural work. The reason they can shirk it is that the ground does the work for them: ἐσθλὰ δὲ πάντα τοῖσιν ἔην: καρπὸν δ᾽ ἔφερε ζείδωρος ἄρουρα 289

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αὐτομάτη πολλόν τε καὶ ἄφθονον: οἳ δ᾽ ἐθελημοὶ ἥσυχοι ἔργ᾽ ἐνέμοντο σὺν ἐσθλοῖσιν πολέεσσιν. (­Works and Days ­116–​­119) All good things were theirs, and the g­ rain-​­giving soil bore its fruits of its own accord, in unstinted plenty, while they at their leisure harvested their fields in contentment and abundance. (­trans. West) The ground “­brings forth” (­though the idiomatic meaning of ἔφερε, “­give birth,” should not be forgotten either) crops in abundance, of its own accord, ungrudgingly. The adjectives are suggestive of a contrast, pointing forward in ­time—​­but backward in the narrative of the ­poem—​­to the moment when Zeus hides the life force (­bios) deep in the Earth so that the growth of crops loses its “­automatic” character and starts to require the input of human labor. In the golden age, plants just grow. But where do the people come from? Some readers, noting the absence of women from this gilded scene, have thought that human beings might also, in this context, sprout up from the Earth. I like this suggestion, and, as I’ll show later on, Lucretius and Vergil liked it too. Women are, after all, a late introduction to Hesiod’s cosmos. Zeus invents them to get revenge on mankind for Prometheus’ theft of fire, an act for which his hiding away of the Earth’s life force is also supposed to count as retribution. Hesiod invites us to read that double punishment as the seminal point of an ongoing hostility between men and women that, as we have seen, structures heterosexual pairing in the present of the poem’s didaxis. Not coincidentally, this is also the moment when humans and plants become different or differently entangled. Humans are forced into sexual reproduction; plants retain their ancient pattern of individual growth. Which is “­natural?” If “­natural” means “­essential” or “­original” (­an equation that Western metaphysics has been all too eager to draw) then Hesiod would appear to be depicting the gendering and subsequent heterosexualization of humans as an unnatural condition. Or it could be that there is no nature. After all, the ­golden-​­age humans that grew on their own were also, originally, a poesis.1

II So the notion of a golden age may be seen to be a device for calling nature into question, for making us doubt the essential or original character of those forms of relation that seem “­obvious” because contemporary and hegemonic. Such a device would operate by way of a posited difference between this world and our own, between past and present. Vergil would seem to be introducing just such a contrast in the passage of the Georgics that refers most openly and explicitly to Hesiod’s story of the golden age. Here, in the middle of book one, Vergil explains that the reason we can’t have nice things is that Jupiter took them away from us: pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse uiam uoluit, primusque per artem mouit agros, curis acuens mortalia corda nec torpere graui passus sua regna ueterno. (­Georgics 1.­121–​­124) The father himself did not want the way of cultivation to be easy, and he first shifted the topsoil with craft, spurring on mortal hearts with worry, not tolerating that his kingdoms should molder in sloth. 290

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Jupiter corresponds, in this instance as elsewhere, to the Zeus of Hesiod’s Works and Days as the god responsible for coercing humankind into an agricultural pattern of life (­Gale 2000, ­146–​­161). Yet Vergil’s version of the story differs in ways that introduce an insoluble ambiguity to the valence of the golden age. In place of Hesiod’s punitive Zeus, Vergil offers us a Jupiter driven by developmental motives (­nec torpere…passus). Some critics have thought that this d­ addy-​­god just wants us to live our best lives (­e.g. Johnston 1980, ­45–​­49); others have seen him as an abusive father, one that exploits humankind with as little consideration for their ­well-​­being as humans show for the animals and plants on our farms (­e.g. Thomas 1988, ad loc). Whichever reading you choose, the distance that separates this ­golden-​­age nature from the one that Jupiter made (­and we have to live in) is clear. Once upon a time, for instance, the leaves produced honey on their own, without the need for bees. In general, the Earth gave forth its fruits in abundance: ipsaque tellus omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat. (­Georgics 1.­127–​­128) And the Earth itself bore all things generously, without being asked. The line is almost a ­word-­​­­for-​­word translation of Works and Days ­117–​­118, already quoted above, and constitutes the only direct Hesiodic quotation in Vergil’s narrative of the golden age. In Vergil’s poem, too, this vanished paradise is characterized especially by luxuriant growth of plants, a mode of reproduction that sets g­ olden-​­age nature apart from our own. For Hesiod, this wild growth remains safely quarantined in the ­past—​­along with the deviant forms of human reproduction that accompanied it. Not so in Vergil’s Georgics, where ­golden-​­age quarantine turns out to be a lot more leaky (­Johnston 1980, ­55–​­64). At the beginning of book two, which covers arboriculture and viticulture, we discover that some trees nullis hominum cogentibus ipsae sponte sua ueniunt camposque et flumina late curua tenent, ut molle siler lentaeque genistae, populus et glauca canentia fronde salicta (­Georgics 2.10–13) Without any humans to compel them, they come up of their own accord and occupy the fields and ­riverbanks—​­for instance, the flexible ­brook-​­willow and the pliant broom, the poplar and the willow, gray with its gray leaves. The ablative absolute nullis…cogentibus strikes me as a callback to the nullo poscente (“­without being asked”) of 1.128, in which case we would be being invited to set the two passages s­ ide-­​­­by-​­side and see that some plants still do reproduce in the old, Saturnian manner. None of the trees that Vergil lists here as growing that way provide food for human beings. However, the second catalog of “­spontaneously generating” trees that occurs a bit later in book two includes both arbutus (­the “­strawberry tree”) and the oak with its acorns, both paradigmatically g­ olden-​­age foods (­Georgics 2.­65–​­72). Georgics book two has generally been thought by readers to bring the golden age into modern times. There’s good prima facie evidence for this in Vergil’s use of the phrase Saturnia tellus to 291

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describe an Italian landscape that in other respects clearly belongs to his own day, as also in the remark that concludes Vergil’s praise of the rustic lifestyle: aureus hanc uitam in terris Saturnus agebat (­Georgics 2.538) Saturn led this gilded life when he was in the world. Saturn is the god whose rule, synonymous with the golden age, was overthrown by Jupiter. In book two of the Georgics, Vergil seems to be suggesting that this lost Saturnian world still survives in certain regions or ways of life. The book’s opening emphasis on the spontaneous generation of trees is of a piece with this golden age that seems to coexist, in a shimmering utopian kind of way, with Vergil’s own present. One might object that it is also a simple statement of fact. Indeed, the passage I shortly ago quoted, Georgics 2.­10–​­13, is a translation with the elaboration of Theophrastus’ Investigation into Plants, 2.1 (­Ross 1987, 96). Sponte sua (“­of their own accord”) glosses Theophrastus’ automatai and may thus activate a window allusion to Hesiod’s ­golden-​­age plants which arise automate. With Theophrastus, however, we move solidly out of poetry and into the domain of natural history: Vergil’s allusion invokes Theophrastus as an authority for spontaneous generation of plants even in this age of iron. As it turns out, plants aren’t the only thing that comes to life this way. In the Georgics, spontaneous generation as reproductive form recurs in every domain of life. For example in mice, among other animal species: saepe exiguus mus sub terris posuitque domos atque horrea fecit, aut oculis capti fodere cubilia talpae, inuentusque cauis bufo et quae plurima terrae monstra ferunt, populatque ingentem farris aceruum curculio atque inopi metuens formica senectae. (­Georgics 1.­181–​­186) Often the wee mouse builds his house beneath the earth and sets up his granary there, or else the eyeless moles dig rooms, and the toad is found in hollows, and whatever other monsters the earth bears, and the weevil pillages a great heap of grain, as does the ant that fears an impecunious old age. Vergil is talking here about the impossibility of keeping pests away from your grain. Part of that impossibility lies in the fact that the Earth itself gives birth to them (­terrae…ferunt). You can’t exterminate pests without destroying nature itself, the source of your own needed food, which in its way also spontaneously generates from the ground. One might suspect that this talk of the Earth giving birth to mice and the rest is just a façon de parler except that Aristotle, among other eminent natural historians, vouches for the reality of spontaneous generation among animals using some of the very examples deployed by Vergil in the passage just quoted. Greek and Roman zoologists were generally in agreement that spontaneous generation occurred and that the young of some species of animals were produced exclusively that way (­Lehoux 2017, ­13–​­31). These “­scientific” writers were important sources of material for Vergil, though he never felt compelled to abide by their conclusions. 292

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Vergil’s selective approach to that material is very evident in the account of bee reproduction he offers near the middle of Georgics book four: Illum adeo placuisse apibus mirabere morem, quod neque concubitu indulgent nec corpora segnes in Venerem solvunt aut fetus nixibus edunt: verum ipsae e foliis natos, e suavibus herbis ore legunt, ipsae regem parvosque Quirites sufficiunt aulasque et cerea regna refigunt. (­Georgics 4.­197–​­202) You shall marvel at how much bees like this custom, since they don’t engage in sex, nor do they indulge their lazy bodies with Venus, nor do they birth their young by pushing them out: instead they use their mouths to pluck their young from leaves and sweet herbs, and thus they supply themselves with kings and little citizens to remake their hives and waxy kingdoms. Bees pluck their young ­half-​­formed from leaves and flowers. Vergil borrows that notion from Aristotle, who moots it in his Historia Animalium but then rejects it in favor of an alternative but wholly speculative theory of sexual reproduction among bees (­Aristotle Historia Animalium ­553a17–​­22). Here as elsewhere, Vergil’s commitment to “­fact” in his didactic verse is at best occasional (­Ross 1987, ­110–​­118). Vergil’s beehive is particularly rife with deviations from natural history and even from everyday experience. These inventions have been understood by scholars as being in the service of an allegory that connects the bees of the Georgics, on the one hand, to a kind of Platonic utopian city (­solae communes natos…habent, “­they alone hold their children in common” 4.­153–​­154) and, on the other, to Rome (­e.g. parvos Quirites in the passage just cited) (­Thomas 1984, ­71–​­73). Book four’s most extravagant fiction, the rite of bugonia, would seem to exceed the bounds of that allegory even while (­on the readings of some critics) completing it. Bugonia goes by way of a shorthand for two different, but apparently related, rituals described by Vergil for generating a live swarm of bees out of the body of a dead ox. This is probably the clearest instance of spontaneous generation in the Georgics (­Osorio 2020). Clara ­Bosak-​­Schroeder has eloquently described bugonia as “­a queer event, crossing boundaries of sex and species:” The event …. cannot be called either natural or cultural. Bugonia is both, the result of human, animal, and plant bodies and practices colliding. … In the Georgics… human artifacts and actions actively participate in reproduction. Cows do not birth bees on their own, but require humans to set the stage and coordinate the players. (­­Bosak-​­Schroeder 2021, 31) The staging of this event thus points us toward something queer on the farm, the divergence from heterosexual reproductive norms inherent in a work of agriculture that requires humans to “­take a hand in” the reproductive lives of other species on which humans themselves depend for life. My intent all along has been to show that Vergil depicts humans as also implicated in this nexus, their reproductive strategies likewise transformed by the agricultural encounter. In the world of the Georgics, humans also adopt a p­ lant-​­like (­or ­mouse-​­like, or b­ ee-​­like) habit of growth. This happens explicitly in book two, where Vergil alleges that armed men emerge spontaneously out of 293

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the ground (­galeis…densis virum seges) in parts of the world less perfect than Italy (­Georgics 2.­ 140–​­142). One would have to compare that passage with the harvest of dead men (­galeas…inanis) that Vergil imagines the future farmers of Philippi turning up (­Georgics 1.­493–​­497). There, the yearly emergence of plants from the soil turns into a structural metaphor for an uncanny return of the repressed, an eruption of war (­once again) into the works of peace. Both these examples of human spontaneous generation are by way of mirabilia, marvelous occurrences that operate as exceptions rather than setting a norm. I think a more striking instance may be hiding in the depiction of contemporary rural life as a kind of second golden age with which Vergil concludes book two. There we encounter two references to human reproduction, the only ones in the poem: a farmer is supposed to be able to feed parvos nepotes (“­little grandchildren,” Georgics 2.514) and enjoy the embrace of his dulces nati (“­sweet offspring,” 2.523). Where did these children come from, how were they created? Vergil makes no mention here, or anywhere in book two, of the farmer’s ­wife—​­and we know by now that the norms which apply on the farm are not necessarily heterosexual. As readers have long recognized, Vergil draws parallels between this utopian rural vignette and the utopian world of book four’s bees (­Johnston 1980, ­90–​­93). Should we extend the comparison to reproduction? Here, too, humans are drawn into the web of spontaneous generation that links together everything in Vergil’s agricultural world, not just in a vanished golden age but in the present as well.

III I am thinking about plants and I am thinking about kinship. I am thinking of the kinship of plants as a model, on Vergil’s farm, for other forms of ­kinship—​­animal kinship, human kinship, and kinships that cross the boundaries between these various kinds. Queer affiliations result. I want to ask questions about these in an ethnographic register, one that will ultimately return ­us—​­as ­promised—​­to the problem of didactic as a genre and social practice. On these questions, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura offers a sort of paradigm for Vergil. This earlier poem, a ­six-​­book exposition of Epicurean philosophy, creates a new didactic register for Latin verse, which gives Vergil in turn a way to be didactic in the Georgics. The relationship between these poems has been conceived in all kinds of ways, as one of remaking or of overcoming or of purely lexical dependence (­Gale 2000, ­1–​­2). It complicates matters that Lucretius is not a particularly agrarian poet, so that topical overlap between his work and Vergil’s Georgics may be hard to see. One particularly attractive point of coincidence is Lucretius’ interest in spontaneous reproduction, a process to which (­on his account) all living things owe their origin. Here, too, plants lead the way. Plants emerge first among all living things from the Earth: Principio genus herbarum viridemque nitorem terra dedit circum collis camposque per omnis. (­De Rerum Natura 5.­783–​­784) In the beginning, the Earth gave forth plantkind and its bright greenness over all the hills and dales. The other “­mortal species” (­De Rerum Natura 5.791) come next and come out from the Earth in a similar way. This includes animals, which includes humans. Lucretius establishes the long ago ­plant-​­like origin of all living things by process of elimination: the arguments presented in the prior 294

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four books of the poem have already excluded a creation ex nihilo for living things, and animals are phenomenologically much more like dirt than they are like water or air. So everything living shares a common kinship through the Earth, which therefore correctly bears the “­name of mother” (­De Rerum Natura 5.775) that ­Greco-​­Roman mythography has already attached to it. Lucretius defers this universal kinship to an originary moment, to the mundi novitatem et mollia terrae/ arva (“­newness of the world and soft surface of the Earth” De Rerum Natura 5.­780–​­781) that, in his atomistic and demythologizing account, stand in for the primal golden age. The gesture of deferral, at least, is carried over from Hesiod, even if the details of the golden age are not. Yet Lucretius also recognizes the survival of spontaneous generation as a minor reproductive form beyond this moment of creation: multaque nunc etiam existunt animalia terris imbribus et calido solis concreta vapore; quo minus est mirum, si tum sunt plura coorta et maiora, nova tellure atque aethere adulta. (­De Rerum Natura 5.­797–​­800) Even now, there are plenty of animals that get formed from dirt, rain, and the hot influence of the sun; so it’s hardly a surprise if, back then, more and bigger animals were created that way, since the Earth was young and the air was at the proper age. The persistence of spontaneous generation into the present actually constitutes another piece of evidence supporting Lucretius’ account of universal origins. Abiogenesis, which now appears as a minor supplement to sexual reproduction (­e.g. by generating a minority of life forms, by generating small ones, and by generating ones whose place on the scala naturae strikes us as humble) may well at an earlier time have been the dominant way of r­ eproducing—​­especially at that original moment, inductively necessary according to the logic of sexual reproduction, when breeding pairs of the animal species didn’t yet exist (­Lehoux 2017, ­60–​­61). Lucretius’ account combines two ways of thinking about kinship that are structurally distinct and produce strikingly different images of nature. One is a heteronormative logic of reproduction that generates branching and recombining genealogies: families or, on a grander scale, species (­Riggs and Peel 2016, ­4–​­10). These branching genealogies are plural in a way that represents the plurality of species, so that reproductive polarities of male and female also produce separate and closed family trees for, say, humans, trees, bees, and mice. At the base of each of these trees, however, the roots generate trouble. Into what soil do they sink? What comes before the breeding pair? Ancient thinkers approached that question in a variety of ways. As we have seen, Lucretius’ answer is spontaneous generation: all animal species, like all plant species, come originally from the Earth. That generates another kind of kinship diagram, more bush than tree. Here, both branching and reproductive sexual polarity are absent. So are species divisions. In this queer form of kinship, all living ­things—​­different and distinctive as they are from one ­another—​­hang together through the medium of the ­non-​­ or ­potentially-​­living Earth, a geontology (­Povinelli 2016). You can, like Lucretius, stick both types of kinship trees together, using the second as a way to solve the rooting puzzle posed by the first. That would be to quarantine queer kinship in the distant past, as part of a creation myth. But you don’t have to think this way. Vergil, for instance, projects the kinship entanglements of spontaneous generation all across the Roman farm. With the exception of the markedly heterosexual (­and disastrous) book three, 295

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where livestock breeding ends in civil war and plague, spontaneous generation is normative in the Georgics, where, once again, plants take the lead and provide the paradigm. Everything on the farm comes up from the Earth, including the farmer. Now I want to think about the use of nature, and about kinship representations as strategies for using nature. Some forms of kinship serve that purpose better than others. If what you really want to do is “­use” nature, then thinking of kinship in a heteronormative way as reproduction according to kind will help you realize that goal. It will help you by recording difference and, as the family tree ramifies, producing more difference. That makes it easier to mark out a particular genealogy as corresponding to “­humankind” and thus, by contrast, to mark all the rest off as nature. The nature thus circumscribed may come to appear as a “­standing reserve” (­Heidegger 1977, ­19–​­25) that stands in no particular relation to us except insofar as we can exploit it for the continued thriving of our own family unit. You would think that there must be something farmlike in this sort of exploitative relation, since agriculture in the abstract is a way of exploiting plants’ and animals’ natural fertility or drive to life for the satisfaction of human needs. That indeed is the view taken by most ancient agronomic works in prose, including Cato’s De Agricultura and the treatises De Re Rustica by Columella and Varro, though Varro may have been joking. As Leah Kronenberg argues, the farm qua extractive enterprise may have seemed morally repellant even to those quintessential absentee landlords, the Roman aristocracy, whose relations with the land really did conform to that conception (­Kronenberg 2009, ­142–​­145). Certainly, the extractive model is not what we generally find in ancient agricultural didactic. I have been arguing that the models of kinship we find there also diverge from the heteronormative, and it is easy to see why these forms of kinship might make the drawing of lines and divisions more difficult. Since plants and farmers alike descend from the Earth, warping the lineage of plants means warping yourself; exterminating pests means, ultimately, exterminating yourself. Other life forms domesticate you at the same time as you domesticate them (­Scott 2017, ­55–​­68). You’re all one family (­Haraway 2016, 103). This is, if not the transhistorical and universal farmer’­s-​­eye perspective, at least one way of inhabiting that point of view. You have to live in and on the farm. You don’t have the critical distance to come to regard it as merely a resource. But didactic poets and their readers are not (­normally) farmers, so their reasons for leaning into queer structures of kinship cannot exactly be farmers’ reasons (­Reay 2003, ­18–​­19). Now I return to the problem of didactic reproduction, or the way in which didactic poetry can be said to reproduce. Didactic poems do not of course make babies. But they do in another way aspire (­or sometimes pretend to aspire) to make people (­Payne 2020, ­55–​­60). As a genre, didactic aims to “­make people” in the sense of crafting them into socii, apt members for a particular society. Didactic is a poetry of social reproduction. In the Roman world, most social reproduction took place in the context of ­genealogically-​­sorted family units and as a form of gendered labor. Didactic poetry instead makes the pretense of birthing new socii out of itself, in a form of queer and s­ elf-​­affecting spontaneous generation, via the process of hearing or reading. In that way, the project of a poem like the Georgics comes to look like the project of the Earth. The aim of the poem is to reproduce, not according to kind, but in a queer fashion. The poem is after all giving rise to something different, a type of human ­being—​­though it may also, as the chain of tradition outlined here suggests, also give rise to other poems. There may thus after all, pace Lee Edelman’s now ­much-​­debated thesis, be some kind of queer future illuminated here, though Vergil is always calling such a future into doubt by gesturing toward the failure of his own didactic project and, not coincidentally, toward the apocalypse of Roman civil war (­Edelman 2004). 296

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And a Coda About Desire Desire appeared first in this chapter as, for Hesiod, both taken for granted and constitutively heterosexual. What the teaching poet had to do in Works and Days was prevent the (­male) addressee of the poem from marrying too young, or for the wrong reasons. The method we saw Hesiod take to achieve these aims was to insist that the male reader treat his own desire as a cipher, or as a desire for a cipher, for someone blank who could be molded to be whatever it was that the reader really wanted. Hesiod tries to have it both ways: desire is basically heteronormative, but not for anything in particular. Why do I wish to return to this point now? Because it leads me to confess a certain unease about the queerness of these works which sometimes seem to frame desire as anything but queer. If anything, Hesiod is doing queer work on desire, turning heterosexual desire for the other into a kind of ­self-​­affection. But the heteronormative character of the desire itself appears naturalized. Lucretius would seem to be making similar assumptions in those famous passages from De Rerum Natura book four (­­1037–​­1287) that made later generations believe Lucretius to have been a madman. There, he evokes the wildness of desire just in order to domesticate it within the bounds of marriage. Yet here, too, it turns out that the poetry does queer work on desire. Lucretius’ way of turning and modulating desire is to convince us that desire is actually for nothing. What inspires our desire is a simulacrum of a body, not the body ­itself—​­a body which is in any case unachievable for us and may be inwardly repulsive. We have to learn that what we desire simultaneously is nothing and could be anything. I point this out because it resonates with one of the most Lucretian passages in Vergil’s Georgics, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice that gets inserted at the end of book four. Orpheus comes to a bad end because, when he looks at the woman he wants, she vanishes in a very Lucretian fashion: ceu fumus in auras commixtus tenues, fugit diversa… (­Georgics 4.­499–​­500) Like smoke mingled in with light breezes, she fled every which way. So we might say that Orpheus has been ghosted on by desire. That’s one reason, among others, why I feel less unease about the heteronormativity of desire in the Georgics than I do about the other two poems. In the Georgics, one can love all kinds of things: praise, the Muses, flowers, the Earth itself. And all kinds of things can love horses, poets, plants, and bees among others. The only kind of love that always goes wrong is the kind between male and female, dominant and disastrous in the d­ isaster-​­governed book three. Love and desire between kinds tend to be rather more successful. Speaking of which, there’s a line in book one of the Georgics that always gets students giggling: at rubicunda Ceres medio succiditur aestu et medio tostas aestu terit area fruges. nudus ara, sere nudus. (­Georgics 1.­297–​­299) But ­rosy-​­cheeked Ceres is harvested in the midst of summer, and in midsummer does the t­hreshing-​­floor thrash the dried grain. Plow naked, sow naked. 297

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Why would you want to work naked, given the option? I can say that it’s a direct translation of a line from Hesiod (­Works and Days 391), but that doesn’t really answer the question. A better answer, or one in any case more sensitive to context, might go by way of suggesting that this nudity figures an attitude, a kind of openness to desiring and being desired by the multispecies world that surrounds one, which is supposed to be one of the things conveyed by Vergilian didaxis. The farmer works in the heat of the middle of the day because that is when the grain wants to be worked upon.

Suggestions for Further Reading Daryn Lehoux’s 2017 book on the conceptual history of spontaneous generation is a sympathetic investigation of an “­obsolete” idea that those of us who study ancient thinking about animals and plants desperately need to understand better. Laurence Totelin 2018 has been thinking through these issues independently of Lehoux’s work and has reached, in some cases, strikingly different conclusions. Clara ­Bosak-​­Schroeder 2021 is pioneering in its application of queer theory to the Georgics (­and I recommend her 2020 monograph for anyone interested in questioning the “­naturalness” of natural worlds in antiquity). Readers who want to understand the nature of “­nature” in the Georgics will find David Ross 1987 essential, and, from an intertextual perspective, Monica Gale 2000 remains basic for locating Vergil’s “­nature” within the didactic tradition.

Note 1 Works and Days 110. It’s unclear to me whether “­natural” and “­unnatural” are terms that have any critical purchase in Hesiod. The vocabulary that constructs this opposition in later Greek texts is missing from Hesiod’s poetry. A better way of reading his relation to origins might be in terms of an opposition between desirable and undesirable: the golden age is a kind of homosocial utopia from which women are excluded because Hesiod takes them as symbols (­and also causes) of the heteronormative dependency in which men now (­on Hesiod’s view) find themselves (­Arthur 1983).

Works Cited Arthur, Marylin B. 1983. “­The Dream of a World Without Women: Poetics and the Circles of Order in the Theogony Prooemium.” Arethusa 16, no. 1/­2: ­97–​­116. Balme, David M., and Allan Gotthelf, eds. 2002. Aristotle: ‘­Historia Animalium’: Volume 1, Books IX: Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartlett, Stuart, and Michael L. Wong. 2020. “­Defining Lyfe in the Universe: From Three Privileged Functions to Four Pillars.” Life 10, no. 4: 42. Doi: 103390/­life10040042 ­Bosak-​­Schroeder, Clara. 2020. Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2021. “­Queer Reproductions in Vergil’s Georgics and Brian Britigan’s Golden.” Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism 1, no. 1: ­26–​­44. Detienne, Marcel, and ­Jean-​­Pierre Vernant. 1989. The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks. Translated by Paula Wissing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fradenburg, Louise O., and Carla Freccero. 1995. “­The Pleasures of History.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 4: 3­ 71–​­384. Gale, Monica R. 2000. Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack. 1976. Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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The Greatest Generation Heidegger, Martin, 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper. Hopwood, Nick, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell, eds. 2018. Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, Patricia A. 1980. Vergil’s Agricultural Golden Age: A Study of the Georgics (­Mnemosyne, Vol. 60). Leiden: Brill. Kronenberg, Leah. 2009. Allegories of Farming from Greece and Rome: Philosophical Satire in Xenophon, Varro, and Virgil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lehoux, Daryn. 2017. Creatures Born of Mud and Slime: The Wonder and Complexity of Spontaneous Generation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Murphy, Michelle. 2017. The Economization of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Osorio, Peter. 2020. “­Vergil’s Physics of Bugonia in Georgics 4.” Classical Philology 115, no. 1: ­27–​­46. Payne, Mark. 2020. Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reay, Brendon. 2003. “­Some Addressees of Virgil’s Georgics and Their Audience.” Vergilius 49: 1­ 7–​­41. Riggs, Damien W., and Elizabeth Peel. 2016. Critical Kinship Studies: An Introduction to the Field. London: Palgrave. Ross, David O. 1987. Virgil’s Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scott, James C. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT: Yale­ ­University Press. Thomas, Richard. 1984. Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry: The Ethnographical Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 1988. Virgil: Georgics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Totelin, Laurence M. V. 2018. “­Animal and Plant Generation in Classical Antiquity”. In Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day, edited by Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming and Lauren Kassell, ­53–​­66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vernant, ­Jean-​­Pierre. 1989. “­At Man’s Table: Hesiod’s Foundation Myth of Sacrifice.” In The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks, ­edited by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, 21–​­86. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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21 QUEERING FEMININE MOVEMENT Sappho, Hồ Xuân Hương and Vi Khi Nao Kelly Nguyen

Introduction In a special issue on queer diasporas and women’s writing, Emma Parker poses a series of pointed questions: Does migration undermine or endorse the dominant ideologies of gender, sexual, and national identity? Does it enable or impede queer encounters? In what ways, and to what extent, do representations of queer diasporas highlight the contingency and incoherence of identity categories? (­Parker 2011, 645) As a case study to explore these questions, I read Vi Khi Nao’s poem “­Sapphở” through the lens of queer diaspora theory, which as Parker explains, provides “­an oppositional mode of reading, interpretive strategy or critical lens through which to question dominant ideologies of gender, sex, and nation” (­Parker 2011, 640). As a contemporary experimental writer, a queer Vietnamese American woman, and a refugee who learned English via Latin, Vi Khi Nao does not shy away from pushing boundaries in her work, whether in form or content. To Nao, experimental writing is “­sexy” because engagement with it is “­like exploring the different spaces or services that you wouldn’t normally explore and when you enter it, something in you opens” (“­BMI Presents: She Who Has No Master(­s)”). From her poetry to her novels, Vi Khi Nao’s writing disorients her audience by suspending and subverting ­expectations—​­and in so doing, ushering them into an imaginary and sensorial space of displacement. As the title of her poem suggests, Nao draws on the poetry of Sappho, a poet from the island of Lesbos who lived during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE; less obviously, Nao’s poem is also influenced by the poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương, a Vietnamese poet and, notoriously, a concubine from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE. Little is known about the lives of Sappho and Hồ Xuân Hương, but they share key similarities: both composed works that explore female desire and agency in societies that defined a “­proper” woman in terms of her role within the household. Both veiled their critiques of oppressive patriarchal societies through subtle wordplay and vivid imagery that, on the surface, seem to uphold traditional feminine roles, such as the blushing bride, 303

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the faithful wife and the dutiful mother. Similarly, Vi Khi Nao’s “­Sapphở” deals with a subject that is traditionally relegated to the “­feminine” sphere, especially within Vietnamese culture: cooking. However, by intertwining the movements of women cooking together with the movements of women making love to each other, Nao queers “­feminine movement”—​­that is, movement related to the traditional roles and duties prescribed to ­women—​­and disrupts the heteronormative boundaries of desire. In this paper, I suggest that like Sappho and Hồ Xuân Hương, Nao exaggerates traditional feminine roles in order to challenge the suppression of women’s sexuality. By tracing the motif of feminine movement in the poetry of Vi Khi Nao, Sappho, and Hồ Xuân Hương, I demonstrate the tension within mobility as both a preserver and a disruptor of heteronormative, patriarchal structures.

Phở and the Queer Diasporic Imaginary The suturing of Sappho and phở in Nao’s poem is striking and demands to be contextualized within Vietnamese cultural heritage, both national and diasporic. Much like Sappho and Hồ Xuân Hương, phở is ­well-​­known and yet enigmatic, distinctive and yet open to a wide array of interpretations. Its origin is obscure, but the general consensus is that it was invented in the north of Vietnam, in or near Hanoi. Some say it stemmed from Cantonese cuisine, others from French. Still others claim that it is a purely Vietnamese dish, denying influences from both China and France. Whatever its origin, the stories surrounding phở reveal the impact of imperialism and colonialism on Vietnamese culture and history, since the Chinese Empire had dominated Vietnam for over a thousand years and the French Empire for almost a hundred. Exploring phở’s various origin stories as well as its subsequent development, food historian Erica Peters has demonstrated the connection between phở and the turbulent ­geo-​­political history of Vietnam (­Peters 2010). For example, she explains how after the Geneva Accords separated Vietnam at the 17th parallel in 1954, the mass migration of about one million northern Vietnamese refugees to the south caused a significant increase in the sale and consumption of phở in southern Vietnam. According to Peters, “­Only from them [the northern Vietnamese refugees] could one obtain the essence of phở, imported to the south for the benefit of their fellow Vietnamese, southerners who had been gone too long from their ancestral roots in the north” (­Peters 2010, 161). Likewise, after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and yet another refugee crisis that saw over a million Vietnamese people flee Vietnam, phở once again moved with the ­displaced—​­but this time on a global scale. As Vietnamese diasporic communities grew around the world, they opened up phở restaurants and popularized what has become known as the “­national dish of Vietnam.” According to Andrea Nguyen, a Vietnamese American chef, Outside of the motherland, pho has taken root wherever there are Vietnamese people. Its strongholds include North America, France, and Australia, where many immigrants have settled and built thriving Little Saigon enclaves. Whether they were born in Vietnam or abroad, people of Viet ancestry are reinforcing their cultural roots through pho, opening and patronizing small joints in their communities, cooking up their own at home, and introducing the noodle soup to friends. (­Nguyen 2018) Nguyen concludes that within the Vietnamese diaspora, phở has become “­a very special food, a gateway to our cultural roots” (­Nguyen 2018). 304

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However, as with many foods that are finally “­discovered” and accepted in the West, phở’s popularization led to its cultural appropriation. In 2016, for instance, Bon Appétit infamously had a white chef be the authority on phở in their video “­PSA: This Is How You Should Be Eating Pho” (­Yam 2016). Meanwhile, in the U.K., Pho Holdings Ltd (­whose owners have no Vietnamese heritage) even went as far as to trademark the word “­pho” and to pursue legal action against small, independent Vietnamese restaurants that had the word “­pho” in their name (­Rayner 2013). In her recent study exploring the relationship between foodways, heritage and belonging among racialized people, historian Natalia Molina considers “­who gets to define a place and how they do so” (­Molina 2022, 9). With her grandmother’s Los Angeles Mexican restaurant at the center of her study, Molina demonstrates how “­public spaces can be hostile to marginalized, racialized people,” while “­semipublic spaces like restaurants provide a safer and no less vital site to host and shape community life” through the process of “­placemaking” (­Molina 2022, 9). According to Molina, “­Placemaking has worked in distinct ways for racialized groups. The kinds of spaces created, how they were used, the relationships that sprang from them, and the nurturing of collectivity and inclusivity they enabled resulted in a placemaking that could be resistant and o­ ppositional—​­a counter to dominant spatial formations and imaginaries” (­Molina 2022, 9). Molina elaborates that “­­place-​­making” by racialized minorities necessarily dictates “­­place-​­taking,” but what happens when the ­place-​­taking shifts back to the dominant group, specifically by white placemakers? What happens when these “­urban anchors,” as Natalia Molina terms spaces cultivated by racialized placemakers to “­find their mooring,” are taken, pirated away? Vi Khi Nao counters this reverse ­place-​­taking in “­Sapphở” by proposing “­to open a Vietnamese restaurant for lesbians called Sapphở” (­line 19). Combining phở with Sappho, a figure who has become not only a feminist icon but also a queer one, reinforces both of their transgressive qualities by unsettling traditional expectations of them. Adorned with Vietnamese diacritics, Sappho is recognizable and yet incomprehensible. The effect of “­Vietnamizing” Sappho is ­subversive—​­an act of appropriating not only an influential figure in the West but also of ­re-​­appropriating phở itself. The speaker’s proposal thus calls on the cultural authority of Sappho in order to reclaim phở not only in the West but also within a queer diasporic imaginary. At the same time, phở is also relocated into a different context. That the movement of phở is profoundly connected to the histories of empire and displacement is clear. But the dish is not only the product of political and cultural o­ ppression—​­it also embodies resilience and innovation. Both in Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora, phở has been adapted and transformed as people combine different spices and accoutrements to create countless variations based on available resources, regional preferences, and collective memory. Regardless of its contested origin stories and its multiple displacements, phở continues to connect the Vietnamese diaspora through a multisensorial and nostalgic experience. As Trung Bảo, a loyal patron of the James Beard a­ ward-​­winning restaurant Pho 79 in Garden Grove, California, puts it, What is most important is to find the phở with the right taste, the same one that you still remember from before you left Vietnam. Eating phở with your own memories, that’s what makes a bowl of phở even more delicious. (­Cái quan trọng nhất đó là người ta tìm được đúng cái hương vị của món phở mà họ luôn luôn nhớ khi rời khỏi Việt Nam. Ăn phở bằng chính ký ức của mình, điều đó làm tô phở ngon hơn.) (­Lê 2019) What makes phở so powerful within the diasporic imaginary are the memories and the sensations it e­ vokes—​­not a universalizing or essentializing experience, but rather an affective consciousness that transcends space and time. 305

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Provocatively, Vi Khi Nao’s speaker does not imagine the restaurant Sapphở as a space for the Vietnamese diaspora broadly, but as one specifically for lesbians within (­and perhaps even beyond) the diaspora. I will return to the significance of emphasizing lesbians later in the paper, but for now, I will discuss the effect of queering the diaspora more generally. According to queer theorist Gayatri Gopinath, If conventional diasporic discourse is marked by this backward glance, this ‘­overwhelming nostalgia for lost origins, for “­times past”,’ a queer diaspora mobilizes questions of the past, memory, and nostalgia for radically different purposes. Rather than evoking an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history, what is remembered through queer diasporic desire and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place riven with contradictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles. (­Gopinath 2005, 4) Gopinath makes a case for a diasporic imaginary that is untethered to a fixed homeland. Similarly, in his work on Sikh diasporas, Keith Axel argues that the diasporic imaginary “­does not act as a new kind of place of origin but indicates a process of identification generative of diasporic subjects” (­Axel 2002, 423). Axel suggests that “­rather than conceiving of the homeland as something that creates the diaspora, it may be more productive to consider the diaspora as something that creates the homeland,” with the homeland “­understood as an affective and temporal process rather than a place” (­Axel 2002, 426). Although this framework frees the diaspora from the fixed concept of the homeland, it still relies on the binary between nation and diaspora. To expand the concept of a diasporic imaginary, Gopinath centers the queer diaspora and in so doing, shifts the diasporic discourse from idealizing to ­reckoning—​­that is, to confronting what has been “­deliberately forgotten within conventional nationalist or diasporic scripts” (­Gopinath 2005, 4). Gopinath explains that a queer diasporic lens Recuperates those desires, practices, and subjectivities that are rendered impossible and unimaginable within conventional diasporic and nationalist imaginaries. A consideration of queerness, in other words, becomes a way to challenge nationalist ideologies by restoring the impure, inauthentic, nonreproductive potential of the notion of diaspora. Indeed, the urgent need to trouble and denaturalize the close relationship between nationalism and heterosexuality is precisely what makes the notion of a queer diaspora so compelling. (­Gopinath 2005, 11) In this way, a queer diasporic imaginary compels us to come face to face with the tensions and contradictions of forced displacement within and beyond the binaries of nation and diaspora, heterosexuality and homosexuality, and men and women.

“­Sapphở” in Dialogue with the Poetry of Sappho and Hồ Xuân Hương To explore this queer diasporic imaginary, the poem “­Sapphở” accordingly begins with a series of oppositions as the speaker and her lover are engaged in pho/­­love-​­making. Sensuality intertwines with violence in descriptions such as “­fennel immolates your desire into my broth” and “­I am clavicle not vulture cleaving your aniseed for pain” (­Nao 2020, lines 3–​­4). The immolating fennel recalls the story of Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus and smuggling the ember in a hollow fennel stalk to humans (­Hesiod, Works and Days 50–​­52; Hesiod, Theogony ­565–​­567). For this and other 306

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transgressions, Zeus punishes Prometheus by tying him to a rock for an eagle to eat his liver day in and day out for eternity. The following line in Nao’s poem reinforces this reference by paralleling this imagery of the eagle pecking at Prometheus’ liver with that of the vulture cleaving the lover’s aniseed. Vi Khi Nao’s speaker crucially asserts that she is not a vulture, but instead is a clavicle. Clavicle’s etymology (­to echo the first line of the poem, “­I hush the etymology of your fingers”) is clavicula, or “­little key,” so the speaker may be suggesting that rather than using brute force on the aniseed, she has the key to it. Intriguingly, the irregular spacing in this line renders it unclear as to whether it is the vulture or the clavicle that is causing pain. This ambiguity surrounding pain and desire is further emphasized by the association of the aniseed to the reddening apple that cannot be reached in Sappho’s fragment 105a and the ripe jackfruit waiting to be pierced in Hồ Xuân Hương’s poem “­Quả Mít” (­Jackfruit). Not only do all three fruits connote female eroticism, they also call into question female agency, and more specifically, women’s control of actions done to their bodies. Indeed, Sappho’s speaker even corrects her previous statement that the ­apple-​­pickers had forgotten the apple hanging on the highest branch to assert that they did not forget, but rather, that they could not reach the ripe fruit. Similarly, although Hồ Xuân Hương’s speaker invites the man to pick the jackfruit and to pierce it with his stick, she warns him not to grope it too much or else its sap will get on his hands. Vi Khi Nao thus begins her poem by calling not only on the myth of Prometheus but also on Sappho’s and Hồ Xuân Hương’s salacious poems in order to challenge the ancient Greek myth’s misogyny. For, according to Hesiod (­Works and Days ­53–​­105; Theogony ­567–​­602), Zeus created Pandora, and thus women more generally, as an “­evil” (­κακόν) to punish mankind for Prometheus’ thievery. Although Virgil tells us that Sappho also addresses this myth in her poetry, her version does not survive, so we do not know whether she adopts this misogynistic view or if she critiques it (­fr. 206). Playing with this lacuna, Vi Khi Nao creates her own sapphic version of the myth that explores female desire outside of patriarchic frameworks. Inverting the myth’s androcentric narrative, Nao centers women and their supposedly transgressive ­movements—​­which provocatively result in a desire that is entangled with pain. The next few lines of the poem continue the themes of opposition and female agency as the women’s desires intensify: “­I h u s h the wilderness near your ­basin-​­shaped cavalcade/­You elevate in your throes of ardor & I bend to meet” (­Nao 2020, lines 5–​­6). The unruliness of the wilderness juxtaposes the orderliness of the cavalcade, and the lover rising contrasts with the speaker lowering herself. Together with the juxtaposition between violence and desire of the earlier lines, the movements in these lines, from the cavalcade to the lovers, recall Sappho’s fragments 16 and 44. Both fragments portray women as they are moving, or being moved, to their new husband’s land, with fragment 16 conjuring Helen as she is sailing to Troy and fragment 44 evoking Andromache as she, too, is sailing to Troy. However, the poems contrast in their depiction of the women’s movements since Helen’s is illicit, while Andromache’s is celebrated. Helen’s movement is immediately qualified in terms of the transgression of her roles as wife, mother, and daughter since she “­left her fine husband” (­Ἐλένα [τὸ]ν ἄνδρα/­τ̣ὸν̣ [πανάρ]ι̣στον/­κ̣αλλ[ίποι]σ̣’) and “­not for her children nor her dear parents had she a thought” (­κωὐδ[ὲ πα]ῖδος οὐδὲ φίλων το[κ]ήων/­πάμ[παν] ἐμνάσθη).1 Moreover, her transgression infamously led to the Trojan War and the subsequent destruction of the city of Troy. Andromache’s movement, on the other hand, is that of a proper bride, one who did not shirk her previous gendered roles for her new marriage, one whose arrival bears gifts instead of ruin. Another contrasting aspect between the two fragments is the agency assigned to each woman’s ­movement—​­at least, at first glance. Just in one line, Helen is associated with three active verbs that denote motion, “­leaving behind,” “­went” and “­sailing” (­κ̣αλλ[ίποι]σ̣’ ἔβα ’ς Τροΐαν πλέοι̣[σα). Menelaus is not mentioned directly by name, but rather as Helen’s “­fine husband,” the object of her abandonment, while Paris is only alluded to as possibly the object of her 307

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love. On the other hand, fragment 44 introduces Hector before Andromache: “­Hektor and his men are bringing a glancing girl/­from holy Thebe and from onflowing ­Plakia—​­/­delicate Andromache on ships over the salt/­sea” (­Ἔκτωρ καὶ συνέταιρ̣[ο]ι ἄ̣γ̣οισ’ ἐλικώπιδα/­Θήβας ἐξ ἰέρας Πλακίας τ’ ἀ[π̣’ ἀϊιν⟨ν⟩άω/­ἄβραν Ἀνδρομάχαν ἐνὶ ναῦσιν ἐπ’ ἄλμυρον/­πόντον·). Unlike Helen in fragment 16, Andromache is not the subject, but rather is the object of these ­actions—​­her movements are dictated by men. Her objectification is exacerbated by the catalog of valuable but inanimate objects, such as gold bracelets, silver cups, and ivory, that immediately follow her introduction. Andromache thus becomes part of this list of desired objects brought to Troy. In addition, the subsequent depiction of animals being led by men to the marriage festivities parallel the earlier image of Andromache being led by Hector and his men to Troy: “­sons of Ilos led mules beneath/­­ fine-​­running carts” (­Ἰλίαδαι σατίναι[ς] ὐπ’ ἐυτρόχοις/­ἆγον αἰμιόνοις) and “­young men led horses under chariots” (­ἴππ[οις] δ’ ἄνδρες ὔπαγον ὐπ’ ἀρ̣[­ματ-​­/­π[ ]ες ἠίθ̣εοι). The repetition of the verb ἄγω, and its compound, across these three descriptions, further underscores the connection between Andromache and these yoked animals. Meanwhile, “­up climbed a whole crowd/­of women and maidens with tapering ankles” (­ἐ̣π̣[έ]βαινε δὲ παῖς ὄχλος/­γυναίκων τ’ ἄμα παρθενίκα[ν] τ.. [.. ]. σφύρων), but “­separately the daughters of Priam” (­χῶρις δ’ αὖ Περάμοιο θυγ[α]τρες[) came to welcome the couple. That the daughters of Priam must arrive separately from the other women calls into question the constraints of movement not only by gender but also by class. To return to fragment 16, scholars have demonstrated the ways that it emphasizes the agency of women and subverts the androcentric narrative of the epic cycle. Page duBois, for example, contends that fragment 16 “­reverses the pattern of oral literature, of the Homeric p­ oems—​­men trading women, men moving past women” by rendering “­Helen as an ‘­actant’ in her own life, the subject of a choice, exemplary in her desiring” (­duBois 1996, ­86–​­87). Similarly Eric ­Dodson-​­Robinson makes the case for the shifting of agency from male to female, from Paris to Helen, suggesting that such an “­unexpected transposition of Helen’s and Paris’s roles in the judgment myth emphasizes a structural equivalence between male and female erotic agency” (­­Dodson-​­Robinson 2010, 18). While Helen is clearly assigned agency at the beginning of the poem, her agency is quickly rendered ambiguous in the subsequent line: “­­no—​­/]led her astray” (­ἀλλὰ παράγ̣α̣γ̣’ α̣ὔταν/]σαν). We are ironically missing the subject of the action, though Aphrodite is probably the one who is leading Helen astray. Regardless, Helen’s move from subject to object calls into question her earlier actions and renders her agency ambiguous, as Nancy Worman has demonstrated (­Worman 1997). According to Worman, mortal female bodies are usually portrayed in ancient Greek literature as not only stationary but also being contained within gendered spheres, which for women are domestic ­spaces—​­that is, unless they are moved outside of those spheres by men or immortal beings (­Worman 1997, 156). Immortal or ­semi-​­mortal female bodies, however, can move on their own accord. Within this framework, Worman argues that “­only Helen vacillates between both of these categories, through the obscurity of her agency in her journey to Troy” and goes on to conclude that “…the vacillating figure of Helen shapes a narrative of desire by the movement of her body in a visual field, the mobility of which highlights the ambiguity of agency in the dynamics of eros” (­Worman 1997, 156, 170). I would add that Helen’s ability to move back and forth between these categories as she explores her desire allows her to exist in multiple gendered spaces at once. Helen’s ­hyper-​­mobile body thus not only renders her agency ambiguous but also her gender. Helen’s movement between (­gendered) spaces also suggests that desire and violence can simultaneously be opposing forces and interrelated ones. Fragment 16 itself is littered with overt war references as it meditates on what is “­the most beautiful thing” (­κάλλιστον). The poem begins by considering how “­some men say an army of horses and some men say an army on foot/­and some men say an army of ships” (­ο]ἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον οἰ δὲ πέσδων/­οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ’), before 308

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asserting that the most beautiful thing is “­what you love” (­ὄττω τις ἔραται). Taken together, this list of beautiful things is supposed to comprise a priamel, with the military units serving as foils to love. But the fact that the speaker calls on Helen as an example of her claim subverts the intended effect of the priamel. After all, Helen’s love triggers a chain reaction that leads to “­an army on foot” and “­an army of ships” devastating Troy. Rather than being in opposition to the object of love, the objects of war are entangled with it (­or him, in this case, Paris). Similarly, fragment 44 also has references to war, albeit less overt ones. Lawrence Schrenk, for example, has explored the connections between fragment 44 and the Homeric Iliad (­Schrenk 1994). Schrenk suggests that not only does the structure of the fragment parallel that of the scene in book 24 of the Iliad in which Priam leads Hector’s corpse back to the palace, but the language in the fragment also alludes to the epic poem more broadly. On the other hand, Henry Spelman proposes the overlooked significance of the traditional scene of Paris and Helen’s wedding for fragment 44, which would have been widely known by Sappho’s contemporary audience (­Spelman 2017). Whether alluding to the Iliad or to Paris and Helen’s wedding, fragment 44 has an ominous undertone of war and death that taints the descriptions of celebration. Although Hector is the one leading Andromache to Troy, he will later be the one being led, or rather dragged, around Troy by Achilles and his chariot. The imagery of Andromache and the animals being led thus foreshadow Hector’s shameful treatment in death and the stripping of his agency. Poem 16 later returns to the meditation on war and love as the speaker moves from Helen’s story to her own and laments the loss of Anaktoria. The speaker claims, “­I would rather see her lovely step/­and the motion of light on her face/­than chariots of Lydians or ranks/­of footsoldiers in arms” (­τᾶ]ς κε βολλοίμαν ἔρατόν τε βᾶμα/­κἀμάρυχμα λάμπρον ἴδην προσώπω/­ἢ τὰ Λύδων ἄρματα κἀν ὄπλοισι/­πεσδομ]άχεντας). Once again, the object of love is associated with objects of war, and once again, the agency is blurred. The object of love, Anaktoria, is being watched, and yet she is also the one taking “­her lovely step.” And yet, Anaktoria’s movement exists within the sphere of desire, contained within the gaze of the one desiring. Likewise, the “­chariots of Lydians” and “­footsoldiers in arms” are the ones whose actions bring destruction, but they, too, are fixed within the speaker’s gaze. This chiasmus thus reinforces the interchangeability between object and subject, as well as that between love and war, as Helen’s ambiguous agency transfers to both Anaktoria and these military units. Hồ Xuân Hương similarly challenges the constraints on feminine movements and the control of feminine desire in her poetry. Like Sappho’s fragments 16 and 44, Hồ Xuân Hương’s poem “­Confession (­III)” (­Tự tình) plays with agency by portraying a woman on a boat: Her lonely boat fated to float aimlessly midstream, weary with sadness, drifting. Her hold overflowing with duty and feeling, bow rocked by storms, adrift and wandering. She rows on, not caring who tries to dock, sails on, not caring who tries the rapids. Whoever comes on board is pleased, as she plucks her guitar, sad and drifting (­Chiếc bách buồn về phận nổi nênh, Giữa dòng ngao ngán nỗi lênh đênh. Lưng khoang tình nghĩa dường lai láng, Nửa mạn phong ba luống bập bềnh. 309

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Chèo lái mặc ai lăm đỗ bến, Giong lèo thây kẻ rắp xuôi ghềnh. Ấy ai thăm ván cam lòng vậy, Ngán nỗi ôm đàn những tấp tênh).2 This poem employs the motif of the aimless boat, which was a common symbol for a woman who chose to live alone (­Balaban 2000, 119). The speaker describes a woman rowing her boat aimlessly down the stream, going with the ebbs and flows of the water, as well as with the ups and downs of her emotions. Melancholic, she does not care who boards her boat but notes that her guests are content with the situation. In her study of Hồ Xuân Hương’s poetry, Trần Mỹ Vân suggests that this poem, along with the other two poems of the same name (“­tự tình”), is strikingly different in that it has a “­more serious tone” instead of “­the hint of cheekiness, mockery, and humor often associated with her other writings” (­Trần 2002, 486). Trần Mỹ Vân contends that these three poems “­give expression to her [Hồ Xuân Hương’s] feeling of insecurity, tinged with sadness and anger at the restricted place of women in society to which she has fallen victim” (­Trần 2002, 486). Vietnam during Hồ Xuân Hương’s time was steeped in the Confucian tradition, which controlled women’s position in society through “­the three submissions” (­tam tòng) and “­the four virtues” (­tứ đức). The three submissions restricted a woman’s identity to the men in her life: when young, she must obey her father, when married, her husband, and when widowed, her son. Similarly, the four virtues outlined the rules associated with labor (­công), physical appearance (­dung), appropriate speech (­ngôn), and proper behavior (­hạnh) that a woman must follow in order to best serve the men in her life. Thus, for example, women should master cooking, sewing, and embroidery, but not reading or writing; they should be attractive to their own husbands but not tempt others; they must be submissive in speech and deferential to their superiors (­Marr 1981, 192). Taking this context into consideration, Trần Mỹ Vân conflates the boat with the woman and contends that the woman/­boat is “­waiting for a helmsman to steer its course downstream to safety,” but that “­whether or not such a man will appear and then guide the boat to shore is beyond her control, as life takes its own course” (­Trần 2002, 486). Although on the surface, Hồ Xuân Hương seems to paint a pitiful scene, a closer analysis reveals how her signature wordplay destabilizes the image of a passive woman. The repetition of nổi (­to float) and nỗi (­feeling) throughout the poem suggests an interplay between the navigation of the boat and of women’s plight. The woman floats despite being weighed down by “­duty and feeling” and she survives despite not having a helmsman. And yet, lines five and six explicitly portray how the woman is not waiting for a helmsman, but that, in fact, she has already been rowing the boat on her own and has even managed to safely weather the storms. The poem’s rhyme scheme further enhances the word play by accentuating the floating motif (­nổi nênh, lênh đênh, bập bềnh, tấp tênh) with onomatopoetic words that themselves echo the bobbing movement of the boat. Our senses are redirected toward the movement of the boat and away from the woman, while the agency of the woman is seemingly eclipsed by that of the boat. The woman is never even directly addressed and the fact that she is a woman is only implied through the known motif of the drifting boat. Like Sappho and Vi Khi Nao, Hồ Xuân Hương thus calls on a traditional cultural reference in order to challenge it. The speaker mourns the plight of women in a m ­ ale-​ ­dominated society, but she is also mocking society’s inability to see women’s subversion by demonstrating the agency that women can claim for themselves. Through these elusive techniques, Hồ Xuân Hương thus asks whether the woman on the boat is indeed directionless and hopeless, or if she should instead be seen as resilient in a society that can only read her as a vessel, but never as the helmsman. 310

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Hồ Xuân Hương similarly critiques the constraints on women’s (­e)­motions in another poem entitled “­Tự tình” (“­Confession (­II)” in Balaban’s translation).3 The poem paints a dismal scene in which the speaker laments the passing of time as love is passing over her: Before dawn, the watch drum rumbles, Lonely pink face among mountains and streams addled but alert with a cup of fragrant wine as the moon sets, just a sliver not yet full. Moss seems to creep across the earth’s face. Stony peaks pierce the belly of the clouds. Sick with sadness, spring passes, spring returns. A bit of love shared, just the littlest bit (­Đêm khuya văng vẳng trống canh dồn, Trơ cái hồng nhan với nước non. Chén rượu hương đưa, say lại tỉnh, Vầng trăng bóng xế, khuyết chưa tròn. Xuyên ngang mặt đất, rêu từng đám, Đâm toạc chân mây, đá mấy hòn. Ngán nỗi xuân đi xuân lại lại, Mảnh tình san sẻ tí con con). “­Confession (­II)” is connected to “­Confession (­III)” not only by sharing the same title, but also by echoing the phrase “­ngán nỗi” (­a feeling of weariness). This phrase is so notable that it is repeated twice in “­Confessions (­III),” once at the beginning and again at the end, creating a narrative chiasmus where the speaker’s active role on the boat is flanked by her sorrowful and seemingly passive drifting. “­Ngán nỗi” is also subject to the wordplay discussed earlier between nổi (­to float) and nỗi (­feeling): a slight change in tone renders “­ngán nỗi” to “­ngán nổi” (­weary of floating). With this small yet significant modification, the phrase takes on a double meaning to comment on the exhaustion of navigating a patriarchic society as a woman. The rest of the line with “­ngán nỗi” in “­Confessions (­II)” features additional wordplay that challenges the expected stationary role of women. If taken at face value, line seven is in keeping with the rest of the poem, which portrays the speaker as stationary while she watches the sunrise, the moon set, and even spring coming and going. However, Hồ Xuân Hương’s infamous penchant for wordplay must once again be taken into consideration. The word for spring (­xuân) recalls part of Hồ Xuân Hương’s name, and this evocation of the poet herself is further emphasized by more plays on words with her name throughout the poem. For example, John Balaban has noted that line four conjures her family name Hồ with the imagery of the moon since the Nôm character for Hồ is 胡, which is a combination of the Chinese words for “­old” (­cổ: 古) and “­moon” (­nguyệt: 月) (­Balaban 2000, 117). I would also add line three to this list, which calls on her first name, Hương. Read in this way, line three transforms from “­addled but alert with a cup of fragrant wine” to “­addled but alert with the cup of wine Hương gave,” as hương shifts from describing the wine to being the subject that offers the wine. The question then is to whom is the wine given? Who is the object of the wine, and thus, who is the one Xuân is leaving and returning to? By inserting herself through this wordplay, Hồ Xuân Hương claims agency for herself and asserts her ability to move beyond the restricted feminine sphere. 311

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Returning to Vi Khi Nao’s poem, the interplay between object and subject takes on a linguistic form as love/­­pho-​­making now becomes entwined with ­language-​­making. Food, language, and eroticism blend together in the next few lines as the speaker wonders, …if your tongue is one type of Transitive verb Will my lips be able to take Yours as a direct object for a complication of time? My left cheek seeks in sequence the grammar of your breath The translucent material of your fugaciousness As you lean from syntax into chopstick. (­lines 8­ –​­13) The movement of the women narrows into their tongues, lips, and cheeks as they ­kiss – ​­the very same body parts crucial for eating and speaking. The focus shifts back and forth from the speaker to her lover, moving from “­your tongue” to “­my lips” and back to “­yours” (­lips), from “­my left cheek” to “­your breath.” The “­syntax” and “­chopsticks” become vehicles through which sexuality is expressed and explored, while the agency behind what to taste, what to articulate, as well as whom to kiss, is explicitly attributed to the women. That the women’s bodies themselves transform into parts of speech is notable. Rather than relying on external tools of communication, tools that may be inadequate for their feminist expression of eroticism, they use their own implements, their own bodies, to create a counterscript. Their metamorphosis echoes Audre Lorde’s immortal quote: “­The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (­Lorde 1984). The speaker continues to subvert traditional expectations/­limitations of women’s sexuality by asking the following series of questions, which concludes the poem: If time identifies herself as a pansexual & you agree to be the nodes on my laptop If my desire is binary + yours has urinary tract infection Won’t it be cruel if I suggest we all sleep together, Muscle & all, on a bed of salt & oysters? Won’t it be fun for bivalves to be bisexual? To open a Vietnamese restaurant for lesbians called Sapphở? (­lines 1­ 4–​­19) We witness another process of narrowing in as the speaker moves from pansexuality to bisexuality to homosexuality, specifically among lesbians. And yet again, this progression leads to an unexpected outcome, with homosexuality as the norm rather than heterosexuality, which is actually left out entirely. As discussed earlier, the Vietnamese restaurant, an active site of cultural preservation within the Vietnamese diaspora, is being reserved exclusively for lesbians. Although this exclusivity may seem at odds with diasporic networking, it actually is a powerful example of “­a conscious adoption of alternative networking,” to borrow queer theorist Jasbir Puar’s phrase (­Puar 2017, 172). According to Puar, “­Queer diasporic theorizing has emphasized ­self-​­crafted kinship, erotic and affectionate networks or lines of affiliation, rather than filiation” (­Puar 2017, 171). To elaborate on this, Puar quotes David Eng, who explains that Reconceptualizing diaspora not in conventional terms of ethnic dispersion, filiation, and biological traceability, but rather in terms of queerness, affiliation, and social contingency[, ] ‘­queer diaspora’ emerges as a concept providing new methods of contesting traditional 312

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family and kinship ­structures—​­of reorganizing national and transnational communities based not on origin, filiation, and genetics but on destination, affiliation, and the assumption of a common set of social practices or political commitments. (­Puar 2017, 172, quoting Eng 2003, 4) So when Nao’s speaker asks her lover to be “­the nodes on [her] laptop,” she is acknowledging her lover’s place within her “­erotic and affectionate networks.” These types of networks, although potentially open to men, do not revolve around male desire, and indeed, they could even craft spaces that exclude men. Unlike the poems of Sappho and Hồ Xuân Hương discussed earlier, Nao’s poem does not begin from the assumption of a patriarchal society that needs to be unsettled, but from the conception of a queer diasporic imaginary that needs to be explored, specifically in feminist ways. While traditional diasporic scripts have “­foregrounded male lives, desires, and subjectivities” and “­inevitably sidelined queer female ones,” as Gopinath has pointed out, a queer diasporic imaginary demands space for counternarratives (­Gopinath 2011, 636). In “­Sapphở,” queer female subjectivities and affect take center stage as counternarratives are crafted by queer female bodies, about queer female bodies, and for queer female bodies.

Conclusion Just as the poem begins, so too does it conclude with oppositional forces as the speaker juxtaposes the “­cruel” and “­fun” effects of different sexual scenarios between the two women. Framing her questions around these affects, the speaker highlights the pain and pleasure associated with queer ­desire—​­a paradox that Vi Khi Nao as a queer refugee woman is acutely aware of. Nao has meditated on this duality by specifically considering the double meaning behind the Vietnamese word, “­thương” (­love or wound). In her interview with poet Jessica Nguyen in the journal, diaCRITICS, Vi Khi Nao reflects, The word ‘­thương’ also connotes ‘­wound’ as in vết thương and/­or ‘­pity.’ This word has always appeared as agony or pain/­painful for me, a love that is filled with aches and regrets. How do you remove the pain from that word when said in the context of love? Speaking of ache, have you always known that you were queer? (­Nao 2019) Nao’s thought progression from love and pain to queerness is telling in how she views and feels the tensions in queer diasporic desire. As Gopinath has demonstrated, Queer diasporic cultural forms and practices point to submerged histories of racist and colonialist violence that continue to resonate in the present and that make themselves felt through bodily desire. It is through the queer diasporic body that these histories are brought into the present; it is also through the queer diasporic body that their legacies are imaginatively contested and transformed. (­Gopinath 2005, 4) In “­Sapphở,” the culinary and the linguistic intertwine with queer eroticism to challenge the Western consumption of Vietnamese food, culture, and bodies. The focus on the affect of the women’s bodies as they make love, phở, and words with and for each other thus “­unsettles a longstanding preoccupation with queer diasporic representational practices,” to quote Puar, as 313

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“­we move from What does this body mean? to What and who does this body affect? What does this body do?” (­Puar 2017, 172). By reading Vi Khi Nao’s poem alongside the poetry of Sappho and Hồ Xuân Hương and by exploring the mobility of women in and out of gendered spaces and gendered roles, as well as the affect affiliated with those movements, we shift from considering women’s bodies as objects of desire and instead as subjects of unbounded eroticism. Moreover, rather than examining the female body in and of itself, this essay has investigated how and why the female body is moving, as well as what the female body is moving against. Seen through a queer diasporic lens, the concept of “­feminine movement” thus gives way to a more nuanced understanding of how women can subversively navigate within and beyond heteronormative, patriarchal structures and in so doing, disrupt them. As the proposed Vietnamese restaurant for lesbians, Sapphở, demonstrates, this ­disruption—​­this “­­space-​­shaking,” to play off of Molina’s concepts of placemaking and p­ lace-­​­­taking—​­produces seismic effects that do not just destroy, but also create. Out of the debris of violence and displacement emerge queer diasporic spaces where communities are reimagined beyond man-​­made borders. After all, as Andrea Nguyen asserts, “­Pho is about tradition as much as it is about change. It comforts as well as stokes the imagination” (­Nguyen 2018).

Suggestions for Further Reading For a wide array of scholarship on queer diaspora theory through a feminist lens, see the entire special volume of Textual Practice (­No. 25, 2011) edited by Emma Parker entitled “­Contemporary Women’s Writing and Queer Diasporas.” See also Gopinath (­2005), which builds on diaspora theory by focusing on queer female lives and subjectivities. For a discussion of queer diaspora theory in Asian American studies, Eng (­1997) remains important. For recent works on queer diaspora theory and Asian/­American communities, see Eng (­2010), Puar (­2017), and Gopinath (­2018). For an overview of how queer studies has developed to include other fields of inquiry, such as women of color feminism, ­queer-­​­­of-​­color critique, and queer diaspora, see Eng et al. (­2005), as well as the more recent essay that serves to update it, Eng and Puar (­2020). The only work published so far on classical reception in Vietnamese American literature is Nguyen (­2022), which examines classical reception in the poetry of Ocean Vuong through the lens of ­queer-­​­­of-​­color critique. For an overview of the history of Vietnamese American literature, see Pelaud (­2011).

Notes 1 All texts of Sappho’s fragments are from Campbell 1982; all translations of Sappho are from Anne Carson 2002. 2 All texts and translations of Hồ Xuân Hương’s poetry are from Balaban 2000. 3 Note that the ordering and associated numbering of the poems is an editorial choice in Balaban 2000.

Works Cited Axel, Brian. 2002. “­The Diasporic Imaginary.” Public Culture 14.2: 4­ 11–​­428. Balaban, John. 2000. Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương. Washington, DC: Copper Canyon Press. “­BMI Presents: She Who Has No Master(­s).” Public Broadcasting Service, published on May 29, 2020, https://­www.pbs.org/­video/­­bmi-­​­­presents-­​­­she-­​­­who-­​­­has-­​­­no-­​­­masters-​­beqixe/ Campbell, David. 1982. Greek Lyric, Vol. I: Sappho and Alcaeus. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carson, Anne. 2002. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Vintage Books.

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Sappho, Hồ Xuân Hương and Vi Khi Nao ­Dodson-​­Robinson, Eric. 2010. “­Helen’s ‘­Judgment of Paris’ and Greek Marriage Ritual in Sappho 16.” Arethusa 43.1: 1­ –​­20. duBois, Page. 1996. “­Sappho and Helen.” In Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, edited by Ellen Greene, 7­ 9–​­88. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Eng, David. 1997. “­Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies.” Social Text 15.­3–​­4: ­31–​­52. Eng, David. 2003. “­Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas.” Social Text 21.3: ­1–​­37. Eng, David, et al. 2005. “­What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” Social Text 23.­3–​­4: 1­ –​­17. Eng, David. 2010. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eng, David and Jasbir Puar. 2020. “­Left of Queer Theory?” Social Text 38.4: 1­ –​­23. French, Agatha. 2017. “­At Home in Exile: Vi Khi Nao on her Experimental Novel ‘­Fish in Exile.’” Los Angeles Times, April 14, 2017, https://­www.latimes.com/­books/­­la-­​­­ca-­​­­fob-­​­­vi-­​­­khi-­​­­nao-­​­­20170414-​­story.html. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2005. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2011. “­Foreward: Queer Diasporic Interventions,” Textual Practice, 25.3: ­635–​­638. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2018. Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. Duke: Duke University Press. Lê, Thiện. 2019. “­Phở ­79 – ​­nhà Hàng Đầu Tiên Của Orange County Được giải Thưởng Danh giá ‘­Oscar ẩm Thực.’” Người Việt, January 30, 2019, https://­www.­nguoi-​­viet.com/­­little-​­saigon/­­pho-­​­­79-­​­­nha-­​­­hang-­​­­dau-­​ ­­tien-­​­­cua-­​­­orange-­​­­county-­​­­duoc-­​­­giai-­​­­thuong-­​­­danh-­​­­gia-­​­­oscar-­​­­am-​­thuc/. Lorde, Audre. 1984. “­The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 1­ 10–​­113. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. Marr, David. 1981. Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1­ 920–​­1945. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Molina, Natalia. 2022. A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nao, Vi Khi. 2019. “­Quiet Thương: Jessica Nguyen in Conversation with Vi Khi Nao.” diaCRITICS, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, June 19, 2019, https://­dvan.org/­2019/­06/­­quiet-­​­­thuong-­​­­jessica-­​­­nguyen-­​­­in­​­­conversation-­​­­with-­​­­vi-­​­­khi-​­nao/. Nao, Vi Khi. 2020. “­Sapphở.” diaCRITICS, Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, May 27, 2020, https://­ dvan.org/­2020/­05/­­sappho-­​­­a-­​­­poem-­​­­by-­​­­vi-­​­­khi-​­nao/ Nguyen, Andrea. 2018. “­The History of Pho.” Viet World Kitchen, March 29, 2018, https://­www.vietworldkitchen.com/­blog/­2018/­03/­­the-­​­­history-­​­­of-​­pho.html. Nguyen, Kelly. 2022. “­Queering Telemachus: Ocean Vuong, Postmemories and the Vietnam War.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 29: 4­ 30–​­448. Parker, Emma. 2011. “­Introduction: Queer, There and Everywhere.” Textual Practice 25.4: ­639–​­647. Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy. 2011. This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Peters, Erica. 2010. “­Defusing Phở: Soup Stories and Ethnic Erasures, ­1919–​­2009.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 14.2: ­159–​­167. Puar, Jasbir. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rayner, Jay. 2013. “­The Vietnamese Pho ­War – ​­Can You Trademark a Soup?” The Guardian, September 24, 2013, https://­www.theguardian.com/­lifeandstyle/­wordofmouth/­2013/­sep/­25/­­vietnamese-­​­­pho-­​­­trademark-­​ ­­soup-​­cafe. Schrenk, Lawrence. 1994. “­Sappho Frag. 44 and the ‘­Iliad’.” Hermes 122.2: ­144–​­150. Spelman, Henry. 2017. “­Sappho 44.” Mnemosyne 70.5: ­740–​­757. Trần, Mỹ Vân. 2002. “‘­Come on, Girls, Let’s Go Bail Water’: Eroticism in Hồ Xuân Hương Vietnamese Poetry.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 33.3: 4­ 71–​­494. Worman, Nancy. 1997. “­The Body as Argument: Helen in Four Greek Texts.” Classical Antiquity 16.1: ­151–​­203. Yam, Kimberly. 2016. “­Why The Outrage Over Bon Appétit’s Pho Article Is Completely Justified.” Huffington Post, September 14, 2016, https://­www.huffpost.com/­entry/­­why-­​­­the-­​­­outrage-­​­­over-­​­­bon-​­app%C3%­A9tits-­​ ­­pho-­​­­article-­​­­is-­​­­completely-​­justified_n_57d84562e4b0aa4b722ce47d.

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22 LES GUÉRILLÈRES Sappho and the Lesbian Body Irene Han

Introduction In her essay “­The Trojan Horse,” Monique Wittig states, Any important literary work is like the Trojan Horse at the time it is produced. Any work with a new form operates as a war machine, because its design and its goal is to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions. (­Wittig 1992, 6­ 8–​­69) In this paper, I pursue this avenue of research: the feminist thought of Wittig, writer, philosopher, and activist, a central figure in the radical lesbian movement in France during the 1970s and one of the founders of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (­MLF) (­Women’s Liberation Movement).1 Influenced by the revolutionary events of May 1968, she is a theorist of materialist feminism, which uses the language of Marx to deconstruct the “…‘­myth of woman,’ plus its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of women” (­Wittig 1981, 247). It is my view that the concepts found in Wittig’s theory originate from and have resonances with the lyric poetry of Sappho, from the Greek Archaic period. I put Wittig in dialogue with this specific voice from antiquity and probe the dialectic between the past and present. The fragmentary nature of Sappho’s poems embodies what Wittig identifies to be a “­war machine,” as a new and unconventional form of writing, comprised of ancient symbols, and we can see that Sappho depicts the lesbian body and subjectivity, what Wittig promotes as the truest, if not only, form of feminism: Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (­woman and man), because the designated subject (­lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically…our survival demands that we contribute all our strength to the destruction of the class of women within which men appropriate women. This can be accomplished only by the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression. (­Wittig 1981, 250) DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-28 316

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In her work, Wittig calls to destroy the category and social construction of “­Woman” as a natural group and argues that the idea of “­Lesbian” can lead to that destruction. By existing outside the system of heterosexuality, Lesbians threaten to upend the entire structure of oppression. In my readings of Sappho, I am interested in mapping out the power dynamics between lover and beloved and examining how she opens up the possibility of reconceiving gender as a ­non-​ ­binary concept. In order to attain these aims, I situate my readings of Sappho’s fragments within the framework of Wittig’s thought and use Wittig as a heuristic model: we better understand the original ancient text by looking through this conceptual apparatus. My paper makes an intervention into recent scholarship, which has brought to light the possibility that the Greeks and Romans thought of ­non-​­tribadic instances of female homoerotic desire as different in kind than other types of human desire. The work of Sandra Boehringer finds evidence for Greek and Roman notions of a less hierarchical female homoeroticism, fundamentally different from m ­ ale-​­male or m ­ ale-​­female desire, and perhaps intrinsic to the sexual identities of certain (­real or fictional) women. I argue that Wittig’s conception of the “­Lesbian” sheds light on the ancient author and enables us to read her poems from a new angle: the ­first-​­person voice of Sappho’s poems confuses the subject/­object binary and promotes a ­non-​­hierarchical, ­non-​­binary version of female homoerotic desire. In this way, by disrupting and overturning traditional power relations, her fragments have a revolutionary potential, in the spirit of Wittig. Wittig’s radical writing enhances the fragments of Sappho. What we find in her lyric is a ­pre-​ ­modern conception of sexuality, one that predates the historically and socially constructed category of “­Woman,” and I will argue that what Wittig advocates in Les Guérillères is a return to this ancient ideal. In both of these texts, Sappho is invoked as a muse and source of inspiration, for Wittig writes: “­When one has read the poems of Sappho, Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, the poems of Sylvia Plath and Anaïs Nin, La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc, one has read everything” (­Wittig 1973, 9) and later calls on “­m/­y mouth opens to entreat the divine incomparable Sappho… glory to Sappho for as long as we shall live in this dark continent” (­Wittig 1973, 57). In Les Guérillères, also, “­Sapho” is listed in the bibliography as one of her references, which, in general, work as ­socio-­​­­historical-​­cultural markers and are simultaneously redacted, as indices of distance that the book tries to take in relation to them (­Wittig 1969, 209). At the same time, by reading Wittig with Sappho, it is my belief that this particular ancient voice illuminates Wittig’s literary, political, and philosophical endeavor, which creates a new language: “­For [Wittig], to theorize a language after and without g­ ender—​­a language without the hierarchy imputed to gender by p­ atriarchy—​­is to create language in that same language” (­Kim 2018, 85). Sappho, in the Archaic period, already challenges this hierarchy and patriarchy; her fragments prepare us for and accomplishes what Kim says in describing the texts of Wittig: “…the experience of language in its fullness, a language that has been stripped down and freed of predictable, sedimented, conventional meaning” (­Kim 2018, 122). My work thus combines theoretical, literary and philological methodologies and is interested in an issue of enhancement: I proceed to show, by periodic demonstrations, that my philological answers verify the theoretical questions and categories that I pose as initiating them, that each depends upon and enhances the other. I probe how the classical might provide a critical perspective on the modern and contemporary, as well as, v­ ice-​­versa.

Before Sexuality It is very true that we cannot conflate the ancient and modern/­contemporary frameworks: it is important to delineate a boundary between the ancient context, with their own “­indigenous” practices, and the contemporary paradigm and to differentiate ourselves, “­what we do,” from the ancient 317

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Greeks, who may exhibit a radical otherness in their experience of sexual desire (­Calame 2018, 8). From the significant scholarship that has been produced on ancient sexuality, Foucault, and on the question of a homosexual “­identity,”2 some scholars have noticed one gaping absence in Foucault’s discourse: the gender bias that shapes his volumes and effaces women from the narrative (­see Richlin 1998). Indeed, the topic of female homoeroticism remained little studied (­in comparison to male homoerotic desire) until more recently, with such work as that of Lardinois and Boehringer. The word lesbos in the ancient context is not entirely associated with what Wittig means in her thought, where she calls for a feminist revolution and aims to destroy the categories of sex and the notion of woman itself. In antiquity, “­Lesbian” refers to the island where both Sappho and Alcaeus composed their songs, “…used in the first place for a female inhabitant of the isle of Lesbos, but from classical times onwards erotic connotations became attached to it” (­Lardinois 1989, 24). As Lardinois argues: The classical comedy writer Aristophanes (­­446-​­385 BC) used a verb lesbiazein, ‘­to do like the Lesbian women’, 3 for women who practised fellatio, and this meaning of the verb is attested until late antiquity. The first overt association of Lesbos with female homosexuality is found in Roman times…In my opinion the development of the meaning of the word ‘­lesbian’ in antiquity can serve as evidence for responses to Sappho’s poetry. (­Lardinois 1989, 24) Despite the philological problem, where lesbos does not denote female ­same-​­sex desire, there is still a concept of the Lesbian figure. In the classical period, Plato recognizes the existence of this particular type of love in Aristophanes’ speech, where we find three original wholes. The myth explains how different sexual orientations come to be, and lesbians form a separate category: any women who are sections from the fully female gender do not turn their attention to men, but, rather, they incline more toward women, and, therefore, female homosexuals come from this group (­Plato Symposium, ­191b–​­e). The philosophical context offers us a conception of erotic love or desire (­erōs) as a lack and recognizes the category of the Lesbian, where such a treatment allows us to reevaluate ancient attitudes toward sexuality. In her study, Boehringer has observed that relations between women are perceived as erotic relations in their own right, and that they are perceived as a category, placed on the feminine side, very distant from behavior between men (­with which no common element appears that can establish a common category): “­The reason is simple: for the philosopher, these relations have no impact on the social life of Athenian men” (­Boehringer 2007, 118).4 What has been historically passed over, “­after two centuries of silence” (­Boehringer 2007, 118) proves to be a key moment for an analysis of feminine homoerotic relations and for an understanding of gender entirely. There is a third type, Aristophanes explains, the neutral: …But there was also a third, which was a combination of both the other two, whose name has survived, but the gender itself has disappeared. For in those days, there was a distinct type of androgynous person, not just the word, though, like the word, the gender too combined male and female. (­Plato Symposium ­189d–​­e) Aristophanes’ narrative reconstructs the androgynous figure, the hermaphrodite, for it presents a shape, a third category beyond the binary framework, eventually split and divided, made two from one, as we know it today. The philosophical discourse proves illuminating because it recognizes 318

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both the existence and practice of female homoerotic relationships, offers a complex treatment of gender, and minimizes the problem of anachronism: it enables us to use the term “­lesbian” in a more modern sense, as an identity and subjectivity that escapes and resists the power differential. In my reading, I will continue to amplify the female voice of desire and argue that what we find in Sappho is the seed of a lesbian identity. That is, even if, as Lardinois claims, a dichotomy between homosexuality and heterosexuality arises only after the classical period (­Lardinois 1989, 25), there is, in Sappho, a unique homoerotic bent that resonates with modern notions of homosexuality, lesbian feminism and also “­queerness,” what Sedgwick defines as “…the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (­or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (­Sedgwick 1993, 8). Wittig’s critique of heterosexuality shares similarities with the lesbian and gay ­avant-​­garde; both schools challenge binary oppositions “…or equations (­gender = sex) upon which conventional notions of sexuality and identity rely” (­Hennessy 1993, 964) and contest the very structures of intelligibility organized and regulated by heteronormativity (­Hennessy 1993, 965). At the same time, certain contesting presuppositions pit material feminism and ­avant-​­garde theories of sexuality against one another. While the terms imagined by queer theorists can be characterized by some common ­features—​­“…an emphasis on queer identities, on the discursive or symbolic dimensions of the social, and on sexuality as pleasure and p­ lay—​­”…“… for materialist feminists, sexuality, along with those features that often accompany how it is understood in the West (­pleasure, consumption, cultural diversity), is part of a given global reality in which these terms have a very specific privileged address” (­Hennessy 1993, 965). In other words, from the material feminist point of view, activities constitutive of social relations such as pleasure, play, and consumption, all of which are embraced by queer theory, operate within the structures of capitalism and exhibit material conditions, in a Marxist sense, though Halberstam does link queerness with a response to capitalism (­Halberstam 2011, 1­ 8–​­21). By reading Sappho through the lens of Wittig’s feminist thought, I suggest that this relation enables us to conceptualize a notion of queer space: “­nonnormative locales that are physical, social, and constituted by and through social relations” (­Garrity 2007, ­1–​­2), a space collectively appropriated as an alternative to majoritarian, heteronormative centers and territories and, ultimately, “­queer time” the blurring of time and temporal relationships among past, present, and future.5 Halberstam claims in In a Queer Time and Place, “…the queer ‘­way of life’ will encompass subcultural practices, alternative methods of alliance, forms of transgender embodiment, and those forms of representation dedicated to capturing these willfully eccentric modes of being” (­Halberstam 2005, 13). Queer time necessitates a “­new temporal logics” and “­even as it emerges from the AIDS crisis, is not only about compression and annihilation; it is also about the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” (­Halberstam 2005, 14). The application of these theoretical concepts elucidates the mechanisms at play in the fragments of Sappho, namely, the n­ on-​­hierarchical homoerotic relationship, the formation of queer communities, a distinct feminine subjectivity,6 and a treatment of gender as “­­non-​­binary.”

Helen In fragment 16, Sappho presents a multiplicity of perspectives, and different voices speak from a field of voices. For her, beauty resides not in war, but in love: Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing 319

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on the black earth, but I say it is what one loves. Easy to make this understood by all. For she who overcame everyone in beauty (­Helen) left her fine husband behind and went sailing to Troy. Not for her children nor her dear parents had she a thought, n­ o–​­ ]led her astray ]for ]lightly ]reminded me now of Anaktoria who is gone. I would rather see her lovely step and the motion of light on her face than chariots of Lydians or ranks of footsoldiers in arms. ]not possible to happen ]to pray for a share ] ] ] ] ] toward[ ] ] ] out of the unexpected.7 Sappho sets up an opposition between the plurality “­some say” (­ο]ἰ… φαῖσ’) and the singular “­I” (­ἔγω) that speaks in this text to redefine what “­the most beautiful” (­κάλλιστον) is: not war, but love, and, with this declaration, Sappho engages in poetic warfare by usurping the language of epic to recast it in the context of her lyric. The idea behind this sentiment, however, is not that love is the antithesis of war nor lyric, that of epic, but that love is war and lyric can be epic: the army, the image of the black earth (­γᾶν μέλαι[ν]αν)­8 and figures that we know from Homer, such as Helen, form the backdrop to her battlefield of love. From the various threads that comprise the texture of her song, perhaps the loudest voice is the one that does not speak, the silence of the speaker’s object of desire, what one loves. In a famous reading of Sappho, Winkler claims that the poet is remodeling these images and tropes to set up her own kind of poetics: “…her proposition is not that men value military forces whereas she values desire, but rather that all valuation is an act of desire” (­Winkler 1990, 177). Ultimately, what Sappho initiates is a “­double consciousness” of two systems, men’s and women’s values, and the ability to speak ­bi-​­lingually: “­Sappho both ­re-​­enacts scenes from public culture infused with her private perspective as the enclosed woman and she speaks publicly of the most private, ­woman-​­centered experiences from which men are strictly excluded” (­Winkler 1990, 181). 320

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The debate on the relationship between public and private discourses in Sappho’s fragments can be approached from another angle if we consider them within their immediate context of melic performance as sung songs, performed on ritualistic occasions, specifically, marriage rituals, accompanied by dance and movement, choreographic rhythm and meter. “­The beautiful” (­κά ̣ λ̣λο̣ς)̣ , for instance, is one of these deictic features, a semantic trait attached to the beauty of the young woman in the initiatory ritual. It is a marker of the homoerotic sentiment, expressed in an enunciative, performative context, in which the “­I” of the poem equates what is most beautiful with Helen, “­for she who overcame everyone in beauty, (­Helen)” (­fr. 16. ­6–​­8). On the one hand, the fragment presents us with an ekphrasis, in which the speaker opens up a keyhole to phantasia or imagination: the love triangle in which Helen finds herself. What Sappho does is to recast Helen into the position of the feminine subject, who gains agency, and to identify herself with this position. Helen is not completely passive or fragile, persuaded to leave by desire, speech, and other pharmaka. The poet, for her part, creates an exemplum and conflates the most beautiful thing (­κάλλιστον) with Helen, who surpasses all in beauty (­κά ̣ λ̣λο̣ς)̣ , and her act of passion, that is, her very decision to chase the object of her desire. The ambiguous status of Helen, furthermore, as both subject/­object, active/­passive, is reflected in the middle voice of the verb ἔραται (“­loves,” fr. 16.4). She leaves behind her husband, the “­best” or “­most completely noble” of men (­τὸν ἄνδρα πανάριστον fr. 16.8),9 Menelaos, and, sailing to Troy to pursue her beloved, is, in turn, led astray as a passive object (­αὔ̣ ταν, “­her,” fr.16.11). The epithet πανάριστον (“­completely noble”) confers on Menelaos his public status, his very manhood, while Paris, on his part, only carves out a space in the text as Helen’s love object (­Stehle 1996, 222). In this ­set-​­up, Paris takes up the position of being an absent presence, objectified and relegated to the status of being “­that thing” (­κῆν’, fr.16.3) which a person loves. Departing and sailing to a foreign land, Helen is cast into the role of the protagonist. She forsakes her feminine duties and, in fragment 16, the act of abandoning is not necessarily vilified, and it is even admirable. There is beauty, the speaker says, in the act of love, and Helen plays the role of the exemplary lover, by choosing to pursue her beloved, even at the expense of forgetting her ties to her family: “­Not for her children nor her dear parents/­had she a thought, no” (­fr. 16.­ 10–​­11). Although it is impossible to truly know, for there is a lacuna in the next line, it seems as though something (­or someone) led Helen astray. Yet, the thought of Helen and Beauty compels the poetess to remember Anaktoria, who is absent: “­reminded me now of Anaktoria/­who is gone” (­fr. 16.­15–​­16). The scenario depends on the sense of sight: “­I would rather see” (­βολλοίμαν… ἴδην fr. 16.­17–​ ­18) is an expression of the lover’s deficiency, where the desire for seeing beauty, whether in its physical presence or through the mind’s eye, is defined by an erotics. In this case, because Anaktoria is gone, the narrator’s gaze must reconstruct her in fantasy (­Stehle 1996, 223), and, in this composition, Sappho is able to picture the lovely walk and bright sparkle of her face. In this relationship, it is unclear who is playing the role of Helen, who is the party desiring and being desired, the active or passive partner. On one level, it would seem that, like Helen, Anaktoria embodies beauty and, similar to her mythological counterpart, that she is moving, departing, and traveling away with her “­lovely step.” In turn, it is the speaker, who is being impacted by the thought and absence of her beloved. Yet on another level, by enacting the force of desire and practicing her volition, Sappho pursues the object of her desire and assumes an active role. An intimation of the will is expressed in the assertion, “­I say it is what one loves” (­fr. 16.­3–​­4), and, furthermore, the ambiguity of the status of the ­first-​­person voice is portrayed philologically by the middle voice βολλοίμαν, “­I would wish” (­fr. 16.17). Helen, Sappho, and Anaktoria are desiring subjects and objects that are desired, and their relationships are defined by reciprocity. The horizontality that exists among them and their 321

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triangulation are indicative of relations that go beyond the active/­passive binary and destroy hierarchical boundaries between activity/­passivity, and subject/­object by confusing and escaping conventional categories, roles, and norms. In this way, Sappho, in fragment 16, accomplishes the destiny and mission of the Lesbian: The refusal to become (­or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role ‘­woman.’ It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man. (­Wittig 1981, 248) In Butler’s contextualization of Wittig, she explains: “­Wittig refers to ‘­sex’ as a mark that is somehow applied by an institutionalized heterosexuality, a mark that can be erased or obfuscated through practices that effectively contest that institution…” (­Butler 1990, 26). As a materialist feminist, Wittig views language as an instrument or tool that is in no way misogynist in its structures, but only in its applications: …She considers language to be ‘­another order of materiality,’ an institution that can be radically transformed. Language ranks among the concrete and contingent practices and institutions maintained by the choices of individuals and, hence, weakened by the collective action of choosing individuals. (­Butler 1990, 26) What we find in Sappho, when she exerts the female voice of desire for a female other, is precisely the refusal of heterosexuality as a system and an escape from its power structures, that resituates itself ­vis-­​­­à-​­vis a masculine epic discourse, in an era “­before sexuality.” In fragment 1 as well, Sappho displays a specific orientation, when she states: “­For if she flees, soon she will pursue./­If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them./­If she does not love, soon she will love/­even unwilling” (­fr. 1. ­21–​­24). In fragment 1, Sappho invokes Aphrodite as an ally in order to be released from the pangs of unrequited love and to snare her most recent love object, who flees, a young girl. At the heart of these poems is lesbian desire and, in this way, by opening up a private world, Sappho participates in a practice that contests the status quo, i.e. masculine epic discourse, and reveals a lesbian identity, for ancient sexuality does construct an identity revealed by this disruptive form of desire (­Sissa 1999, 153). Furthermore, rather than assuming a position and carving out a space that sits in opposition to the masculine sphere, Sappho enacts the posture of the Guérillères: privileging love and beauty, and expressing homoerotic desire, she reclaims the language, tropes, and conventions of the masculine space and creates a women’s circle that evades and replaces patriarchal norms. Sappho’s milieu, “…a group of women tied by family, class, politics, and erotic love” (­Parker 1993, 346) constitutes a ­same-​­sex, lesbian community. It is unclear whether Sappho’s group is indeed a choral circle, in which young women would be initiated into marriage, or an association of women friends (­hetairai) in a sympotic setting, but she does occasionally refer to female “­friends” or “­companions” [hetairai; frr. 126, 142 [referring to goddesses], 160] (­Kurke 2021, 95). The performative context of Sappho’s poetry has also been called into question: …None of the prayers examined so far presents a pragmatic articulation of the text that evokes, let alone establishes performance as a song within a cultic context. Such an interpretation is certainly compatible with the formulation of frs 2 and 17 in particular, but no 322

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more than that. In linguistic terms, the texts all present themselves as speech acts addressed to divine addressees. (­D’Alessio 2018, 45) Whether her songs were composed for choral performance, accompanied by dance and movement, or performed in ritual activities, cult practice, and informal social events (­Parker 1993, 346), or completely monodic,10 in the speech act alone, a specifically feminine subjectivity is assumed, and homoerotic bonds are established between lover and beloved, in the Sapphic relationship; the speaking “­I” addresses a female beloved and conveys the painful experience for an absent love object. The homoerotic sentiment, furthermore, is preserved through writing after the performance. Writing preserves the memory and allows the poet “…to project an implied speaker independent of the physical mode of transmission” (­Stehle 1997, 294): What Sappho discovered in writing was not only a way to produce an assertion of the self that is independent of the speaker (­as Solon did) but a way to preserve communication in the face of separation. The speaker in her poetry may focus on herself or on the other, but either way a relationship of desire that is affirmative for the other is created. (­Stehle 1997, 311) Beyond the performative context, Sappho exploits the possibilities of writing and language and, in doing so, in her fragments, imagines the spirit of material feminism: she chooses to compose songs of longing, desire, and love and, devouring epic themes and form, arranges Sapphic stanzas. She revises Homeric language and invents her own aesthetic and literary identity. What Sappho achieves in fragment 16 is precisely a critique of the language of war, rendered by the army of horse, on foot, of ships, the chariots of Lydians, and ranks of footsoldiers in arms, and creates a language in the language of (­masculine) Homer: the language of desire, a feminine language,11 which is not prescribed by patriarchal hierarchy. Reconceptualizing Helen as a subject, Menelaus and Paris both as objects, Sappho inverts the active/­passive, masculine/­feminine binaries and thus uses language in an unpredictable, unconventional, and original way. She turns signified into signifiers, transforms language and, in the manner of Wittig, moves toward a system after and beyond gender: in this new language, what prevails is the f­eminine—​­Helen, who sails away, Anaktoria, who is ­gone—​­both of whom excel in the concept of beauty, expressed in the neutral (­κάλλιστον, “­the most beautiful”) and (­κ̣άλ̣λο̣ς̣, “­the beautiful”). In other words, Sappho universalizes the feminine and writes from the point of view of a lesbian, who has canceled out genders by reversing gender roles and making them obsolete (­Wittig 1992, 61). Just as there is a move toward the transcendence of gender in the fragments of Sappho, there is also a move toward the transcendence of time. In fragment 16, Sappho portrays various temporal registers; she begins in the present, with her declaration of ­love—​­“…but I say it is what one loves” (­fr. 16.­3–​­4)—​­and recalls the mythological past, as she describes the paradigm of Helen: “­For she who overcame everyone in beauty (­Helen) left her fine husband” (­fr. 16.­7–​­9). Subsequently, the poet moves to a more recent past, as she is reminded of ­Anaktoria—​­“…] reminded me now of Anaktoria who is gone” (­fr. 16.­15–​­16)—​­and ends on an elliptical note, on a note of surprise that disrupts clear delineations among these temporal markers: “­out of the unexpected” or “­out of surprise” (­fr. 16.32). The ellipses that precede this phrase amplify the sense of rupture or opening and the feeling of ambiguity, which culminates in a moment of surprise. The alternation from the present to a distant past, then to a closer past and, lastly, 323

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to a seemingly timeless period disrupts linear temporality, where such irregularities play into a sense of “­queer time,” the blurring of time and temporal relationships among past, present, and future. A new temporal logics, moreover, is born out of the exemplum that we find in Helen, for her condition, leaving her husband, abandoning her maternal duties, and forsaking ties to her family, embodies what Halberstam defines as “…the potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” (­Halberstam 2005, 14). Finally, the relationship between the speaker and Anaktoria disrupts the linear progression of chronology because it follows the paradigm of desire and eludes precisely these conventions. The strictly feminine relation sits outside normative temporality and, ultimately, constructs and contributes to an anachronistic community.

Les Guérilleres The ­anti-​­chronology of queer time is magnified in Wittig’s Les Guérillères, in which Archaic Sappho works as one of the text’s spiritual mothers. The correspondences are striking, particularly with respect to how, in Les Guérillères, the protagonists (­elles), who have grown from being young women to Amazonian warriors, form their own circles and participate in choral movement. Between their violent episodes and clashes with men, they train and celebrate with dance (­Wittig 1969, ­141–​­142). As in fragment 16, there is a juxtaposition between the masculine space of war and the feminine experience of choral dance. These female warriors wage war against men, “­speak violence against men” (­Wittig 1969, 142),12 and aim to liberate themselves by forging an attack on male bodies and the language of patriarchy imposed upon them. As a form of training and ritual, they beat the ground, engage in rhythmic movement, “­the rhythm needed for the dance” and move in a circle (­Wittig 1969, 141). This circle of dancers needs to make a revolution and achieves “­something quite new” by stamping the ground in time and letting the foot move in rhythm (­Wittig 1969, 142). As we saw in Sappho fragment 16, the protagonists shape their own experience in such a way that the feminine experience envelops and eclipses masculine practices, tropes, and behaviors. They reclaim the earth, appropriate the masculine space of war and aggression and, in turn, create their own rituals, such as choral dance, patterns, and language, all of which supplant former patriarchal traditions. Les Guérillères occupy their own unique feminine, Lesbian subjectivity, which is beyond the categories of sex (­woman and man) (­Wittig 1981, 250), and establish their Sapphic, utopian circle, with its own secret laws, symbols, customs, and feminine religious rites. These women imitate the ­bacchantes—​­“[t]hey shake their hair like the bacchantes who love to agitate their thyrsi” (­Wittig 2007, 98)—​­an a­ ll-​­female cult dedicated to the god Dionysus, who have their private ecstatic rites, and, furthermore, pay homage to “­warlike Minerva” (­la belliqueuse Minerve), commonly designated as the Roman counterpart to the Greek goddess Athena (­Graf 2001, 139). An androgynous, paradoxical figure, also the virgin goddess, Athena represents the “­third type,” both masculine and feminine, “…who ‘­was not nourished in the darkness of the womb’13 ” (­Loraux 1993, 11). Les Guérillères reclaim the goddess from the genealogy instituted by the ­fifth-​­century BCE Athenian civic imaginary and set her up as an idol in their pursuits. In fact, Minerva/­Athena is the divinity that presides over their ritual, what we can understand to be a religious rite or rite of passage, in the manner of the chorus of young women in the Archaic context, which would be dedicated to Aphrodite, Hera or Dionysus, for example, in their initiation into marriage (­Calame 2019, 447). In this case, the female warriors situate themselves around Minerva/­Athena Parthenos, maiden, virgin, described as bellicose, and it is fitting that they do so because the goddess escapes the gender binary, like the Lesbian, and refuses the “­constraints 324

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of patriarchal oppression:” marriage and motherhood. Choral dance, in this instance, therefore, constitutes a revolutionary act because, in their movements, actions, and attitudes, these women empower themselves by r­e-​­empowering images of the past, the bacchantes, Minerva, and, from the collective training of their bodies, demolish the former system from the interior; they reconstitute space and language by reorganizing and redefining what is masculine and what is feminine and combine these two spheres, the public and the private, in their aim to build a lesbian utopian society. In Wittig’s novel, episodes of combat are interspersed with vignettes of respite. In one particularly remarkable moment, Les Guérillères make a direct appeal to Sappho fragment 16 (­Wittig 1969, ­150–​­152). In this interlude, the young women find a moment of repose in the sea, which offers them a space to indulge their bodies. Their sensuality is accentuated and also recalls the experience of the speaker of fragment 31: “­the sweat running down their necks,” “­under their armpits,” “­along their backs” (­Wittig 1969, 150).14 They r­ e-​­enact the postures of Odyssean figures, the handmaidens of Nausicaa or the ­sea-​­nymphs of the Odyssey, 15 female presences, who emerge from and have affinities with the sea. After the completion of their work, Les Guérillères practice a similar sort of play and leisure as the handmaidens of Nausicaa, in particular: they enjoy the shining sun, “­stretched out in the sun” (­Wittig 1969, 150), and “[s]ome…jump in the sand and jostle each other” (­Wittig 1969, 150). One of them, in the nude, has “­tresses of hair that falls over each shoulder” (­Wittig 1969, 150), like the s­ emi-​­divine females of the Odyssey, who are “­­fair-​­tressed” (­ἐυπλόκαμοι, 6.135), and performs a song, as Nausicaa ­does—​­“­she was the leader in song” (­ἤρχετο μολπῆς, 6. 101)—​­by reciting the poetry of Sappho. Like her predecessor before her, the anonymous young woman (­chorus leader) revises the epic tradition and language of Homer, the silent intertext of this passage. In this instance, Wittig engages with the Odyssey, whose central theme, generally speaking, encompasses the nostos (­homecoming) and the reinstitution of the oikos, rather than the anger, war, and battle that we find in the Iliad. Sappho’s disavowal of Iliadic themes is mirrored in the actions of Les Guérillères, when they plunge into the sea and lay down their rifles (­Wittig 1969, 150), just as the handmaidens of Nausicaa jump into the sea and enjoy the scenery of the beach after washing stains on their garments. Les Guérillères assume the masculine function of the warrior and, yet, at the same time, organize themselves around a more private, intimate moment, namely, the recitation of erotic love poetry. The poet, in this instance, asks: “­Is the finest thing on the dark earth really a group of horsemen whose horses go at a trot or a troop of infantry stamping the ground? Is the finest thing really a squadron of ships side by side?” (­Wittig 1969, ­150–​­152). Then she asserts the beauty and superiority of Anaktoria: “­Anactoria Kypris Savé have a bearing a grace a radiant brightness of countenance that are pleasanter to see than all the chariots of the Lydians and their warriors charging in their armour” (­Wittig 1969, 152). Wittig recasts the anaphora that Sappho deploys in fragment 16 (“­Some say… others say… others say” ο]ἰ…οἰ…οἰ… φαῖσ’, fr. 16.­1–​­4) with a series of ­questions—​­“­Is it really… or rather, is it really…” (­­est-​­ce vraiment…ou bien… [e]­st-​­ce vraiment?)— ​­and aligns herself with the preferences of Sappho rather than with those of Homer; the poetess Guérillère believes that the step, the grace, and radiant brightness of the face of Anaktoria bring more pleasure than all the war machinery of the Lydians (­Wittig 1969, 152). This viewpoint the fi ­ rst-​­person speaker of fragment 16 also expresses: “­I would rather see her lovely step/­and the motion of light on her face” (­fr. 16.­17–​­18). In Wittig’s version, Anaktoria bears the epithet Kypris Savé, where Kypris refers to Aphrodite and her birthplace, the island of Cyprus, and Savé, being an elusive name, has various resonances. In fact, in a film that Wittig will later ­co-​­write with Zeig, The Girl (­2000), which depicts the love 325

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affair between two women and plays out some of the concepts and ideas found in The Lesbian Body, “­The Straight Mind” and “­The Trojan Horse” (­Dolidon 2009, 74), one of the character’s name is Bu Savé: “­For French ears, her name resembles the words bouche (­mouth), suave (­suave), saveur (­flavour) or even savoir (­to know, as in vous savez—​­you know)—​­words and sounds that carry sensual connotations…” (­Dolidon 2009, 85). It also evokes “­saving” in English (“­to save”) and “­war” in Turkish (­savaş). Bu Savé is the ­long-​­term lesbian lover of the Painter in the film and, as Scanlon argues, …Exists as an oppositional force outside of the straight world. This is exaggerated by the fact that she is the only character with a given name, contrasting sharply with the generic placeholders of ‘­the Girl’ and ‘­the Man.’ Bu Savé is also played by the only black actor (­Sandra N’Kake) in an otherwise ­all-​­white cast, accentuating her position as a minority in the film’s binaries. (­Scanlon 2010, 9) The name Savé already makes an appearance in Les Guérillères and, as a manipulated linguistic term in the novel, acts as a marker for Anaktoria’s ambiguity, her position outside of an occidental, heteronormative paradigm, thereby signaling her lesbian status, just as Kypris invokes the presence of Aphrodite and attributes to Anaktoria a divine status. The implicit connection to the goddess recalls the performative context of Sappho’s poetry, and the ancient performance is doubled in Wittig’s interpretation; after the ­pseudo-​­chorus leader recites these lines, her audience applauds. The past and the present intersect, merge, and are perfectly balanced at this moment, where such fluidity between what is otherwise two distinct temporal realms works as an expression of queer time. The recitation of Sappho, furthermore, solidifies the queer community, whose Muse is Sappho, and whose goddess is Anaktoria, in the manner of Helen in the Archaic context, and disruptive power seeks to eradicate an oppressive patriarchal structure. By playing the role of guerrilla warriors, yet identifying with the figure and attitude of Anactoria Kypris Savé in a more private setting, ­re-​­enacting the Sapphic position, les Guérillères, therefore, combine and call into question the masculine/­feminine binary and open up a space of lesbian desire. Finally, I would like to explore in what way the fragments of Sappho work as a “­war machine” of Wittig’s theory in “­The Trojan Horse.” First of all, on a visual level, the Sapphic corpus has a new form, due to the fragmentary nature of her poems. Indeed, there is an element of a chance in the way that these fragments have survived and come down to us, in the manuscript tradition, but, to a certain extent, the themes of absence, lack, and desire are enhanced by the lacunae and gaps, which Carson, in her translation, preserves (­­Figure 22.1). The striking visual component of her work bears a resemblance to the form of Wittig’s Les Guérillères, which contains vignettes, dispersed between lists of names, all in capital letters, and giant circles, a symbol of the female anatomy: Like the Trojan Horse, her poems are teeming with bodies and corporeal experiences, in the way that in fragment 31, for example, Sappho experiences the madness of love and the condition of ekstasis. The sublime, in fact, resides in Sappho’s fragmented body: Longinus admires the poem for Sappho’s selection of ideas and the combination of them, in other words, for the rupture and integration of the members that constitute a living body (­Longinus On the Sublime, 10.1). According to Longinus, she negotiates the tension between erotic desire and truth itself (­On the Sublime, 10.­1–­​­­8–​­9). Sappho’s experience of erōs informs her corporeal discourse and influences Longinus’ own project: fragmented limbs that he combines to produce his treatise on the art of the sublime (­technologia) (­On the Sublime, 40.1). 326

Les Guérillères: Sappho and the Lesbian Body

­Figure  22.1  Circle from Wittig’s Les Guérillères, an abstract symbol of the female anatomy. Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères © 1969 by Les Editions de Minuit.

Lastly, Sappho’s fragments use language in a way that pulverizes old forms and formal conventions and promote a political experience. They recuperate the silence of both women and lesbians and contribute to a new, alternative canon, which Wittig recovers in her thought: Male homosexual literature has a past, it has a present. The lesbians, for their part, are ­silent—​­just as all women are as women at all levels…Only the women’s movement has proved capable of producing lesbian texts in a context of total rupture with masculine culture, texts written by women exclusively for women, careless of male approval. (­Wittig 1973, 9) In the immediate context itself, where these poems might have been shared in a social setting by an association of hetairai or performed by a chorus of young women, the desire of the poet radiates outwards and is felt collectively, performed and ­re-​­performed, and r­e-​­generated and transmitted through the medium of writing. In this private circle, therefore, Sappho creates a community, a lesbian community, the future toward which Wittig looks.

Conclusion Using the Wittigian conception of sexuality, and, in particular, of lesbian sexuality as it is literally deployed in Les Guérillères and The Lesbian Body, I have argued that Wittig finds its model, if not its source, in Sappho’s text, which is part of a ­pre-​­modern conception of sexuality, preceding the historically and socially constructed category of “­Woman.” Ultimately, this project has as its intention of showing that female homoeroticism, as ancient literature and philosophy testify, exceeds gender categories and hierarchies. On the theoretical level, this reading of Sappho introduces a new understanding of gender, beyond the binary interpretation of identities, by emphasizing the “­erotic force” and the becoming subject of desire through “­the force of sung poetry.” Furthermore, Sappho and Wittig, both of whom are invested in the power of language and render original versions of what is signified, advance, in a radical and pioneering way, a deconstruction or even destruction of language and hierarchies (­subjectivity, identity, sexuality). Exploring such affinities, I inscribe the Wittigian enterprise in a long and ancient genealogy. This approach has, therefore, magnified the temporal fluidity, which is at play in the fragments of Sappho and the thought of 327

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Wittig, and fundamentally works in a queer way: unraveling binary oppositions, disturbing the ideal of linear progression, and shedding light on new spaces of association and alternative alliances, which decenter the patriarchal and heteronormative paradigm. In the spirit of queer theory, these writers exhibit “…transgression in the form of visible difference from norms” (­Stewart 2017, 62) and see gender and sexual identities “…to be demonstrably defiant definitions and configurations” (­Stewart 2017, 62).

Suggestions for Further Reading For further exploration of some of the important works discussed in this essay, I would suggest the following. Wittig 1981 is critical for an early understanding of lesbianism as disruptive to gender. Boehringer 2007 provides the first comprehensive study of female homoerotic desire in ancient Greece and Rome. Carson 2003 presents a collection of Sappho’s extant fragments and offers a beautiful translation, from a contemporary angle, together with the classical Greek. Butler 1990 stands as a foundational text of feminist, queer theory, for its notion of gender performativity and reconceptualization of the sex/­gender divide. As for other works to discover, always being interested in the intersection between cinema and literature, I would recommend Akerman’s Je tu il elle (­1974), which portrays the fluidity of female sexuality and elides boundaries between the pronouns of its title. As for “­queer” texts and other Trojan Horses, Garréta’s Sphinx (­1986) writes a novel that steps outside the gender binary and, in a Wittigian approach, creates a new language “­without gender.”

Notes 1 I am indebted and very grateful to Claude Calame, Sandra Boehringer, Kirk Ormand, Sara Lindheim, and Ella Haselswerdt for their readings and investment in the paper, as well as the EHESS and ­Franco-​ ­American Fulbright Commission for sponsoring the project. 2 See, e.g., Dover 2016 and Halperin 1990. 3 E.g., Aristophanes Frogs 1308. 4 Translation of modern scholarship is mine, unless otherwise noted. 5 Atack detects a sense of queerness in Plato’s dialogues and relies on Rohy’s claim “…that queerness (­in parallel with race, in the context of the USA) disrupts the ‘­fantasy’ and ‘­linear temporality’ of straight time, the ‘­normative temporality’” (­Atack 2020, 14). 6 In his reading of fragment 58, Calame, for example, using an anthropological feminist approach, identifies a distinct “­feminine subjectivity” in Sappho’s poetry (­Calame 2013, 48), whose enunciative plasticity and polyphony make it possible to traverse masculine and feminine identities (­Calame 2013, 63). 7 The translation has been adapted from Anne Carson’s in If Not, Winter (­Carson 2003). 8 The “­black earth” is a trope throughout Homer, as in the formulaic line: “­But now indeed the black earth held him,” τότε δ’ ἤδη ἔχεν κάτα γαῖα μέλαινα. (­Homer Iliad 2.699); see also Iliad 15.715; 17.416; 20.494; Homer Odyssey 11.365; 11.587; 19.111. 9 Campbell suggests this reconstruction for the lacuna. 10 Sappho’s epithalamia (­wedding songs) could be monodic or choral (­Kurke 2021, 95). 11 I use “­feminine language” as being distinct from “­feminine writing,” which, Wittig claims, “…amounts to saying that women do not belong to history, and that writing is not a material production” (­Wittig 1992, 60). 12 Translations follow Le Vay’s (­Wittig 2007) with occasional adaptations. 13 (­Aeschylus Eumenides, 665.) 14 The speaker of fragment 31 undergoes une petite morte: “…fire is racing under skin/­and in eyes no sight and drumming/­fills ears/­and cold sweat holds me and shaking/­grips me all, greener than grass” (­fr. 31. ­10– ​­14). 15 The handmaidens of Nausicaa, after washing their garments in the sea, find pleasure in their leisure: engaging in a game of ball, dining, sunbathing, and singing (­Homer Odyssey, 6.­85–​­101). These maidens

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Works Cited Atack, Carol. 2020. “­Plato’s Queer Time: Dialogic Moments in the Life and Death of Socrates.” Classical Receptions Journal 12. 1: ­10–​­31. Boehringer, Sandra. 2007. L’Homosexualité Féminine Dans l’Antiquité Grecque et Romaine. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Calame, Claude. 2013. “­La Poésie de Sappho aux Prises Avec le Genre: Polyphonie, Pragmatique et Rituel (­à propos du fr. 58b).” QUCC 104: ­45–​­67. —​­—​­—​­. 2018. “­Civilisation et Kultur: de Friedrich August Wolf à Sigmund Freud.” Cahiers “­Mondes Anciens” 11: 1­ –​­10. _______. 2019. Les Choeurs de Jeunes Filles en Grèce Ancienne: Morphologie, Fonction Religieuse et Sociale. Paris: Les belles lettres. Campbell, David, ed. 1982. Greek Lyric Poetry. London: Duckworth Publishing. Carson, Anne. 2003. If Not, Winter. New York: Vintage Books. D’Alessio, Giambattista. 2018. “­Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Lyric: The Case of Sappho.” In Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece, edited by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips, ­31–​­62. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dolidon, Annabelle. 2009. “­Shifting Wittigian Binaries: Abstraction and R ­ e-​­materialization of the Lesbian Body in Sande Zeig’s The Girl.” Feminist Review 92.1: ­72–​­90. Dover, Kenneth J. 2016. Greek Homosexuality. London: Bloomsbury. Garréta, Anne. 1986. Sphinx. Paris: Grasset. Garrity, Jane. 2007. “­Mapping Queer Space.” English Language Notes 45.2: 1­ –​­5. Graf, Fritz. 2001. “­Athena and Minerva: Two Faces of One Goddess?” In Athena in the Classical World, edited by Susan Deacy and Alexandra Villing, 1­ 27–​­139. Leiden: Brill. Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place. New York: New York University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halperin, David. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. London: Routledge. Hennessy, Rosemary. 1993. “­Queer Theory: A Review of the Differences Special Issue and Wittig’s The Straight Mind.” Signs 18.4: 9­ 64–​­973. Je tu il elle. 1974. Dir. Chantal Akerman. Belgium: Paradise Films. Kim, Annabel. 2018. Unbecoming Language: ­Anti-​­Identitarian French Feminist Fictions. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Kurke, Leslie. 2021. “­Sappho and Genre.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, edited by Patrick J. Finglass and Adrian Kelly, 9­ 3–​­106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lardinois, Andre. 1989. “­Lesbian Sappho and Sappho of Lesbos.” In From Sappho to De Sade, Moment in the History of Sexuality, edited Jan N. Bremmer, ­1–​­14. London: Routledge. Loraux, Nicole. 1993. The Children of Athena. Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division Between the Sexes, trans. Caroline Levine. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parker, Holt. 1993. “­Sappho Schoolmistress.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 123: ­309–​­351. Richlin, Amy. 1998. “­Foucault’s History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women?” In Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, edited by David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter, ­138–​­170. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scanlon, Julie. 2010. “­Getting The Girl: Wittig and Zeig’s Trojan Horse.” Genders 52. https://­ www. colorado.edu/­­gendersarchive1998-​­2013/­2010/­11/­01/­­getting-­​­­girl-­​­­wittig-­​­­and-­​­­zeigs-­​­­trojan-​­horse. Accessed 14 December 2021. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sissa, Giulia. 1999. “­Sexual Bodybuilding: Aeschines against Timarchus.” In Constructions of the Classical Body, edited by James Porter, ­147–​­168. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

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Irene Han Stehle, Eva. 1996. “­Sappho’s Gaze: Fantasies of a Goddess and Young Man.” In Reading Sappho, edited by Ellen Greene, 1­ 93–​­225. Berkeley: University of California Press. —​­—​­—​­. 1997. Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stewart Jay. 2017. “­Academic Theory.” In Genderqueer and ­Non-​­Binary Genders, edited by Christina Richards, Walter Pierre Bouman, and M ­ eg-​­John Barker, ­53–​­72. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Winkler John J. 1990. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. London: Routledge. Wittig, Monique. 1969. Les Guérillères. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. —​­—​­—​­. 1973. The Lesbian Body, trans. David Le Vay. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. —​­—​­—​­. 1981. “­One Is Not Born a Woman.” In Feminist Theory Reader, edited by Carole R. McCann and ­Seung-​­kyung Kim, ­246–​­251. London: Routledge. —​­—​­—​­. 1992. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2007. Les Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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23 THE RISE AND FALL OF THE QUEER MALE BODY IN ­MID-​­CENTURY MUSCLE PHOTOGRAPHY Alastair J.L. Blanshard In this chapter, I want to puzzle through what an exploration of a specific photographic genre might tell us about the reception of the classical in the modern world and how that might relate to the operation of the discursive category of the queer. Photography seems a good medium in which to explore these issues because both the classical and the queer occupy privileged places within its artistic practice. From its very beginning, photography has been a genre engaged with imagining and representing the classical past. One of the founders of the artform, William Henry Fox Talbot, was a man fascinated by the ancient world. He read Classics at Cambridge and in 1820 was awarded the Porson Prize, the university’s most distinguished prize in Greek composition, for his rendering of part of Shakespeare’s Macbeth into Greek verse. Later in his life, he would devote considerable time to the decipherment and interpretation of Assyrian cuneiform (­Robson 2013). Photography has also been a genre that has not shied away from the homoerotic potential that lies waiting to be activated within the field of the classical. In his ­ground-​­breaking photographic work, The Pencil of Nature (­1844), Talbot praised the photographic process for its ability to capture the beauty of classical statuary and he illustrated this capacity with photographs of a cast that he owned of a Hellenistic sculpture from the Townley collection in the British museum. In this period, this sculpture was identified as a representation of Achilles’ lover, Patroclus and this is how it is identified in The Pencil of Nature (­Burns 2008, 442). Crucial to early photography’s success in capturing this sculpture was its “­whiteness,” a feature that Talbot identified as allowing sculpture to be rendered with rapidity and ease by the photographic process and which allowed a number of satisfying light effects to be produced by the photographer (­Talbot 1844, ­23–​­24). From its very inception then, photography has been a medium keen to ­represent – ​­and seemingly pleased with its capacity to r­ epresent – queer, ​­ white, male bodies. As a number of histories of photography have shown, there has never been a moment when queer photographic images were not being produced (­Ellenzweig 1992; Waugh 1996). It is perfectly possible to tell the history of photography solely through a sequence of queer images and it is impossible to tell the history of photography without them. This chapter pursues a thread in this narrative. It traces the story of the representation ­of – ​­let’s provisionally call them “­queer” – ​­white, male bodies forward a century or so from the beginnings of photography and focuses on the gay muscle photography that flourished in the United States from the late 1940s to the 1950s. These 331

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images of ­near-​­naked men modeling their physiques with only flimsy posing pouches to ensure their modesty were one of the key products of gay culture in this period. In providing an account of this material, this chapter aims to offer a narrative that is sensitive to the key issues that must be attended to in any analysis of moments of queer reception. It considers the historical and material context of that reception and it seeks to place that reception within its wider generic and intellectual milieu. Finally, this chapter attempts to unearth the politics of this moment of reception. In doing so, it charts how these images oscillate in and out of the category of the queer, and so exposes a number of features of this discursive category. One of the considerations that it wishes to foreground is the intersection of this imagery with the category of race. The stark whiteness of these bodies is inescapable and is directly and proportionately related to the classicism of the imagery. It is not only a product of aesthetics that constantly refers back to ­Greco-​­Roman marble statuary (­famously wrongly conceived of as “­white”) but also an historical imagination which sees a classical antiquity in which people of color play no significant role. In so firmly committing to a representational regime that erases experience and eliminates diverse visibility, these magazines compromise their claims to the status of “­queer.” Indeed, the “­queerness” or otherwise of this imagery is a running question throughout this essay.

Conditions of Production: Mainstream Queer? Let us first turn to the historical circumstances in which the production of 1950s muscle photographs occurred and consider the magazines that published them. This historicist turn is partly to acknowledge that the field of reception studies has always privileged historical ­analysis – ​­in distinction to other modes of understanding an event or cultural product (­e.g. philosophic, formalist, or psychoanalytic approaches) – ​­as the principal means for understanding manifestations of classicism. In this respect, Classical Reception Studies struggles to escape its intellectual origins in the Rezeptionsgeschichte of the Constance school of critics led by H.R. Jauss and W. Iser. As Jauss’ provocatively titled work, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft (“­Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” 1967; cf. Jauss 1970) makes clear, for these critics, it was only by placing work within the historical context of its production, dissemination, and reception that you could begin to appreciate it and critically appraise it. So beginning with history acknowledges that this is where most reception studies begin. However, I also want to begin by sketching out the historical situation in which muscle photography emerged and circulated because it is through a consideration of the conditions that operated in relation to the production and dissemination of these images that the significance of these magazines is best comprehended. Through a historical lens, we can best appreciate the primacy, originality, and legacy of these works. As we shall see, other lenses, especially intersectional ones, are less kind to this material. Gay muscle photography proliferated in a period of social adjustment and upheaval following WWII and has been described as “­the high point of gay erotic culture before Stonewall” (­Waugh 1996, 176). These photographs were marketed to an increasingly affluent, white, gay male populace which had emerged in the p­ ost-​­war period and who were settling into organized communities of the types that emerged in New York City’s West Village, L.A.’s West Hollywood, and San Francisco’s Castro District (­Morgan 1996, 281). For many of these gay men, their service in the ­all-​­male environment of the armed forces during the war had been a catalyst for the recognition of their own sexuality and had facilitated their engagement with other similar homosexuals (­cf. Bérubé 1990 and D’Emilio 1983). 332

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Although these photographs were available for purchase from individual studios, they primarily circulated through the pages of over 100 different ­so-​­called “­physique” magazines. These magazines featured numerous photos of naked or ­semi-​­naked young men, often posed in a manner deliberately evocative of antiquity. Most of these magazines were published in the United States, although there were also significant publication centers in West Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia (­Waugh 1996, 217). Produced largely in digest or duodecimo format, they were privately printed and distributed through ­mail-​­order to either individual subscribers or subscribing newsstands. Their cost was relatively low; magazines generally cost between 35 and 50 cents per issue. As we delve into the material conditions of the production of these magazines, it is productive to pose questions about how queer identity is constructed and expressed. In particular, these magazines entreat us to think about the relationship between consumer culture, popular media, homosexuality, and queerness. Are these images “­queer”? While definitions of queer are famously elusive, it is hard to find a definition that doesn’t involve elements of ­counter-​­cultural destabilization of societal norms. With that in mind, let’s put a few specific questions on the table that are worth considering alongside the primary question about the queerness of these images: How do we correlate the terms “­gay” and “­queer”? Is there such a thing as “­mainstream queer”? Or to put that question another way, “­how integral is marginalization to queer identity?” Hanging above these questions is a more general question, “­Are these magazines too replicative of normative values and content so as to be unable to be regarded as queer either in our time or theirs?” As we shall see, the extraordinary volume of production of physique magazines and the way in which they accelerated and facilitated gay capitalism, all the while pushing a politics that disavowed the radical potential of homosexual desire, complicates any story that we might want to tell about the inherent queerness of these texts. The volume of output of these photographs and the widespread nature of their circulation is the first fact that should command our attention. In writing histories of queer visibility, scholars have, for obvious reasons, been attracted to early manifestos on homosexual rights and works of sexology which adopted sympathetic stances toward manifestations of ­same-​­sex desire. Yet, such works, for all their intellectual daring, only enjoyed very limited circulation. For example, John Addington Symonds’ A Problem in Greek Ethics (­1883) in which he argued for an adoption of a tolerant attitude toward sexual inversion on the grounds of its primacy in ancient Greek culture was only initially published in an edition of ten copies. His later work A Problem in Modern Ethics (­1896) which argued a similar position based on insights gained from breakthroughs in Continental sexological studies enjoyed a larger, but still limited, production run of 100 copies. Similarly, ­ground-​­breaking works such as Edward Carpenter’s Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society (­1894) or Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion (­1897, rep. 1905) were only published in the low hundreds (­Tobin 2015, 4). As landmarks of intellectual history, they command respect, but they are by no means works of popular culture and their impact in their day is often hard to quantify. The same cannot be said for the physique magazines of the 1950s and 1960s where we can talk perhaps for the very first time of a “­gay popular culture.” Estimates of the total monthly sales for physique magazines give readerships of up to 750,000 people, with annual sales in the region of nine million magazines (­Polak 1965, 9). Even if we regard Polak’s numbers as possibly exaggerated, a number of individual magazines recorded subscriber numbers of between 75,000 and 100,000. In legal depositions, one magazine publisher disclosed a subscriber base of 40,000 subscribers (­Johnson 2019, ix). Writing about the phenomenon of physique magazines during its final years, Clark Polak observed, “­even today, there are few towns in which one physique book is not available and a surprising number of rural … areas feature … magazines” (­Polak 1965, 15). Other studies confirm the truth of Polak’s observation, especially in relation to the geographic 333

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distribution of physique magazines. Only a year earlier, Herbert Otto noted that a newsstand in Dayton, Ohio featured 25 different physique magazines (­Otto 1964). A survey conducted by the Grecian Guild Pictorial concluded that over half the subscribers lived in “­smaller cities, towns, and rural areas” (­July 1957, 4). The volume of photographs produced by these magazines was enormous. The photographer and publisher, Bob Mizer photographed over 1,000 different male models and his archive of images amounts to over 2,000,000 photographs. Through their wide dissemination and their extremely regular publication of imagery, these magazines represent one of the twentieth century’s most significant representations of homosexual desire and aesthetics. The magazines not only published photographs, but they also ran stories on topics relevant to gay life as well as published correspondence from readers many of whom felt isolated in their own communities, but who, through the magazines, felt part of a larger community. Thomas Waugh quotes a letter from Physique Pictorial in which a young man writes a note of thanks to the publishers: “­I knew that I was not alone in my beliefs … you are doing a truly wonderful job in uniting young men all over the world who share a common interest” (­Waugh 1996, 219). Some magazines also ran sidelines in ­short-​­film production. Bob Mizer personally directed over 3,000 short films in his career and, through his Athletic Model Guild, facilitated the dissemination of other ­short-​­film makers such as Richard Fontaine. The magazines were also important facilitators of gay commerce containing advertisements for prints, sculpture, and other decorative objects of homoerotic interest. David Johnson has coined the term “­­mail-​­order activism” (­2019, 5) to describe the way that these magazines organized, and mobilized the gay community, strengthening connections between members, raising consciousness about issues of common interest, challenging legal regimes and restrictions, and articulating cultural values. Importantly, the publishers who produced these magazines were largely ­non-​­elite figures. Irvin Johnson, the publisher of Tomorrow’s Man was a ­small-​­time Chicago gym owner. Bob Mizer publisher of Physique Pictorial grew up in a rooming house run by his mother in Los Angeles. H. Lynn Womack, whose MANuel Enterprises would own a number of physique magazine titles, was the child of impoverished tenant farmers in Mississippi and endured an interrupted university education. Only Randolph Benson and John Bullock, the publishers of Grecian Guild Pictorial had anything that approximated an elite education, having met as undergraduates at the University of Virginia in 1947 (­Johnson 2019, 85). For this reason, the strong evocations of the classical world that run through these magazines are noteworthy. As an expression of populist, n­ on-​­elite classicism, these magazines are also p­ ath-​ ­breaking. With titles like Adonis, American Apollo, Little Caesar, Demi Gods, and The Olympians, these magazines played heavily on notions of classical prestige. The most explicitly and overtly classicizing of the magazines was the Grecian Guild Pictorial whose ­first-​­edition cover featured a ­close-​­up detail of the head of Myron’s Discobolus. The explicit aim of this magazine was to revive the spirit of ancient Greece in the modern world and recreate a world in which “­the body of a muscular, graceful, w ­ ell-​­proportioned youth was among the most admirable of things” (­Grecian Guild Pictorial Fall 1955, 43). In order to do this, the magazine sought to create a brotherhood of ­like-​ ­minded individuals among its readers. Readers were encouraged to become “­guild members” by swearing an oath and pledging allegiance to the values “­first perceived and perfected by the people of ancient Greece … pure beauty of art, particularly as it is embodied in the human physique at its best.” Like other fraternal organizations, the Grecian Guild held conventions and retreats for its members. It even produced discrete pins for its members to wear, so that they might recognize similarly ­like-​­minded individuals. With its focus on creeds and pledges, and in so strongly advocating for the creation of a movement to bring about the return of a highly romanticized form of antiquity, the Grecian Guild 334

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Pictorial was a slightly eccentric, if nonetheless popular, outlier among physique magazines. A more typical example of how physique magazines engaged with the classical world is provided by the most famous, ­widest-​­distributed, and ­longest-​­lasting of the physique magazines, Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial. The classicism of Physique Pictorial is primarily to be found in the way in which its photography constantly alludes back to classical statuary as the benchmark of male beauty. Models are stripped and exposed, their thin posing pouches imitating the contemporary practice of covering the genitals of classical statues with plaster fig leaves. They routinely adopt poses that show off their muscles through imitation of w ­ ell-​­known examples of ­Greco-​­Roman art. Popular statues to imitate include the Farnese Heracles, the Belvedere torso, the Dying Gaul, the Mazarin Hermaphrodite, the Capitoline and Barberini fauns, and the Ludovisi Ares (­­Figure 23.1). Even when there is no specific statue alluded to by the pose of the model, the classical world is often evoked by the presence of props or backgrounds. The most ubiquitous is the fluted column, but there are a number of images where models adopt classical costuming including antique headdresses and jewelry, Roman armor and weapons, and, in one instance, a complete toga (­while a naked slave abases himself at his master’s feet) (­­Figure  23.2). Occasionally, posing pouches give way to classicizing loincloths. If there is footwear, it is almost always a Roman sandal. In one image (­Physique Pictorial Winter 1955, 5.4, 22), a popular

­Figure  23.1  Model Bob Schwartz from the Spring 1953 issue of Physique Pictorial (­3.1: 3). Photo: Athletic Model Guild. Image provided by the Bob Mizer Foundation.

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­Figure  23.2  “­A Roman ­soldier-​­boxer is prepared for the games by a slave boy and fellow soldier.” Tableau from the Spring 1955 issue of Physique Pictorial (­5.1: 21). Photo: Athletic Model Guild. Image provided by the Bob Mizer Foundation.

physique model, Bud Counts, wears antlers in imitation of Acteon undergoing his transformation to a stag. This classicizing display of the male body is suffused with ­para-​­material that emphasized the connections between antiquity and these modern images. These images stood alongside print advertisements advertising bronze and plaster copies of ancient statuary (“­Reposing Hercules in White or Suntan $3. Magnificent bronze finish on any of these statues: $1 additional. Contact ATHENS studios, Los Angeles”). Drawings and paintings of naked men set in the ancient world can be found adorning the b­ ack-​­covers and inside pages of issues. Men lounge by pools in Arcadian settings or emerge h­ alf-​­naked and victorious from the gladiatorial arena or gaze out at the reader as they stand exposed in the Roman slave market or appear in the guise of suggestive dancing fauns or wrestle naked in the palaestra. Even classicizing mainstream cinema was ­co-​­opted by Physique Pictorial. Images of a ­bare-​­chested Marlon Brando in a peplum skirt from Julius Caesar (­1953) duels with images of Steve Reeves’ Hercules (­1959) for the reader’s attention. In later editions, the masthead of the magazine designed by John Campbell depicted a scene in which a naked slave boy kneels down and offers up a copy of Physique Pictorial to a Roman centurion while in the background stood a temple in which the name of the owning company of Physique Pictorial, the Athletic Model Guild, appears prominently in the pediment. Through a variety of techniques and media, a central message is made clear: there is a direct line of continuity between the classical past and the modern physique magazine in the appreciation and idealization of the naked male body and the voyeuristic pleasures that this arouses are transhistorical. 336

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Who Is Afraid of Muscle Photography?: In Search of Queerness So far, this chapter has only tentatively flirted with the idea of labeling these images as “­queer.” Why only flirt? Part of the hesitation comes from noting that such a label, or rather the politics attendant on the label “­queer,” would have been vehemently and publicly denied by the publishers of these images. For these publishers, these images violated no norms and challenged no systems of representation. “­Healthy” is a word that is constantly invoked throughout the pages of physique magazines. As Mizer observes: “­It is our hope that everyone who sees this Pictorial will become a little more conscious of his own ­body – ​­more willing to live the clean wholesome life which makes bodies such as these possible” (­Physique Pictorial Fall 1954, 4.3, 2). They argued that there was nothing corrupting or debilitating about these images. They belonged to the realm of “­art”, a sphere of cultural production beyond reproach. On a purely formal level, these claims have merit. The genealogy that lies behind ­mid-​­century muscle photography is a rich one. Notable ancestors include the heroic nudes of the ­history-​ ­painting tradition that constituted the benchmark for artistic endeavor throughout the palaces and Academies of Europe from the 1760s to the 1830s. In this period, the heroic classicizing naked male form became the “­alpha and omega” of art and yet for all this contemplation of the male form, these images remained curiously immune to the projection of homoerotic desire by their contemporaries (­their subsequent reception is another matter). As Abigail ­Solomon-​­Godeau remarks about these nudes: How then does something called ‘­homosexuality’ fit into this equation? … To this deceptively obvious question there are a number of complicated answers, the gist of which is that our current concept of homosexuality, of the homosexual, maps ill upon premodern visual culture … a certain caution in deploying the concept of homosexuality is necessary. (­­Solomon-​­Godeau 1997, 29) In terms of photographic precursors, these photographs have their origins in the Academic nude photography of athletes that emerged in the m ­ id-​­nineteenth century as part of a gradual “­institutionalisation and commodification of sports and leisure that were altering the place of the (­male) body in the public domain” (­Waugh 1996, 177). In this period, we see the athlete emerge as a new masculine paradigm to stand alongside other heroes of the ­nation-​­state such as the soldier and the father (­Leoussi 2001, ­61–​­63). Adding impetus to this desire to record the athletic body was an anxiety fueled by physical anthropology about bodily degeneracy (­Miller 2018, ­21–​­23). The documentation of the naked athlete was the product of a series of complementary ­state-​­sanctioned, even ­state-​­sponsored, regimes, which combined elements of public health initiatives, the reinforcing of normative masculine ideals, and the policing of racial difference. Again, this is a tradition in which the strict allocation of homoerotic desire on the part of either the creator or the viewer is more complicated than one might originally think (­Snow 2019). So in terms of formal artistic precedent, the pedigree of these images is impeccable, untouched by “­sin.” Moreover, the purpose for which images in physique magazines were professedly deployed was far less about challenging normative masculinity than buttressing its key precepts. Their target was not heterosexuality, but rather the association of the homosexual with the “­sissy.” Mizer again is programmatic: Books such as Physique Pictorial … lay such a heavy stress on heroic masculinity … Many people believe that the word “­sissy” is synonymous with “­homosexual”. And in turn they 337

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believe that every homosexual is “­sissy”, and abounding in feminine traits … to be sure, if a boy is labelled a “­sissy” and treated like a girl, he may make an adjustment to this role all the way, accepting the female role as a matter of course. On the other, homosexuality was the standard way of life among the rugged Greek warriors, and according to researchers of our own current times is no rarity among masculine occupations as truck drivers, cowboys, military men, policemen, and many others. Bodybuilding, and the creation of the rugged, powerful body will almost always remove the stigma of “­sissy” from any young man, because big muscles and femininity are incongruous. (­Physique Pictorial June 1960, 10.1, 13) Drenched in such rhetoric, these images are presented as part of a strategy which aims to reinforce strict gender binaries and assimilate the gay into the straight. Let’s set aside the question of whether Mizer is speaking ironically at this ­point – ​­or whether such extraordinary disavowals constitute a form of queer practice in their own right (­Mullins 1992)— and ​­ take him at his word. The question, then, that we need to think through is how crucial to queer arts are authorial intentions or challenges to formalist conventions. Where can we locate queerness if not in the aims of its creator or in the problems that it poses for the generic? In thinking through the question of what made a text “­queer,” Teresa de Lauretis declared that central to the project of queerness was the way that it disrupted narrative, semiotic, and generic conventions (­2011, 244). What do we make of a set of imagery that not only refuses to participate in such politics but also actively disavows it? Queerness in this sense is proving to be both potent and elusive. One way forward is suggested by those interpretative moves that reject formalist criteria in preference to the affective. Namely, that queerness is recognizable in the traces that it produces, in the terror that it prompts, in the emotions that it animates, in the boundaries that it causes to collapse, and in the identities that it facilitates. In short, queerness is queer not because of what it is, but because of what it does. If we follow these lines of inquiry, then the potential queerness of physique magazines comes into view. Despite the best efforts of the publishers to play by the rules, the alarm that these magazines generated and the passions that they elicited were genuine and not insubstantial. If we take panic and passion as elements crucial to the queer, then physique magazines qualify as “­queer.” Let’s start with panic. From its very beginnings, physique magazines alarmed, at least, some postal inspectors, and this alarm only increased over time. Formed in 1775 by Benjamin Franklin, the US Postal Inspection Service was charged with the implementation and prosecution of federal law in relation to the carriage of goods through the US postal service. This included the prohibition on the distribution of “­obscene” material through the post under the Comstock Law of 1873. As a result, the reaction of postal i­nspectors—​­namely the extent to which they refused to accept the “­alibi” of art and instead saw the photographs as dangerous and ­corrupting—​­becomes a mechanism by which we can trace the queerness of the imagery. The initially inconsistent reaction of postal inspectors illustrates well the way in which the queerness of this material is so tantalizing and confounds readings which see the images as exclusively homoerotic (­cf. Hooven 1995). Some inspectors found the material in the magazine objectionable, others did not. Physique Pictorial captures the divided nature of the Postal Inspection Service’s thinking on the matter. In an editorial that opens the second issue of the magazine in 1952, Bob Mizer sketches out the current state of play with regard to the US Post Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation: All of the advertisers herein attempt to the best of their ability to present the male physique in a wholesome, inspiring manner  … Each scrupulously avoids that questionable 338

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“­borderline” where art leaves off and pornography begins. Unfortunately, however, some officials interpret any exposure of the body as being “­objectionable” and it is impossible to strike a satisfactory compromise with them. Luckily, such extremists are in the minority and we have found the majority of postal inspectors and other officials whom we have contacted to be intelligent, sensible men doing a job the best way they know how … These … officials view with alarm the activities of their o­ ver-​­zealous associates because … they cannot accept arbitrary prejudices. (­Physique Pictorial February 1952, 2.1, 2) An editorial in the following issue repeats this warning about a “­prurient” minority and subsequent issues give advice to budding photographers about how to avoid problems with postal inspectors: Pubic hair should not be shown in any part, though this factor too becomes a matter of difficult interpretation since technically all hair which comes on the body at the time of puberty is pubic hair … For the most part, however, if your intentions are good you are unlikely to conflict with authorities, unless you are unfortunate enough to contact one of the few extremists, and in such cases intelligent argument is useless. If the initial response of the US Postal service was one of ambivalence that position had changed by the end of the decade. “­Good intentions” were no longer enough. In 1959, the Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield began a coordinated campaign against physique magazine. This campaign included specially commissioned postmarks (“­Report Obscene Mail to your Postmaster”), the coordinated placement of sympathetic newspaper articles supporting his c­ lamp-​­down, and a series of special briefings for Senators and Members of Congress about the dangers of obscene publications (­Paul and Schwartz, 1961; Johnson 2019, 132). The climax of the campaign came in 1961 when the US federal government indicted more than 50 members of the Adonis Male Club, a group promoted by and associated with Vim, the most risqué of the physique magazines (­and indeed a critic of other magazines for their conservatism, cf. Johnson 2010, ­185–​­186). In many ways, Vim was unrepresentative of typical physique magazines, yet on the back of this indictment, we see postal inspectors raiding the premises of physique photography studios as well as seizing the mailing lists of physique magazines. Individual subscribers were harassed and threatened with prosecution (­Johnson 2019, ­117–​­152). In Summerfield’s clear signs of panic, we see the queer potential of these images manifested. Among the ­high-​­profile victims of Summerfield’s campaign was the distinguished literary critic Newton Arvin who was arrested and charged with “­possession of obscene photographs,” examples of which were copies of Adonis, Physique Pictorial, and Grecian Guild Pictorial (­Werth 2001, 6, 166 pl. 3). Arvin would subsequently be dismissed from Smith College over this incident. In the legal wrangling over whether Grecian Guild Pictorial and other similar publications were obscene or not, the federal government led evidence from Dr. Frank Caprio, a practicing psychiatrist, who testified that such pictures through their poses were particularly exciting to homosexuals and as a result should be regarded as lewd (“­In the matter concerning MANUAL enterprises et al”, P.O.D. Docket no.1/­246). In arguing not for any objective test of lewdness, but focusing on the subjective effect of these images, we see emerging another way in which the queerness of the images manifests itself, namely how did these images make their viewers feel? For many homosexuals of the period, physique magazines were one of the earliest places in which they found their identity. In the opening section of Buying Gay (­2019), David Johnson 339

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surveys a number of memoirs and demonstrates how important physique magazines were in facilitating gay men’s recognition of their n­ on-​­normative identity: For countless men growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, their first recognition of gay culture came not from visiting a gay bar … nor from joining one of the few avowedly gay organizations then meeting quietly behind closed doors. Long before they moved to Chicago or New York or heard of the Mattachine society, they encountered Physique Pictorial, Tomorrow’s Man or VIM on their local newsstand. (­4) These magazines animated desire, but importantly also shame. Indeed, it is arguable that it is in the shame that these magazines elicited that we see the full force of these images’ queerness. Johnson’s survey brings this out well. David Chapman described how he flushed and stammered as he bought his first copy of a physique magazine, having waited until the shop was empty. Michael Denneny had his mother buy him a copy of Strength and Health as he was too embarrassed to buy it himself. Paul Monette shoplifted his copy of Tomorrow’s Man, secreting it within the pages of the ­thoroughly-​­respectable Modern Screen. In their shame, these subjects recognize their abject status, their outsider identity. They fear exposure because it will lead to hate. In that hate, they see how threatening they are, they recognize their dangerousness, their queerness. One other way in which we might see the queerness of these images manifested is through their legacy. In this respect, I want to gesture toward the work that has been done on queer muscle culture. The conflation of physique magazines with gay identity helped to facilitate the conditions of possibility out of which queer bodybuilding would emerge. David Halperin was the first to theorize the relationship between queer identity and bodybuilding. Taking his cue from an interest manifested by Foucault in late antique ascesis and the regulation of the body in the final section of his History of Sexuality, Halperin saw in bodybuilding a fulfillment of the features associated with ascesis, namely “­transformative queer practice of the self” that yields as result “­a culture and an ethics” (­Halperin 1995, 78). Halperin’s observations about the queerness of gay muscle culture have attracted followers (­Benzie 2000; Shernoff 2001) and have provided a productive site for the analysis of how “­subversion, transgression, and shifts in the dominant production and treatment of gendered bodies occur and what implications, if any, there might be for other situations where bodies are configured in complex networks of norms (­including, but not limited to, gender and sexuality)” (­Schippert 2007, 156). It is important to note that the gay muscle culture that Halperin envisages here is distinct from the muscle culture of the physique magazines. As we have seen, the aim of these magazines was to perpetuate normative aesthetic values. Queer muscle culture radically departs from this, and needs to be distinguished from the straight muscle culture in which physique magazines are so firmly rooted: Queer muscles are not the same as straight muscles. Gay male body styles nowadays differ distinctly from heteronormative ones. The typical result of contemporary gay muscle culture is to produce a physique that deviates noticeably from conventional, ­straight-​­male norms of masculinity … Gay men work out not in order to conform to an average or received standard of male beauty but in order to develop a specific part of their body or a particular muscle group that holds a special significance … the goal of such a physical ascesis is not to look normal but to look weird, hypertrophic, even ­grotesque – ​­that is, ­queer – ​­and yet, for all that, intensely desirable. (­Halperin 1995, 1­ 16–​­118) 340

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Following Halperin’s injunction elsewhere (­cf. Halperin 2002, ­106–​­107) for an approach that is attentive to ideas of genealogy and convergence, we must give weight to the significant role of physique magazines in these later developments. However we draw the genealogy of these queer muscles, physique magazines must be an important ancestor. In locating muscles and bodybuilding as a locus of queer identity formation and in providing a rhetoric that would prove itself adaptable to queer deployment within later muscle culture, physique magazines lay the ground for more radical identity politics. Through their epigone, we can see them as catalysts of the queer.

Politics and Poetics: Queer No Longer Accepting then the “­queerness” of muscle photography also confronts us with the fundamental contingency of this label. If physique photography was productive of queer effects in the 1950s and early 1960s, that period seems to have well and truly passed. By grounding queerness not in formal properties, but in effects, we expose the fact that queerness has a lifespan, a “­­use-​­by” date. The queer of yesterday is not the queer of today. A consideration of the politics of ­mid-​­century muscle photography inevitably entails a discussion of its intersectionality. Ever since the 90s, there has been an increasing awareness that any viable notion of “­queer” must attend to issues of class, gender, and race (­cf. Smith 1993; Cohen 1997, esp. ­441–​­449; Goldman 1996). This recognition, especially on the topic of race, arose out of an increasing dissatisfaction felt by critics over queer theory’s inattention to the issue (­e.g. Dhairyam 1994; Vaid 2012). Important studies on the intersection of queer and race quickly followed (­cf. Muñoz 1999; Barnard 2003; Ferguson 2004). Although some have questioned queer theory’s ability to ever fully accommodate racial issues (­Johnson 2001; Eng 2010). We have already seen the way in which physique magazines police gender binaries and bolster normative masculinity. Concern about the “­sissy” bleeds all too easily throughout the magazines into a broader rejection and disparagement of the feminine and femininity. The same applies only more so when it comes to race. The whiteness of the bodies is certainly one of the most striking features of the photography, and indeed in the sport of bodybuilding more generally (­Dyer 1997, ­148–​­155). The number of models of color represents a tiny proportion of the figures displayed. Strikingly, the more classicizing the publication, the less likely it was to display Black bodies. In her important study of the racial politics of physique magazines, Tracy Morgan compared the representation of n­ on-​ ­white bodies in Grecian Guild Pictorial and the ­much-­​­­less-​­classicizing, more “­­All-​­American” Vim. While neither publication is strong in representation of racial diversity, she finds “­the ‘­­All-​ ­American’-​­style physique magazines … included more than four times as many images of Black Men as did the Grecian publications” (­1996, 289). Moreover, the posing of the figures was often subtlety different: “­their hands do not rest invitingly on their hips, and their eyes, unlike the eyes of their white counterparts, often avoid direct contact with the camera” (­291). She concludes that this representational difference is due to a desire to present the Black models as athletes rather than as objects of desire. A survey of Physique Pictorial produces similar results. Given its classicizing tendencies, its representational profile resembles more Grecian Guild Pictorial than Vim. So, for example, while Robert Shealy appears in the 1953 Spring volume of Physique Pictorial (“­Bob’s ambition is to be the first colored man to win the Mr. America contest”: 3.1, 6), it would be another four years and many hundreds of photographs later before another Black model, Wendel Lee, would appear. Even here, Lee is a subsidiary character in a Roman imperial tableau in which the main action involves a Roman emperor disciplining a white slave (­­Figure 23.3). 341

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­Figure  23.3  Roman emperor orders disciplining of slave (­Bob Riley) by a Roman soldier (­Wendel Lee). Tableau from the Fall 1957 issue of Physique Pictorial (­7.3: 27). Photo: Athletic Model Guild. Image provided by the Bob Mizer Foundation.

It would be another year until Physique Pictorial would publish photographs with Black models as principals with four models (­Winston Jackson, Evret Evans, Walter Mayfield, and Bob Walker) on a single page (­Physique Pictorial Fall 1958, 8.3, 30). The reason for this highly unusual appearance of so many Black models is given in the caption to the page, where readers discovered that the presence of the models was to advertise a new separate publishing venture, a catalog of exclusively Black models (“­So many readers have requested colored models that we have made up a special catalog. This catalog will have at least 30 pages and more are planned”). Black bodies appear only to announce their segregation from the pages of Physique Pictorial. After their appearance in 1958, there are no more Black models in Physique Pictorial for the rest of the decade. The use of the word “­segregation” is deliberate. The establishment of Physique Pictorial’s exclusively Black catalog happens only four years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka which ended racial segregation in public schools. Yet, the pages of the physique magazines remain immune to the civil rights movement burgeoning around them. Morgan notes only one instance of even a “­glimmer of recognition” of the civil rights struggle in a physique magazine. This was a caption in Adonis where the b­ ody-​­builder Arthur Harris is praised for triumphing “­over adversities that would have destroyed lesser men” (­Morgan 1996, 292). Even a socially progressive editor like Bob Mizer rarely publicly acknowledged the civil rights struggle in the pages of his magazine. The only exception seems to be as part of his broader campaign 342

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against the death penalty in which he notes in an editorial the racial bias of the penalty and that “­poor, racial minority groups are 5 times as likely to be executed” (­Physique Pictorial Summer 1955, 5.2, 20). This fact he repeated later in the year as well as drawing attention to the case of ­African-​­American Jess Neal who “­was shot by a firing squad though the American Civil Liberties Union clearly showed the court that his conviction had been obtained by perjured evidence of the police” (­Physique Pictorial Fall 1955, 5.3, 15). Apart from these instances in the context of the discussion of the death penalty, the pages of Physique Pictorial remained immune to broader civil rights questions. In terms of space, the magazine gave more attention to the death of white physique model, Leonard Chambers at the hands of two ­off-​­duty police officers than it did to Neal, devoting both the cover and the inside front page to the case (­Physique Pictorial Summer 1956, 6.2). At a time in which the enduring legacy of slavery was being calculated, the physique magazine chose to see nothing problematic in the institution. Their ludic (­and ludicrous) treatment of the institution of Roman slavery, for example, displays an ignorance that, at times, borders on the grotesque. The Roman slave tableaus that occur through the pages of the magazines formed part of a larger phenomenon that we can observe, namely the tendency for white bodies to regularly dress up as the “­other” for play and pleasure. Indigenous Americans were a favorite choice. War bonnets, Indigenous designs on loincloths, and body art were not infrequently sported by models. Symbols from the cultures of ancient Mesoamerica were similarly appropriated. In his analysis of the use of Indigenous American imagery in these magazines, Rahul Gairola shows how these images were deployed as part of a strategy of “­playing Indian” (­following Deloria 1998) in order to facilitate “­an indigenous, masculine Americanness while delineating it as predominantly white” (­2012, 13). Crucial to this instrumentalization is erasure of history, genocide, and dispossession. We see a similar politics in the tendency to “­play Roman” in the magazine. We have already noted the way that the masthead of Physique Pictorial eroticizes the subjugation of its slave/­­post-​ ­boy by placing him naked at the feet of a fully dressed, Roman centurion. Other images repeat this dynamic. Popular physique magazine artist, George Quaintance, offered an image of two strapping white slaves erotically displayed with just a hint of pubic hair in his painting the “­Slave Market” (­Physique Pictorial December 1953, 3.4, 22). The figures look expectantly at the viewer, seemingly indifferent to the slave owner behind brandishing a bullwhip. And they have a good reason not to worry: chastisement within the pages of physique magazines comes without consequences, no flesh is blemished, and no scars are shown. This denial of the brutality of slavery is seen perhaps most explicitly in the “­physique muscle films” that were produced in the late 1950s. These films were sold as companion pieces to the physique magazines and offered the viewer a chance to see their favorite models animated in various scenarios. Ancient Roman slave scenes prove popular (­Blanshard 2015, ­259–​­262). Almost all of these involve the slave being “­punished” in some way, but the punishment when it eventuates is never severe. In one film, A Gift for Demetrius (­c. 1958), we see a slave being whipped, but the whipping is so ­half-​­hearted that the audience never sees the slave as being placed in any real danger. Normally, the “­punishment” involves just a bout of energetic wrestling by ­oiled-​­up slaves and masters in posing pouches. Time and again, the message is clear: Being a slave is sexy fun. Is it ever OK to play a “­chattel slave” for fun? At the very least, the queerness of such acts is contentious. Within the BDSM community, the racial overtones of such acts have proved divisive (­Oddie 2022, ­91–​­92). Recent scholarship has pointed out how long studies of kink have ignored questions of race (­Cruz 2020). While some have argued that BDSM acts such as slave auctions act as a way of bearing witness within the erotic realm to colonial oppression (­Demaj 2014), others have seen it as part of a white erasure of black experience, a project assisted by the majority whiteness of BDSM practitioners (­Martinez 2020) and the “­invisibility” of color and whiteness (­Weiss 343

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2011, ­210–​­211). Only in the way that such acts possibly invite an opportunity to reflect critically on racialized power structures and explore the intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and class has there been a recognition that BDSM slave play can participate in a full progressive politics (­Musser 2014; Cruz 2016; Oddie 2022). Did physique magazines encourage such critical reflection? Certainly, not explicitly. Indeed, only a very generous reader would see them as encouraging it even accidentally. We can see slipping away whatever purchase these magazines might have once had on queer. The disavowals are so strong, the whiteness so blinding, the absences so complete and profound that a ­kink-​ ­reclamation of physique magazines seems an unfeasibly Romantic project. In contemplating the queerness of ­mid-​­century muscle photography, we may well remark that “­The Queer is dead. Long live the Queer.”

Suggestions for Further Reading The best general studies of queer photography remain Ellenzweig (­1992) and Waugh (­1996). Cooper (­1995) provides an analysis of a number of genres of photography involving the male nude. A survey of the intersections with classicism and homoerotic photography is provided by Burns (­2008). The best introduction to physique magazines is D. Johnson (­2019). There is also a useful collection of material in Hooven (­1995) and Taschen published in 1997 a complete reprint of Physique Pictorial in three volumes (­vol. 1 ­1951–​­1960; vol. 2 ­1960–​­1967; and vol. 3 ­1968–​ ­1990). The Bob Mizer Foundation is currently undertaking a major digitization project of Mizer’s photographs, writings, and films (­www.bobmizer.org). In thinking through the racial implications of physique magazines, Tracy Morgan’s essay is central (­1996). Ariane Cruz was one of the early scholars working on the intersections of race and BDSM and her work The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (­2016) provides an important and useful introduction to the theoretical issues and implications of the topic. Barnard (­2003) provides a provocative starting point for thinking through intersections of queer identity and race.

Works Cited Barnard, Ian. 2003. Queer Race: Cultural Interventions in the Racial Politics of Queer Theory. New York: Peter Lang. Benzie, Tim. 2000. “­Judy Garland at the Gym: Gay Magazines and Bay Bodybuilding.” Continuum 14, no. 2: ­159–​­170. Bérubé, Allan. 1990. Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two. New York: Plume. Blanshard, Alastair J. L. 2015. “­The Erotic Eye: Cinema, Classicism, and the Sexual Subject.” In Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, edited by Jennifer Ingleheart, ­252–​­272. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burns, Bryan E. 2008. “­Classicizing Bodies in the Male Photographic Tradition.” In A Companion to Classical Receptions, edited by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray, 4­ 40–​­451. Malden, MA: ­Wiley-​­Blackwell. Carpenter, Edward. 1894. Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society. Manchester: The Labour Press Society. Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. “­Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3: 4­ 37–​­465. Cooper, Emmanuel. 1995. Fully Exposed: The Male Nude in Photography. London: Routledge. Cruz, Ariane. 2016. The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography. New York: New York ­University Press. Cruz, Ariane. 2020. “­Not a Moment Too Soon: A Juncture of BDSM and Race.” Sexualities 24: 8­ 19–​­824.

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The Queer Male Body in Mid-Century Muscle Photography D’Emilio, John. 1983. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, ­1940–​­70. Chicago: Chicago University Press. De Lauretis, Teresa. 2011. “­Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, nos. 2­ –​­3: ­243–​­263. Deloria, Philip. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Demaj, Ada. 2014. “­Touching Race Through Play: Sadomasochism, Phenomenology, and the Intertwining of Race and Sexuality.” Gender & Sexuality 11: ­97–​­111. Dhairyam, Sagri. 1994. “­Racing the Lesbian, Dodging White Critics.” In The Lesbian Postmodern, edited by Laura L. Doan, 2­ 5–​­46. New York: Columbia University Press. Dyer, Richard. 1997. White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Taylor and Francis. Ellenzweig, Allen. 1992. The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/­Delacroix to Mapplethorpe. New York: Columbia University Press. Ellis, Havelock. 1897. Sexual Inversion. London: Wilson and Macmillan. Eng, David L. 2010. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gairola, Rahul K. 2012. “­White Skin, Red Masks: “­Playing Indian” in Queer Images from Physique Pictorial, ­1957–​­1967.” Liminalities 8, no. 4: ­1–​­17. Goldman, Ruth. 1996. “­Who is that Queer Queer? Exploring Norms around Sexuality, Race, and Class in Queer Theory.” In Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology, edited by Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason, 1­ 69–​­182. New York: New York University Press. Halperin, David M. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halperin, David M. 2002. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hooven, F. Valentine. 1995. Beefcake: The Muscle Magazines of America, 1­ 950–​­70. Cologne: Taschen. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1967. Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1970. Literaturgeschichte als Provokation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Johnson, David K. 2010. “­Physique Pioneers: The Politics of 1960s Gay Consumer Culture.” Journal of Social History 43, no. 4: ­867–​­888. Johnson, David K. 2019. Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement. New York: Columbia University Press. Johnson, Patrick E. 2001. “‘­Quare’ Studies, or (­Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1: ­1–​­25. Leoussi, Athena. 2001. Encyclopaedia of Nationalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Martinez, Katherine. 2020. “­Overwhelming Whiteness of BDSM: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Racialization in BDSM.” Sexualities 24, nos. ­5–​­6: 7­ 33–​­748. Miller, Peter J. 2018. “­The Imaginary Antiquity of Physical Culture.” The Classical Outlook 93, no. 3: ­21–​­31. Morgan, Tracey D. 1996. “­Pages of Whiteness: Race, Physique Magazines, and the Emergence of Public Gay Culture.” In Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology, edited by Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason, 2­ 80–​­297. New York: New York University Press. Mullins, Greg. 1992. “­Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of Disavowal in ‘­Physique Culture’.” Discourse 15, no. 1: ­27–​­48. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Musser, Amber Jamilla. 2014. Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism. New York: New York University Press. Oddie, Morgan. 2022. “‘­Playing’ With Race: BDSM, Race Play, and Whiteness in Kink.” Panic at the Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2: 8­ 6–​­95. Otto, Herbert A. 1964. ““­The Pornographic Fringeland” on the American Newstand.” Journal of Human Relations 12: ­375–​­390. Paul, James C. N., and Murray L. Schwartz. 1961. Federal Censorship: Obscenity in the Mail. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Polak, Clark. 1965. “­The Story Behind Physique.” Drum 5, no. 8: ­8–​­15.

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Alastair J.L. Blanshard Robson, E. 2013. “­Bel and the Dragons: Deciphering Cuneiform after Decipherment.” In William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography, edited by Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean and Chitra Ramalingam, ­193–​­218. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shernoff, Michael. 2001. “­Steroids and the Pursuit of Bigness.” Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 8, no. 4: ­32–​­34. Schippert, Claudia. 2007. “­Can Muscles be Queer? Reconsidering the Transgressive ­Hyper-​­built Body.” Journal of Gender Studies 16, no. 2: ­155–​­171. Smith, Barbara. 1993. “­Queer Politics: Where’s the Revolution?” The Nation 257, no.1 (­July 5): ­12–​­16. Snow, K. Mitchell. 2019. “­Does This Fig Leaf Make Me Look Gay? Strongmen, Statue Posing and Physique Photography.” Early Popular Visual Culture 17, no. 2: 1­ 35–​­155. ­Solomon-​­Godeau, Abigail. 1997. Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. New York: Thames and Hudson. Symonds, John Addington. 1883. A Problem in Greek Ethics. Edinburgh: Ballantyne and Hanson. Symonds, John Addington. 1896. A Problem in Modern Ethics. London. Talbot, William Henry Fox. 1844. The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Tobin, Robert D. 2015. Peripheral Desires. The German Discovery of Sex. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Vaid, Urvashi. 2012. Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Politics. New York: Magnus. Waugh, Thomas. 1996. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from the Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press. Weiss, M. 2011. Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Werth, Barry. 2001. The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin, a Literary Life Shattered by Scandal. New York: Nan A. Talese.

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24 DESTINY’S QUEER SCRIBBLINGS Greek Myth and Etiologies of HIV/­AIDS Emilio Capettini

The emergence of a new epidemic or pandemic is inevitably marked by deep epistemic uncertainty, and the inception of the HIV/­AIDS crisis was no exception. We now know that the initial discovery of AIDS among gay men was a mere accident, a result, as Steven Epstein (­1996, ­49–​­50) has pointed out, of the fact that “­gay men, some of them affluent and privileged, found their way into private doctors’ offices and prominent teaching ­hospitals—​­and from there into the pages of medical ­journals—​­while drug users often sickened and died with little fanfare.” In the months that followed the first reports, in 1981, of Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in gay men, however, most epidemiologists approached this syndrome as a “­gay disease”—​­so much so that its first acronym was GRID: ­Gay-​­Related Immune ­Deficiency—​­and strove to find its primary cause in the lifestyle of gay men, which was characterized, in their mind, by overindulgence in sex and drugs. Thus, a theory of causation that gained wide currency was the s­ o-​ ­called “­immune overload” hypothesis, which posited that repeated exposure to STDs, sperm, and recreational drugs could lead to the collapse of the immune system. It is unsurprising, given its failure to explain cases of the syndrome in blood transfusion recipients and infants, that this hypothesis rapidly lost support after the announcement, in the spring of 1984, of the discovery in some people living with AIDS (­PWAs) of the retrovirus later named HIV, and that by the end of 1986 “­the proposition ‘­HIV causes AIDS’ was hegemonic in US science and society” (­Epstein 1996, 101).1 Nonetheless, even after this pivotal discovery and the emergence of an overwhelming consensus about the etiology of AIDS, the idea of an essential link between homosexuality and the syndrome remained powerful in the cultural imagination. As Simon Watney (­1994, 48) argued, “­a ‘­knowledge’ of AIDS [was] uniformly constituted across the boundaries of formal and informal information,” a knowledge which “­resolutely insist[ed] that the point of emergence of the virus should be identified as its cause.” Two particularly egregious examples may suffice to substantiate this point: in October 1987, as he argued against the use of federal funds for “­AIDS education, information, or prevention materials and activities that promote, encourage, or condone homosexual sexual activities,” the US senator Jesse Helms stated that “[e] very AIDS case can be traced back to a homosexual act” (­133 Cong. Rec. S27752 and 27754,

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-30

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daily ed. October 14, 1987).2 Similarly, an editorial published in New Hampshire’s Manchester Union Leader on June 3, 1991, averred that homosexual intercourse is the genesis of every single case of AIDS in that every case is ­traceable—​­either directly or i­ndirectly—​­to the practice. However the disease is transmitted, the sexual perversion that is anal intercourse by sodomites is the fundamental point of origin. (­quoted from Edelman 1994, 9­ 7–​­98) Rejections of this phobic discourse are, of course, ubiquitous in the rich output of queer artists and writers active in the 1980s and 1990s, some of whom ­co-​­opted the literary and material relics of their ancient Greek “­ancestors” in their responses to the crisis.3 In this essay, I will focus on two ­texts—​­Alain Emmanuel Dreuilhe’s 1987 diary Corps à corps, journal de SIDA, which was published in North America the following year under the title Mortal Embrace: Living with AIDS, and Mark Merlis’ 1998 novel An Arrow’s Flight—​­that employ Greek myth to queer widespread etiologies of the epidemic. As I will show, these literary interventions can be described as queer acts not simply because they rebuff the homophobic, heteronormative discourse surrounding the crisis but, more specifically, because they do so by rejecting transparent, linear ­teleologies—​­most notably, those undergirding accounts of HIV as divinely ­created—​­and by embracing uncertainty over knowingness.4 In a penetrating discussion of HIV and AIDS, Judith Williamson (­1989, 69) has argued that “[n]othing could be more meaningless than a virus. It has no point, no purpose, no plan… And yet nothing is harder for us to confront than the complete absence of meaning.” It is precisely this “­complete absence of meaning,” I will suggest, that prompted both Dreuilhe and Merlis, taking advantage of the etiological murkiness and instability that they found in Greek myth, to p­ rivilege—​­although in different ways and to different ­degrees—​­arbitrariness, contingency, and undecidability over meaningfulness, necessity, and certainty.

Fate and the Trojan War in Mortal Embrace It is difficult to give a straightforward generic description of Mortal Embrace. Although its French subtitle presents it as a journal (­that is, a diary), it does not have the traditional markers of diaristic works: rather than being organized according to dated entries, it is subdivided into a prologue and 12 chapters, in which Dreuilhe, without following a rigidly chronological structure, describes the effects AIDS has had on his life, discusses societal and governmental reactions to the epidemic, and tries to articulate a model of resistance that other PWAs may follow.5 What grants cohesion to the many strands of Mortal Embrace, however, is Dreuilhe’s persistent use of military language to describe both his condition as a PWA and the development of the epidemic, language that, as shown by his mention of Susan Sontag’s critique of “­the paranoia lying behind the warlike images used by the press” in relation to cancer (­130) and by his awareness that some may accuse him of “­latent neofascism” (­147), he did not embrace uncritically.6 Thus, Dreuilhe characterizes the onset of HIV/­AIDS as the beginning of World War III (­18), refers to the years that preceded the sudden arrival of the virus as “­life before the war” (­54), compares his experience of bouts of illness to gruesome battles of the recent and more distant ­past—​­for instance, Austerlitz, Verdun, and the ­D-­​­­Day—​­and presents himself as member of a battalion led by his two doctors (­18). As readers make their way through the text, then, it becomes abundantly clear why, in the prologue, Dreuilhe, echoing the title of a famous book by Roland Barthes, describes the pages that will follow as “­fragments of a warrior’s discourse” (­6). 348

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Given Dreuilhe’s pervasive evocations of the military sphere as well as his many allusions to famous literary texts, it is not entirely surprising that he repeatedly refers to the ­best-​­known war of Greek myth: the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans. Significantly, the most extended parallelism he establishes between this mythological event and the HIV/­AIDS crisis occurs during a reflection on his own seroconversion and, especially, on the origins of the epidemic. In the ninth chapter of the text, Dreuilhe compares the state of mind of many gay men in the p­ ost-​­Stonewall years, when “­the oppression of the American homosexual community by the puritan majority had diminished somewhat,” to that of the Trojans “­overjoyed at what [they] thought to be the departure of the Greeks” (­115). Just as in the tale of Greek myth, though, “­no sooner had the homophobes lifted their siege than the massacre began,” since “­the soldiers were hidden in the womb of the horse, in the needle, in the phallus.” This presentation of the late 1970s as “­a moment filled with tragic viral momentum” (­Anderson 2019, 160) is reinforced just a few lines after, when Dreuilhe, centering his own experience, mentions again the fate of Troy: “­My AIDS and the Trojan War were brought about by Love, by Aphrodite, the patron deity of Troy, goddess of sexuality and lust” (­116). In this case, Dreuilhe connects, with a sweeping move, the inception and conclusion of the Trojan War; for, after arguing that “­through the sexual flame [the goddess] ignited in Paris and Helen […] Troy was symbolically lost,” he concentrates, as in the previous passage I mentioned, on the introduction of the wooden horse into the city walls, the episode of the ­decade-​­long conflict that seems to bear for him the closest resemblance to the circumstances surrounding the onset of the HIV/­AIDS crisis. In one case, “­the sensual abandon and derangement induced by the seductive Aphrodite led directly to the blindness of Priam and his men,” making them unwilling and unable to heed Cassandra’s warnings; in the other, American Cassandras were accused by the majority of Trojans, myself among them, to be playing into the enemy’s hands by calling for a halt to all erotic revelries until the AIDS horse had revealed what was concealed in its belly. (­­116–​­117)­7 If read in isolation, these comments may seem to come dangerously close to narratives that create “‘­meaning’ through a temporal logic of before and after that slides into a logic of cause and effect,” accounts in which “­the ‘­before,’ and thus the ‘­cause,’ of ‘­AIDS’ is consistently represented as the narcissistic hedonism of gay men after Stonewall” (­Edelman 1994, 114).8 Yet Dreuilhe was well aware of the fact that many narratives of causation appear inevitable only in hindsight; for the very first sentence of the first chapter of Mortal Embrace reads: “­The disease was foreseeable only in retrospect.”9 In fact, this perspective informs the pages preceding and following the comparisons with the Trojan War that I mentioned, pages in which Dreuilhe criticizes some of the early attempts to explain the genesis of the syndrome and, especially, their insistence on finding a hidden meaning in what was transpiring. Thus, Dreuilhe takes aim at some of the “­paranoid” rumors and accounts that began to circulate at a time when “­AIDS was as mysterious as a punishment from heaven” (­114). Before developing his extended reflection on Troy, he ridicules theories according to which HIV had been created by the CIA as “­part of a plan to bring Cuba to its knees once and for all” (­114) and had started to spread either because of a mistake by a laboratory technician or, in an even more conspiratorial hypothesis, because the CIA decided to test it on “­American deviants” before utilizing it abroad.10 And after his mythologically inflected reconstruction of the first stages of the epidemic, he claims that public authorities, too, promoted “­outrageous misconceptions” and “­los[t] their grip on common sense” as they “­fell back on explanations that were tautological or irrational” and “­blam[ed] factors such as certain lifestyles or the consumption of this or that drug” 349

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(­­118–​­119). In contrast to these misguided and, at times, paranoid etiologies and their implicit or explicit attempts to find a guilty party, Dreuilhe confidently claims: “­I see the epidemic as the tragic result of an unfortunate chain of circumstances” (­­114–​­115)—​­a sentence that recalls his presentation of AIDS, in a previous passage, as “­the blind creation of destructive forces” (­103). In light of these two statements, which unequivocally reject the notion that the origins of the epidemic could be traced back to the transparent intent of human beings or of powers beyond the human sphere, it may seem counterintuitive that Dreuilhe should stress, as we have seen, the similarities between the crisis and the Trojan War; after all, in traditional accounts of this latter the whims of gods and g­ oddesses—​­whims that are entirely transparent to the ancient authors and, thus, to their ­audience—​­play an important role. However, Dreuilhe conveys that what makes the conflict between Greeks and Trojans an appropriate comparandum for the epidemic is, in his mind, not the importance of the gods in it but that of fate: the Trojan War is, he says, “­Western culture’s archetype of the fated inevitability of armed conflict” (­115); just as that event was inevitably fated, so too, he states, “­the pathological process thrown into gear inside me without my knowledge, at a time when the existence of the virus was yet unknown, is marked with the sign of fate” (­116). This view finds parallel in the works of other gay men confronting their seroconversion in those same years: in the memoir Borrowed Time, Paul Monette, after describing his feelings of guilt at the thought that his sexual encounters with other men may have caused his partner, Roger, to contract HIV and develop AIDS, claims resolutely: “­Fate was the issue, if anything; not guilt” (­Monette 1988, 89). Similarly, in a 1992 journal entry published after his death, Derek Jarman reports the thoughts he had on the way to the hospital for treatment earlier that day as follows: “­I was haunted by memories of The Ruin and other ­Anglo-​­Saxon poems, fate is the strongest, fate, fated. I resign myself to my fate, even blind fate” (­Jarman 2000, 191).11 Commenting upon Monette’s sentence, George Newton (­1998, 54) has argued that “­ultimately, it matters little whether suffering is caused by fate visited on the unsuspecting or by retribution visited on the guilty, since belief in fate and ascription of guilt both spring from the same ­impulse—​­to see meaningful cause in this otherwise random chaos.” This final point is ­well-​­taken: Monette’s words, just like Dreuilhe’s and Jarman’s, appear to be a demonstration of the fact that “[o]n the psychic level, contingency must be at least partially turned into necessity” (­Rohy 2020, 17). Yet, while the impulse behind the two etiologies discussed by Newton seems indeed to be the same, it should be stressed that there is an enormous ­difference—​­one that matters more than a l­ittle—​­in the meaningfulness of the causes they posit: if one accepts that suffering is “­retribution visited upon the guilty,” as some conservative Christians did in their interpretations of HIV/­AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s,12 the meaning of that suffering and the intent of the agent or power causing it are fully transparent; if, instead, one assumes fate as the reason for suffering, one manages to “­neutralize […] the vertigo of the random event” (­Rohy 2015, 180) without, however, imposing a definite meaning upon it. “­The sign of fate,” to return to Dreuilhe, may be recognized in the events that befall us, but it remains undecipherable, yielding a meaning that we cannot comprehend. That Dreuilhe’s turn to fate should be seen as part of his rejection of the logic of guilt and retribution underlying “­meaningful” interpretations of the epidemic as a kind of “­just punishment” is confirmed by earlier passages in the text. Thus, in the second chapter, fittingly titled “­The Trojan Horse,” Dreuilhe examines the “­unconscious ambivalence” (­36) that gay men of his generation felt about themselves, detecting its roots in the homophobia surrounding them on all fronts. And, he goes on to argue, “­all these inner misgivings we feel about our ability to survive constitute an entire syndrome, which I call our Trojan horse, and we allowed this Trojan horse within our gates long before the virus arrived on the scene” (­37). The result of such internalization of homophobic views, Dreuilhe contends, is that although it has become clear that HIV “­is a virus like all the rest, 350

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even if it displays the unusual characteristics of a retrovirus,” gay men affected by it “­all know, in their heart of hearts, that there is a more profound reality behind all these reasonable explanations: a punishment from heaven that will not be denied” (­38). The threat that these phobic ideas and the hostility displayed by religious leaders pose to the emotional ­well-​­being of PWAs is highlighted by Dreuilhe with yet another evocation of Troy in a later passage: This reproving and vindictive God who is supposed to have visited his biblical wrath upon our Sodom is also something of a Trojan horse, since he’s the foe of the besieged, as Athena was at Troy: once admitted into the religious convictions of those ill with AIDS, this wrathful God weakens their resistance by making them doubt the justice of their cause. (­66) As his charged use of “­supposed” shows, Dreuilhe firmly rejects the presentation of the Christian god as responsible for the sudden emergence of the virus and, as a result, that of the epidemic as a punishment comparable to the destruction of Sodom. He focuses, instead, on the emotional toll that this discourse exerts on those who, like him, are fighting against the effects of the virus: already besieged by several opportunistic infections, they have to ward off the assault of those who, by trying to persuade them that they deserve their suffering, want to lead them to give up the fight altogether. As in one of the passages discussed above, Dreuilhe does not avoid references to the gods who, according to ancient authors, heavily intervened in the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans; it is clear, however, that he does not believe there to be in our world any room for their numinous powers. Thus, in the analogy developed here, God, although compared to Athena, is downgraded, as it were, from prime mover of the universe to ­human-​­made instrument, with no connection to the origins of the virus whatsoever. In addition to further illuminating Dreuilhe’s critique of phobic etiologies of the epidemic, these passages also direct our attention to the temporal complexity, and apparent contradictoriness, of the analogies he establishes between his life as a PWA and Troy’s vicissitudes. In passages like the one in which he offers his reading of the p­ ost-​­Stonewall years, the capture of Troy is presented as a fait accompli, and its destruction, although not explicitly discussed, is powerfully evoked; in others, like the last one quoted or a later one in which Dreuilhe compares those gay men facing the syndrome with the loving support of their partners to “[t]he Trojans in their besieged city” who could count on the fact that “­at nightfall, binding up their […] wounds, the women of Troy would praise their courage and increase their determination” (­74), the s­ iege—​­of the bodies of PWAs and of queer c­ ommunities—​­is presented, however, as still ongoing. These competing uses of the images and symbols of the Trojan War are indicative, I contend, of Dreuilhe’s perception of HIV’s and AIDS’ “­deconstruction of clear temporal categories,” a deconstruction that has resulted in his “­complex and paradoxical inhabiting of different time zones, where to be is also to be dead, and where to be dying is also to be […] regenerated in some way” (­Bruhm 2011, 318). This queer temporality is most explicitly and potently described by Dreuilhe in the final chapter of Mortal Embrace, which is titled “­My Body, My Beirut.” Reflecting on the precarious equilibrium that the care of medical experts is giving to his life, Dreuilhe compares himself to the Lebanese people he has seen in some news reports; for, just like them, he displays “­a seemingly irrational persistence in clinging to a phantom city clearly in the throes of disintegration” (­157). Even though in this case Dreuilhe turns not to mythological events but to contemporary ones, it is evident that his words are a logical development of his earlier evocations of Troy: his body is both disintegrating and still standing; it resembles Troy both during the Greeks’ ­decade-​­long siege and after its conclusion. 351

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Dreuilhe’s perception of the paradoxical temporality imposed upon him by HIV/­AIDS was undoubtedly compounded by the unshakeable conviction of the media, public opinion, my father, all my friends and a­ llies—​ ­when they are being honest with ­themselves—​­a conviction that part of me shares: that AIDS […] “­is an illness that is rapidly fatal and for which there is no cure.” (­8) It seems hardly a coincidence, then, that his final reference to Troy in the penultimate chapter of Mortal Embrace comes at the end of a long reflection on how to resist and unsettle the belief in the inevitably linear development of the disease. According to Dreuilhe, gay men living with AIDS should fight not only for their individual survival but also to defend “­their second native country,” which he describes as the place “­where we have found so many pleasures and so much comfort in a hostile world” (­154). If at earlier points Dreuilhe had seemed to espouse the “­ascesis” and the “­antipleasure agenda” that, as Lee Edelman (­1994, 110) has pointed out, had become part of the rhetoric of certain AIDS ­activism—​­in describing himself and the other gay men treated by his doctors as fellow soldiers, he had stated, for instance, that “[a]n army is not supposed to make love” (­24)—​­in this case, he foregrounds the preservation and cherishing of queer practices and pleasures: instead of “­turning away from the poisoned well of homosexuality,” gay men should be “­drawing from it new reserves of spiritual strength, merely filtering out the dangers inherent in careless sexual activity” (­­154–​­155). And this proud, queer nationalist attitude, Dreuilhe continues, “­should provide the basis for our counterattacks against those who eagerly seek to exploit our fears and uncertainties” (­155). Unsurprisingly given the passages we examined above, this resistance is described in ­Troy-​­related terms: “­Day after day, we must burn our Trojan horse to ashes and in its place construct the Ark of our Covenant.” What distinguishes this reference from previous ones, however, is that Dreuilhe breaks, as it were, with the linear script of the Trojan War: the emphasis here is not on the idea that the ­enemy—​­in this case, the ­self-​­doubt engendered by homophobic interpretations of the ­crisis—​­has already breached gay men’s ­defenses—​­an idea that conditions one to imagine their capitulation to be both imminent and ­inevitable—​­but on the fact that the seemingly inevitable conclusion of the enemy’s assault can be forestalled with a continuous counterattack that should be taking place “­day after day.” Only in this way, Dreuilhe argues imagining the discovery of a cure, could gay men survive “­until […] the virus is expelled from our desecrated Temple”—​­that is, until the inexorable linearity of narratives of HIV/­AIDS as a “­death sentence” is not just momentarily interrupted but upended once and for all.

Destiny’s Scribblings in An Arrow’s Flight A comparable use of Greek myth to reflect on the origins of the epidemic and contest the discourse that surrounded it can be found in Mark Merlis’ An Arrow’s Flight, a novel that appeared in 1998 and that reimagines the story of Philoctetes from a gay perspective.13 According to the traditional myth, Philoctetes, who hailed from Thessaly, joined the expedition of the Greeks against Troy but was abandoned by his comrades on the island of Lemnos, well before they reached the city of Priam, because of a strange injury he suffered: while he was approaching the sacred precinct of the minor goddess Chryse on an island named after her, a snake bit his foot, inflicting an incurable wound that quickly became ­foul-​­smelling and that would often force him to utter sharp cries of pain. In the tenth and final year of the war, however, the Greeks became aware of a prophecy that stated that they could not take Troy without the aid of Philoctetes and the bow that he had received 352

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from Heracles. As a result, they sent him envoys who, using deception, persuasion, or coercion (­or a mixture of the three), managed, in spite of his initial resistance, to have him sail to Troy, where he was cured, killed Paris with his bow, and took part in the sack of the city.14 The most famous retelling of the myth is Sophocles’ Philoctetes, a play that focuses on the attempts of Odysseus and Neoptolemus, Achilles’ adolescent son, to steal Philoctetes’ bow and to force him to rejoin the ranks of the Greeks, and that explores the ethical positions occupied by the three main characters. The tragedy famously reaches an impasse when Neoptolemus, after stealing the bow from Philoctetes who has lost consciousness because of the unbearable pain in his foot, has a change of heart and reveals to the suffering hero the scheme devised by Odysseus. Only the appearance of Heracles as deus ex machina bends the stubbornness of Philoctetes and ensures that the prophecy will be fulfilled. Merlis preserves most of the key elements of Sophocles’ ­play—​­for instance, the snakebite, Helenus’ prophecy, and Odysseus’ manipulation of ­Neoptolemus—​­but radically transforms it by transposing its gods, demigods, and heroes into a sociocultural setting reminiscent of Greenwich Village in the late 1970s. As a result, the world in which the story unfolds is neither the one that Sophocles’ audience would have expected nor that of the modern reader but rather, as Merlis put it in a talk he gave at the Foundation for Hellenic Culture in NYC in 1999, “­a third world where there are gods and there are ­taxicabs—​­a heterocosm, to use Coleridge’s word.”15 In this alternative universe, Neoptolemus, who is usually referred to by the name of Pyrrhus, is indeed the grandson of a ­goddess—​­although a “­­B-​­list” one (­5)—​­but, when we first see him, he is clambering onto the bar of the gay club where he performs as a g­ o-​­go dancer, a stint that had been preceded by one as hustler; only after being found by Phoenix, he joins the war efforts and is entrusted by Odysseus with the mission of seducing Philoctetes. This latter, who, just like Neoptolemus, is reimagined by Merlis as gay, has indeed been abandoned by his comrades on Lemnos because of his incurable wound, but that island, far from being uninhabited as in Sophocles’ play, is a popular getaway for queer people.16 The reinterpretation that is most significant for our analysis, though, is that concerning Philoctetes’ mysterious ailment: although the terms HIV and AIDS are never used in the novel’s heterocosm, it is readily clear that Merlis intended for the reader to connect Philoctetes’ condition with that of a PWA. Thus, the very first description of the hero, when Pyrrhus accompanied by Admetus finds him sitting in a bar on Lemnos, focuses on the extreme weight loss he has experienced while living on the island: There was none of him to spare. He was at that eerie point in the downward glide when every redundant ounce has been pared away, as by a carver, but just before the carver has done that one stroke too many… (­224) The very compressed reference to “­the downward glide” indicates that the narrator expects his ­audience—​­that is, “­Greeks a generation younger than himself”17—​­to be very familiar with the progression of the disease affecting Philoctetes, just as Merlis’ own readers would be with the physical manifestations of AIDS. Yet several passages make clear that Philoctetes was in fact the first gay man to experience this condition in the novel’s world. This is suggested by some of the remarks with which the narrator characterizes the timeframe he i­nhabits—​­at the very beginning of the novel, for instance, he claims that “[w]e already live in the world after the end, we are ­post-​ ­Lemnos: the disco there still rakes in money every summer, but the mirrored ball at tea dance hurls its splinters of light at ghosts” (­8)—​­and becomes incontrovertibly clear as the narrative progresses: at one point, Philoctetes is described as “­still the only afflicted one” (­295). The watershed moment 353

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marking the end of “­the age of heroes” (­56) and the beginning of the “­­post-​­Lemnos” era in which the narrator and his audience live appears to be, then, the snakebite on the island of Chryse. In the 1999 talk I already mentioned, Merlis claimed that when he began writing the novel, he “­did not think of AIDS immediately” and that, when he did, he “­wasn’t especially thrilled. The world did not need another AIDS novel.” “­Still there I was,” he continued, “­if I tried to avoid the analogy readers would nevertheless stumble on it. So I started working it out.” Even though Merlis did not explain any further why he found the story of Philoctetes useful to think with, an important part of the answer has to do, I would argue, with the fact that many ancient accounts of Philoctetes’ story leave the reason why the snake bit the hero indeterminate.18 In Sophocles’ play, for instance, the closest we come to hearing a precise explanation is when Neoptolemus tells Philoctetes: “­You are sick with this pain by divine fortune, having approached the guardian of Chryse, the hidden serpent that keeps watch over and protects the roofless precinct” (­σὺ γὰρ νοσεῖς τόδ᾽ ἄλγος ἐκ θείας τύχης | Χρύσης πελασθεὶς φύλακος, ὃς τὸν ἀκαλυφῆ | σηκὸν φυλάσσει κρύφιος οἰκουρῶν ὄφις, ­1326–​­1328). The suggestion here seems to be that Philoctetes transgressed the boundaries of a sacred space; yet the verb used by Sophocles to describe this spatial ­encroaching—­​­­πελασθείς—​ ­does not possess in and of itself a negative nuance, and, in any case, the phrase “­by divine fortune” (­ἐκ θείας τύχης) encourages us to consider the episode as orchestrated by the gods. This causal indeterminacy clearly lent itself to the exploration and contestation of the etiological discourse surrounding the epidemic, and it is not coincidental that the circumstances and apparent causes of Philoctetes’ injury are narrated several times in the novel.19 The first account we hear is the one that Admetus gives to Pyrrhus, who has just joined the army and is being taken to Lemnos: So we were all on this godforsaken island, Chryse, and Philoctetes got bit by a snake. That’s all, he just stumbled on it or something, but he got bit. And it wouldn’t get any better. […] People started to get scared. Like maybe it was a curse or something, Philoctetes had offended the gods somehow and was being punished. And if we didn’t get rid of him something terrible would happen to all of us. (­191) When Pyrrhus, whose sexual orientation is known to everyone aboard the ship because he has begun an affair with a sailor named Corythus, condemns that reaction as stupid, Admetus responds: “­I don’t know. He ­was—​­well, he was, like you, you understand? […] Some people thought that was it, that he was being punished for that.” This first allusion to phobic, panicked interpretations of Philoctetes’ mysterious wound is quickly followed by a much more developed account, one offered by the surgeon who happened to be the first to inspect and try to cure the snakebite. Pressed by Pyrrhus on whether abandoning a suffering patient did not violate medical ethics, this physician states that Philoctetes’ “­wasn’t any ordinary snakebite. He broke some kind of rule” (­195), and then immediately makes clear that the rules he has in mind pertain to sexuality: I don’t mean just that he was a fairy. […] I heard about his life, in the city, before he was called up. You can’t imagine the way he lived, the things that these guys did with one another. I know my anatomy, and let me tell you, the things I heard about: they just weren’t meant to be. The similarity between these claims and those made by religious and political figures during the 1980s and early 1990s could not be any clearer. 354

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The strategy used by Merlis to reject this moralistic explanation of the snakebite is twofold. On the one hand, the narrator confirms the description of Philoctetes’ life given by the surgeon but frames it as a heroic exploration of human limits rather than an abhorrent transgression. Philoctetes is, thus, characterized as the first among the heroes of love, the “­Eronauts,” who, we are told, “­had done everything that can be done with two or three or four bodies” (­231); “­they had crossed every frontier, circumvented every inhibition, acted out their deepest wishes and their shallowest fancies”; they were indeed “­lawless” but “­in the manner of heroes.” In what could be described as both imitation of the behavior of Dante’s Ulysses (­Inferno 26.­106–​­125) and compliance with the Village People’s (­and later the Pet Shop Boys’) famous exhortation, “[t]hey sailed west without a chart, beneath night skies with unnamed constellations … liv[ing] out their freedom for all the generations that had been caged” and “­for everyone who came after” (­­231–​­232). On the other hand, Merlis highlights that the surgeon’s etiology is part of a worldview that, to borrow a remark by Simon Watney (­1994, 48), “­can only conceive homosexual desire within a medicalized metaphor of contagion.” This is shown by the behavior of some young officers who had listened to the tense exchange between Pyrrhus and the surgeon: they “­did not take their eyes off Pyrrhus. As if wondering what sort of snakebite he had brought on board with him” (­195). And it is made even clearer when Philoctetes gives his own account of his injury and its consequences: after claiming that the wound “­was a neon sign saying that the gods were pissed at me for something,” Philoctetes argues that it didn’t just signal open season for intolerance, but brought back that feeling that was drummed into them [i.e., the other soldiers] when they were kids and that a few of them had just started to get over: that if you tolerated faggots you were one. That was the infection people were afraid of… (­243) Phobic views of homosexuality as the cause of HIV/­AIDS, Merlis suggests, are the inevitable result of the ­deep-​­seated perception of homosexuality as always already a contagious disease. And, just like Dreuilhe, Merlis emphasizes the insidious effect that these views can have; for Philoctetes admits that after some time he himself “­started to believe […] that all those years of freedom were one long crime, the whole great party one huge sin against the gods.” The oppressive heteronormativity that underlies the reactions of Philoctetes’ and Pyrrhus’ fellow sailors is resoundingly rebuffed in the scene that contains Merlis’ most stunning departure from the traditional myth. In it, both Odysseus and Philoctetes address a speech to Pyrrhus, who has the bow and is hesitating whether to go to Troy; while the former tries to lure him with the promise of glory, honor, and wealth and with the argument that by fighting in the war he would be “­doing something bigger with [his] life than … counting how many people [he] can sleep with” (­360), the latter tells him that even if he “­dress[es] up in [his] daddy’s armor” (­362), he will still be a “­sissy” for the other soldiers, and warns him against accepting the premise that Odysseus’ is “­the only way to be a man” (­363). Persuaded by this speech, Pyrrhus gives the bow to Philoctetes, who breaks it over his knee and, with this simple gesture, puts an end to Odysseus’ hopes of taking Troy. If Dreuilhe, in one of the final sections of Mortal Embrace, rejected the notion that the linear script of the Trojan War could serve as an apt analogy for the epidemic because of his hope in the discovery of a cure, Merlis does the same in this scene precisely because that hope has not yet been realized: “­Maybe some son of Asclepius,” the narrator remarks, “­is, right now, concocting that miraculous salve. But he did not do it for Philoctetes, Heracles did not appear, we are where we are” (­359). Philoctetes’ surprising act is, then, both a form of respect that Merlis pays to those 355

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who already died in the ­epidemic—​­“­If I owe nothing else to the dead,” the narrator says, “­I can at least refrain from wheeling out Heracles” (­359)—​­and a paradigm of queer resistance against the homophobia and discrimination of heteronormative society. With his words and actions, Philoctetes encourages Pyrrhus, to use one of Dreuilhe’s phrases, to draw without fear or shame “­from the poisoned well of homosexuality” and to chart his own way to be a man. Contrary to what the ­first-​­time reader may expect, this rousing scene is not the final one in the novel, for the episode of the destruction of the bow is followed by a­ nother—​­only a handful of pages ­long—​­which takes place “­five or six years after Odysseus and the other Greeks sailed home” (­368) not on Lemnos but in the city where both Philoctetes and Pyrrhus lived before taking part in the war. Now a couple, they have moved back there together, and Philoctetes is receiving treatment in a hospital that is full with other gay men affected by the same syndrome he has. Significantly, the narrator offers one final reflection on the origins and development of the epidemic: If it were possible to trace the course of things, the most direct chain would be snake to Philoctetes, Philoctetes to Pyrrhus, Pyrrhus to Corythus, Corythus to: the HUNDREDS OF US he glimpsed that night at Pterelas’s [i.e., at a gay club on Lemnos] … That would be the simplest tree. (­371) As is clear, however, even though this ­noso-​­genealogical tree, so to speak, finds support in the preceding ­narrative—​­Philoctetes and Pyrrhus did indeed have sex on Lemnos at a time when Pyrrhus was also having sex almost every night with the sailor ­Corythus—​­the narrator refuses to endorse it, in what seems to be a veiled yet harsh rebuke of the thoroughly misguided fascination, common in the media and the wider public in the 1980s and 1990s, with identifying “­patient zero”—​­that is, the gay man who allegedly started the crisis (­McKay 2017). The exact origins of the epidemic, Merlis suggests, are ultimately unknowable, and obsessing over them is futile, just as it is futile to look for a deeper meaning in the sudden emergence of the virus: “­all Destiny’s scribblings,” the narrator claims, “­if compiled into one unimaginable volume, would not yield a message. She has no point to make. Corythus was innocent. Even the snake was innocent. Philoctetes innocently misstepped, the snake innocently bit” (­371). Although in this final sentence the misstep and the bite are clearly placed in a temporal sequence, the fact that its two cola are juxtaposed in asyndeton rather than connected hypotactically, coupled with the emphatic repetition of “­innocently,” prevents what seems to be “­a temporal logic of before and after” from sliding into “­a logic of cause and effect” (­cf. Edelman 1994, 114).20 Thus, Merlis resoundingly rejects the logic of sin and punishment that undergirds homophobic interpretations of the epidemic, and, just like Dreuilhe, he does so by elevating the inscrutable role that fate and destiny, not a vindictive god, play in our lives. In his text, however, fate is exposed as entirely meaningless: much like HIV itself in Judith Williamson’s description, Merlis’ destiny “­has no point to make.”

Conclusion Mortal Embrace and An Arrow’s Flight are very different literary ­works—​­one is a strange hybrid of diary and political manifesto, the other a novel set in a heterocosm that combines elements of ancient Greece and of our ­world—​­and their engagement with Greek myth clearly differs in scope: in one case, the Trojan War is just one of the paradigms, albeit an important one, used to reflect on the HIV/­AIDS epidemic; in the other, the story of Philoctetes represents the scaffolding around which the entire examination of the crisis is constructed. As I hope to have shown, however, the 356

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uses to which Dreuilhe and Merlis put Greek mythology share important similarities: although, in formulating their forms of queer resistance, they both ultimately subverted the linear script of the Trojan War, they nonetheless exploited some of its episodes to rebuff widespread interpretations of HIV/­AIDS as a form of divine punishment of gay men for their alleged sexual transgressions. What made Greek myth especially appealing to these two writers are, to quote one of Henry James’ complaints about Victorian novels, its “­queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary” (­James 1908, x), which trouble neat relations of causality. In the inscrutability of the fate sanctioning the onset of the Trojan War or Philoctetes’ suffering, Dreuilhe and Merlis found a powerful corrective to some of the ­all-­​­­too-​­transparent and ­all-­​­­too-​­meaningful etiologies of HIV/­AIDS, a corrective that enabled them to express, albeit with rather different degrees of explicitness, the idea that destiny’s meaning is utterly meaningless.

Suggestions for Further Reading Essential studies of the cultural politics of the HIV/­AIDS crisis are Crimp 2002; Edelman 1994, ­77–​­117; Treichler 1999; and Watney 1994. The epistemic uncertainty that surrounded the onset of the epidemic is carefully reconstructed by Epstein 1996, whereas McKay 2017 focuses on the creation of the “­patient zero” myth. There is, unfortunately, no detailed study of the evocations of ­Graeco-​­Roman antiquity in the queer literary or artistic responses to the HIV/­AIDS crisis; Dean and Ruszczycky 2014 offer an overview of the literary creations prompted by the epidemic. Stimulating applications of queer theory to issues of etiology can be found in Rohy 2015 and 2020.

Notes 1 This does not mean, however, that the immune overload theory was universally rejected. The most vocal among the scientists who continued to defend it was Peter Duesberg, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. On this figure and the “­AIDS causation controversy,” see Epstein 1996, 1­ 05–​­178. 2 For a detailed analysis of the amendment proposed by Helms and the debate on safe sex education, see Crimp 2002, 6­ 8–​­76. 3 Bravmann 1997, ­47–​­67 discusses the “­multiple uses of Greece in queer fictions of the past” (­67) by (­white) gay men and lesbians, especially before Stonewall. 4 Queerness, according to Edelman 2004, 27, is characterized by a “­stubborn denial of teleology” and “­a resistance to determinations of meaning.” On the intersections of queer and narrative theories, see Rohy 2015, ­1–​­21 and 2020, 1­ –​­19. 5 For an overview of this text, see Boulé 2002, ­120–​­141. Its complexity also reflects Dreuilhe’s cosmopolitanism: born to French parents in Egypt, he spent his childhood in Cambodia and France; as an adult, he lived in Brazil, Cameroun, San F ­ rancisco—​­about which he wrote La société invertie, ou, Les gais de San Francisco (­1979)—​­and finally in New York City, where he died of ­AIDS-​­related complications in November 1988. For an illuminating portrait of Dreuilhe with details about the composition of Corps à corps, see Holleran 2008, ­185–​­200. All quotations of Corps à corps in this essay are from Linda Coverdale’s 1988 English translation. 6 Dreuilhe refers to Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, which was first published in 1977, also on ­p. 100, where he discusses the applicability of her insights to AIDS. Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors appeared in 1988, after the publication of Corps à corps. Interestingly, Sontag strongly supported the appearance of the American edition of Dreuilhe’s book, as he himself makes clear in the “­Acknowledgements” (­160). On the connections between the literature of AIDS and the literature of war, see Dean and Ruszczycky 2014, ­712–​­713. For a critique of Sontag’s arguments based on “­the omnipresence of metaphoric thinking,” see Kagan 2018, 2­ 9–​­30. 7 In connecting HIV and the Trojan Horse, Dreuilhe may have been influenced by characterizations of the virus in the media. For instance, in a National Geographic article discussed by Treichler 1999, 31, HIV is compared to the “­Greeks hidden inside the Trojan horse.”

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Emilio Capettini 8 We may wonder to what extent Dreuilhe’s depiction of the years of the sexual liberation was influenced by the views of one of his doctors, Joseph Sonnabend, who advanced a “­variant of the original immune overload hypothesis” in an article titled “­Promiscuity Is Bad for Your Health” (­Epstein 1996, 60). Dreuilhe, who describes himself as part of the “­Sonnabend Battalion” (­14) and praises Sonnabend’s “­humanity” (­44), appears familiar with the debates surrounding the etiology of AIDS: in the prologue, for instance, he claims that “­the enemy is not so much the HIV virus ­itself—​­supposing that it is the only cause of AIDS” (­8). 9 I have slightly altered Coverdale’s ­translation—​­“­Illness is foreseeable only in hindsight” (­13)—​­since Dreuilhe’s ­words—​­“­La maladie n’était prévisible que rétrospectivement”—​­appear to be a specific remark about his experience, not a general remark about illness. 10 On these and other conspiracy theories, see Epstein 1996, 96. 11 Jarman included a slightly altered version of this remark in the text that forms the soundtrack of Blue, the last film he completed before his death: “­Fate is the Strongest | Fate Fated Fatal | I resign myself to Fate | Blind Fate” (­Jarman 1994, 9). On Jarman’s engagement with The Ruin, see Mills 2018, 1­ 02–​­105. 12 On the epidemic as God’s punishment of the supposed sexual transgression of gay men, see Petro 2015, ­22–​­34. Jerry Falwell, for instance, claimed that “­AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals. It is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals” (­quoted from Petro 2015, 24). 13 Merlis, who combined his career as novelist with one as health policy analyst, authored four novels before his death in August 2017: American Studies (­1994); An Arrow’s Flight (­1998); Man about Town (­2003); and JD (­2015). 14 For an overview of this myth in the literature and art of the archaic and classical periods, see Schein 2013, ­1–​­10. 15 Merlis published the text of this talk on his personal website. Although no longer active, it can still be accessed on “­Internet Archive”: https://­web.archive.org/­web/­20120508165539/­http://­www.markmerlis. com/­Hellenic2.htm. 16 Merlis discusses some of his most important transformations of the traditional myth in a brief note at the end of the novel; there, he also states that he consulted in Mandel 1981 several versions, both ancient and modern, of Philoctetes’ story. 17 https://­web.archive.org/­web/­20110714035415/­http://­www.markmerlis.com/­arrow_interview.htm. 18 As Schein 2013, 45 points out, the Cypria and the Attic tragedians do not seem to have explained why Philoctetes was bitten. Later scholiasts (­scholion on Sophocles Philoctetes 194 and scholion on Lycophron Alexandra 911) report that the bite was the result of the hero’s rejection of Chryse’s love, whereas Hyginus (­Fabulae 102) claims that Hera orchestrated it in order to punish Philoctetes for helping in Heracles’ cremation. 19 Leporini 2012 and Jenkins 2015, ­70–​­78 examine Merlis’ transformation of the myth of Philoctetes; however, they do not focus on the competing interpretations of the snakebite in the novel. 20 This passage is not discussed by Leporini 2012, who a­ rgues—​­unpersuasively, in my o­ pinion—​­that in this novel “­mankind … is punished because of its promiscuity” and that Merlis “­risks reasserting … the ‘­wrongness’ of gay promiscuity” (­222 and 224).

Works Cited Anderson, Fiona. 2019. Crusing the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Boulé, ­Jean-​­Pierre. 2002. HIV Stories: The Archaeology of AIDS Writing in France, ­1985–​­1988. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bravmann, Scott. 1997. Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruhm, Steven. 2011. “­Still Here: Choreography, Temporality, AIDS.” In Queer Times, Queer Becomings, edited by E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, ­315–​­332. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Crimp, Douglas. 2002. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dean, Tim, and Steven Ruszczycky. 2014. “­AIDS Literatures.” In The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature, edited by E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen, ­712–​­731. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Greek Myth and Etiologies of HIV/AIDS Dreuilhe, Emmanuel. 1988. Mortal Embrace: Living with AIDS. Translated by Linda Coverdale. New York: Hill and Wang. Originally published as Corps à corps, journal de SIDA (­Paris: Gallimard, 1987). Edelman, Lee. 1994. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York and London: Routledge. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC and London: Duke ­University Press. Epstein, Steven. 1996. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Holleran, Andrew. 2008. Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and its Aftermath. New York: Da Capo Press. James, Henry. 1908. The Tragic Muse. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Jarman, Derek. 1994. Blue: Text of a Film by Derek Jarman. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press. Jarman, Derek. 2000. Smiling in Slow Motion, edited by K. Collins. London: Century. Jenkins, Thomas E. 2015. Antiquity Now: The Classical World in the Contemporary American Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kagan, Dion. 2018. Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/­AIDS in the Popular Culture of “­Post Crisis.” London: I.B. Tauris. Leporini, Nicola. 2012. “‘­How the Greeks Lost Troy’: Subversion of Myth in Mark Merlis’ An Arrow’s Flight.” In Myth and Subversion in the Contemporary Novel, edited by José Manuel Losada Goya and Marta Guirao Ochoa, 2­ 13–​­224. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Mandel, Oscar. 1981. Philoctetes and the Fall of Troy: Plays, Documents, Iconography, Interpretations. ­Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. McKay, Richard A. 2017. Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Merlis, Mark. 1998. An Arrow’s Flight. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mills, Robert. 2018. Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Monette, Paul. 1988. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. Newton, George. 1998. “­From St. Augustine to Paul Monette: Sex and Salvation in the Age of AIDS.” In True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern, edited by G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg, 5­ 1–​­61. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Petro, Anthony M. 2015. After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rohy, Valerie. 2015. Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology, and Queer Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rohy, Valerie. 2020. Chances Are: Contingency, Queer Theory, and American Literature. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Schein, Seth L. 2013. Sophocles, Philoctetes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Treichler, Paula A. 1999. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Watney, Simon. 1994. Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HIV/­AIDS. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Williamson, Judith. 1989. “­Every Virus Tells a Story: The Meanings of HIV and AIDS.” In Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics, edited by Erica Carter and Simon Watney, 6­ 9–​­80. London: Serpent’s Tail.

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25 SOCRATES AND SEDGWICK Ancient Greece in Epistemology of the Closet Daniel Orrells

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (­1990) was foundational for queer studies, especially in its contribution to queer theory’s response to religious, legal, and medical discourses and institutions which have professed knowledge about sex and sexuality.1 Sedgwick would question the political efficacy of knowing one’s sexuality, reflecting Michel Foucault’s argument in The History of Sexuality (­­1978–​­1984) that the “­sexual revolution” was the historical product of late ­nineteenth-​­century sexological and legal discourses on sexuality (­Foucault 1978). Sedgwick highlighted the need to “­denaturalize the present … in effect, to render less destructively presumable ‘­homosexuality as we know it today’” (­Sedgwick 1990, 48). Both knowing and professing ignorance about the male homosexual has become one of the most powerful instruments wielded by ­twentieth-​­and ­twenty-­​­­first-​­century governments and institutions to control and stigmatize people who do not conform to a jejune catalog of heterosexual desires, behaviors, and norms. “­The relations of the c­ loset—​­the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit” structured, for Sedgwick, the experience of modern Western male homosexual identity (­Sedgwick 1990, 3). The male homosexual is never simply inside or outside of the closet but positioned somewhere in between. Male homosexuality has become both a secret and a spectacle in the modern Western cultural imagination (­Sedgwick 1990, ­3–​­4; ­71–​­72). If Sedgwick did not seek to ­know—​­and to ­diagnose—​­the male homosexual in the present, then she was also interested in not knowing and not diagnosing the male homosexual in the past. Sedgwick questioned the usefulness of knowing the origins of homosexuality: the arguments about nature and n­ urture—​­understanding why someone was ­gay—​­could be weaponized by homophobic people and institutions to exterminate gay people: “­there is no unthreatened, unthreatening conceptual home for a concept of gay origins” (­Sedgwick 1990, 43). Sedgwick, in particular, questioned the project of disinterring the historical origins of homosexuality. Whereas “­Foucault in an act of polemical bravado offered 1870 as the date of birth of modern homosexuality,” for Sedgwick, “­the historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity” (­Sedgwick 1990, 44; see Foucault 1978, 43). Rather than a narrative of supersession in which one hegemonic discourse of sexual desire has replaced a previous one and rather than citing a moment such as the 1969 New York Stonewall riots as the coming out of homosexuality in history, Sedgwick was interested in the contradictions and the continual contestations over the definability of (­homo)­sexual identity in the period between the DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-31 360

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end of the nineteenth and of the twentieth centuries. For Sedgwick, “­homosexuality” as a concept has been Organized around a radical and irreducible incoherence. It holds the minoritizing view that there is a distinct population of persons who ‘­really are’ gay; at the same time, it holds the universalizing views that sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful solvent of stable identities; that apparently heterosexual persons and object choices are strongly marked by ­same-​­sex influences and desires, and vice versa for apparently homosexual ones; and that at least male heterosexual identity and modern masculinist culture may require for their maintenance the scapegoating crystallization of a s­ ame-​­sex male desire. (­Sedgwick 1990, 85) The “­homosexual” hovered between a minority identity and a universal possibility. Modern ­Euro-​ ­American culture has been structured, Sedgwick argued, by a “­homosexual panic” which fueled a paranoia about the blurred line between “­normal” male homosocial relationships and male homosexual “­aberration,” a line which has continuously required problematizing in order to be policed. In this chapter, we will be exploring the importance of ancient Greece, and the figures of Socrates and Plato, in particular, for Sedgwick’s analysis of the incoherence of male “­homosexuality.” Plato’s dialogues have become sites for intense debate about modern masculinity (­Dowling 1994 and Orrells 2011). Plato’s dialogues have repeatedly been mined for their seemingly affirmative and glamorizing depictions of homoeroticism: in the Charmides, Socrates is struck by the physical attractions of the eponymous male youth (­­155a–​­d); in the Meno, Socrates mentions how he is “­overcome by beautiful persons” (­76c); and in the Symposium, Socrates reports Diotima’s lesson that characterizes male philosophers as pregnant, preferring “­beautiful bodies to ugliness” for the birth of their ideas (­209b) and that the male philosopher will “­cling to [haptomenos] the beautiful one and associate with him” (­209c). And yet, as John Addington Symonds noted in A Problem in Greek Ethics, the first ever history of homoerotic Greek desire to appear in English (­originally printed in 1883 in a tiny edition of ten copies), Plato’s Laws “­condemn the passion which, in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, he exalted as the greatest boon of human life and as the groundwork of the philosophic temperament.” Socrates, of course, does not appear in the Laws, which led Symonds to argue that “­the philosophic idealisation of paiderastic love, to which the name Platonic love is usually given, should rather be described as Socratic. …. In the Laws … [Plato] discarded the Socratic mask” (­­Chapter 15).2 But Socrates himself was a complex figure. He was already the subject of much debate in antiquity as early Christians compared him with Jesus. During the Renaissance, in Erasmus’ version of the Symposium, his Convivium Religiosum (­1522), one character would exclaim “­St Socrates [Sancte Socrates], pray for us” (­Erasmus 1997, 194). In the eighteenth century, Johann Matthias Gesner, the famous professor of philology at Göttingen, would write an essay called “­Saint Socrates the Pederast,” canonizing the philosopher’s pedagogy of Athenian youth (­Orrells 2011, ­62–​­73). Socrates would become a highly contentious figure in the European Enlightenment. He “­was praised by the philosophes as a martyr for the good cause,” and he was condemned as “­the Athenian citizen justly accused, judged and sentences for ἀσέβεια [irreverence towards the gods]” (­Montuori 1981, 15). “­There were as many Socrateses as there were philosophes in the eighteenth century” (­Goulbourne 2007, 244; see also Trapp 2007a and 2007b, Moore 2019). In the nineteenth century, Socrates would become a hero for both British democratic reformists and for more conservative commentators seeking to alleviate the polarizing political and social debates of the fin de siècle.3 Socrates emerged as a contested figure in the modern Western imagination, respectable 361

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and radical, conventional and dissident, enlightened pagan and ­proto-​­Christian, a figure of both tradition and doubt. If Socrates and Plato resembled radical dissidents and members of the conservative elite in the late nineteenth century, then in the late twentieth century, Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet also emerged at a juncture when the relationship between Socratic/­Platonic philosophy and politics was a topic of much debate on both sides of Atlantic. For many m ­ id-­​ ­­twentieth-​­century readers, the late ­nineteenth-​­ and early ­twentieth-​­century idealization of Plato had enabled Fascist and Nazi interpretations of the dialogues, especially the appropriation of the Republic as a philosophical justification for totalitarianism. Moreover, the Nazis utilized a rhetoric of classicism to idealize martial s­ ame-​­sex homosociality while violently purging it of homosexual desire (­Roche and Demetriou 2018). In the decades after the Second World War, many intellectuals were confronting the Nazification of ancient Greece (­Leonard 2005). It was in this context that Foucault saw Socrates in Plato’s dialogues as encouraging readers to embark on a journey of philosophical ­self-​­fashioning and ­truth-​­telling outside of the traditional parameters of the political arena. Between 1982 and 1984, Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Collège de France, exploring the relationship between philosophy and the polis.4 For Foucault, Socrates was the original philosophical ­truth-​­teller, who in Plato’s Apology had practiced a discourse which does not claim to know anything but “­is constantly testing itself at every moment” (­Foucault 2011, 327). In his seminar on Plato’s Seventh Letter, which reports Plato’s unsuccessful attempt to teach Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse how to rule over Sicily, Foucault argued that philosophy should never “­plan what political action should be.” Rather, philosophy “­tells the truth in relation to political action. … And this is what I call a recurrent, permanent, and fundamental feature of the relationship of philosophy to politics … [into] the modern or contemporary period” (­Foucault 2011, 288). Or in Frédéric Gros’ words, for Foucault, “­philosophy does not have to state the truth of politics, but to confront politics in order to test its truth” (­Foucault 2011, ­386–​­387, emphasis original). Profoundly critical of the politics of the right and deeply disenchanted with the politics of the left, Foucault used Socrates as a model for the questioning of political dogma. Foucault’s lectures have received polarizing responses: Plato’s critique of tyranny has underlined Foucault’s commitment to political radicalism for some, whereas for others Foucault’s Socratic interest in the care of the self has signified his turn away from progressive politics and his capitulation to the individualist neoliberal order.5 While these lectures were only published after Foucault’s death in 2008 and it is unlikely that Sedgwick read them, as Epistemology of the Closet was written in the years just after Foucault delivered his lectures, she demonstrates an explicit interest in the political ambiguities of the example of Socrates. Indeed, in this chapter, we will explore the importance of Socrates for Sedgwick. As we shall see, Sedgwick’s own Socratic pose in Epistemology sought to excavate the paranoid enmeshments and entanglements of conservatism and sexual dissidence in the first hundred years of modern homosexuality. The blurred line between the homosexual and the homosocial was epitomized for Sedgwick by the fraught relationship between Hellenism and Christianity. Sedgwick’s readings of the reception of Socrates and Plato in late ­nineteenth-​­century literature would, as we shall examine, allow her to comment upon the sexual politics of the 1980s during the HIV/­AIDS crisis: the late nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries elucidated and stood in counterpoint to each other. We will begin, then, by exploring how Sedgwick chose the year 1891 as an exemplary moment at the end of the nineteenth century when many writers and intellectuals became ­concerned—​ ­even ­paranoid—​­about the similarities and differences between the male homosocial patriarchal order, on the one hand, and homosexual desire, on the other. Instead of Foucault’s 1870, then, 362

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when the homosexual came out of the historical closet, the late nineteenth century was for Sedgwick a useful moment which magnified the emergence of the incoherent category of “­the homosexual” in the ­Euro-​­American cultural imagination, encapsulated in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, which remained unfinished at Melville’s death in 1891 and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which appeared in novel form in the same year. The contested reception of Socrates and Plato was central to Sedgwick’s examination of these texts. As we shall see, Plato’s texts did not straightforwardly offer a coded vocabulary for homoerotic desire. While Melville and Wilde have become totemic writers for many gay and queer audiences in the last hundred years (­see Martin 1998 and Sinfield 1994), for Sedgwick, the classical and biblical imagery in Billy Budd and Dorian Gray exemplified the fraught relationship between the homosocial and the homosexual. As we will go on to examine, Sedgwick was writing in the context of a larger public debate about the reception of Socrates and Plato in the United States. Epistemology of the Closet was also a response to the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a bestseller published in 1987, which lamented recent developments in the teaching of the humanities in American higher education. Bloom critiqued the commoditization of the American university and extolled the Western cultural canon as providing the tools for a true education for the formation of the self. But he used Socrates and Plato to justify an elitist argument that only a small minority could truly benefit from a liberal education. As a former student of Bloom, Sedgwick would explore her own intellectual ­self-​­positioning through Plato’s Socrates, as she sought to examine and question the relationship between the homosexual and the homosocial, the radical dissident and the conservative establishment, between queer and conservative politics, between reading against the grain and preserving the classical literary canon. In the Apology, Socrates exhorted the value of knowing oneself and yet he also ironically emphasized that he knew that he did not know anything. If the Reagan administration in the 1980s professed its ignorance about gay life as AIDS claimed so many lives, what were the politics of Sedgwick’s Socratic pose of ­not-​­knowing about homosexuality? What did it mean for modern queer politics in the 1980s to think about the reception of the ancient Greeks at the fin of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

Greek and Christian in Late ­Nineteenth-​­Century Culture ­Graeco-​­Roman antiquity held a privileged place in elite Western culture and education. ­Nineteenth-​ c­ entury modernity turned back to the examples of the Greeks and the Romans, to reflect on the political and social experiments being conducted by European and North American ­nation-​­states and empires. The ancient Athenians provided a powerful and ­much-​­exploited model for modern masculinity, which might look democratic, enlightened, and imperial. In Victorian Britain, a classical education was widely perceived as suitable training for a career as a statesman and bound together a special class of men. John Grote, philosopher, Anglican clergyman, and brother of George (­the banker, politician, and classical historian), called classical study “­a point of intellectual sympathy among men over a considerable surface of the world” and a “­bond of intellectual communion among civilized men” (­Turner 1981, 4). The language of feeling and religion was not accidental: when Darwinism, geology along with biblical criticism were encouraging people to question the authority of the biblical texts, the Greek and Roman Classics provided Victorian gentlemen with a pedagogical canon for negotiating the difficult challenges of the modern age. Plato was an important figure in the elite male Victorian imagination. Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford (­­1855–​­1893), made him a central feature of the redesigned Classics undergraduate syllabus in the second half of the nineteenth century. Jowett translated all of Plato’s 363

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dialogues and they were widely enough read to come out in three editions in his lifetime. “­Jowett conceived himself,” as Melissa Lane has put it, as fighting the latest round of the ­idealist-​­materialist battle, against materialist opponents who in his day were embodied by the utilitarian creed of Jeremy Bentham and his followers, J.S. Mill and George Grote. Utilitarianism held that the crucial test of any public policy was whether it served the greatest happiness. Jowett acknowledged that utility was important. But he argued that Plato’s Republic showed that it was not enough. The highest law is not the greatest happiness, but the good and the right. (­Lane 2001, 100) For Jowett, Plato’s idealism provided students with a model for the quest for transcendental truths at a time of deep religious dissension and heated discussion of social and political issues around class, the New Woman, and New Imperialism. Indeed, by the time of the appearance of the third edition in 1892, the British fin de siècle was the stage for much debate about the degeneration and decadence of modern culture and society (­Marshall 2007). For Jowett, Plato’s dialogues provided political and moral lessons applicable to modern man in those testing times (­Dowling 1994, ­64–​­66; Orrells 2011, ­97–​­123). Jowett’s promotion of the tutorial system at Oxford reflected his admiration of the Platonic teaching scene, the Socratic elenchus, between an older man and male youth (­Evangelista 2007). The Oxford Classics course aimed to produce “­the manly reasoner” (­Ellis 2007, ­47–​­48). With Plato, Jowett sought to raise the British ­nation-​ ­state and its empire to its best possible potentiality. Indeed, Jowett ensured that many of his students had careers in the imperial civil service (­Vasunia 2013). His interpretation of Plato aspired the transcendence of reality to the ideal Forms. But Jowett did not argue for the realization of Plato’s Republic: he did not have a ­mapped-​­out political program in mind when he tutored his undergraduates. Rather, ­Jowett—​­like other idealist philosophers in the late nineteenth ­century—​ ­sought to bolster and stabilize the British establishment through Socratic sense and moderation in the face of so many difficult questions about politics, society, and art circulating at the fin de siècle (­Turner 1981, 267). And yet, even if Plato’s dialogues were seen as manuals for modern Victorian masculinity, they also repeatedly feature beautiful male bodies and presented emotionally and even erotically intense relationships between males, as we mentioned earlier. Jowett suggested that reference to pederasty in Plato was nothing more than “­a figure of speech which no one interpreted literally” (­Jowett 1892, 1, 534). But Jowett’s translations, which did not shy away from mentioning those “­figures of speech,” ensured that Jowett’s pupils and readers, including ­nineteenth-​­century writers such as Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Oscar Wilde, could turn to Plato for descriptions of m ­ ale-​­male bonds which could be applied not only by aspiring imperialists but also those men who nourished sexual desires for other males. If the ancient Greeks looked to the Victorians as both exemplars and aberrations of Western masculinity, they encapsulated, for Sedgwick, the incoherence of late n­ ineteenth-​­century notions about the relationship between male homosociality and homosexuality, between “­intellectual sympathy among men” and another sort of fellow feeling. Melville’s Billy Budd confronted its ­late-​­Victorian and ­twentieth-​­century readers with the paradoxes of the sexual politics of male homosocial order: as Sedgwick wrote, “­Is men’s desire for other men the great preservative of the masculinist hierarchies of Western culture, or is it among the most potent threats against them?” (­Sedgwick 1990, 93). This tension is played out in Billy Budd through the turn to classical and biblical imagery. On the one hand, Billy Budd is a biblical figure: he is explicitly compared to 364

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an “­angel” (­Melville 2012, 372), “­a young Adam before the Fall” (­365), and “­a martyr to martial discipline” (­395). His story is soteriological: like Jesus, he is sacrificed by the father figure Captain Vere, for the good of society. And yet, he is also an alluring and seductive character from the ­Graeco-​­Roman world. As the “­Handsome Sailor,” (­305, 306, 313, 316, 365) Bill is like “­Apollo” (­310) and has “­that human look of reposeful good nature which the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to his heroic s­ trong-​­man, Hercules” (­314). He is an ancient pagan, who attracted the attention of early Christians, like those “­picked specimens among the earlier British converts to Christianity,” whom “­the Pope at that time” admired for “­the strangeness of their personal beauty” (­394). Billy’s beauty was noticed by John Claggart, the ship’s ­master-­​­­at-​­arms, who spread a rumor that Billy was planning a ­mutiny—​­a rumor which resulted in Billy’s execution. But what was Claggart’s motivation? How was the relationship between these two men to be understood? Plato was, as Sedgwick pointed out, an important reference for the novel’s authorial voice, to whom Claggart seemed impenetrable. He is “­mysterious,” “­peculiar,” “­obscure,” and “­secretive,” which muddies the motivations of the ship’s policeman: was Claggart’s rivalry with Billy, which resulted in his eventual hanging, also an attraction? Just as Jowett had turned to Plato to understand modern masculinity in an age of doubts about biblical authority, so Melville’s narrator also asks his reader to use Plato rather than the Bible to understand the man Claggart: “­the Holy Writ” is “­no longer popular” and so One must turn to some authority not liable to the charge of being tinctured with the biblical element. In a list of definitions included in the authentic translation of Plato, a list attributed to him, occurs this: ‘­Natural Depravity: a depravity according to nature.’ (­Melville 2012, 343) The reference comes from Plato’s Laws where the Athenian Stranger promotes “­the natural use of sexual intercourse for the production of c­ hildren—​­by abstaining on the one hand from intercourse with males” (­636c). We have already seen Symonds reading Plato’s Laws. The language of “­natural” sexual intercourse within the context of a marriage between man and woman would be picked up by Roman Stoics, Platonic commentators such as the Jewish Hellenistic philosopher Philo and early Christian fathers such as Paul, thereby underpinning Western Christian sexual ethics. But as Sedgwick in her reading of Billy Budd pointed out: “­The narrator does not pause to remark, however, that the platonic ‘­definition’ is worse than tautological, suggesting as it does two diametrically opposed meanings.” “­A depravity according to nature,” like “­natural depravity” “­might denote something that is depraved when measured against the external standard of ­nature—​­that is, something whose depravity is unnatural. Either of the same two phrases might also denote, however, something whose proper nature it is to be ­depraved— ​­that is, something whose depravity is natural” (­Sedgwick 1990, 95). For Sedgwick, the politics of the text is not clear: Is the authorial voice ­gay-​­affirmative or homophobic? “­Claggart is depraved because he is, in his desires, a pervert,” or he is depraved not because of the ­male-​­directed nature of his desire, here seen as natural or innocuous, but, rather, because he feels toward his own desires only terror and loathing … Claggart is depraved because he is homosexual, or alternatively depraved because homophobic. (­Sedgwick 1990, 96) 365

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The text sets up Claggart as the homosexual villain, and yet it can also be read as a critique of the circumstances which produce Claggart as the ­self-​­hating homophobe. Rather than explaining the relationship between men, then, turning to Plato, for Melville as for Jowett and his readers, provoked further questions about male homosociality and homosexuality. What Plato taught his modern readers about what it meant to be a man, Sedgwick suggested, was not straightforward. The difficulty in reading Plato exemplified, for Sedgwick, the contests from the late nineteenth century onwards over defining the border between healthy and pathological, legal and illegal, respectable and aberrant, masculinities. Jowett’s interpretation of Plato, which sought to bind the real and the ideal, encouraged some of his students to think in ­non-​­dualistic ways which blurred the binaries of ­nineteenth-​­century categories of gender and sexuality. Plato’s Form of Beauty provided an alluring opportunity for such an interpretation. As Lane observes, “­the sheer sensual sway of beauty makes one feel that the Form of Beauty is nothing chill or abstract, and can help us appreciate the way it animates the sensible world” (­2001, 72). In his 1893 Plato and Platonism, Walter Pater, one of Jowett’s most famous pupils, made this point when he imagined how Plato, entranced by his ­teacher—​­like another ­Alcibiades—​­at “­about ­twenty-​­eight years old” having “­listened to the ‘­Apology’ of Socrates” (­Pater 1893, 138), was turned (­on) to philosophy: The lover, who is become a lover of the invisible, but still a lover, and therefore, literally, a seer, of it, carrying an elaborate cultivation of the bodily senses, of eye and ear, their natural force and acquired ­fineness—​­gifts akin properly to τὰ ἐρωτικά [matters concerning eros] as he says, to the discipline of sensuous l­ove—​­into the world of intellectual abstractions … (­Pater 1893, 1­ 39–​­140) The Greek phrase in Pater’s prose here appeared in the Symposium some 11 times with half those instances alone in Diotima’s lesson to Socrates about “­eros-​­matters,” including the moment when she said to Socrates: When a man has been so far tutored in the eros-​­matters [τὰ ἐρωτικά], seeing beautiful things in order and properly, as he reaches the conclusion of his dealings in eros-​­matters [τὰ ἐρωτικά], suddenly he will distinctly see something, beautiful in its nature; and this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils. (­210e) While Diotima sets out an ascent from the appreciation of visible, tangible, bodily pleasures to an understanding of the beautiful more generally, in Pater’s account of the philosopher’s development, Plato’s erotic desires seem to linger on into maturity: Plato is “­still a lover, and therefore, literally, a seer, of it.” Pater’s subtle allusions to the Greek and his complex syntax blurred the line between visible and invisible, between concrete and abstract beauty, leaving open the question of the relationship between homoerotic desire and homosocial pedagogy, between sexual pleasure and respectable scholarship. For Pater, Plato’s philosophical quest was conditioned by his aesthetic sensibility (­Higgins 1993). Oscar Wilde read Jowett’s Plato and was a huge admirer of Pater’s aestheticism. In her reading of Dorian Gray in Epistemology, Sedgwick highlighted the Paterian subversion of Jowett’s Platonic lessons. Basil Hallward the artist, who paints Dorian’s portrait, extols the aesthetic turn to the Greeks precisely because they recognized “­the harmony of the soul and body … We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void” (­Wilde 1949, 17). For Basil, Dorian is the embodiment of the Ideal. He is described as “­Apollo,” 366

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“­Adonis,” and “­Hermes” in the novel as if a ­real-​­life example of transcendent beauty. If Jowett’s Plato provided his readers with a path to ideal values that circumvented the fierce debates about the veracity of the biblical texts, then as Sedgwick showed, “­the Romantic rediscovery of ancient Greece” provided an imaginative space in which relations among human bodies might be newly a subject of utopian speculation. … [T]he Victorian cult of Greece gently, unpointedly, and unexclusively positioned male flesh and muscle as the indicative instances of ‘­the’ body, of a body whose surfaces, features, and abilities might be the subject or object of unphobic enjoyment. This pleasure in the male Greek body’s beauty could be contrasted, Sedgwick observed, with the Christian tradition’s focus on the female body which was surrounded “­with an aura of maximum anxiety and prohibition” (­Sedgwick 1990, 136). But Dorian Gray like Billy Budd was also caught up in the paranoid contradictions which structured discourses of masculinity. Lord Henry Wotton, on meeting Dorian and posing as ­Paterian-​­Platonic tutor to the young man, commends the virtues of a “­return to the Hellenic ideal” to “­forget  all the maladies of medievalism,”—​­Christianity. And yet, Wotton’s Socratic/­Platonic pedagogy was designed to seduce Dorian into transgression: “­We are punished for our refusals … The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” Wotton’s paradox showed, for Sedgwick, that there was no homoerotic Greek utopia without the dangerous frisson of temptation. As Sedgwick pointed out, Wotton taunts Dorian that the young man has had “­dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame.” Greek love, which was “­supposed to involve a healing of culturewide ruptures involved in male homosexual panic”—​­that is, an escape from Christian ­norms—​­was just as much “­a propellant of … homophobic prohibition,” enacted by Christian discourse (­Sedgwick 1990, 138). Victorian Christian morality produced and incited the attraction of Greek temptation. Or in Wotton’s words, “­your soul grows sick … with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful” (­Wilde 1949, 26). But if there was no turning back to ancient Greek love which was not already framed by Christian prohibition, then as Sedgwick went on to show, there was always the risk of Christian imagery becoming “­exemplary propellants of homosexual desire” (­Sedgwick 1990, 138). Sedgwick reminds us how the scandal of the figure of Jesus “­within a homophobic economy of the male gaze doesn’t seem to abate: efforts to disembody this body, for instance by attenuating, Europeanizing, or feminizing it, only entangle it the more compromisingly among various modern figurations of the homosexual” (­Sedgwick 1990, 140). The more ­de-​­sexualized and the more sublimated Jesus’ body has become in the history of Western visual culture, the more eroticized and seductive his body has appeared. Socrates’ report of Diotima’s lesson about the Beautiful in Plato’s Symposium allowed Victorian readers such as Pater to explore the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible, the fleshly and the ideal. Christian writers from antiquity onward to the Reformation and beyond responded to Plato’s description of the Beautiful, by repeatedly asking how one was “­to reconcile Christ’s ­super-​­human divinity with his mortal bodiliness?” (­Squire 2011, 175) The ­Platonic-​­Christian suspicion of the image, which would culminate with Reformation iconoclasm, underpins the paradoxes of representation explored by Wilde in Dorian Gray. The novel revolves around a portrait which none of us can ever see. Dorian Gray, Sedgwick highlighted, is a novel oscillating between a figurative and an abstract aesthetic. The novel’s language both reveals and conceals, both says and does not say, the pleasures Dorian practices. It is a story about a beautiful man’s illicit desires and passions and an exploration of the concept of mimesis. It can 367

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have “­a thematically full ‘­homosexual’ meaning” as well as “­a thematically empty ‘­modernist’ meaning” (­Sedgwick 1990, ­165–​­166). And it is, as Sedgwick pointed out, “­the desired male body” which encapsulated Victorian debates about what one can and cannot see in representation: “­what represented ‘­representation itself’ came … signally to be a very particular, masculine object and subject of erotic desire” (­Sedgwick 1990, 167). Dorian Gray and Billy Budd in 1891, then, did not offer Sedgwick a historical moment for the emergence of the modern homosexual in Western literary culture. Instead, these novels comprised, for Sedgwick, exemplary documents of the emergence of the incoherence of modern Western male sexual identity, for which Plato’s dialogues provided a suitably confusing vocabulary. Plato’s texts appeared both to permit and prohibit male homoerotic desire, contradicting and corroborating Christian sexual ethics. Sedgwick could read Billy Budd as both a critique and a confirmation of homophobia and Dorian Gray both represented and refused to represent the homosexual. Billy Budd might have seemed like a Christian parable but on closer inspection became a tale of forbidden Greek love, while Dorian Gray appeared to be a story of Greek transgression but ended up bowing to the representational strictures of Christian morality. A “­straight” text might become more “­gay”, and a “­gay” text might become more “­straight.” The turn to Socrates and Plato encapsulated, for Sedgwick, the complex enmeshment of queer counterculture and heteronormative establishment.

Socrates in the 1980s The cultural and religious contestations of the end of the nineteenth century provided Sedgwick with a historical context for the moment in which she was writing 100 years later. Epistemology of the Closet was published during the ­so-​­called “­culture wars,” when university campuses on both sides of the Atlantic were the object of fierce debate about curricula and syllabi, disciplines and subjects, reading lists and canons (­Hunter 1992). What the humanities were meant to teach and how they were to be taught, was the focus of polarizing polemics. Sedgwick remembered a class that she taught at Amherst College where fully half of the students said they had studied Dorian Gray in previous classes, but not one had ever discussed the book in terms of any homosexual content: all of them knew it could be explained in terms of either the Theme of the ­Double—​­‘­The Divided Self’—​­or else the Problem of ­Mimesis—​­‘­Life and Art’. (­Sedgwick 1990, 161) Sedgwick was fascinated by the contest over the meaning of the Western literary canon. Turning back to ancient Greece, for Sedgwick, in search of a queer heritage was hardly straightforward. Indeed, as she put it: “­The relation of gay studies to debates on the literary canon is, and had best be, tortuous” (­Sedgwick 1990, 48). If the Greek/­Christian binary opposition provided Sedgwick with an exemplary instance of the blurred line between homosexual/­homosocial definition, then the place of ancient Greece in the modern American university would epitomize what she called “­the high volatility of canonical texts,” as both subversive and confirmatory of hegemonic norms. One of the most important figures in the 1980s “­culture wars” was Allan Bloom, who positioned himself as Socrates from the Apology, a gadfly who questioned what the public thought it knew (­Plato Apology 30e). “­At the infamous Cornell of the infamous late sixties,” Bloom taught Sedgwick who remembered “­this great teacher” as “­dramatizing for us the explosive potential he lent to every interpretive nexus,” so that “­I [Sedgwick] and some others of that ­late-​­sixties 368

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generation learned the urgencies and pleasures of reading against the visible grain of any influential text” (­Sedgwick 1990, ­54–​­55). In The Closing of the American Mind, which became a bestseller after its publication in 1987, Bloom argued that “­No real teacher can doubt that his real task is to assist his pupil to fulfill his human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice” (­Bloom 1987, 20). For Sedgwick, Bloom’s class provided an invaluable space where “­the true sin against the holy ghost would be to read without risking oneself” (­Sedgwick 1990, 55). Or in Bloom’s own words: “­Liberal education puts everything at risk and requires students who are able to risk everything” (­Bloom 1987, 370). For Bloom, the university was supposed to awaken “­an awareness of difference,” “­an awareness of other possibilities,” and offer the “­presence of alternative thoughts” and “­alternate visions, a diversity of profound opinions,” “­an experience of liberation” (­Bloom 1987, 238; 249; 333). The Socratic Bloom placed himself in opposition to American civic society, in lamentation of what he perceived as modern America’s loss of the true understanding of culture and learning. As Sedgwick noted, Western culture was encapsulated for Bloom “­as the narrative that goes from the Phaedrus to Death in Venice” (­Bloom 1987, 55). Aschenbach, the protagonist in Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, thinks that Tadzio, the boy he sees while on vacation, is “­beauty itself, form as a divine idea.” But his recollection of Plato’s Phaedrus leads not to wisdom but to i­ ntoxication—​ ­the narrator calls Aschenbach “­the enthusiast” and “­the bewildered one” (­further references to Plato’s text)—​­and ultimately to death in the ­cholera-​­infested city, as he refuses to leave Venice lest he lose sight of his beloved despite the risk to his health. As Bloom pointed out in Closing, “­The Phaedrus was probably one of the things Aschenbach was supposed to have read as a schoolboy while learning Greek. But its content, discourses on the love of a man for a boy, was not supposed to affect him. The dialogue, like so much that was in the German education, was another scrap of ‘­culture,’ of historical information, which had not become a part of a vital, coherent whole. This is symptomatic of the deadness of Aschenbach’s own cultural activity” (­Bloom 1987, 236). Sedgwick observed, “­Bloom is frightened by the petrification of these passions within the tradition” (­Sedgwick 1990, 56). Aschenbach had not heeded any of Socrates’ lessons about the value of the philosophical life: instead, his knowledge of Greek had brought him to his death. Mann’s protagonist was a sign of modern times: modern education had become a commodity: to be consumed and not meant to affect the student in any deep or meaningful way. The “­explosion of enrolments in economics” demonstrated to Bloom that the modern student “­is not motivated by love of the science of economics but by love of what it is concerned w ­ ith—​­money.” Bloom then analogizes: “­The only parallel would be if there were a science of sexology, with earnest and truly scholarly professors, which would ensure its students lavish sexual satisfactions” (­Bloom 1987, ­370–​­371). The commoditization of the university required that students’ demands be gratified. Bloom imagined a very different Socratic/­Platonic eros, which he had learned from his teacher Leo Strauss, a Jewish German émigré, who had left Germany in 1932, and via France and England, had settled in the United States in 1937, eventually becoming a professor at Chicago, where he taught Bloom philosophy. Strauss argued that Plato had understood from Socrates’ fate that philosophers had to shield their full teachings to protect the city and themselves. In Strauss’ interpretation, Plato sought to prove that radical political reform was impossible. Plato’s Republic, far from setting out a civic ideal, was designed to demonstrate its impossibility: Socrates makes clear in the Republic of what character the city would have to be in order to satisfy the highest need of man. By letting us see that the city constructed in accordance with this requirement is not possible, he lets us see the essential limits, the nature, of the city. (­Strauss 1964, 138) 369

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In Lane’s words, “­the apparently radical politics of the Republic are a mirage: they are a product of the profound irony of the text” (­Lane 2001, 105). Strauss again: “­According to Socrates, the greatest enemy of philosophy, the greatest sophist, is the political multitude (­Republic ­492a5–​­e6), i.e., the enactor of the Athenian laws” (­Strauss 1983, 88). Strauss refers his reader to a passage where Socrates explains why philosophers avoid politics. Socrates’ teachings were ironic so that most would not understand them. They were not designed to teach the young gentlemen of Athens how they should live. “­Philosophy,” for the Socratic/­Platonic Strauss, “­is quest for wisdom. … We cannot be philosophers … but we can love philosophy, we can try to philosophize” (­Strauss 1995, 7). In Closing, Bloom adumbrated Strauss’ interpretation of Plato. Eros was the catalyst for philosophical inquiry which did not have limits or parameters: “­This longing for completeness is the longing for education … Socrates’ knowledge of ignorance is identical with his perfect knowledge of erotics.” Socrates was “­both the neediest and most grasping of lovers, and the richest and most giving of beloveds” (­Bloom 1987, 133). For Bloom, the unrealizable eros conditioned the possibility of truly liberated thinking and the search for truth within the university away from the political sphere. Strauss’ reading of Plato was a response to a generation of early to ­mid-­​­­twentieth-​­century interpretations of the Republic which had contended that Plato had argued for the actual possibility of his utopic vision, which, in turn, had encouraged Fascist and Nazi identification with Plato’s politics (­Lane 2001, ­97–​­134; Demetriou 2002). Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (­1945) was the most famous critique of Plato’s “­totalitarianism.” After the Second World War and during the ­Cold-​­War era, Strauss argued for a Platonism which respected the individual’s freedom of thought. Strauss’ reading was both controversial and influential: he “­taught his many and devoted American students a conservative politics of moderation,” which encouraged people to think for themselves and safeguard the city from fanaticism (­Lane 2001, 105). If Strauss’ reading reflected the ­post-​­war critique of idealism, it nevertheless valued the conservation of the political establishment (­Zuckert 1996, ­104–​­200). Bloom, also a Jewish American, who like Strauss also had to endure ­anti-​­Semitism, saw in Plato’s Socrates a figure who exercised his freedom to contemplate the “­serious questions” of “­­good-​­evil,” “­­freedom-​­necessity,” and “­­reason-​­revelation” (­Bloom 1987, 228). Strauss sought to reclaim the idealism of Plato, in response to the crudity of ­mid-​­century applications, and like Jowett, this stress on Plato’s idealism suited a ­self-​­consciously liberal politics (­accretive, deeply moral, and conservative) that imagined itself as “­natural” and “­real” (­like heterosexuality)—​­that is, not political. In 1952, Strauss published Persecution and the Art of Writing, in which he argued that Plato and other philosophers had to be read esoterically: the philosopher often had to adapt their writing to their circumstances, so that their texts could only be understood by a select few. Bloom similarly argued in Closing in 1987 that “­philosophers engaged in a gentle art of deception” (­Bloom 1987, 279), with a nod to Socrates’ “­noble lie” in the Republic (­­414e–​­415c). And like Strauss, he preached a conservative politics: Nonphilosophic men love the truth as long as it does not conflict with what they cherish … The hopes of mankind almost always end up in changing not mankind but one’s thought. … Socrates does much the same thing in the Apology when he addresses those who voted for his acquittal and tells them myths that tend to make death seem less terrible. (­Bloom 1987, ­277–​­278; 279; 281, emphasis original) While Strauss’ reading was a response to the Nazification of the Greeks, which also sought to rescue the timeless value of the Platonic quest for ideal truths, Bloom would compare the 1969 Woodstock Festival to the 1923 Nuremberg Rallies (­Bloom 1987, 314). “­The nation is not ready 370

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for great changes” demanded by “­radical black students” (­Bloom 1987, ­315–​­316), referring to the occupation by some African American students of Willard Straight Hall on Cornell’s campus in April 1969, which took place when Bloom was professor and Sedgwick was a student at the university. For Bloom, the incident represented the end of enlightenment values and warranted comparison to political events in 1933 in Germany. But Bloom did not refer to the fact that the occupation was directly related to the burning of a cross on the lawn of a campus dormitory for female African American students. He also did not mention that the occupation led to the creation of the Cornell Africana Studies and Research Center in late 1969, whose building was then burned down in a racially motivated arson attack less than a year after the Center’s creation.6 Bloom, who positioned himself as a radical Socrates in relationship to the “­gentlemen” of the polis, was nevertheless, then, the conservative intellectual who sought to preclude any f­ar-​ ­reaching political and social change. Sedgwick, who focused on Bloom’s sexual politics, observed that Bloom’s erotic, philosophical longing meant for him that “­sexual passion is no longer dangerous in us.” The gay call for equality “­wasted that marvelous energy and tension, leaving the student’s souls exhausted and flaccid” (­Bloom 1987, 99, ­50–​­51). Modern university students were “­exaggerated versions of Plato’s description of the young in democracies” (­87), going on to quote from his own 1968 translation of the Republic: “[The democratic youth] lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him” (­561c; Plato 1968, 239). For Sedgwick, then, Bloom was another Socrates precisely because he understood the “­dangerous truths,” which modern Western culture kept hidden from itself and which therefore depended on a closet for their “­exiguous toleration” (­Sedgwick 1990, 57): “­Bloom poignantly writes, … ‘­Toleration, not right, is the best he [Socrates] can hope for’” (­1987, 282). For Sedgwick, this meant that “­the compact between the philosopher and youth is held together not only by love but by the perhaps necessarily elitist community formed of mutual contempt. He is allowed to despise them for not, he thinks, seeing him for what he is” (­57). She then quotes Bloom again: “­Crito, the family man, thinks of Socrates as a good family man. Laches, the soldier, thinks of Socrates as a good soldier” (­283). Bloom, a gay man, consigned himself to the open closet, both inside and outside, a spectacle and a secret, tolerated and marginalized, permitted to exist if he didn’t make too many political demands.

Socratic Politics When Sedgwick asked in Epistemology, “­Has there ever been a gay Socrates?” responding with the answer, “­Does the Pope wear a dress?” (­Sedgwick 1990, 52), she too positioned herself like Bloom as Socrates in Plato’s Apology. Sedgwick’s invocation to know the gay self, combined with her knowledge that she does not know what might constitute that self, looked back to Socrates’ call to know oneself and his knowledge of his ignorance in Plato’s text. On the one hand, literary studies in the ­Euro-​­American university had been framed and underpinned from the late nineteenth century onwards by an institutionalized homophobic commandment not to inquire into writers’ sexual habits: “­Don’t ask; You shouldn’t know” (­Sedgwick 1990, 53). And yet, as Sedgwick pointed out, the question of the relationship between homoerotic desire and canonical literature could be asked about numerous w ­ ell-​­known authors: “­What was the structure, function, historical surround of ­same-​­sex love in and for Homer or Plato or Sappho? What, then, about Euripides or Virgil? If a gay Marlowe, what about Spenser or Milton? Shakespeare? Byron?” (­Sedgwick 1990, 53) Sedgwick’s catalog goes on and on. “­The very centrality of this list,” for Sedgwick, “­and its seemingly almost infinite elasticity suggest that no one can know in advance where the limits of a ­gay-​­centered inquiry are to be drawn” (­Sedgwick 1990, 53, emphases original). “­The homosexual” has been caught in a bind of being both a secret and a spectacle in modern homophobic 371

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Western culture, a bind from which Sedgwick herself could not escape. But if Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, when Sedgwick was writing, proclaimed ignorance about gay people which would toll the death knell of so many people during the (­still ongoing) HIV/­AIDS crisis (­Sedgwick 1990, ­5–​­8), Sedgwick’s ­non-​­knowledge about the gay canon was a gesture about not diagnosing and not legislating about what should count as “­gay,” “­lesbian,” or “­queer.” And yet because Sedgwick had argued that there was no gay liberatory epistemological certainty which could save and safeguard gay selves, Sedgwick herself acknowledged that her own analysis of the incoherence of (­homo)­sexual definition might have the unintended consequence of “­contributing to the credibility of the pathologizing ‘­homosexual panic’ legal defence of ­gay-​­bashers” (­Sedgwick 1990, 21). Sedgwick was all too aware of the different political uses of her text. Like Strauss and Bloom, then, Sedgwick was another Jewish American Socrates who was keenly conscious of the complexities of her political positioning, writing after the Second World War and the Shoah. N ­ ineteenth-​­and t­ wentieth-​­century discourses of race and a­ nti-​­Semitism have, like modern sexual definition, also constructed notions of identity in terms of universality and minority: people of color and members of ­non-​­Christian communities and faiths, such as Jews and Muslims, are continuously suspended between constituents of “­the human race” and representatives of “­the other.” In Epistemology, Sedgwick was especially aware of the overdetermined figure of the Jew at the fin de siècle. In ­late-​­Victorian ­England—​­which can stand in for the rest of ­Europe—​­the Jew “­refus[ed] to assimilate and yet assum[ed] a false English identity; cosmopolitan and tribal; ‘­alien’ and yet almost overly familiar; ideal colonizer and undesirable immigrant; white but not quite” (­­Bar-​­Yosef and Valman 2009, 3). The insider/­outsider position of the “­Jew,” whose identity was both presented in spectacularly phobic stereotypes and figured as secretive and hidden, reflecting the contradictory and paranoid constructions of the “­homosexual.” Sedgwick reminded her reader of the story of Esther, whose coming out as Jewish to her husband King Ahasuerus saved the Jews from slaughter (­Esther 7:­1–​­6). But then Sedgwick reminisced about the “‘­Queen Esther’ dress my grandmother made” for Purim, as recorded in a photo taken by her father, “­in a careful ­eyes-​­down ­toe-​­pointed curtsey,” with her shadow “­pillaring up tall and black” behind her (­Sedgwick 1990, 82). If Esther had saved the Jews, Sedgwick could not, however, compare herself to that Jewish heroine. Rather, the pillar of Sedgwick’s shadow recalls Lot’s wife who had looked back when fleeing from the destruction of Sodom and is turned into a pillar of salt (­Genesis 19:26). Sedgwick cannot help but glance back at a despised sexuality, and yet she questions the reach of her political agency. If Sedgwick’s Jewishness made her especially attuned to the genocidal policies of modern statecraft, then she was also painfully aware that critiques of the American ­state—​­such as Bloom’­s—​­might have their limitations and complicities in rightist political ideologies. ­Socrates—​­both radical and conservative, knowing and u­ nknowing—​ ­was a difficult model to adopt.7 Indeed, Sedgwick herself emerges as an overdetermined figure in her book: not just Esther, Lot, and Socrates, her own first name, “­Eve,” reminds us of the original woman’s sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Sedgwick positioned herself as the woman who knew too much about the male homosocial/­homosexual community into which she had entered. And so, then, if Sedgwick identified with Socrates the ancient Greek philosopher, who knew that he knew nothing, then she also repeatedly characterized the contradictions of male sexual identity and her analysis of them as “­excruciating” (­Sedgwick 1990, 68, 70, 115, 136, 198), a word which comes from the Latin “­excruciare”, resonant with the language of the torture of martyrs, thereby making a ­Christian—​­another crucified Christ who was actually ­Jewish—​­out of Sedgwick. As we saw above, debates over the “­gay canon” would for Sedgwick be “­tortuous.” If Sedgwick’s Socratic identification pointed to the emancipatory unknowability of queer desire, then her Christianizing 372

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language emphasized her entanglement in the heteronormative system she was analyzing. Sedgwick understood that the possibilities and the limits of the political agency of her analysis to change the “­double binds, systematically oppressing gay people” (­Sedgwick 1990, 70) were at stake. Her language signaled the complexity of the relationship of the radicalism of queer theory to the conservatism of the l­iterary-​­philosophical canon. Sedgwick had learned a lot from her teacher Bloom. Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet argued that the homosocial could become homosexual, just as the homosexual could become homosocial. For Sedgwick, Plato’s Socrates encapsulated that incoherence. Jowett’s Victorian idealism ended up encouraging writers like Pater and Wilde to blur the transcendent and the real, the establishment and the criminal, the Christian and the Greek. And if Platonic idealism would seem to justify political totalitarianism in the ­mid-​­twentieth century, then in the ­post-​­war period, Strauss and his students such as Bloom sought to rescue Plato’s Socrates as a radical figure, only to end up emphasizing his conservative, establishment credentials. The Socratic Foucault would also prove to be a polarizing figure. Sedgwick shows us what is at stake in the conflicted reception of the ancient Greeks for modern queer politics.

Suggestions for Further Reading For a detailed introduction to Sedgwick and her work, see Edwards 2009 and Berlant 2019. On Foucault’s Greeks, see Leonard 2005 and Miller 2022. On the modern reception of Socrates and Plato, see Lane 2001, and specifically on the Victorian homoerotic reception of Plato, see Dowling 1994, Evangelista 2007, and Orrells 2011. On Strauss’s Plato, see Zuckert 1996 and on Bloom, see Buckley and Seaton 1992.

Notes 1 I would like to record my deepest gratitude for Ben Winyard who read a draft of this essay and has read queer theory with me for all these years. I would also like to express warmest thanks to Bonnie Honig and James Porter who also read and commented upon a draft of this essay. On Sedgwick within modern intellectual history, see Barber and Clark 2002, Edwards 2009 and 2022, Kollias 2012, Berlant 2019, Davis 2020. 2 On “­Socratic love,” see Blanshard 2007. 3 See Turner 1981, Lane 2001 and Demetrios 2011. 4 On Foucault’s lectures, see Elden 2016, Lawlor 2019 and Miller 2018 and 2022, with further bibliography. 5 See Leonard 2005, Kelly 2014, Zamora and Behrent 2015, Miller 2018, and Gane 2018. 6 For an avowedly ­right-​­wing, conservative interpretation of the events, see Downs 1999. On Bloom’s Closing, see Buckley and Seaton 1992 and Kinzel 2002, with further bibliography. 7 See also Edelman 2010 and Somerville 2010 on Sedgwick, Jewishness, and race.

Works Cited Barber, Stephen M. and David L. Clark. 2002. Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory. London/­New York: Routledge. ­Bar-​­Yosef, Eitan and Nadia Valman (­eds.). 2009. ‘­The Jew’ in ­Late-​­Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa. Basingstoke/­New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Berlant, Lauren. 2019. Reading Sedgwick. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blanshard, Alastair. 2007. “­From Amor Socraticus to Socrates Amoris: Socrates and the Formation of a Sexual Identity in Late Victorian Britain.” In Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Michael Trapp, ­97–​­117. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. Buckley, William K. and James Seaton (­eds.). 1992. Beyond Cheering and Bashing: New Perspectives on The Closing of the American Mind. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

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Daniel Orrells Davis, Whitney. 2020. “­Triple Cross: Binarisms and Binds in Epistemology of the Closet.” Representations 149: 1­ 34–​­158. Demetriou, Kyriakos. 2002. “­A Legend in Crisis: The Debate Over Plato’s Politics, ­1930–​­1960.” Polis 19: ­61–​­93. Demetriou, Kyriakos. 2011. Studies on the Reception of Plato and Greek Political Thought in Victorian Britain. London/­New York: Routledge. Dowling, Linda. 1994. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Downs, Donald. 1999. Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Edelman, Lee. 2010. “­Unnamed: Eve’s ‘­Epistemology’.” Criticism 52.2: 1­ 85–​­190. Edwards, Jason. 2009. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. London/­New York: Routledge. Edwards, Jason. 2022. Queer and Bookish: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as Book Artist. Earth, Milky Way: Punctum Books. Elden, Stuart. 2016. Foucault’s Last Decade. Cambridge/­Malden: Polity Press. Ellis, Heather. 2007. “­Newman and Arnold: Classics, Christianity and Manliness in Tractarian Oxford.” In Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1­ 800–​­2000, ed. Christopher Stray, 4­ 6–​­63. London: Duckworth. Erasmus, Desiderius. 1997. Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, translated and annotated by C.R. Thompson. Toronto/­London: University of Toronto Press. Evangelista, Stefano. 2007. “­Platonic Dons, Adolescent Bodies: Benjamin Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater.” In Children and Sexuality: From the Greeks to the Great War, ed. George Rousseau,­ 203–​­236. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge, translated by Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 2011. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1­ 982–​­1983, edited by Frédéric Gros and translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gane, Nicholas. 2018. “­Foucault’s History of Neoliberalism.” In After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the T ­ wenty-​­First Century, ed. Lisa Downing, ­46–​­60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gros, Frédéric. 2011. “­Course Context.” In The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France ­1982–​­1983, ed. Michel Foucault, 3­ 77–​­391. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goulbourne, Russell. 2007. “­Voltaire’s Socrates.” In Socrates from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century, ed. Michael Trapp, 2­ 29–​­247. Aldershot: Ashgate. Higgins, Lesley. 1993. “­Jowett and Pater: Trafficking in Platonic Wares.” Victorian Studies 31.1: 4­ 3–​­72. Hunter, James Davison. 1992. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books. Jowett, Benjamin. 1892. The Dialogues of Plato: Translated into English with Analyses and Introductions, Third Edition, 5 Volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelly, Mark G.E. 2014. Foucault and Politics: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kollias, Hector. 2012. “­Queering It Right, Getting It Wrong.” Paragraph 35.2: 1­ 44–​­163. Kinzel, Till. 2002. Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika: Studien zu Allan Blooms the Closing of the American Mind. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. Lane, Melissa. 2001. Plato’s Progeny: How Socrates and Plato Still Captivate the Modern Mind. London/­New York: Bloomsbury. Lawlor, Leonard. 2019. “‘­Sacrifice a Cock to Asclepius:’ The Reception of Socrates in Foucault’s Final Writings.” In Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Socrates, ed. Christopher Moore, ­928–​­949. Leiden/­Boston: Brill. Leonard, Miriam. 2005. Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Postwar French Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marshall, Gail. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, Robert K. 1998. “­Melville and Sexuality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine, 1­ 86–​­201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Melville, Herman. 2012. The Confidence Man and Billy Budd, Sailor. London: Penguin. Miller, Paul Allen. 2018. “­Queering Plato: Foucault on Philosophy as ­Self-​­fashioning and Resistance in Plato’s 7th Letter.” Trans: Revue de Littérature Générale et Comparée 52. https://­doi.org/­10.4000/­trans.1807

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Ancient Greece in Epistemology of the Closet Miller, Paul Allen. 2022. Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity: Learning to Speak to Truth. London/­New York: Bloomsbury. Montuori, Mario. 1981. De Socrate Iuste Damnato: The Rise of the Socratic Problem in the Eighteenth Century. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben. Moore, Christopher (­ed.). 2019. Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Socrates. Leiden/­Boston: Brill Orrells, Daniel. 2011. Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pater, Walter. 1893. Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures. London: Macmillan. Plato. 1968. The Republic of Plato, by Alan Bloom. New York: Basic Books. Roche, Helen and Demetriou, Kyriakos. 2018. Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Leiden: Brill. Sedgwick, Eve Kososfky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley/­Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sinfield, Alan. 1994. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Movement. London: Cassell. Somerville, Siobhan B. 2010. “­Feminism, Queer Theory, and the Racial Closet.” Criticism 52.2: 1­ 91–​­200. Squire, Michael. 2011. The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press. Strauss, Leo. 1946. “­On a New Interpretation of Plato’s Political Philosophy.” Social Research 13: 3­ 26–​­367. Strauss, Leo. 1964. The City and Man. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally Strauss, Leo. 1983. Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strauss, Leo. 1988 [1952]. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago. Strauss, Leo. 1995 [1968]. Liberalism Ancient and Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Symonds, John Addington. 1883. A Problem in Greek Ethics. Privately printed. Trapp, Michael (­ed.). 2007a. Socrates from Antiquity to the Enlightenment. Aldershot/­Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Trapp, Michael (­ed.). 2007b. Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Aldershot/­Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Turner, Victor. 1981. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Vasunia, Phiroze. 2013. The Classics and Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilde, Oscar. 1949. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Zamora, Daniel and Michael C. Behrent. 2015. Foucault and Neoliberalism. Malden, MA: Polity. Zuckert, Catherine H. 1996. Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida. Chicago/­London: University of Chicago Press.

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26 SHEDDING LIGHT, CASTING SHADOWS Queerness, Club Performances, and the ­ Faux-​­Natural Narratives of Classical Reception Eleonora Colli Introduction In 1973, Harold Bloom published what would become an extremely influential text in reception studies and Western, canonical literature more specifically: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. In the text, Bloom seeks to understand the history of literature and specifically poetry as a history of influence, anxiety, and reception: all authors and all texts are inevitably made to confront their predecessors and pay their dues, in a fraught relationship Bloom describes as genealogical and patriarchal, where the older text is cast as the “­father,” and the younger one as the “­son” within the “­Western Imaginative life” (­Bloom 1973, ­5–​­11). Taking Bloom’s discourse on father and son, and light and shadow, as well as other canonical narratives of reception, this essay aims to look at other possible queer narratives and languages that might be able to r­ e-​­structure how we think about reception and the classical. Particularly, I aim to focus on how light and shadow are conceived of in classical reception theory and propose a different way to think about them. By looking at how light and shadow are artificially organized and performed in queer club spaces, I aim to demonstrate how they might provide us with a new kind of language to think about reception, writing, and reading. To do so, I will focus on two club performances that also engage with the classical, Nick Finegan’s “­Theseus on the Heap” (­2019) and Crispin Lord’s “... Was Already Screaming Its Name” (­2019). Artificial lights within queer spaces and queer clubs, even when connected to Classics, it seems, reject the influence of Classics as illuminating or overshadowing anything: rather, even if momentarily, they ­re-​­interpret the classical as something e­ ver-​­changing, moving, appearing and disappearing under stroboscopic club lights.

Reception and the Western Canon To start my analysis, I want to first look at canonized models of reception, and particularly at Harold Bloom’s theoretical language and how it fits into wider discourses and imagery of reception. Bloom’s texts have hugely contributed to preserve and elevate the concept of the Western canon as something valuable, inescapable, and necessary: his focus on a masculine, aggressive, and Western model, consisting of “­father” and “­son” texts, puts the author at the center of his reception theory, opposed to more popular models of archaeology such DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-32 376

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as Foucault’s. The idea that the author can and will decide how and to whom to pay tribute remains regardless of the writer’s general feeling of anxiety, the fact that they supposedly owe something to the previous author, and that they will forever be in someone’s shadow. In this dysfunctional family, no text can be free of patriarchal models of genealogy and paying dues, recognizing, and being recognized within a Western framework where reference and originality need to strike a precise balance for the author to succeed. The “­classical tradition,” here, stands as one of the greatest fathers and origin points of these imagined and disturbing kinships and relations between the Western canon and the Classics: f­ aux-​­biological, familial, incestuous, and ­anxiety-​­inducing. This violent model of reception is not the only one Bloom adopts in his theory of influence. Talking about Shakespeare in The Anatomy of Influence (­2011), for example, he states that “­everything else in Western literature either prepares for it or dwells in its enduring shadow” (­Bloom 2011, 42): here, he also talks about a “­shadow of past poetic anxiety” (­Bloom 2011, 57) that hangs over authors wrestling with their works as well as the concepts of influence and originality. Yet at the same time, in the preface, he states how many authors of the Western canon “­bring us fire and light” (­Bloom 2011, x). The imagery employed by Bloom therefore does not stop at the more immediately evident model of direct genealogy that reception theory is so often drawn to, but also deals with images of shadow and light, chiaroscuro, darkness, and brightness. This is, of course, a product of the Enlightenment, and even before, of a longer, seemingly naturalized tradition where reason and light are paired together as an unshakable and unreducible duo. Yet it is not only light that the canonical text almost everyone is forced to deal with represents. In traditional models of reception, the supposedly original text from which everything stems becomes both light and shadow: text, light, and shadow, become as inseparable as the influencing and the influenced text are. The canon shines a bright light, yet simultaneously casts a long shadow. It shines on every other text, yet it also obscures it. In this imagery, the canon remains as a naturalized subject, which, according to universal laws of sunrise and sunsets, decides who gets illuminated and how, what gets shrouded in darkness and when. This imagery of light and shadow is particularly common in classical reception studies. To cite one example also starting and quoting from Bloom, David Ricks’ The Shade of Homer: A Study in Modern Greek Poetry (­2004) starts with the following questions: The Burden of the Past, the Anxiety of Influence: however we term it, the subject of the poet’s relation to his predecessors is one that the late twentieth century finds compelling; and the reader of this book will no doubt be hoping to learn something more about this phenomenon. It has after all been acknowledged that ‘­everyone who now reads and writes in the West, of whatever racial background, sex or ideological camp, is still a son or daughter of Homer’. What is the importance of Homer for the poets of modern Greece? Is he a helper, a kindly ancestral shade who speaks to them across the ages, or a handicap, a shadow that will loom over their efforts for ever? (­Ricks 20004, vii) Conflating the ­faux-​­biological model with imagery of shadow and light like Bloom does, Ricks also distinguishes between a “­kindly ancestral shade” and “­a shadow that will loom over their efforts for ever”: the Western canon, and in this case the classical and Homer in particular, as a literary ghost, dictating ways of illuminating and seeing, pervade not only every crevice of f­ aux-​ ­biological models (“­everyone who now reads and writes in the West, of whatever racial background, sex or ideological camp, is still a son or daughter of Homer”), but also every f­ aux-​­natural 377

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perception of light and shadow, going so far as to distinguish the positive and soothing “­shade” from the negative and too dark “­shadow.” Ricks is of course not the only one who falls into this use of light and shadow imagery, which often remains even when the apparent aim of a text is to critique false and naturalized conceptions of the classical and its influence. In Postclassicisms 2019, for instance, the authorial collective asks itself: “­can we imagine a classical literary criticism without such a theological shadow? Or, for that matter, a history of theology that does not acknowledge its classical shadow?” (­Postclassicisms Collective 2019, 87). For all that the book tries to imagine a new way of engaging with classical reception, its imagery, and metaphors remain the same. Perhaps we should then ask ourselves: can we imagine a theory of classical reception that does not rely on ­faux-​­natural concepts of brightness and darkness, of the classical as both light and shadow? The aim of this essay, then is to analyze the rhetoric of “­casting shadow” and “­illuminating” and explore how terminology regarding light and shadow is employed in classical reception studies. By looking at how concepts of light and shadow are naturalized to hold specific meaning in classical reception, I will suggest a different reading of these concepts through an analysis of performances in queer clubs and undergrounds spaces, taking Nick Finegan’s “­Theseus on the Heap” (­2020) and Crispin Lord’s “... Was Already Screaming Its Name” (­2019) as case studies. These performances, I argue, propose to embrace artificial light as a way of depicting the self and its influences in a consciously ­anti-​­normative way and, taking from Muñoz, with a conscious disidentificatory effect (­Muñoz 1999), as performances that work against the grain of dominant ideologies (­and in this case dominant discourses on the classical), and instead open up utopian spaces for queer existence. Looking at how these queer performances engage with both the classical and intentional uses of artificial light, then, I aim to propose a new way of understanding imageries used in classical reception through a queering of the light and shadow of influence and expression.

Images of Shadow and Light in Classics As hinted already by Ricks’ qualitative difference between “­shadow” and “­shade,” shadows (­real and figurative) have been interpreted differently in different contexts. Shadows can bring cold and darkness, or freshness and relief; the brightness of the morning can be blinding, whereas shadows and shades can soothe. Yet they can also hide, scare, and prohibit vision. Shadows provide different sensorial experiences, as noted by Edensor and Hughes: Though we rarely pay heed to its multiplicities, we live in a dappled world in which variegated patterns of sunlight and shade play across space, enchanting landscape with colours, tones, textures and intensities that ceaselessly reconfigure apprehension and attention. This dynamic production of light and shade constitutes an integral part of everyday affective and sensory attunement to place. As we inhabit and move through dappled places, we are […] immersed in the currents of a world in formation. (­Edensor and Hughes 2021, 1302) The imagery of shadow and light does not only articulate and create margins and centers, zones of power, and sites of exclusion but also often does so in a way where these concepts are naturalized and how they create architectures of brightness and shade are not questioned. Shadows are perceived as indicating and creating absence, light as illuminating, making space for. They are therefore not just simple metaphorical terms, but represent instead an ideological imagery that creates an epistemological, affective, and sensory experience even in classical reception studies 378

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and how we approach it. This imagery creates a specific technology of power (­Foucault 1988, 18), determining how texts are received, how they are read, which ones are allowed to shine, and which ones are left in the shadow. Distinctive patterns of light and shadow, artificially constructed and yet naturalized in everyday life as well as in theories of reception and literary criticism, define and shape our reading experience. As again Edensor and Hughes note, “­the ways in which we make sense of what we see with light and shadow veer from the cosmological to the moral, and from the aesthetic to the political, and vary enormously across time and space” (­Edensor and Hughes 2021, 1311). Yet this particular technology of reception has been naturalized and constructed into a single naturalizing narrative for an especially long time. Perhaps the dialogical and yet unified nature of both light and shadow of the Classics has been exemplified in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (­1872): the text shows how not only classical reception theory has taken and embedded both images of light and shadow but also the classical canon itself, thus leaving no other space in technologies of brightness and shades for the receiving text to exist. Nietzsche opposes the “­Apolline ­light-​­image” (­Nietzsche 1999, 112) to the Dionysian world. Informed by Greek mythology as well as the Hegelian tradition and metaphorical world, Nietzsche describes Apollo as The ‘­luminous one’ through and through; at his deepest root he is a god of the sun and light who reveals himself in brilliance. ‘­Beauty’ is his element, eternal youth his companion. But the lovely semblance of the world of dreams is his realm too; the higher truth, the perfection of these ­dream-​­states in contrast to the only partially intelligible reality of the daylight world, raise him to the status of a prophetic god, but equally certainly to that of an artistic god. (­Nietzsche 1999, 120) By contrast, he talks of Socrates, representing the irrational and dark Dionysian element, as being “­like a shadow growing ever longer in the evening sun, obliging men, time after time, to create art anew” (­Nietzsche 1999, 71). Nietzsche’s text is by no means the only one making a distinction and constructing a dichotomy between binomials of light/­reason and darkness/­feeling, but it is perhaps the most canonical and well established, as well as drawing on traditions of both classical mythology and Enlightenment philosophy, showing how the Western tradition has monolithically defined this metaphorical field. Nietzsche’s text demonstrates that not only is classical reception theory defined by a rhetorical field of images where the Classics represent both light and shadow, but also theories of the classical itself naturalize this dichotomy as belonging to the classical text in equal part, as a sort of divine essence that spreads itself as falsely naturalizing. Light and shadow thus are simultaneously mythical, imaginative, and symbolic concepts which are indeed perceived as either natural or divine, essentialized in a unifying narrative where the classical permeates and dominates all spaces and crevices. Classics are the light showing the truth, yet they cast shadows, too: either way, it seems, they cloud everything in too much brightness, or in a too black darkness, prohibiting real vision, and pushing the reader into a world where they cannot seem to direct their gaze how they want to, either blinded by a metaphorical glow or suffocated by a dark that does not seem to lessen. The question then becomes, how can we orient ourselves toward a metaphorical language that allows for a n­ on-​­essentializing narrative and allows readers to construct their own reading and vision of the field, through specific lenses, across different phases of day and night? There are, of course, theories in Classical Studies that already argue against this kind of essentializing narrative and specifically against the idea of the Classics as the light of Western reason. ­Post-​­colonial and ­de-​­colonial theory is particularly focused on this: in her seminal book on classical reception and Caribbean literature, ­Afro-​­Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean 379

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Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century, (2010) Emily Greenwood discusses the motto of the University of the West Indies, established in colonial times in 1948 under British rule. The motto reads “­oriens ex occidente lux” (“­light rising from the west”): Greenwood notes how it was “­presumably chosen to signal the West Indies as a source of learning and higher education,” and was later criticized as a symbol of “­colonial education as foreign indoctrination” (­Greenwood 2010, 93). Sir Thomas Taylor, the first principal of the University College of the West Indies, noted that “­the motto was a matter of very serious debate since Classical Studies flourish in some of the Caribbean colonies possibly more actively than they do in Great Britain.”1 The explicitly colonial nature of the proverb is made even more evident when we consider that it is an inversion of an anonymous Latin saying, “­ex oriente lux, ex occidente lex” (“­light from the east, law from the west”). While this proverb also implies a connection between Classics, the fictional idea of the West, righteousness and light, the version that is still today the motto of the University of the West Indies makes this connection even stronger and justifies it through a false and paradoxical ­faux-​ ­natural event: the light rising from the West. The inversion in the proverb from the sun rising from the East to the light rising from the West naturalizes an event that does not exist, ­re-​­inventing our perception of the world, the sun, and light so as to pair it with the concept of the West as a Eurocentric and colonial force of white supremacy, portrayed as the light of reason casting shadows over other countries. As Ursula LeGuin incisively tells us: Whiteness in its righteousness bleaches creatures colorless tolerates no shadow.2 No other forms of expression can exist under white supremacy, and under the Classics as a colonial force. Knowing where such imagery of light and shadow stems from, then, it is fundamental for Classics and classical reception to find new metaphors to counteract this naturalizing narrative. In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet,3 (2017) the developmental biologist Andreas Hejnol calls for a need to r­ e-​­evaluate our language when considering biological events: For centuries, biology has relied on a particular set of metaphors […] to classify and order living beings. Such metaphors have depicted life as a slow but inexorable march ­upward—​ ­as a stairway of creatures with humans at the top, positioned as the most advanced beings. This hierarchical understanding of life, which defines ‘­progress’ as a linear movement from the ­so-​­called simple to the complex, has long haunted biological inquiry […] new biologies are forcing us to tell very different stories with dramatically different metaphors. (­Hejnol 2017, 87) While the images of light and shadow are not immediately hierarchal as the images Hejnol discusses (­ladders, trees), when looking at their history and the history of Classics, it is immediately evident how a new language has to be found for them as well. However, it is also interesting to consider: should we get rid of them altogether, or just ­re-​­evaluate how they are conceived? Even the movement of the sun expresses itself differently across space, depending on how it is f­ ormed—​ ­on buildings, lack thereof, open spaces, trees, nature, and so on. Should we just, then, recognize that the construction of light and shadow and all concepts to them relate are ultimately constructed and cannot be related to one single meaning? 380

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A famous interpretation of how light and shadow can indeed be perceived as constructed as opposed to naturalized is Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows (­1977). The essay focuses on aesthetics and architecture and yet conveys again important critiques to Western colonialism and its overarching reach, present not just physically but also ideologically, metaphorically, and aesthetically. Talking about Western architecture, Tanizaki notes how: There are of course roofs on Western houses too, but they are less to keep off the sun than to keep off the wind and the dew; even from without it is apparent that they are built to create as few shadows as possible and to expose the interior to as much light as possible. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows. […] We never tire of the sight, for to us this pale glow and these dim shadows far surpass any ornament. (­Tanizaki 1977, 17) Tanizaki’s analysis of Japanese architecture as opposed to the Western style is a claim of aesthetic resistance to Europe’s blinding “­light” and tools of expansion. His insistence on the game and play shadows create does not qualitatively distinguish between shadows and shades but instead sees their differences and interplay as allowing for ambiguity, complexity, intellectual and aesthetic richness, as a refusal of symbol borders and binary divisions. More than that, Tanizaki also recognizes how both shadow and light are ultimately something ­man-​­made, in our world made of buildings, rooms, and trees that we cut down or regrow: commenting on industrialization and the expansion of cities, in fact, he notes that “­to snatch away from us even the darkness beneath trees that stand deep in the forest is the most heartless of crimes. At this rate every place of any beauty in Nara or in the suburbs of Kyoto and Osaka, as the price of being turned over to the masses, will be denuded of trees” (­Tanizaki 1977, 42). Tanizaki’s essay therefore not only cautions against Western imperialism and its insidious nature but also shows how light and shadow are artificial concepts one can or should be able to play with. His closing words, after many reflections on electric lightning, urbanization, and the difference between European and Japanese aesthetics, are a plea to “­be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them” (­Tanizaki 1977, 42). Seeing between shadow and light, then, organizing them, and arranging their architecture, can allow for new ways of expressions that go against their usual Eurocentric metaphorical language and creating new, multiple, and heterogenous assemblages (­Deleuze and Parnet 1977) to play with.

Shadow and Light in Queer Spaces Such heterogenous assemblages can be found, I believe, in queer spaces and particularly queer clubs, where consciously technological uses of music, light, and shadow are many and varied. The history of queerness, techno or EDM, and club subculture(­s) is a vast one: today, queer clubs and raves remain a subculture in some places hit harder by homophobic and transphobic laws, while they have also become more public and at times institutionalized in others. As Buckland notes: As queers are often denied access to state, church, media, or private institutions, they constitute lifeworlds in a variety of sometimes contesting ways that cannot assume a ­taken-­​­­for-​ ­granted social existence. Many people who identify as queer are made worldless, forced to create maps and spaces for themselves, without the support of these more traditional realms. 381

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In such circumstances, any queer lifeworld is itself a critique as well as a place from where participants critique these realms. However, being queer in and of itself does not guarantee entry to queer clubs, or even the desire to go. Open access to queer dance clubs was problematic because although they may exist outside some traditional institutions, they are firmly situated within a market economy in which some clubs charge thirty dollars for entry. Clubs also operated within economies of desirability based on ideals of beauty, status, race, gender, sexuality, and age. (­Buckland 2002, 3­ –​­4) The element of age is definitely noted in Julia Bell’s article “­Really Techno,” published in The White Review, where the writer and poet recounts her experience of living in Berlin as a single queer woman in her forties, still interested in clubbing and exploring Berlin’s techno and queer spaces. Specifically, she recalls one specific evening at Berghain, one of Berlin’s most famous ­clubs—​­recalling the process of queuing but, more importantly, of dancing and interacting with such a space, made up by an e­ ver-​­changing and intricate technology of music and lights, as well as people moving, dancing, entering and exiting. Bell describes the experience of entering the club as: ….An overwhelming sensory overload. Almost like taking a deep breath and diving underwater. The music moves through me, around me, with a terrible force. Loud and crisp and deep. The lights mirror the synaptic lightning of the rhythm, bass thudding like a heartbeat. The noise lifts me off my feet. […] This is music as full body experience; music as drugs. (­Bell 2018) The concept of “­music as drugs,” when understood as being made of lighting and sound, conveys how ­full-​­body and intense the experience is. Bell sees the space of the techno club as rejecting “­values of sociability,” since techno dancing is mostly characterized by dancing alone, eyes closed, arms separate from others. Yet at the same time she describes the experience of watching people move “­from the edges”: as she says, “­the dance floor heaves, it moves as one body, like the surface of the sea” (­Bell 2018).4 There is, therefore, still an experience of commonality in entering a queer space. Not all techno spaces are queer, yet it is true that the glitches and the experimentality of techno, the way it lends itself to experimentation and ­genre-​­blending, often conflates with queerness, queer spaces, and queer bodies. This is also recounted by Bell not just as an external eye to the body dancing, but in her own, more than erotic, ­kin-​­making encounter with a woman from London (­where Bell also lives): ‘­Come to the dark room,’ she says, holding out a hand to help me stand. We go to a room behind the main dance floor. At first it’s hard to see. There is a dim light somewhere behind me casting everything into shadow. There is a squash of bodies, mainly men. […] She kisses me again, this time for much longer. We press into each other, fumble with zips and buttons, touch arms, skin, fingers, lips, breasts, until we both shine with sweat and desire. I think of the huge statue of a ­Bacchus-​­like figure holding a giant cornucopia in the lobby by the Garderobe. Sex is the logical extension of the energy being raised on the dance floor; in this place we are all Maenad. […] Afterwards, we emerge on the dance floor, blinking, as if into daylight. We catch another beat, start to dance. The hairs on my arms 382

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thicken and prickle as another acid break ripples through the crowd. The dancing gets harder and again, I am in thrall of the beat. (­Bell 2018) The experience of dancing and moving between shadow and light in the sphere of the irrational and the spectacular is here intertwined with references to Bacchus, and, notably, not a group of Maenads but instead a singular one, again showing the contrast between Bell’s perceived notion of dancing to techno as rejecting the values of sociability. The classical here marks Bell’s entering into an erotic and sexual space: this narrative follows the sometimes problematic and disturbing attachments (­Amin 2017) felt by some queer people in nostalgically positioning the classical world as an ­origin-​­world, a utopia of queerness. Yet it is not only the classical but also primarily the intentional changes made by the club in room lighting that define the experience for Bell. The first thing she notes about the “­dark room” is that “­at first it’s hard to see” and that there is “­a dim light”: lighting and artificial lighting specifically here enable the queer erotic experience, “­until we both shine with sex and desire.” The classical reference, (“­here we are all Maenad”), is queered through bodies touching, feeling, and moving across different architectures of darkness and light, allowed and voluntarily created by the queer space of the club. As Bell says, the club, the music, the ­lighting—​­they all have “­a kind of architecture, which I can see in my mind’s eye. At this saturation, the sound creates its own spatial awareness, its own metaphysical structures” (­Bell 2018). Exiting the “­dark room” is also an experience defined by lighting, as Bell and her companion go back to the dance floor “­blinking, as if into daylight.” Artificial lighting, voluntary and intentional, defines the queer experience in the club. As Bell concludes, leaving the club: “­all that night and for a long time afterwards, my head is full of echoes, flashes of light and color, touch, and the persistent rhythm of the machines, beeping like life support” (­Bell 2018). I propose here that classical reception theory could and should learn from the intentional artificiality of lights in queer spaces and performances. Light and shadow in performance and club spaces are meant to illuminate, hide, reflect: bodies move through shadow and light, constantly illuminated in different ways, losing themselves in the dark and then letting themselves be illuminated or instead performing with the lights. Why cannot, in reception studies, light and shadow of influences also be perceived as artificial? As something everyone is free to play with, ­re-​­arranging and staging themselves to embody and experience ­ever-​­changing artificial lights? I’d like here to point to a quotation from singer and songwriter Björk, referenced by Bell in her essay: I had been away from Iceland for over a year and when I returned for New Year I stayed on top of a mountain. I went for a walk on my own and I saw the ice was thawing in the lava fields. All I could hear was the cackle of the ice, echoing over hundreds of square miles. It was pitch black, the Northern Lights were swirling around and just below them was a layer of thick cloud. I could see the lights from all the towns in my childhood mirrored in the reflection of these clouds, with the lava fields cackling below. It was really techno. (­Björk as quoted in Bell 2018) Returning for a moment to the “­oriens ex occidente lux” motto, the difference between the two quotes is striking. While this new Latin proverb meant for colonial purposes naturalizes the indeed wrong event of the sun rising from the west, Björk sees the natural event of the Northern Lights and comments that “­it was really techno,” therefore turning it into a purposeful, orchestrated game of light and shadow. This is what queer clubs and performances do with their artificial lighting: 383

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they allow different elements to be illuminated at different times, and they allow individuals to move between light and shadow, hiding or showing themselves with a purpose. They intentionally draw attention to different influences and references through projections and more, and yet allow for new interpretations to emerge too. This expansive power of performance and club spaces is something that José Esteban Muñoz also examined in his work, though he did not focus on lighting in particular. In Cruising Utopia, he quotes from visual artist Kevin McCarty’s experience of the club and specifically of the queer punk scene hidden in Ohio: Behind the bare cinder blocks of the Chameleon Club one could hear the beats of dance music. The sweating bodies of intoxicated gay men crowded the dance floor only to be revealed through the artificial fog by streaks of red, blue, and green lights circling above their heads. Here men forgot about the bluecollar oppressive city they called home and imagined a world where they could be free from shame and embarrassment. Neither place was mine. I observed both from the outside. My utopia existed at the doorway on the ­threshold—​­neither space at one time and in both simultaneously. (­McCarty as quoted in Muñoz 2009, 105) While McCarty’s account points to a sense of lack of belonging in how he thinks about the connection between the queer and punk scene, again his sense of the club and of the possible utopia enacted within the club starts with the physicality of queer bodies, visible “­through the artificial fog by streaks of red, blue, and green lights circling above their heads.” The experience of lighting, of what can be seen and how, therefore influences the experience of the queer space and of the queer body more generally. The club space, to Muñoz, is also a place that allows for performances and moments of disidentification, a political act through performance that resists dominant ideology while embodying a “­positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture” (­Muñoz 1999, 31). Focusing on performances by queer people of color, Muñoz sees disidentificatory practices in performance as referencing and making use of dominant cultures to create “­a crucial practice of contesting social subordination through the project of worldmaking” (­Muñoz 1999, 200) that performance and embodiment allow. To disidentify, then, means to offer “­a Utopian blueprint for a possible future, while, at the same time, staging a new political formation in the present” (­Muñoz 1999, 200). Clubs themselves, as organized spaces, can serve this function, as, in Gorman’s words, taking from Foucault’s concept of heterotopia,5 they “‘­expose’ other real spaces that stymie or repress their sense of agency. They mimic the ‘­­ill-​­constructed’ and ‘­jumbled’ spaces of normative society and yet are ‘­meticulous’ and ‘­perfect’ in so far as they allow for an alternative distribution of power and agency” (­Gorman 2020, 132). Can artificial arrangements of light and shadow also point to a better, more critical future in how we approach the discipline of Classics? Club spaces, heterotopias, and utopian performances might join a process of queer futurity which does not prescribe or craft rules for an ideal formation of the field of the classical, or attempt to correct or redeem it, but instead aims to make it more livable for queer people now, queer students and performers who work in or around the field of Classics. 6 The utopia I want to present here is not therefore one that works teleologically, but rather one that provides moments of solace, spaces and to breathe, enjoy, and have fun. As Angela Jones notes, “­given that happiness is a normative and regulatory construct, it seems fitting here that the construction of queer utopian spaces does not hinge upon happiness, but rather are simply autonomous spaces in which to breathe” (­Jones 2013, 3). So perhaps ­queer-­​­­world-​­making(­s) 384

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(­Muñoz 2009) of light and shadow with relation to the classical can just be a club performance, a film, a ­gesture—​­fleeting and limited, and yet allowing for that moment of happiness, critical thinking, and euphoria.

Club Performances: Case Studies In their article “­INFERNO: Catastrophically Queer”, Marcus Bell also see the queer club spaces as enacting a space of utopia.7 Taking into consideration the event INFERNO,8 Bell comments how he had “­always read the apocalypse which INFERNO stages to be one in which there had been a mass failure of racist ­hetero-​­patriarchal capitalism” (­Bell 2021, 5), yet it is the very staging of this catastrophe that allows us to think of new worlds: “­as the participants enact an apocalypse, as they dance through catastrophe, the feeling of INFERNO is that a queer utopia is arriving as an imperative state in the present, as a pose” (­Bell 2021, 6). Fundamentally, as Bell notes, This is a utopic futurity rendered in the rave. The night still happens within an enclosure […] the enclosure of the ICA is not itself a realised utopic or fully ­anti-​­normative space. It still runs under the market, under the conditions of those violent hierarchical structures and power relations. It is still a space open to further a­ nti-​­racist critique, queer, and crip interventions. (­Bell 2021, 6) These are all valid points that we should always keep in mind when approaching any queer performance or event: to queer is to critique, and for the space to keep itself open, utopian, and f­ uture-​ ­oriented, the critique can never find a full stop, a full resolution. I start from Bell’s article not only because it reads the space of the club in the way I have also been trying to highlight throughout this essay, but also because he focuses on a particular instance of INFERNO, hosted at the ICA as opposed to its usual Hackney ­rave-​­space and thus in a much more established gallery space, that was regardless queered and made club for its event on 31 January 2020. The event was advertised as showing “­an ­all-​­night programme of music, queer porn and performance art.”9 The program, linked below, already shows a number of classical references in its title, specifically in Nick Finegan’s “­Enter the Temple of Hera” program,10 which is still listed under this name online but eventually ended up taking the name “­Theseus on the Heap.”11 The immediate connection between the classical world and the space of the rave is created through the common imaginary of Bacchanalia, Saturnalia, and other festivals that took part in Ancient Greece and Rome and that included, in some ­re-​­tellings, public sex and orgiastic celebrations.12 “­Theseus on the Heap” plays on this connection, yet refuses the classical as a starting origin point illuminating and/­or casting shadows on the modern queer performance. The performance starts already in the club setting, with the naked performers bathed in red light. A group of dancers, dressed in long white dresses reminiscent of Greek tunics, hide the performer Sue Gives a Fuck, dressed in more modern clothing, wearing a ­cut-​­out dress and corset. While the choreography goes on, a voiceover narrates the story of Theseus. The light of the club changes to yellow as the music rises to a crescendo while the formerly hidden figures pour water onto the ­white-​­dressed figures. The voiceover then leaves space to music only, a deep electronic bass, to which naked figures dance and contort. Their movements are disjointed, purposefully not ­fluid—​ ­this way of moving highlights the compositions of their bodies, specific parts of it, specific limbs, “­as if the sound is coming from their body’s articulated cracks and slaps, and is simultaneously reverberating against their flesh” (­Bell 2021, 9). One of them takes a necklace out of their mouth. The classical seems here to serve as introduction, but the performance highlights the present, the 385

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immediate bodily expression of spitting, wetting, and being naked. It expresses the erotic, the queer. The ­club-​­goers ­co-​­participating in this performance have to move to see its second act on a different stage as the lights set again to red. The voiceover starts again: “­somewhere in Athens,” it says as the light illuminates a person in k­ ink-​­puppy gear eating and drinking whatever their dom(­me) is giving them: yet again bodily functions are highlighted, and yet highlighted through the use of stroboscopic lights, making everyone’s movements appear jerky, spaced out. This kind of technological embodiment allows us, I think, to focus on the bodies we are shown, their erotic expression, and their movement. The use of light, dance, and music takes attention away from the voiceover narrating the classical background of the performance. The classical is left as a contextual element that does not (­over)­shadow nor (­high)­light the performance: the club lights make sure of that, ending in darkness and stroboscopic light as the music continues. The performance then dissolves into performance of the c­ lub-​­goers immersed in this world where the classical is hidden, highlighted only in the forms we want to see, reformed. It is not light and shadow but voice, while technological lights show the embodied, the queer, and the erotic. The interaction between kink and the classical myth is interesting because, according to Bell, the performance creates A moment where an ancient Greek mythic system begins to r­ e-​­cohere the cages, chains, and modes of subjection and domination were played out on the stage. If the beginning of the performance and the rest of the night had been about raving against these modes of domination, here they were put into play. (­Bell 2021, 11) In line with Bell’s considerations, I believe lighting plays a fundamental role in this staging. The deep red, infernal light at the beginning of the performance transports us not into a world of gods, justice, and light, as the classical has often been conceived, but rather into the infernal, the monstrous, imagining the classical not as a perfect, finite, illuminating universe; but rather as something destined to fail, to fracture. The shift to the yellow light and then back to the red in tune with the movement of performance and of the music maintains a sense of artificiality, of staging: we might see better, and performers might be illuminated more clearly, but we are not being let out of this infernal world. The fall into darkness and stroboscopic lights at the end of the performance highlights this: the classical provides no light, and is instead staged, together with sound and the performers’ fragmented and ruptured movements, as something fractured, ruptured, hard to make sense of, resisting a unifying narrative. The club space, calling ­club-​­goers to join the performance, and the artificial lights, creating a ­techno-​­narrative of the classical, all contribute to shift away from the idea of the classical as illuminating or overshadowing contemporary interpretations. The technological elements of the performance show the classical as construction, as a machine affecting real bodies, movements, and affects. The technological, in “­Theseus on the Heap,” exposes the false biopolitical narrative of the classical. “... Was Already Screaming Its Name” (­2019), created and directed by Crispin Lord, choreographed by Marcus Bell, and filmed by Darling Baby Jay is another performance staged within a ­club-​­like environment that deconstructs naturalizing conceptions of the classical.13 In two instances, the performance was filmed and then reproduced and shown at raves in London and Berlin, 14 projected on a wall close to the space’s dark room. On the official website of the project, Crispin Lord describes it as a: …Queer revision of the Daphnis et Chloe story, in which two young teens struggle to express their sexuality with one another […] The films use this provocation to investigate the 386

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performance of sexuality in both domestic and theatrical contexts, through a series of choreographic images and short movements, alongside footage of u­ n-​­choreographed sex. The footage has been shredded and jumbled, and presented identically across the three screens. The installation invites audiences to reflect on their own sexual practices in relation to what is expected of them, and perform them on the beds laid out before the screens. (­Lord 2019) Due to the nature of the performance being filmed and then reproduced, its technological element is perhaps clearer than in the INFERNO performance, yet it is still very much embodied and erotic: the film, in Berlin, was screened in front of giant beds, where ­rave-​­goers themselves could film and ­re-​­perform it. The classical reference exists only in the context, as the rest is naked bodies moving, yet the connection between the classical novel and the contemporary performance is interesting: as Bell says, “­the video work drew on the myth of Daphnis and Chloe in order to interrogate the choreopolitics of desire” (­Bell 2020, 86), taking Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe as a reflection power, desire, consent and more. I was struck, looking at the installation, by how white and luminous the background is in the film. The performers exchange bodily fluids, movements, touches, and intimate ­gestures—​­all clearly in front of an artificial film set, bathed in artificial bright white light. This same light is the one illuminating the beds in front of the screen, leaving them in ­semi-​­darkness. “... Was Already Screaming Its Name” then denounces the artificiality of the classical through the choreographed erotic performance of its actors, illuminated by a light immediately recognized as artificial: yet this same artificiality casts itself onto the spectators, invited to reproduce the movements of the performance. Crispin Lord’s work then asks us, with this use of choreography and light, to consider the ways in which we bodily enact, absorb, and eroticize the classical and its artificiality. Referencing Deleuze and Guattari, Bell notes how “­this sense of ­techno-​­biophilia makes kin out of the body’s own ­de-​­territorialisation” (­Bell 2020, 86), letting the queer body choreograph and dissolve itself at the same ­time—​­yet I think the same effect is achieved with the classical: by watching an artificial performance and deciding what to ­re-​­enact, queer[ness?] disregards classical myth as a­ ll-​­encompassing and naturally erotic, instead looking at it as a technology of desire between the light of the screen and the darkness of the club. These two performances, then, engage with the classical by deconstructing it through a series of queer practices of choreography, lighting, staging, and erotic and a­ ffect-​­based encounters. They do not hold the classical as an unshakable truth or, necessarily, as a morally positive inspiration for queer performances, but instead d­ e-​­naturalize its dominance over Western culture and queer sexualities and identities, by rendering it entirely or predominantly technological, staged, and purposefully interactive with performers and viewers alike. The use of artificial lights in particular within the space of the queer club rejects the influence of the classical as shedding light or casting shadows over anything: the classical remains as a construction, as much as the stroboscopic club lights, turning and moving and hiding different bodies, gestures, and movements throughout the performance.

Conclusion I started my discussion by highlighting the ways in which Classics has purposefully naturalized itself as a necessary discipline and as an inescapable cultural influence over any text. Widely speaking, classical reception studies has, until recently, engaged in a mode of studying classical texts and the way they are received in later works that reinforces this same narrative by adopting a naturalizing approach defined by metaphors of light and shadow. By analyzing queer performances 387

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happening in club spaces and/­or raves, I hope to have shown how an explicit use of technological lights in performance refuses such a naturalizing narrative of classical influence, instead exposing its formulaic reiteration across culture, and its constructed nature. Classical reception theory, I think, should learn from such queer performances and adopt new metaphors in its arsenal, going from the ­faux-​­natural to the technological construction, from the essentializing narrative to the queer dissembling.

Further Reading For more useful critical approaches to classical reception theory and especially its interactions with queerness, see Kadji Amin’s work in Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (­2017), as well as in ­Chapter 1 of The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies (­2020). Similarly, Mathura Umachandran’s and Marchella Ward’s work on Critical Ancient World Studies is fundamental to recognizing which power structures and assumptions the field of Classics relies on. Their respective interventions at the ‘­Queer and the Classical: Critical Feelings, Critical Futures’ Conference in 2020 also provide important insights into how queer theory and Classics should or should not come together. On the subject of technology, music, and queerness, see Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (­2020), and Marcus Bell’s and Nicolette D’Angelo’s talk “‘­warp the text’: Glitch Philology, Arca, SOPHIE” at the ‘“­You Better Work’: Queer Labour, Queer Liberation” Conference (­2022).

Notes 1 Taylor, quoted by Greenwood 2010, 189. 2 LeGuin, ‘­WHITENESS: MEDITATIONS FOR MELVILLE’, in Tsing, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, M19. 3 Thank you to Marchella Ward and her talk “­Cripping Ancestorship for Queer Time”, first presented at the “­Queer and the Classical: Critical Feelings, Critical Futures” conference in 2020 for letting me know about this book and this very specific quote. 4 Visually, this is evident even when ­club-​­goers stay in their own space: in their short film Dansepasar 2021, for example, the duo Gabber Modus Operandi show the Indonesian club scene in times when some ­Covid-​­19 restrictions were still in place. The film shows the ­club-​­goers’ space being delimitated by tape on the floor, to preserve social distancing, yet the collective experience is still preserved by everyone dancing to the same music, at the same rhythm. 5 Heterotopias are defined by Foucault 1986, 24 as “­­counter-​­sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites [...] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” 6 Here I am drawing from Sarah Ahmed 2010, The Promise of Happiness, where she defines the ‘­freedom to breathe’ as a fundamental queer aspiration. Similarly, I do not mean to imply we should not work towards a field of Classics that is always livable, rather than only at ­times—​­but rather to emphasize the need for moments of pause even in the work of critique. 7 I want to thank Marcus deeply for all the help they gave me with this chapter (­and in life), their care, their talent as a scholar and performer, and how willing they were to share resources, videos and pictures. 8 On their website (­https://­www.infernolondon.com), INFERNO is described as A techno rave come performance art platform that prioritizes and champions trans+, ­non-​­binary and queer DJs and performers with artists and DJ Lewis G Burton at the helm. […] INFERNO marries the camp with the underground, pop with techno and the good with the bad, creating an exciting and unique clubbing experience. INFERNO thus describes itself as a space where the binary between different aesthetics is shattered and confused. It follows that it can provide the same environment for light and shadow as well.

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Shedding Light, Casting Shadows 9 From the ICA website, https://­www.ica.art/­live/­inferno. 1 0 The performers for this piece were Sue Gives a Fuck, Rezm Morah, Chester Hayes, Francesco Miggliaccio, Nick Finegan, Rudi MC, Radam Ridwan, Joey Davidson, Luly Love, Magnus McCullagh, Gabriella Peach Faparini, and Valeria McLaren. 11 From Finegan’s website, https://­www.nickfinegan.com/­theseusontheheap. 12 More on queerness and public sex in Berlant and Warner (­1998). 13 Crispin Lord, https://­crispinlord.com/­­Was-­​­­Already-­​­­Screaming-­​­­Its-​­Name. Thank you again Marcus for your kindness and aid. 14 Pornceptual in Berlin (­June 2019), Riposte in London (­October 2019).

Bibliography Amin, Kadji. 2017. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2020. “­Genealogies of Queer Theory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, edited by Siobhan B. Somerville, 1­ 7–​­29. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, Marcus. 2020. “‘­Hold Me, Spit on Me, Cover Me in Care’: Daphnis and Chloe at a Rave Last Summer.” Love Spells & Rituals for Another World, edited by Lilly Markaki and Caroline Harris, London: Independent Publishing Network. —​­—​­—​­. 2021. “­INFERNO: Catastrophically Queer.” Agôn 9: 1–18. Bell, Julia. 2018. “­Really Techno.” The White Review. June 2018. . Berlant, Laurent, and Warner, Michael. 1998. “­Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24.2: ­547–​­566. Bloom, Harold, 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2011. The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life. New Haven/­London: Yale University Press. Buckland, Fiona. 2002. Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer W ­ orld-​­Making. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Crispin, Lord. 2019. … Was Already Screaming Its Name. . Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1977. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion. Edensor, Tim, and Hughes Rachel. 2021. “­Moving through a Dappled World: The Aesthetics of Shade and Shadow in Place.” Social & Cultural Geography 22.9: 1­ 307–​­1325. Finegan, Nick. 2019. Theseus on the Heap. . Foucault, Michel, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton, and Luther H. Martin. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. 1986. “­Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1: 2­ 2–​­27. Gorman, Sarah. 2020. Women in Performance: Repurposing Failure. London: Routledge. Greenwood, Emily. 2010. ­Afro-​­Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hejnol, Andreas. 2017. “­Ladders, Trees, Complexity, and Other Metaphors in Evolutionary Thinking”. In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, 8­ 7–​­102. Minneapolois: University of Minnesota Press. INFERNO. Institute of Contemporary Arts . Jones, Angela. 2013. A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias. New York: Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Sexual Cultures. New York: New York University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Wilhelm Raymond Geuss, and Ronald Speirs. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Eleonora Colli Ricks, David. 1989. The Shade of Homer: A Study in Modern Greek Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres. Russell, Legacy. 2020. Glitch Feminism. London: Verso. Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō, Thomas J. Harper, and Edward G. Seidensticker. 1977. In Praise of Shadows. New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books. The Postclassicisms Collective 2019. Postclassicisms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Ancient Pasts/­Queer Futures

27 QUEER PHILOLOGY Shane Butler

Of all the products of the famously trilingual pen of Angelo Poliziano (­­1454–​­1494), the great scholar and poet of the Renaissance court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, none quite defines him and his age like his Latin Miscellanea. Properly speaking, the Miscellanea comprise not one work but two, each planned to contain 100 essays on a wide variety of topics from ancient art, literature, language, and life. The second installment or “­century,” never completed, went missing for half a millennium and was only published in 1972, after the autograph manuscript suddenly resurfaced. But the first, published in 1489 under Poliziano’s anxious direction, reportedly saw eager readers grabbing unbound sheets directly from the printing press. The author himself is the possibly untrustworthy source of that anecdote, but the fact remains that the Miscellanea’s original publication has been recognized ever since as a watershed event in the history of classical scholarship. I first read the 1489 installment in the 1990s, in a study tucked under the eaves of a building in the back garden of the American Academy in Rome. In a perverse example of taking owls to Athens, I had brought my Poliziano with me to Italy, consisting of the three compact, ­vellum-​­bound volumes of a ­sixteenth-​­century edition of Poliziano’s opera omnia that I had acquired at the Strand Bookstore back in New York for the astonishing price of $100. That was no mean sum for an impoverished graduate student in an increasingly expensive city, but it was a steal all the same. At the time of purchase, I had only a very vague idea who Poliziano was, but I soon learned that he was the author of, inter alia, the following remarkable declaration: “­Someone says to me, ‘­You don’t express Cicero.’ So what? I’m not Cicero! All the same, as I see it, I express myself.”1 To receive this message in those years was, almost inevitably, to hear in it something jarringly c­ ontemporary—​­and maybe even polemically queer. To be sure, Poliziano was not addressing homophobia or the silence of the closet but, rather, the widespread adoption of Cicero as an exclusive model for modern Latin prose, for which he instead preferred a diversity of models. Still, his seems to be the earliest known formulation of the ­first-​­person figure of “­­self-​­expression” in any language, for any purpose. It was and is hard for me to imagine the queer expression of my youth, from sweaty dancefloors to angry activist streets, without this reflexive grammar, which often led to loud, proud plurals, in which we expressed ourselves in chants like “­We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” There existed, as I further discovered, more obvious if still ambiguous invitations to read Poliziano queerly, such as his intense friendship with the philosopher and adventurer Pico della Mirandola, the obscure character flaw that led Lorenzo de’ Medici’s wife to dismiss him as the teacher of her sons, 393

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-34

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the posthumous rumors that he had died of “­­love-​­sickness” for a boy, and, more concretely, his two known citations by Florence’s notorious ­anti-​­sodomy police force, the Office of the ­Night—​­though this last fact, as Michael Rocke (­1996, ­317–​­318) has shown, actually makes him more typical than atypical of Florentine men of his day. And then there is the persistent and pervasive interest shown by his work in the homoerotic themes of classical literature. None of this was conclusive, of course, nor was it clear what any stronger evidence would have allowed one to conclude anyway. After all, it was at the start of the nineties that classicist David Halperin (­1990) had insisted that, properly speaking, “­homosexuality” was only 100 years old. Still, it seemed more than merely ironic that John Addington Symonds, the man who introduced that word into English print from the German in which it had been coined a few decades before, had himself wondered whether Poliziano might have been a kindred spirit. Facile identification with lovers in the past fell seriously out of fashion in the wake of the work of Halperin’s idol, Michel Foucault, in his History of Sexuality, but there is a curious way in which both modes start by asking things like, “­Is he or isn’t he?” That Symonds concludes, “­yes, maybe,” while Foucauldians instead tend to object, “­not really,” may be less important than the persistence of the question. As more recent critics like Mark Turner (­2003) have observed, doubt that people before the nineteenth century understood themselves to have sexual “­identities” and the like has only served, paradoxically, to increase the resemblance of such figures to the strangers, relative or absolute, with whom gay and other modern sexual subjects often have negotiated pleasure: one cruises the past much as one may cruise the present, unsure where the other’s signs may lead. All one really has to go on is a hunch that there has been or could be a connection. This kind of queer hunch, I shall argue, bears a more than casual relationship to the kind of love for which Poliziano ordinarily has been celebrated: namely, philology. The object of this love (­philia) was not simply language in some general, expansive sense but, even more centrally, its singular elements (­letters, words), an attention deftly captured by Vittore Branca in the title to his magisterial study, Poliziano e l’umanesimo della parola, “­Poliziano and the Humanism of the Word” (­1983). Strange as it seems to us today, for example, Poliziano’s insistence that the author of the Aeneid spelled his name with an e rather than an i won him almost as much astonishment from his contemporaries as did his polemic with the Ciceronians. It is to this kind of granular sensibility, tending toward contentious irritability, that I propose to direct my attention in this chapter. In turning from queerness to philology, I am partly retracing the initial steps of Jeffrey Masten’s Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time, which opens with a brilliant and hilarious romp through the title period’s perceptions ­of—​­and seemingly endless puns ­on—​­the letter Q. Special attention is paid to that letter’s long tail, which a contemporary French source describes as invading the space of his almost inevitable “­companion and good brother,” the letter u, in order “­to embrace him with his tail from below.” Such ribaldry leads Masten to his own rather more serious point: namely, the postulation of a continuum between sexual history as philology (­what words were used when, and for what exactly?) and the sexual language (­and drives) of philology itself. As he puts it, There is rarely philology without s­ ex—​­rarely, that is, an analysis of language and textual transmission, contamination, and correction that does not draw upon or intersect with terms from the lexicons of sex, gender, reproduction, the body, and the family. This entanglement is what he calls “­queer philology”: At a formative early modern moment in the history of Western knowledge production and technologies of language, the emergence of the standardization of the letter, humanism is 394

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fully entangled with (­one might say “­­en-​­tailed to”) the body, its genders, its associations, its sodomitical and affective ­encounters—​­entailed as well to what is disavowed in the standardizations of the body/­letter. Through the letter as body, the body as letter, queer philology exposes (­and is) humanism’s fraught relationship to embodiment. Or (­and) to reverse this: modern Western embodiment reflects humanism’s fraught account of the letter. (­Masten 2016, 31) The classicist is immediately tempted to extend this tale (!) backward (!) to “­standardizations” of the letter even earlier than that of Early Modernity, back at least to Ancient Rome. For what Q was ever more exuberantly, even flamboyantly itself than those we find in Latin inscriptions? Of course, this yields an equally immediate dilemma, in that the l­ong-​­tailed Q really comes into its own amidst the many conformities, aesthetic and otherwise, of Augustan Rome. Can an imperial Q be queer? Well, as the ­long-​­tailed letter’s appearance on coins depicting Augustus as a handsome, beardless adulescens perhaps hints, this story might turn out to belong to the long and often uncomfortable history of homoeroticism in totalitarian propaganda. (­Indeed a quick, admittedly unscientific survey suggests that the tail of the imperial Q becomes even longer in its reprise in classicizing inscriptions of the Fascist period!) At any rate, I don’t propose to continue querying ancient Qs any further here, interesting and amusing as that might be. I do instead partly hope to expand on Masten’s suggestions about philological “­embodiment.” Nevertheless, I want also to push a bit beyond his insistent framing of both queerness and philology in terms of the body. For if the former does indeed help to expose the sexualized bodies of the latter, the latter may inversely point us not just back to queer bodies, but also to something like a “­queer mind.” I introduce this last word not in order to reinstate a dualism, but precisely in order to blur such, in the name of a queer philology, and so both a queerness and a philology, to the extent they can be conceived separately, that embrace body and mind alike, indiscriminately. Let me attempt to illustrate my meaning via a longstanding antiquarian puzzle. Apparently, one way a Roman could call another Roman a cinaedus—​­a man, that is, who sought sexual penetration by other ­men—​­without resorting to the derogatory term itself was by suggesting that he “­scratches his head with a single finger.” The phrase appears, among other places, in a satire of Juvenal (­Satires 9.133: qui digito scalpunt uno caput), where the scholiast helpfully explains, “­Cinaedi adjust their hair in womanly fashion.”2 Erasmus, in his Adagia (­1.7.34), would further clarify that the use of a single finger, by women and the men thus derided, was to avoid mussing an elegant coiffure (­ne comam studiose compositam perturbent). Such has remained the standard interpretation, and it doubtless is correct, at least up to a point. But even if we suppose the surgical scratching sometimes served a banally practical purpose, might it also have functioned as a cinaedic “­code gesture,” as Rabun Taylor (­1997, 339) has suggested, “­perhaps for soliciting sex”?3 Such would lend slightly better force to a fragment of Licinius Macer Calvus (­Seneca, Controversiae 7.4.7) that lampoons Pompey’s apparently innocent ­single-​­fingered ­head-​­scratching as meaning that he wants a “­man” (­vir, which in Latin can also mean “­husband”).4 One similarly can read a passage in the younger Seneca’s Epistles (­52.12) either way: Omnia rerum omnium, si observentur, indicia sunt, et argumentum morum ex minimis quoque licet capere: impudicum et incessus ostendit et manus mota et unum interdum responsum et relatus ad caput digitus et flexus oculorum… If you mark them carefully, all acts are always significant, and you can gauge character by even the most trifling signs. The lecherous man is revealed by his gait, by a movement of the 395

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hand, sometimes by a single answer, by his touching his head with a finger, by the shifting of his eye. (­trans. Gummere) On the one hand, Seneca seems overall to be describing what he imagines to be the involuntary symptoms of effeminacy; on the other, the application of the finger to the head (­relatus ad caput digitus), which here, significantly, is not described as having any other motivation, seems far more an intentional gesture than the spontaneous scratching of an itch. In the latter regard, Seneca’s list can be compared to much later homophobic polemic, such as this extraordinary description of supposed ­goings-​­on in ­eighteenth-​­century London: These wretches have many ways and means of conveying intelligence, and many signals by which to discover themselves to each other; they have likewise several houses of rendezvous, whither they resort: but their chief place of meeting is the ­Bird-​­cage Walk, in St. James’s Park, whither they resort about twilight. They are easily discovered by their signals, which are pretty nearly as follows: If one of them sits on a bench, he pats the backs of his hands; if you follow them, they put a white handkerchief thro’ the skirts of their coat, and wave it to and fro; but if they are met by you, their thumbs are struck in the ­arm-​­pits of their waistcoats, and they play their fingers upon their breasts. By means of these signals they retire to satisfy a passion too horrible for description, too detestable for language; a passion which deserves the punishment not of the law only, but an exclusion from Society on the most light glance of just suspicion of it.5 What really joins these two descriptions is their dizzying convolution of perspective and purpose. Both authors offer, with confidence that borders on defensiveness, assurance that they know what they see, which partly though not wholly depends on the fact that “­these wretches” know full well what they are doing. Although the stated purpose in both cases is to identify such men in order to avoid (­or persecute) them, these are also lists of traits that one must oneself take pains to avoid (­careful, Pompey!) if one does not wish to be likened to the men that both authors somehow have managed to observe at length and in detail, which has the paradoxical result of providing something like a ­how-​­to guide to those whose intent is quite the opposite. In other words, “­Is he or isn’t he?” here works in two directions and everywhere seems perilously close to a different question: “­Am I or am I not?” What scratching one’s head with one finger risked expressing, rightly or wrongly, is the point of departure of the seventh chapter of the first century of the Miscellanea. Poliziano, however, quickly declares the insult’s meaning as obvious to all from its context in Juvenal and skips any discussion of its etiology in order to hurry on to a virtuosic recension of the sources regarding its application to Pompey. This culminates in a series of quotations, including the fragment of Calvus, from the Controversiae of the Elder Seneca, a work “­still most difficult to find.” As he will do throughout the Miscellanea, Poliziano is showing o­ ff—​­not just his learning but also his access to rich libraries, especially that of his patron Lorenzo. But it is hard not to notice a remarkable congruence between subject and form: Poliziano assembles examples of the phrase much as Roman moralists synthesized examples of the gesture. The truth can be revealed “­even by the most trifling signs,” which could be a finger touching the head or a slender fragment of the lost works of Calvus. Even that poet’s name, which literally means “­bald,” inadvertently offers a suggestive homology. Poliziano, I should clarify, here resists any urge to pun, though he and his contemporaries were 396

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hardly above doing so on the resemblance of his own name to the Latin for “­polished,” politus. Even in this regard, however, we find ourselves in a world of strangely proximate metaphors. For the humanists, a polished style was one that passed an ancient carpenter or sculptor’s test of the “­fingernail,” which is to say that one could trace one’s fingertip across its surface without catching on a joint or rough spot. Achievement of such was no mean feat for the bricolage of ancient sources that characterizes, for example, the Miscellanea, as its title already suggests, but success against those odds was a large part of the point. And so, by an admittedly ambitious analogy, we might be inclined to see the gait, gesture, etc., of the cinaedus not only as a series of signs or signals (­Seneca’s indicia) but also as gaps or incongruities in a decorous surface, meaningful precisely because they are jarring, resistant, unsettling, or, to stretch the sense of another cognate, “­impolite.” As it happens, a single word in Miscellanea 1.7 is exemplary, albeit in a rather complicated way, of the kind of thing on which a reader’s fingernail may catch, as I discovered when I undertook to reread the work with a graduate seminar on its author, on the occasion of its l­ong-​­awaited translation into ­English—​­its first complete translation into any ­language—​­for the I Tatti Renaissance Library. Near the beginning, Poliziano clarifies the full intended force of the insult’s application, however false, to Pompey: Ceterum non tam mollis ex his verbis quam plane pathicus et draucus aliquis designatur, rendered by the translators as, “­Yet he is characterized in this excerpt as someone not so much effeminate as clearly a passive homosexual and an athlete.” I am tempted to say that it should be obvious to anyone that something has gone wrong here, though it would then be hard to understand why the translators themselves failed to notice. The problem, let me say at once, is not the translation of pathicus as “­passive homosexual”: yes, that’s an anachronism in terms of the Foucauldian historicism I have already invoked, but translation by its very nature is an anachronistic enterprise, and it’s hard to render cinaedus and the like in any other efficient way without producing obscurity or archaism (­and so, another kind of anachronism). The problem instead is “­athlete,” which simply makes no sense. I turned to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which deepened my perplexity by giving only the same meaning, “­an athlete,” followed by a handful of examples of its use in the Epigrams of Martial. The word was “­prob[ably] Gall[ic]” in origin, the entry first explains, and was used “­freq[uently] as [a] pers[onal] name in Gaul” (­Glare 1996, 574). Had the seeming incongruity of “­athlete” as a sexual insult bothered me during my earlier reading of the text, years before? Back then, the dictionary on my desk was my trusty copy of Lewis and Short, which I had bought when still an undergraduate in North Carolina, upon my return from my first trip to Rome and on the advice of the much lamented Reginald Foster, whose summer Latin classes I had taken there and whose own longue durée approach to Latin made the newer but somewhat narrowly classical OLD inferior in utility to the slightly better later coverage, at least through Late Antiquity, of Lewis and Short. My Lewis and Short still remains always close to hand, and so, on a hunch, I grabbed it next to look up draucus, about which, in fact, it told a markedly different story than the OLD. It too gave just one definition, though there the singular meaning was “­a sodomite,” followed by some of the same examples from Martial, plus one from the ­so-​­called Glossarium Philoxeni, probably of late antique date (­Ferri 2019, 92), reported as equating the term with the Greek καταπύγον, a vulgar term crafted from the word for backside (­Lewis 1879, 612). The experience of looking up the word triggered the ­long-​­lost memory that I had once begun compiling a list of such terms on the blank endpapers (!) of that very dictionary, a project I quickly abandoned, mostly because it made better sense to consult J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (­1982), or works like Amy Richlin’s The Garden of Priapus (­1992). Flipping to those pages, I met with a list of just seven terms, the last of which, lo and behold, was draucus. It is quite possible that I wrote it there as a result of reading the Miscellanea, though it’s 397

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not inconceivable that I had instead run across the word in Martial. On the nights I stayed up late in my study or beneath a dim lamp in the Academy’s otherwise dark library, my reading was rather promiscuous, embracing pretty much anything that enabled me to avoid writing my dissertation. One way or another, how are we to explain draucus’s lexicographical double life, leading, if we assume that the newer dictionary is more likely to be right, to an unmasking that exactly reverses the usual drama of queer detection, since it is not the “­athlete” who is shown to be, unbeknownst to all, a “­sodomite,” but the other way around? As it happens, the word’s change of fortune was the result of the typically brief but decisive intervention of one of the few critics whose place in the history of philology is on a par with Poliziano’s own: namely, A. E. Housman. Housman shares with Poliziano not only critical acumen but also a vicious tongue about the failures of others; more important, however, for our present purposes is his queerness, which included the love for his Oxford roommate, Moses Jackson, which, a century later, would inspire Tom Stoppard’s play, The Invention of Love. Tackling draucus in a 1930 article for Classical Review that is only barely longer than a page, Housman opens in full voice and high camp: The definitions of draucus in Forcellini and Freund and Georges and Lewis and Short may best be described as lurid moonshine; and the care of Benoist and Goelzer to conceal the very existence of the word from the Gallic nation reminds one of Miss Prism superintending Cecily Cardew’s study of political economy and directing her to omit the chapter on the Fall of the Rupee. (­Housman 1930, 114) The initial references are to a series of Italian, German, French, and English dictionaries of Latin, while the closing one is to a line in the second act of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, in which the young heiress Cecily is instructed by her governess, “­Cecily, you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have their melodramatic side.” By the citation, Housman plays for immediate laughs at the expense of purportedly prudish French lexicographers, but in invoking a play that turns on double lives and double entendre (­starting with that of its title: “­earnest” ­e-­​­­a-​­r or “­Ernest” the proper name?), he also is quietly setting the stage for the rest of his own philological performance. Housman builds the case for translating draucus as “­one who performs feats of strength in public” on the several appearances of the word in Martial, starting with two (­7.67 and 14.48) that plainly refer to ­body-​­building. “­But,” he continues, “­partly because of the common though false opinion”—​­he does not tell us how he knows it to be “­false”—​­“­that muscular strength and sexual vigor go together, and partly because these men, being infibulati to prevent them from impairing their stamina”—​­here Housman refers to the ancient practice of pinning or tying the foreskin before sport, a practice supposed to conserve virile ­strength—​­“­might be expected, when refibulati”—​­i.e., unpinned or u­ ntied—​­“­to exhibit ardour”—​­the first in a series of e­ uphemisms—​­“­they were also in request for another purpose and could now and then earn ­pocket-​­money in their spare time.” These manly men, in other words, were objects of fantasy who sometimes took money for sex. Among their suspected admirers was the friend Martial describes in Epigrams 1.96: una lavamur: aspicit nihil sursum, sed spectat oculis devorantibus draucos nec otiosis mentulas videt labris.

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We go to the baths together. He keeps his gaze low, devouring the drauci with his eyes, never seeing cocks without busying his lips. Similar oral pleasures are sought by the target of Epigrams 9.27, who spots a draucus “­whose swollen penis the blacksmith has just unpinned” and “­leads him off, having beckoned him with a nod.” And Epigrams 11.71 dispenses entirely with preliminaries: Drauci Natta sui vorat pipinnam, collatus cui gallus est Priapus. Natta devours the pecker of his draucus, compared to whom Priapus is a castrated priest. Housman cites (­without quoting) these three explicit epigrams as further illustration that draucus in Martial means “­nothing more” than what he has proposed. He then quickly dismantles the reference by Lewis and Short and other older dictionaries to the Glossarium Philoxeni, “­for the MSS have ‘­depugis’,—​­not to mention that καταπύγον means exactly the opposite of what draucus is supposed to mean” (­Housman 1930, 115). In what way “­opposite”? Housman surely doesn’t mean to suggest an opposition between anal sex and the insistent orality of the three epigrams just cited. The conjured contrast, rather, is between penetrator and penetrated, regardless of the orifice involved. Indeed, it must have been the same opposition that brought Housman up short in the first place, when he sought to understand Martial’s draucus by recourse to the various dictionaries he names. In English ­usage—​­and in historical English ­jurisprudence—​­“­sodomite” could name either party in a penetrative sexual act between two males. Greek and Latin, by contrast, tend to take sides. Natta, therefore, like his counterparts in the other two epigrams quoted above, is a fellator (“­cocksucker”), but the draucus is instead an irrumator (­for which English has no similarly common equivalent). Where the dictionary imagines these scenes as meetings between men with similar tastes, Housman recognizes a somewhat more transactional encounter predicated on different but complementary needs and desires. He could, therefore, have concluded that draucus was a synonym for irrumator, but that would have made two other uses of the word by Martial, in each of which the context is athletic but nonsexual, gratuitously specific. Better, therefore, to settle on an innocently athletic meaning for the word itself, whatever some drauci may have gotten up to on the side. And so it is that the OLD has, simply, “­an athlete.” Along similar lines, Amy Richlin (­1992, 43, 276) tentatively suggests “­stud,” describing Martial’s drauci as “(­slave) males attractive to pathics because of their musculature.” Alexander Nikolaev (­2014, 320), revisiting the matter largely on historical linguistic grounds, similarly proposes “­strong man, stud, hunk.” Mutatis mutandis, Martial’s Roman bath looks more and more like a modern gym!6 In fact, while Housman’s reconstruction of the ancient meaning of draucus is either right or, at the very least, moves decisively in the right direction, it is hard to escape the sense that his intervention is haunted by his own personal present and past. After all, the great, unrequited love of his life reportedly was for the strapping Jackson, a champion rower. Was it Jackson’s resemblance to the athletic bathers surreptitiously longed for in Martial’s first mention of a draucus that initially attracted Housman to the question? (­Along similar lines, Stoppard’s play has Housman recall “­Horace […] in tears over some athlete,” the handsome Ligurinus, whose name another character later uses to salute Jackson, returning victorious from a race [Stoppard 1997, 41, 66; Horace Odes 4.1, 4.10].) Curiously, Housman defers any nod to the origins of his interest in the word to the 399

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second half of his brief essay, where he turns to a final instance in the received text of Martial, one in which “­neither with its true nor with its imaginary meaning”—​­respectively, “­athlete” and “­sodomite”—​­“­can this word maintain itself,” given “[i]ts incongruousness in the one sense and its hideous incongruousness in the other” (­Housman 1930, 115). In the poem, which Housman quotes almost in full, the narrator compares the morning kisses of a beloved boy to a series of perfumed places and things, starting with lassa … hesterni … opobalsama drauci, which would be “­the spent balsam of yesterday’s draucus.” That this couldn’t be right had long been plain to Housman: I have known for years and years that drauci is here a corruption of the name of some vessel used for holding the unguent; but probably I should never had discovered the name itself if it were not for the 9th edition [vol. 1, 1925] of Liddell and Scott’s Greek lexicon. It is dracti. (­1930, 115) What interests me here is not the deus ex libro resolution but the ­long-​­lingering unease that it finally dispels. One hardly needs to be queer or even a particularly good philologist to detect the “­incongruousness” that once characterized not just this poem but all the other, genuine instances of draucus, in the received understanding of the word. Still, some r­ eaders—​­much like the translators of Poliziano’s Miscellanea who give us “­a passive homosexual and an athlete”—​­have been content to move along without giving the matter too much thought; at the very least, they just aren’t interested. Not so Housman. The point, however, is not that he thereby shows himself to be interested in ancient sex between men. Rather, the texts to which he is drawn are themselves queer, in that word’s own root, ordinary sense: something is slightly off or odd. They are, to use Housman’s own term, “­incongruous.” What then of Poliziano? That he has gotten draucus from his own close reading of Martial is clear, since it appears in no other ancient text. Here too he is showing off, using a word that presumably would have baffled readers without a copy of the Epigrams and that could have left even those who had read them perplexed. Indeed, while the matter would require more research to be sure, it is prima facie likely that Poliziano’s twinning of pathicus and draucus in his widely influential Miscellanea is ultimately responsible for the subsequent understanding of the latter term in a sexual sense. With his Martial before him, however, Poliziano surely would have realized that the individuals described there as drauci were the “­opposite,” in Housman’s sense, of pathici. In other words, it is clear that Poliziano mistook the sense of draucus to be sexual, possibly establishing thereby the l­ong-​­running error reversed by Housman, but he was far too attentive a reader of ancient texts to have made the additional mistake of confusing the active role of a ­draucus-​­irrumator with the passive one of a ­pathicus-​­cinaedus. Has he simply forgotten his source in the interim? That would itself be interesting. In any case, the cause of the lapsus probably is best reconstructed on the basis of its result: namely, the translation “­sodomite” for draucus in dictionaries before Housman. For “­sodomite” offers what ancient thought does not: namely, a term that implies an act (­just which act or acts were included varied across time and place) but not necessarily a role or position. In this regard, Poliziano’s thinking, even if it only really amounts to an unconscious archiving of a new word learned from an ancient text, is consistent with that of his age. But given, inter alia, his own two arrests for sodomy, it is harder to ascribe to him disgust at or indifference to the finer details of sexual acts and tastes. On the contrary, the attention he clearly paid to his Martial, even if not as careful as that of Housman (­who, of course, had better texts and tools), itself demonstrates a more than passing interest. The same can be said of his close reading of Juvenal’s ninth satire, the source on ­head-​­scratching that opens the chapter. Striking, in fact, is the language with which, just after the sentence we have been considering, he returns to Juvenal: Quod genus homines in satyra universa Iuvenalis 400

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insectatur, “­Juvenal goes after this category of men in the totality of his satire.” It is not clear whether in satyra universa means all of the ninth satire or the entirety of the satirist’s output (­thus including the second satire, usually read as a companion to the ninth). One way or another, it combines with the sentence’s simultaneous emphasis on a whole “­category” to hint that, at some level, Poliziano knows that the truth is not quite so simple. The ninth satire, in fact, concentrates on two characters whom it treats quite differently: a rich cinaedus and patron, whom the satirist savages, and the poor client who must service him sexually, who is instead described with sympathy and even lent a gentle nobility. Is Poliziano implying that the latter belongs to the same genus as the former? It’s unclear. But what instead does seem clear is that, to use a philological term of art, what we have here is a case of contaminatio, that is, of one tradition of sexual understanding (­the ­Judeo-​­Christian one) laterally influencing another (­that represented by surviving classical literature). “­Influence,” however, is probably too purposeful a word. It is more a question of an error produced by bringing two partly incompatible systems together. And if, as I am suggesting, we can see in this error something like the (­accidental?) emergence, in at least a very preliminary form, of the category of the homosexual, long before the date de naissance assigned to such by Foucault, then its source is neither system per se but, rather, the very “­incongruousness” of their encounter. If this seems too abstract, let us consider a somewhat simpler case that I have explored elsewhere (­Butler 2016, ­29–​­30, revised and expanded in Butler 2022). Miscellanea 1.45 addresses a seemingly straightforward question: Who was older, Achilles or Patroclus? Poliziano makes the sexual stakes of the question clear already in his first sentence: Disseminata inter omnes iam pridem receptaque opinio Patroclum fuisse Achille iuniorem ab eoque vel[ut] adamatum, sicut ferme Hylan ab Hercule, “­That Patroclus was younger than Achilles and functioned as”—​­or, following the editors’ tentative suggestion to read vel for velut, “­and even was”—​­“­his beloved, as Hylas was for Hercules, is a universally disseminated and accepted view.” Nevertheless, as Poliziano proceeds to reveal, the ancient sources are actually inconsistent, swapping back and forth their ages and the corresponding roles of erastēs and erōmenos. These include a naughty bit of Martial about the “­smooth” (­lēvis, i.e., hairless) Patroclus in bed; Plato’s description of Achilles as, instead, the younger, handsomer, beardless one; Plato’s reproach of Aeschylus for reversing things in his now lost tragedy Myrmidons, where Achilles recalls the pleasures of Patroclus’ “­thighs”; a confusing suggestion by Statius that the two were the same age; and the more recent example of a pornographic poem by Antonio Beccadelli, in which Achilles is quite emphatically on top. (­Poliziano, I should note, does not quote any of the racy parts of these sources, leaving that to the curious reader’s own consultation.) Homer, whom Poliziano saves for last but somewhat coyly does not quote, even though in this case there is nothing racy to suppress, explicitly tells us that Patroclus was the older of the two. This might seem to resolve the crux and so to shatter the conventional wisdom with which the chapter opens. But along his way there, Poliziano has revealed an aggregate reality that is potentially as shocking to pederastic thinking as quantum theory is to classical mechanics. For, across the entirety of the tradition, here assembled in one place and so, in a sense, made to happen simultaneously, Achilles and Patroclus do precisely what erastēs and erōmenos cannot: that is, they change places, mirroring, let us add, the tragic events of the Iliad, which likewise permitted Achilles to seem be two places at once, because in one of those places was, instead, Patroclus, wearing his armor. The result, to revert from physics to philology, is something like a textual crux that cannot be resolved definitively, not even by appeal to Homer, since he is explicit about the ages but not about any sexual component to their relationship, a fact that frustrated some readers already in antiquity. We might even compare the crux that appears in Poliziano’s own first sentence: velut adamatum or vel adamatum, “­as” a beloved or “­even” a beloved? Even as it seeks to clarify, the classical machine keeps sowing doubt. Is he or isn’t he, and if so, what exactly? 401

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Answers to such questions can ultimately depend on the reader’s sensibility, in a quite literal sense. Suggestively, the immediately preceding chapter in the Miscellanea regards a textual crux so hard to explain as a copying error that some have regarded it as an authorial variant. The prefatory poem to the endlessly obscure Satires of the Roman poet Persius ends either with nectar (“­nectar”) or melos (­the transliterated Greek word for “­song”), depending on the manuscript one consults. Poliziano comes out emphatically for nectar on linguistic and metrical grounds: the meter requires a long syllable, but the e of melos is short by nature and, as he takes pains to argue against the possible objection of occasional exceptions to such rules, cannot be lengthened here. In other words, Poliziano hears that melos is w ­ rong—​­so wrong that he likens it to a wart that must be ­excised—​­because he has a highly refined ear both for Greek and for meter. Needless to say, the fact that the offending word means “­song” only underscores that this is an exercise in virtuosic listening, even if it leads to the somewhat paradoxical, but in its own way potentially significant, rejection of music for the sake of the different oral pleasures provided by “­nectar.” “­What we designate ontologically by the term ‘­­state-­​­­of-​­mind’ [Befindlichkeit] is ontically the most familiar and everyday sort of thing; our mood [Stimmung], our ­Being-​­attuned [Gestimmtsein]” (­Heidegger 1962, 172). Thus in a single sentence does Martin Heidegger introduce several of the key terms by which he will explore Dasein, being as “­being there,” and the related concept of ­Being-­​­­in-­​­­the-​­world. The least frequently heard is the last (­Gestimmtsein or, more commonly, Gestimmtheit), which is a term used to refer to the tuning of musical instruments but which here is best understood not as a matter of being in or out of tune but, rather, as the more basic state of “­attunement” to vibrations that do not fully belong either inside or outside the experience of Dasein. A “­mood,” to use Heidegger’s second term, which also means a “­tuning” (­both it and the last are derived from Stimme, “­voice”), comes over one or changes, sometimes beyond one’s apparent control. Heidegger’s preferred word is the first, Befindlichkeit, here translated “­state of mind,” though it probably is best understood in terms of the everyday question, “­Wie befinden Sie sich?,” “­How are you feeling?,” literally, “­How do you find yourself?” The reflexiveness of the German expression is not the same as that of me exprimo, “­I express myself,” but it perhaps invites us to consider more carefully how Poliziano frames s­ elf-​­expression as a matter not of substance but of style and so of something like feeling or mood: sounding like Cicero doesn’t feel right to me, it isn’t my voice (­Stimme). To be clear, Heidegger’s point is not about authentic voicing or virtuosic listening. But Poliziano’s ­self-​­celebratory posing is rooted, I would suggest, in unexpressed meditations on ­Being-­​­­in-­​­­the-​­world, or better, on ­Being-­​­­in-­​­­the-​­res publica litterarum, the “­Republic of Letters,” the community of the living and the dead to which much of his being was dedicated. Philology, in this regard, can itself be understood primarily as a kind of attunement or mood, or better, as a kind of ­second-​­order, ­self-​­reflexive experience of what “­is ontically the most familiar and everyday sort of thing.” It is in this sense that philology begins to look quite a bit like queerness, at least as the latter is theorized by the sociologist Henning Bech in When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity. This book, originally published in Danish in 1987 and revised and translated into English in 1997, has not quite had the scholarly influence it should have, in part because, not without the author’s collusion, it is easy to mistake for a ­how-​­to guide. But Bech’s insights, sometimes relegated to his footnotes, are often breathtaking. Here, for example, he concludes a long note on how he will deploy Heideggerian Gestimmtheit in his own analysis of queerness: Moreover, ‘­tuning’ refers to a philosophical anthropology and a world view totally different from that of, e.g., psychoanalysis or symbolic interactionism: tunings are not situated on the level of the individual, they are not reducible to ‘­meanings’ or ‘­significations’, nor are they 402

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i­ nter-​­or t­ ransactional—​­they cut across the distinctions of subject and object, me and others. This makes it possible to conceive of ‘­social’ or ‘­collective’ tunings, e.g. attached to life spaces, as I shall do later in the book. (­Bech 1997, 221) It is not that Bech supposes there is no such thing as a queer ­individual—​­quite the contrary. But rather than supposing that queerness exists, complete, in each and every such individual, all of whom are linked by common but separately conceived desires, communicated via plain speech or subtle signals, Bech imagines a pervasive queerness in which queer subjects participate. How might this help us to understand what is happening in Poliziano’s chapter on Achilles and Patroclus? The question of their relationship and relative ages would turn out to be central to the postulation of homosexuality as such in the work of John Addington Symonds, who, as I’ve noted, introduced “­homosexual” into English and who was also an avid reader of Poliziano, with a particular interest in the humanist’s own erotic constitution. What Symonds sought to formulate was a homosexual relationship predicated on “­equality,” which he found exemplified in the Whitmannic “­comradeship” of Achilles and Patroclus in Homer, where, as we have reminded ourselves, they are so equal as to be almost interchangeable. Symonds, however, also needed for that relationship to be at least potentially sexual, and since he supposed this potential not to be indicated by the Homeric text, he adduced the later tradition to confirm it. Such sexual expression, however, could not in turn disrupt the posited equality, which meant that at least in theory it had to be separable from the strict delineation of pederastic roles present in every single source but disrupted through variation in the aggregated tradition. Add it all up, and Achilles and Patroclus, read across that tradition, are friends, equals, and ­lovers—​­a kind of relationship, we should add, that Symonds never fully achieved in his own life but which he nevertheless insisted on as an ideal. When, let us now ask the crucial question, did this ensemble first begin to mean what Symonds means? In the terms in which instances of classical reception tend to be framed, what we have here seems to be nothing less than an exemplary instance of “­meaning […] realized at the point of reception” (­Martindale 1993, 3): Symonds’s reading, on such an understanding, not only belongs emphatically to his age but helps us to pinpoint the emergence of the “­homosexual” as such and so named. But does such an explanation really exhaust the queerness of what came before? It is true that, to return to the language of philology, we theoretically can explain the very existence of Poliziano’s chapter in terms of two basic mechanisms: on the one hand, error, which yields variants, and on the other, recension and collation, that is to say, Poliziano’s gathering and tabulation of those variants, in the service of a critical synthesis that he arguably leaves incomplete and that in any case makes the variation visible in one place. But in precisely this regard, one could argue that a kind of desubjectivized queerness is already there in the result, the product, not necessarily of any interested effort on Poliziano’s part, but of the diachronic and synchronic forces of tradition itself (­error and variation on the one hand, canons and antiquarian completism on the other): something no individual need ever have intended emerges all the same. Nor need we connect this emergence teleologically to “­homosexuality” as a putative endpoint, even if the later event retrospectively requires the former. Rather, it would be better to try to understand the queerness of the Achilles/­Patroclus story as something like a “­mood,” predicated not on this or that possibility, but on the very possibility of possibility itself, on, in a word, indeterminacy. Quot editores, tot Propertii, wrote J. S. Phillimore in the preface to his 1901 Oxford Classical Text, warning of the risk that, without editorial restraint, there could one day be “­as many Propertiuses as there are editors” (­Propertius 1901, n. p.). Thus has philology as textual criticism presented itself as an ongoing war against textual chaos. (­Interestingly, Phillimore is fulminating principally 403

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against the sweeping transpositions of lines proposed by Housman, as notes Butrica 1997, 176). Sean Gurd, however, in his provocative Iphigenias at Aulis, argues that textual variation, far from being the enemy of criticism, has long been more like its animating principle, and he calls for a “­radical philology” that explicitly embraces this state of affairs.7 The plural in Gurd’s title points not only to the quot … tot multiplicity of editors and editions, but to the way in which even each single edition is best understood as a “­singular plural” object: In addition to being contained by this differential system of texts, each edition also incorporates difference and plurality as part of its essential mode of being. In the modern critical text, this can be seen most clearly in the critical apparatus… (­Gurd 2005, ­46–​­47) One could easily expand Gurd’s thesis to include philological objects other than editions, such as Poliziano’s chapter on Achilles and ­Patroclus—​­and by extension, his whole Miscellanea, a “­singular plural” already in its very name. Gurd likens the joining of the work of the critic with the mechanistic processes of textual replication and transmission to a cyborg, with the human component providing “­a radical capacity for choice and thought,” the latter word being Housman’s own for the unmethodical method that characterizes the true critic (­such as himself), who proceeds on the basis of instinct (­Gurd 2005, 43). But as we’ve seen, sometimes it is instead the machine part of the hybrid that is doing the “­thinking,” precisely by generating variation where human ­ingenuity—​ ­or at least, human e­ xpression—​­has not. Might we understand philology and queerness alike as, fundamentally, “­attunements” to indeterminacy itself? Certainly, both find something like an ideal object of attention and care in Achilles. His potential queerness lies not just in his b­ ack-­​­­and-​­forth relationship with Patroclus, but in his concurrent desire for the enslaved captive Briseis (­Martial seems mischievously to imagine all three in bed together), his earlier c­ ross-​­dressing on Skyros (­in which guise he seduces a princess), and his sudden f­ alling-­​­­in-​­love with the Amazon queen Penthesileia, moments after he has fatally stabbed her. But this sexual indeterminacy finds a broader analog in the question about him that frames the Iliad from the start: not “­is he or isn’t he?,” but “­will he or won’t ­he—​­rejoin the war?” All of this receives an astonishingly influential emblem in the scene that opens book 24, where Achilles tosses and turns in bed after the death of Patroclus: Then was the assembly broken up, and the men scattered, each man to go to his own ship. The rest took thought of a meal and sweet sleep, to take their fill; but Achilles wept, ever remembering his dear comrade, nor did sleep, that subdues all, lay hold of him, but he turned ever this way and that, yearning for the manhood and valiant might of Patroclus, thinking on all he had done with him and all the woes he had borne, passing through wars of men and the grievous waves. Thinking on these things he would shed large tears, lying now on his side, now on his back, and now on his face; and then again he would rise to his feet and roam distraught along the shore of the sea. (­Homer, Iliad 24.­1–​­12, trans. Murray and Wyatt) Socrates, scandalized (­or pretending to be) by Homer’s description of Achilles “­lying now on his side,” etc., uses the lines to justify the regulation of poetry in the ideal state he imagines in Plato’s Republic. Later, the Alexandrian critics Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace rejected lines ­6–​­9 (“­yearning  … tears”) as unlikely to have been written by Homer. Socrates’ 404

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ostensible problem is instead that such r­ estlessness—​­which would not look much different if the person in bed were an ordinary man and his trouble were, say, i­ ndigestion—​­ill suits a hero born of a goddess. Juvenal, in fact, later invokes the scene in order to describe the squirming of a Roman drunk still itching for a fight (­Satires 3.­279–​­280). Seneca, finally, in his essay On Tranquility of Mind (­2.12), uses Homer’s restless Achilles as exemplary of a broader malaise that seeks change for change’s sake: Sunt enim quaedam quae corpus quoque nostrum cum quodam dolore delectent, ut versare se et mutare nondum fessum latus et alio atque alio positu ventilari: qualis ille Homericus Achilles est, modo pronus, modo supinus, in varios habitus se ipse componens, quod proprium aegri est, nihil diu pati et mutationibus ut remediis uti. There are certain things which bring our body pleasure along with a kind of pain, such as turning oneself over and shifting a side of the body that is not yet tired and cooling oneself through this or that position. An example is Homer’s Achilles, now prone, now on his back, arranging himself into various poses, which is the property of a sick person, enduring nothing for long and using changes as remedies. There is something more than vaguely worrying about this pathologizing of grief, the cause of which Seneca conveniently fails to mention. But are love and sex ever entirely out of mind in this remarkable m ­ ini-​­tradition, which keeps returning to Achilles in bed, giving us, over and over, a 3­ 60-​­degree view of his presumably undressed body? Achilles himself, after all, is “­yearning for the manhood and valiant might of Patroclus,” as he turns his body this way and that, inconclusively. Indeed, the pornographic possibilities of Seneca’s modo pronus, modo supinus seem almost endless, once one cycles through the multiple possible meanings of the first ­adjective—​­“­on his stomach,” or “­lunging forward,” or “­on all fours”—​­as well as the reader’s ability to assume either the point of view of the unseen narrator or that of the lover in Achilles’ own mind’s eye. Nevertheless, my purpose emphatically is not to root this story in an irreducibly erotic queerness. On the contrary, my interest is in all the ways in which Achilles has continued to disrupt the sleep of critics, poets, and philosophers, just as surely as Patroclus disrupted his own. Aristophanes and Aristarchus sought to seclude the disruption; Plato, to outlaw it; Juvenal, to banalize; Seneca, to generalize, moralize, and reproach. But all of this only insured the perpetuation and proliferation of this untranquil “­­state-­​­­of-​­mind,” which is forever changing its position, ­haunted—​­but also ­exhilarated—​­by this or that seemingly insoluble crux.

Suggestions for Further Reading On cinaedi, three decades after Amy Richlin (­1993, 573), in a still bracing manifesto, called them a “­silent group awaiting their historian,” see now Sapsford (­2022), which builds on work done in the interim but also offers an exciting fresh start. Specifically on the Roman period’s efforts to catalog the visible and audible “­signs” of cinaedic desire and/­or gender trouble, see Gleason (­1995, ­55–​­81). On philology’s entanglement in queer desire, see Masten (­2016), discussed above. Several of Angelo Poliziano’s works are available in recent English translations, mostly as part of the I Tatti Renaissance Library of Harvard University Press; on his queer style, see Butler (­2018). On A. E. Housman, see especially Ingleheart (­2018). On John Addington Symonds, see Butler (­2022), the introduction to which includes an extended review of other bibliography. 405

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Notes 1 Poliziano, Letters 8.16, in Poliziano 1498, n. p., my translation, as are all others in this chapter unless otherwise indicated. Extended discussion in Butler 2018. 2 On this and other ancient sources, see Otto 1890, ­116–​­117, whose narrow interpretation follows the scholiast, though, as Preston 1916, ­43–​­44 observes, the phrase belonged to a broader tendency to lend sexual significance to an itching head. 3 Williams 2010, 244 rejects this suggestion (­and much of Taylor’s argument about “­subcultures”) and reverts (­unawares) to the Erasmian view, in dogged pursuit of an extended argument that the cinaedus presented cultural “­trouble” based on “­gender rather than sexual role,” a neat disaggregation that simply does not work, however different ancient understandings of each were from more recent ones. See the rejoinder of Frier 1999, who adds an intriguing report, regarding ­single-​­finger head scratching, that “­the practice survives today in parts of Italy […] to solicit sexual partners.” 4 “­He scratches his head with one finger. What do you believe he wants [or means]? A man” (­digito caput uno / scalpit. quid credas hunc sibi velle? virum), The second part makes the instrumental point more plainly in the corrupted form in which the text was known to most Early Modern readers, “­whereby you may believe he wants a man” (­quo credas hunc sibi velle virum). 5 Parker 1781, 2: ­86–​­88. Discussion in Cook 2003, 9. 6 Taylor 1997, 369 attempts to reverse this drift toward a less explicitly sexual meaning, hypothesizing that the implication of “­sexual services” was the primary sense of draucus, with the connection to an athletic physique a consequence of the places where such men plied their trade. He does this, however, by overreading what he calls “­an undercurrent of innuendo” in 7.67 and 14.48. 7 Gurd’s arguments are partially anticipated by Marcus 1996, 1­ –​­37.

Works Cited Bech, Henning. 1997. When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity. Translated by Teresa Mesquit and Tim Davies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Branca, Vittore. 1983. Poliziano e L’umanesimo della Parola. Turin: Einaudi. Butler, Shane. 2016. “­Homer’s Deep.” In Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, edited by Shane Butler, 2­ 1–​­48. London: Bloomsbury. —​­—​­—​­. 2018. “­Things Left Unsaid.” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 21, no. 2: ­245–​­274. —​­—​­—​­. 2022. The Passions of John Addington Symonds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butrica, J. L. 1997. “­Editing Propertius.” The Classical Quarterly 47, no. 1: ­176–​­208. Cook, Matt. 2003. London and the Culture of Homosexuality: ­1885–​­1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferri, Rolando. 2019. “­The ­Greco-​­Roman World.” In The Cambridge World History of Lexicography, edited by John Considine, 8­ 4–​­105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Frier, Bruce. 1999. “­Review of Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, by Craig A. Williams.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review, November 5. https://­bmcr.brynmawr.edu/­1999/­ 1999.11.05/. Glare, P. G. W. ed. 1996. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gleason, Maude W. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and ­Self-​­Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gurd, Sean Alexander. 2005. Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Halperin, David M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row. Homer. 1999. Iliad. Edited and translated by A. T. Murray and William F. Wyatt, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Housman, A. E. 1930. “­Draucus and Martial XI 8 1.” The Classical Review 44, no. 4: ­114–​­116. Ingleheart, Jennifer. 2018. Masculine Plural: Queer Classics, Sex, and Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Queer Philology Lewis, Charlton T. 1879. A Latin Dictionary, Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marcus, Leah S. 1996. Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton. London: Routledge. Martindale, Charles. 1993. Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Masten, Jeffrey. 2016. Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nikolaev, Alexander. 2014. “­Latin Draucus.” The Classical Quarterly 64, no. 1: 3­ 16–​­320. Otto, A. 1890. Die Sprichwörter und sprichwörtlichen Redensarten der Römer. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Parker, George. 1781. A View of Society and Manners in High and Low Life, Being the Adventures in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, &c. of Mr. G. Parker, in Which Is Comprised a History of the Stage Itinerant, 2 vols. London: printed for the author. Poliziano, Angelo. 1498. Omnia Opera Angeli Politiani et Alia Quaedam Lectu Digna. Venice: Aldus Manutius. —​­—​­—​­. 2020. Miscellanies. Edited and translated by Andrew R. Dyck and Alan Cottrell, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Preston, Keith. 1916. Studies in the Diction of the Sermo Amatorius in Roman Comedy. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Chicago. Propertius. 1901. Carmina. Edited by J. S. Phillimore. Oxford: Clarendon. Richlin, Amy. 1992. The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor, revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 1993. “­Not Before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love between Men.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 4: 5­ 23–​­573. Rocke, Michael. 1996. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York: Oxford University Press. Sapsford, Tom. 2022. Performing the “­Kinaidos”: Unmanly Men in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seneca. 1917. Epistles. Edited and translated by Richard M. Gummere, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stoppard, Tom. 1997. The Invention of Love. New York: Grove. Taylor, Rabun. 1997. “­Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 3: ­319–​­371. Turner, Mark. 2003. Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London. London: Reaktion. Williams, Craig. 2010. Roman Homosexuality, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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28 HOW TO DO THE HISTORY OF ELAGABALUS Zachary Herz

Introduction Take my title literally.1 Yes, it references David Halperin’s classic book of essays How to Do the History of Homosexuality (­2002), which deals with many of the same issues I here explore. But it also nods to my venue. This is part of a ­handbook—​­you might want to know how to bring queer scholarship into your own work. In this chapter I make claims about Elagabalus, a ­short-​­lived emperor who appears in the historical record as an ­almost-​­perfect archetype of the cinaedus.2 I argue that this portrayal reflects the anxieties and insecure social position of Elagabalus’ elite biographers, but more broadly I use Elagabalus to stage some problems ancient historians face and show how queer theory can address them. The first problem is one of disciplinary fit. Certain constitutive features of “­queer theory” make it hard to apply to the ancient world. In particular, queer theory has strong roots in activist movements of the late twentieth century and accordingly often adopts a posture of concern for the lived experience of abject(­ed) subjects (­Love 2021, ­14–​­15). That concern can manifest itself as a conscious effort to use the tools of the academy to address and repair the abjection described (­à la Rubin 1984 or Hoppe 2017) or alternately as an examination of the mechanics of abjection and their role in producing the modernity in which the theorist themself exists (­closer to Love 2007 or Chakrabarty 2002). We might imagine this difference of approaches as a slight variation on traditional social/­intellectual distinctions. One group considers queers, as a class of marginalized people to whom their scholarship is to a greater or lesser extent addressed; another considers queerness in modern culture in order to sharpen engagement with that culture. Both modes, however, look consciously to the world of their authors and reject the disinterested omniscience of earlier scholarly practice. Such work is harder for historians of the ancient Mediterranean. Our subjects are weirder, their moral impulses are more alien to ours, and the society within which those impulses were formed connects to our own more tenuously. Accordingly, we tend to ask different questions: Why did Greeks and Romans understand certain identities as marginal? How did people with those identities go about their lives? What coercions and extractions made possible the social life our sources record? By the standards of ancient history, all of these projects would be considered “­activist work.” They remain, however, firmly anchored in the past; all consider injustices long DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-35 408

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since concluded, and do no more to rehabilitate their victims than ventilate (­and perhaps reframe) whatever traces those victims were permitted to leave in the historical record.3 Classical history, as a discipline, relates to modernity differently than queer theory and its descendant schools. While important recent work has interrogated the role of ancient history, as a discourse, in creating modern society (­S. Butler 2016; Winterer 2002), we still expect our practitioners to think mostly about people who died a very long time ago. That expectation leads to a scholarly and critical distance that queer theory deplores. In other words, we struggle with the first person. That discomfort is especially sharp, and takes on an especially ethical valence, when confronting marginalized subjects or hostile archives. I feel alright trying to reconstruct the worldview of someone like Cicero, both because the resources I have in that endeavor are ones he wished to be left to me and because Cicero spent his life being perceived mostly as he wished to be perceived. If I put foreign ideas in Cicero’s mouth, I can lay some blame at his feet, since I analyze texts he committed to posterity and thus weapons he pulled on himself. By contrast, when we try to reconstruct marginalized identities, we often read between the lines of texts that our subjects did not sanction being produced or read in that way; one thinks of Sarah ­Levin-​­Richardson’s (­2019) ethnography of Pompeiian sex workers, or Amy Richlin’s (­1993) and Rabun Taylor’s (­1997) discussions of queer communities in Imperial satire and novel. These projects have greater risks. Any misidentification cannot be blamed so easily on the misidentified; those we study were largely prevented from expressing themselves in fashions that survive, and what ­self-​­representation we have arrives in scraps and requires speculative context. Furthermore, I believe we have greater moral duties to those we attempt to rehabilitate. There is a power differential between the contemporary queer academic and the marginalized subject (­Brim 2020; Pérez 2015), over and above that between living and dead. The subject not only cannot correct inaccurate portrayals of their inner lives, but the unjust conditions of their marginalization make them uniquely vulnerable to such portrayals. If ­I—​­an ­upper-​­class white gay man who writes down my thoughts for a ­living—​­want to give a voice to the voiceless, I cannot do so by rendering my subject into another tool in my communicative arsenal or another extension of myself. Historiography that avoids speculation on these grounds is inhospitable, perhaps ontologically so, to certain modes and styles with which queer theory is associated. But even if ancient history will never comfortably accommodate certain kinds of inquiry, queer theory has produced insights about the workings of society that historians of ancient society ought to consider. The next problem, perhaps specific to me, is one of scope. The project I undertake in this chapter differs slightly from earlier incursions into the queer past. Important ­queer-​­inflected scholarship has explored the paradigm within which Roman sexualities were construed as deviant. The ­best-​­known work in this vein is probably Craig Williams’s Roman Homosexuality, but similar projects by Tom Sapsford and Joseph Marchal, as well as more theoretical discussions like Halperin’s, consider what it meant for ancient societies to think of a sexual act or person as “­wrong.”4 Much of this work centers upon the cinaedus/­κιναίδος, a term of abuse or discursive trope that delineated men who failed to perform masculinity in the way their culture expected. More ­specifically—​­and since the cinaedus-​­trope is very important for understanding portrayals of Elagabalus, it behooves us to get ­specific—​­to call someone a cinaedus implies effeminacy, anal receptivity, and u­ n-​­Romanness. While the insult appears in Latin literature from Catullus on (­most famously at 16.2), the cinaedus’ role in real (­rather than imagined) social fabrics remains up for debate. On the one hand, we might follow Williams and Maud Gleason (­1995, ­62–​­81) in understanding the cinaedus as a marker denoting the limits of acceptable Roman masculinity. Like ­Ange-​­Marie Hancock’s account of the “­welfare queen,” cinaedism worked as something like a “­public identity” (­2004, ­4–​­6, ­23–​­64); while it might have described real individuals with real 409

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n­ on-​­normative relationships to the world, it served primarily to focus public imagination upon particular threats and render them superficially legible (­Williams 2010, ­210–​­211). From this view, some Roman men got fucked but we know little about them, even if the language that stereotyped and abused them can be fruitfully tracked. Another argument takes the historical cinaedus as a subject worth excavating. We see “­tantalizing hints” (­Richlin 1993, 541) of cinaedic sociality in satire and even in surviving Pompeian art (­Clarke 2006), after all. Tom Sapsford (­2022) takes a middle path, considering the long Hellenic performance tradition that gave Rome her cinaedi and that gave those cinaedi jobs while also treating the “­supple and lubricious body” (­136) of the cinaedus as a stage upon which elite cultures could perform and contest their ideas of manhood. No one of these approaches gets at the truth of the cinaedus, and no one could; it would perhaps be easier to understand a set of subjects who were more exhaustively or neutrally commemorated, but no one becomes an ancient historian to solve easy problems. Furthermore, the problem of the cinaedus is a fun one to solve. Queer historiography famously refuses to elide the historian, and resorts to longing, fascination, and pleasure to justify engagement with the past. Carolyn Dinshaw looks to history for “­partial connection” (­2004, 14), acknowledging both her fervent desire for an identifiably queer past and the impossibility of satisfying that desire. Valerie Traub cites desire as a core historiographical impulse that “­takes us outside of ourselves, challenging us to meet and engage with an other” (­2002, 353). I read these claims as less battle cry than acknowledgment; to engage in a research project is to select a phenomenon to which one is attracted, and that attraction is not ontologically distinct from other affective commitments. Choosing what to study is not objective, and even the most careerist historian merely predicts and satisfies the preferences of others. We learn what we want to, all the way down, and Jennifer Ingleheart (­2015) reminds us that the pleasure queers have taken from our Classical past informs the categories and rhetorics upon which modern queer life is built. I feel this pleasure, too. I find histories of Roman queerness fascinating, and I love to read them. However, I don’t get to deploy them very often; I research Imperial ideological and legal history, which reads as comparatively butch and tends only to engage this corpus when discussing sexual politics. Being asked to write this chapter, then, led me to experiment. How can ancient historians use the insights of queer theory to understand topics outside of queer’s traditional ambit? Ideologically minded Imperial historians have long understood the Roman Mediterranean as mediated by symbolics of power, and queer theory is great at considering symbolics. The ancient historian will never play the same role in their work as other kinds of queer scholars might play in theirs, but the tools of queer theory do not require autopsy. We can use this corpus to do better history, whatever sort of history we do. The best proof of potentiality is demonstration, which is why I use Elagabalus as a case study. If we try to unearth Elagabalus’ own subjectivity, our sources fail us; however, queer theory gives us the tools to understand how a cardboard deviant like the literary Elagabalus can express latent anxieties around broader political change and delineate the borders of elite sociality. Elite sociality and reactions to political change are acknowledged as important phenomena in our discipline, which even straight people find interesting.5 Histories of sexual marginalization are important, but they are not the only questions that matter and they are not the only questions with which queer theory can help. Here, queer theory helps us understand how the trope of the cinaedus assimilated Elagabalus into existing models of Roman social life and gave his interlocutors a language with which to evaluate and judge him. Traditional paradigms of imperial legitimacy were collapsing in Elagabalus’ period, but those of normative and polluted manhood were not, and they allowed Rome’s senatorial elite to preserve their position within a changing world. Cinaedism 410

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was a politics all its own, and queer theory gives us the tools to see how sex and the state could reinforce each other. After briefly explaining what we know about Elagabalus as a person, politician, and trope, I will discuss two different queer approaches to the material and how they do and don’t work. I explore the ethical and archival issues raised by attempts to reconstruct the queered teen around whom this chapter revolves, before considering how queer literary analysis and media studies might get us somewhere that these more humanistic approaches do not. Specifically, I argue that Elagabalus’ biographers used tropes of cinaedism and failed masculinity to reassert social power in a politic that had stripped them of it. I finally return to the ethical questions raised by historicizing Elagabalus in my conclusion.

Man and Myth It seems useful to start by explaining what we know about Elagabalus, as historical figure and discursive object. Our main sources for Elagabalus’ career are the ­third-​­century historian Cassius Dio and the biography preserved in the Historia Augusta—​­an odd collection of imperial biographies that likely plagiarized the lost Severan history of Marius Maximus. Both Dio and (­presumably) Maximus record Elagabalus as coming to prominence in 218 CE. The empire was ruled at that time by Macrinus, an equestrian who had killed the previous emperor (­Caracalla) and been named successor by soldiers stationed nearby (­Dio Cassius 79[78].6, 11; Historia Augusta, Caracalla 7.1). Both authors claim that Caracalla was hated, but Macrinus proved no more popular; Dio’s (­fragmentary) account accuses him of elevating men of low birth and rank to high positions in order to spite the Senate (­79[78].14), and the Historia Augusta (­dubiously) claims that Macrinus had been a gladiator, lawyer, and prostitute before entering civil service (­Macrinus 4). In 218, a large contingent of Macrinus’ soldiers suddenly revolted and declared a Syrian teenager to be the natural son of Caracalla and accordingly his true heir (­Dio Cassius 79[78].32). Both Dio and the Historia Augusta view this claim as absurd, and suggest that the soldiers were bribed by the teenager’s grandmother Julia Maesa, who had been Caracalla’s aunt (­Dio Cassius 79[78].30.2, Historia Augusta Macrinus 9.5). After a short and decisive battle at Antioch, Macrinus was deposed and the victorious rebels elevated their preferred candidate to the throne. About that candidate little is known. Dio calls him Avitus or Sardanapalus, and claims he was the son of Maesa’s daughter Julia Soaemias and Varius Marcellus, a senator from the Syrian city of Emesa (­79[78].30.2). The Historia Augusta calls him Elagabalus or Varius and claims that his father was unknown (­Elagabalus 2.2). Both describe him, however, as playing a leading role in the local cult to a baetyl (­sacred stone) known as Elagabal (­Dio Cassius 79[78].31, 80[79].11 [Xiphilinus]; Historia Augusta, Elagabalus 1.5). When the child (­who used the name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus as emperor but whom most later authors, present company included, call Elagabalus) was acclaimed as emperor, this youth and inexperience posed a problem. The standard syntax of ­third-​­century state messaging grounded legitimacy in virtues and personal characteristics (­e.g., mercy, wisdom, martial valor; see Noreña 2011) that a ­fourteen-­​­­year-​­old boy could not easily claim to possess, and it is not clear who in Elagabalus’ inner circle would have even known how to execute such a representational program. That said, Elagabalus emerged from a milieu in which he was understood as powerful and charismatic due to his special relationship with Elagabal. Accordingly, Elagabalic representation broke sharply with Severan and Antonine models and focused on the young emperor’s close connection to the god (­Rowan 2012, ­164–​­218). Consider this Alexandrian tetradrachm (­­four-​­drachma coin) from 220 CE. (­­Figures 28.1a and 28.1b). 411

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­Figures 28.1a and 28.1b Billon tetradrachm. Obverse: laureate bust of Elagabalus. Reverse: a chariot facing forward, carrying a baetyl and an eagle. ANS 1944.100.64317. American Numismatic Society.

Roman coins follow a standard grammar. “­Heads” (­the obverse) depicts an important person, while “­tails” (­the reverse) shows a symbolically laden scene underlining the goodness or legitimacy of the issuing regime. Traditional reverses might include Rome personified dominating the world, scenes of public benefaction, or Roman gods. This reverse, by contrast, shows an Elagabalus that derived his legitimacy not from any term which might be meaningful in established symbologies of imperial power but instead from a meteorite (­or baetyl), with an eagle on top of it, being pulled by a chariot. At the same time, though, coins were struck bearing the image of Elagabalus’ young first cousin, Severus Alexander, which made rather different claims. ­Figure 28.2a and b show a silver denarius struck in 221 CE; while Elagabalus was still emperor at the time, the coin depicts Alexander on the obverse and traditional priestly implements on the reverse with the legend PIETAS AVG, or “­imperial piety.” The contrast is pointed. Alexander was already Elagabalus’ adopted heir but was clearly being positioned as a more immediate successor (­Kemezis 2016). In 222, Elagabalus suffered the same fate as Macrinus before him; Dio and the Historia Augusta both describe soldiers killing Elagabalus and his mother, likely with more bribes from Maesa (­80[79].20 [Xiphilinus]; Elagabalus 17). Severus Alexander was acclaimed emperor soon after. His representational program was far more traditional, emphasizing a return to Roman piety after Elagabalic aberration (­Rowan 2009, 2012, ­219–​­245). The young Alexander ruled for 13 years before dying in another military coup. So much for what we know. The above account of Elagabalus’ short career is possibly the most boring you will ever read. Both Dio and the Historia Augusta paint Elagabalus as an effeminate Eastern cultist with an uncontrollable appetite for sexual pleasures including, but not exclusive to, getting fucked. In the Historia Augusta he mutilates his penis (­Elagabalus 7.2), puts on lewd pantomimes in which he is anally penetrated (­5.4), and sends agents to scour Rome for ­well-​­hung sexual partners (­5.3). Dio’s Elagabalus dresses as a female sex worker and solicits clients (­80[79]13.2.4 [Xiphilinus]), submits to beatings from his enslaved “­husband” Hierokles (­80[79]15.­2–​­3 [Xiphilinus]), and at 80[79].16.7 [Xiphilinus] seeks out vaginoplasty. In both authors, Elagabalus keeps himself hairless (­Dio Cassius 80[79].14.4 [Xiphilinus]; Historia Augusta, Elagabalus 5.5), engages in cultic human sacrifice (­80[79].11 [Xiphilinus]; 8.1), and repeatedly rapes a Vestal Virgin (­i.e., a celibate priestess of the goddess Vesta) (­80[79].9.3 [Xiphilinus]; 6.6). 412

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­Figures 28.2a and 28.2b Silver denarius. Obverse: bust of Severus Alexander. Reverse: PIETAS AVG and religious paraphernalia ANS 1944.100.52437.  American Numismatic Society.

Elagabalus appears in these biographies as an ­almost-​­perfect example of the cinaedus. He takes on the “­womanly” role in his sexual relationships, while pointedly rejecting Roman models of public masculinity in favor of one built around Syrian priesthood. The one example these biographies provide of Elagabalus penetrating a ­woman—​­his marriage to the Vestal Aquilia ­Severa—​ u­ nderscores his violation of Roman tradition in the service of transgressive sexual pleasure. Notably, though, Elagabalus is a cinaedus après la lettre. Neither Dio nor the Historia Augusta calls Elagabalus a κιναίδος/­cinaedus. This may partly reflect quirks of the texts; both are quite late, and in fact, neither uses the term at any point.6 But it also shows how the trope, which is blatantly invoked by both authors, can persist in the absence of specific terminology. Gleason shows (­1995, ­64–​­67) the unstable language with which ­Greco-​­Roman authors described the catalog of debilities we now call cinaedic. But that catalog remained, and both Dio and the Historia Augusta call upon it in the stories they tell about the emperor Elagabalus. But what do these stories mean for us? We can see them as evidence for someone’s life, or alternately (­perhaps simultaneously) as evidence for some ways of talking about people’s lives. Elagabalus is uniquely well suited for staging this difference because his story is so unusual and potent. Martijn Icks’ account of the reception of Elagabalus in later queer communities shows what that story could do; Elagabalus became an icon for queer Victorians and Romantics (­2012, ­180–​­213). To give one example, J. Stuart Hay’s 1911 biography The Amazing Emperor Heliogabolus reads Elagabalus as an early example of the Victorian sexual type known as the invert, best described by Hay himself: “­in the body of the man resided the soul with all the natural passions of a woman” (­230). Similar readings persist today, albeit with more sophistication and political thrust; consider Roland Betancourt’s Byzantine Intersectionality, which refers to Elagabalus using she/­her pronouns and argues that “­Dio Cassius offers us fragments of historical evidence for a coherent transgender identity and subjectivity, whether or not these were the lived realities of the historical Elagabalus” (­2020, 107). That said, this reception presents real dangers for historians today. One problem is that the most intriguing bits of the Elagabalus ­biographies—​­for Hay their apparent depiction of an invert, for us of a trans ­woman—​­are also the least verifiable. As Betancourt acknowledges, our accounts of Elagabalic queerness come from a slanderous court tradition (­also Osgood 2016; Sommer 2004); no one describes Elagabalus acting like a woman except to make him look bad. Normally, of course, these kinds of accounts are the best we have; most of the queer subjects elsewhere 413

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in this handbook could not tell their own stories. Elagabalus, remarkably, could. Remember ­Figure 28.1a: while Elagabalus would hardly have chosen that image himself, the officials who did knew how Elagabalus wanted to appear better than we do, and cared about fulfilling that desire more than his biographers did. The images they chose tell us something about how Elagabalus wished to appear in public, especially since they break with a­ lready-​­established representational programs. Elagabalic coins portray the emperor as a young priest, in Emesene sacral garments and closely related to his patron god (­Manders 2004). These are strange choices within imperial numismatics, and it is not obvious why Elagabalus would be represented this way if he did not want to be. These coins suggest that Elagabalus wanted to be represented as male. No extant numismatic portrayal of Elagabalus shows him in women’s clothing or with any traditional female attributes: he wears men’s clothes and men’s hair. Similarly, while few sculptural portraits of Elagabalus survive those that do portray him as a teenage boy. See ­Figure 28.3, and note the sideburns. Both Dio (­80[79].14.4 [Xiphilinus]) and the Historia Augusta (­Elagabalus 5.5) claim that Elagabalus kept himself hairless, so what do we make of public images of the emperor with obvious facial hair, including a pubescent mustache? These images might reflect Elagabalus conforming to Roman ideas of sex in public while living as a trans woman in private, but it is not obvious

Figure 28.3  Portrait of Elagabalus. Marble. Roma, Musei Capitolini, Palazza Nuovo, inv. no. MC0470. Archivo Fotografico dei Musei Capitolini. © Roma, Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali.

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why an emperor who flouted representational norms in one arena would scrupulously observe them in another. Other accounts of Elagabalus, while hardly positive, portray him as a religious fanatic rather than a gender outlaw; Herodian, for example, echoes Elagabalus’ ­self-​­portrayal as a priest and describes his appearance as “­foreign and entirely barbarous” (­ἀλλοδαπὸν ἤ παντάπασι βάρβαρον) (­5.5.5) rather than womanly per se. Those representations over which Elagabalus had some control portray him as a religious innovator; that only becomes evidence of gender deviance in a hostile biographical tradition. A second issue is the occasionally exploitative nature of Elagabalic historiography. Returning to Hay, his account of Elagabalic inversion is immediately followed by an unsupported and somewhat troubling account of the 1­ 4-­​­­year-​­old’s sexual allure. In form [Elagabalus] was attractive and exceedingly graceful; his hair, which was very fair, glistened like gold in the sun; he was slender and possessed of glorious blue eyes, which in turn were endowed with the power of attracting all beholders to his worship; and he knew his power over men; he had first realised it when the legionaries flocked to the temple at Emesa attracted by reports of this Prince Charming. (­Hay 1911, 231) More recently, in The Emperor Elagabalus: Fact or Fiction? Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado (­2010) demonstrates the falsity of traditional portrayals of Elagabalus before putting forward a (­concededly) fabulist account of how the young emperor might have lived. This account mixes more traditional ­claims—​­that, for example, anyone in Elagabalus’ position would have found imperial politics scary and strange (­­240–​­242)—​­with digressions about “­physical development . . . doubtless leading to curiosity and exploration . . . . with male companions in the temple, the stable, or the woods” (­232). Y Prado is here telling a story, which he finds plausible and/­or compelling, about a historical subject. This practice is called fabulation, and we all do it; we all speculate on how our subjects came to produce the evidence we have, and we all present that speculation in the form of more or less credible narratives. Fabulation necessarily presents methodological and ethical problems, and I will end this chapter by discussing those problems. But here we have a special case. Y Prado argues, strongly and I believe correctly, that we have no reliable information on Elagabalus’ sex life. Given that lacuna, imagining him “­rolling with his comrades in the hay” (­259) worries me. We can think of our subjects however we like, but telling stories about them strikes me as imposing different duties; Elagabalus cannot correct the record we produce, or object to sexualizations that he may well have objected to in life. Furthermore, when we recognize a queer subjectivity in historical figures, the lines between kinship and fascination can blur. Traub is right to find this blurring in queer history more broadly, but Elagabalus’ youth raises different questions. In echoing sources that describe a promiscuous cinaedus do we describe the eroticization of beautiful boys, or enact it? This danger is not restricted to Elagabalus, or to children, or to sex. The queer historian is a desiring subject, longing for community and kinship as much as stimulation and going to the archive to get what they want (­Love 2007, 37). There is nothing wrong with getting what one wants, but my own archival romance is a neurotic one. I am scared to get what I want from someone without their permission, and archives of marginalized Romans were usually constructed without that permission. I do not know exactly how Elagabalus wanted to be remembered, but I do know that the story he told about ­himself—​­of a priest appointed to rule the world, of the special favorite of ­Elagabal—​­has not become famous. That is because Elagabalus’ interlocutors do not see ourselves 415

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in that story, or because it does not give us what we want. My concern is that telling those other stories risks placing our desire to listen over our subject’s wish to be heard.

Severan Slashers I still want to listen, though. Anxiety over exploiting dead subalterns must lead somewhere better than embarrassed silence, and while the explosion of smut in the biographies of Elagabalus seems designed to frustrate historical analysis it itself merits historical analysis. The Elagabalus biographies render elite revulsion at late Severan political conditions obvious and overdetermined; biographers like Dio could use these stories to criticize the dead ruler without appearing to make any demands on his successor. While Dio (­more than the Historia Augusta) preserves complaints about Elagabalic administration, he folds them into a caricature of perversion that was unlikely to repeat. Dio’s implicit argument that emperors should follow meritocratic appointment norms (­preserved at 80[79].15.3 [Xiphilinus]) is troublingly general and could become criticism of the current ruler, but the explicit claim that emperors should not choose civil servants based on penis size renders maladministration into absurd and harmless fantasy. That fantasy derives its power and its pleasure from sexualized tropes, and a different strand of queer theory (­one I associate most closely with Lisa Duggan, but which has visible roots in most early queer literary analysis) considers how tropes of queered villainy define public life. I care a lot about late Severan public life, and so do my friends in the field; the insults and fantasias of the biographies did not distract from that public life but formed a vital part of it, a part with which queer theory can help us engage. In particular, the Elagabalus story can be analyzed through the lens Duggan brings to bear on the “­lesbian love murder story” at the turn of the twentieth century. In Sapphic Slashers (­2000) Duggan argued that audiences in that period used stories of murderous women lovers to make sense of their world. Greater independence for women had disturbed traditional domesticities, and American understandings of racial hierarchy had been unsettled by recently ended experiments in Reconstruction (­­42–​­46). In this environment, stories of predatory masculine women luring traditional femmes away from their husbands held some explanatory power. They concretized a growing fear that hegemonic paradigms of domestic life were less attractive than newer and more exotic socialities, appealed to curiosity about these socialities, and nevertheless assured the public that marriage and family were the only safe options for ­upper-​­class white women (­­154–​­155). These stories of murderous female “­inverts” appeared in novels and newspapers, trial records, and sexological texts. But regardless of genre, they offered audiences titillation that sweetened and destabilized broader projects of social control. Duggan shows us how the gossipy fictions of Dio and the Historia Augusta can be thought of as recording certain kinds of elite anxiety. Without analogizing Elagabalus to Duggan’s murderous “­girl lover” (­28) Alice Mitchell, I take two major analytic commitments from Duggan that help decode the fantastical Elagabalus biographies. First is Duggan’s interest in archetype and character, and the role that such social types can play in an evolving discourse while still “­refer[ring] to populations and situations with existences outside of the news columns” (­39). I find this concept liberating when studying the ancient world. Duggan explicitly disavows reality; the stories of murderous lesbians that populate her work paper over lived realities that are possibly irretrievable, and that if not are of only dubious relevance to the representational work with which Duggan concerns herself. Other histories might unearth the practices and s­ elf-​­perceptions of the women represented with these tropes, but tropes themselves exercise a social power independent of the reality off of which they key. Duggan is hardly the first to separate out discursively produced type from the lived experience of the typecast, and I personally first encountered that separation in J. 416

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Butler 1990 and 2003 [1996]. But Duggan specifies the vastly greater importance of the type for her specific inquiry. Histories of ideology by definition consider social constructions of the world over and above the world itself; the process by which given practices are shown to merit respect or disgust takes place in the realm of social types. But Duggan acknowledges the diversity of lived reality while tabling it for her project, and that feels more respectful of the dead queers upon whom the cinaedus was built. I am uncomfortable making claims about the sex Roman subalterns had, but we can acknowledge (­1) that it probably happened, (­2) that it probably did not resemble sex we have today, and (­3) that it played with t­hen-​­popular imaginaries of queer sociality while diverging from them in unknown fashions and to unknown degrees. Elagabalus’ relationship with the cinaedus is especially tenuous, given our evidence for his acts and desires; however, we can talk about cinaedi without necessarily talking about people. Duggan also provides a subtly distinctive account of the work stories do. She argues that the stories of “­lesbian love murder” that proliferated in media of her period “­shift[ed] the terms of contest from the grounds of politics and citizenship to those of morality and normality” (­2000, 155). This account of narrative power is odd within the discipline. Queer theory often seeks to uncover what is latent, unspoken, or coded, perhaps because its activism has often fused with a particularly psychoanalytic lit crit, exemplified by the foundational work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (­as at 1990, ­23–​­27). That hermeneutic obviously affects vocabulary and method but also brings with it some (­ironically, often unspoken) assumptions about why a person might express themselves obliquely. The closet Sedgwick describes is not so much an externally imposed constraint as a kind of double consciousness (­du Bois 1999 [1903], ­10–​­11), born from the queer subject’s perception of themself as self and assimilation of social narratives that perceive them as other (­Sedgwick 1990, ­55–​­57). That double consciousness forces ideas underground, and the theorist attempts to reconstruct the dislocated longings or obsessions of the analysand. By contrast, things a speaker knows to be true but cannot say out loud require less explanatory work; no one wins prizes for explaining why Maurice was published posthumously. As a result, understanding latency in queer art through Sedgwick and her successors requires delving into queer artists’ interiority. Duggan asks different questions: not how stories express the inexpressible, but how they captivate audiences in environments marked by discursive constraint. That latter model works better here, since I can more easily describe ancient authors’ social milieux than I can their secret terrors or desires. Lesbian love murders transmuted the political into the personal; they symbolized new politics or socialities in apolitical terms. Imperial writers could not, as a rule, speak frankly about their political conditions (­Bartsch 1994); as a result, the shift Duggan identifies is a common Imperial move. When Seneca describes Roman governance as hinging on an emperor’s moral character (­e.g., de Clementia 3.5) or when Pliny takes Trajan’s benefactions as evidence of his greatness of spirit at Panegyricus 25.2, we understand that these authors make political claims into discussions of virtue because they have to. Duggan’s authors, obviously, worked under different constraints. But the methods they employed are familiar to me as a Romanist. They spoke about a confusing and strange world in terms of domestic continence; they concretized l­arge-​­scale political shifts in stories of erotomaniacal teenagers. Now, back to the erotomaniacal teenager above. How can we understand the Elagabalus narrative, preserved in both history and biography, through contemporary queer media analysis? While we tend to think about authors like Dio and Maximus as repositories of information, they wrote for an audience within a literate media culture. That culture helped its participants think through big questions, of course, but also entertained them. History and biography shared space with “­lighter” genres like novel, and could fantasize or amaze with the best of them. This phenomenon is clear enough when the history described is obviously impossible; no one is confused by the ­dog-​­headed 417

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men (­κυνοκέφαλοι) of Herodotus (­e.g. 4.191) or Strabo (­16.4.14). But the social impossibilities of imperial biography could do something similar. When Suetonius’ vita Neronis describes Nero dressing as an animal (­ferae pelle contectus) to perform oral sex on partners/­victims tied to wooden stakes (­29), we usually approach it as purported fact: as either a slanderous piece of a hostile historiographic tradition or as a true claim about a weird man. But that story is also titillating. A reader of Suetonius could imagine themselves with infinite resources and absolute power, and judge Nero’s excesses while simultaneously delighting in them (­Vout 2007, ­5–​­6). Imperial ­biographies—​­especially those of ‘­bad emperors’ like Nero/­Otho/­Elagabalus (­Bittarello 2011)—​ ­were lurid, and alluring. They formed their own genre, with its own pleasures, and were consumed for entertainment as much as scholarship or edification. Modern comparands abound. We all understand the “­unauthorized biography” as a distinct form of storytelling and site of trashy pleasure, but a better comparison might be pulp novels. Pulps, as Mark Jordan argues in Recruiting Young Love, “­fancy themselves as readings for and about delinquents” while nevertheless permitting counternormative identification or fantasy (­2011, 49). Imperial biography was a highbrow genre that imagined its readers judging the royal perverts described, but it could no more control those readers than could any other account of deviance. Biography’s frame narrative of judgment and disgust created a socially acceptable space for transgression; stories like Elagabalus’ excited strong emotions while also providing scripts with which those emotions could be recast. That affective charge makes pulp a useful medium for discussing troubling realities. Understanding the biographies of Elagabalus as a kind of pulp literature helps us excavate those realities and better understand how producers and consumers used them to think about their lives. We can see why those producers and consumers might have a lot to think about. By the Severan period the political conventions of the second c­ entury—​­a period in which emperors were chosen from among an elite senatorial class, claimed to rule together with members of that class, and died peacefully with a successor already ­chosen—​­had collapsed (­Kemezis 2014, ­74–​­89). Instead, emperors of this period valued military support over senatorial approval and treated senators (­like Cassius Dio and Marius Maximus) with disdain. Things only got worse after Caracalla’s murder; Macrinus was deposed by his soldiers in favor of a child king (­Elagabalus), who would himself be deposed by his soldiers in favor of another child king (­Severus Alexander). The symbolic order in which Dio and Maximus had come to believe that their approval was necessary for imperial legitimacy had been replaced by one in which their preferences were irrelevant. In this new environment, the prerogative of evaluation that Dio and Maximus enjoyed was one of the few prerogatives they had left. Manhood was another prerogative, or perhaps the same in another dialect. After all the stock cinaedus of the biographies of Elagabalus is a discursive type, the evidence for which is almost entirely preserved in the conversations of more normative men. The cinaedus was penetrated but also discussed, lacking both sexual and descriptive agency (­Walters 1997; Williams 2010, ­217–​­218). In a political crisis which stripped traditional elites of power over their own lives, then, the cinaedus became a particularly apt or helpful script of abuse. Making Elagabalus into this stock type helped his biographers reassert their control over events and reclaim a socially dominant position in a world that had deprived them of that good. Elagabalus and Severus Alexander would have been marginal figures within Antonine milieux: too young, and lacking senatorial support. Those marginalities no longer mattering stung, but biographers could not criticize Elagabalus for vices his ­successor—​­their ­ruler—​­shared. Instead they attacked on a different axis, transmogrifying the political transgressions of the late Severan period into sexual ones and asserting for themselves as biographers (­and men) the privileges that had been stripped from them as senators. Dio and Maximus could no longer govern, but they could still write. 418

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Conclusion So much for methods, and so much for ideology. The entire argument I have made is built on the back of a murdered teenager, and it seems wrong to conclude without looping back to him and his reality. Most work on Elagabalus begins with reparative aims; this child, this interesting child, deserves the voice that history has stripped from him. For all my skepticism of the approaches above, I also want Elagabalus to have some dignity, and to have a rich afterlife as a historical subject. But how can we do that with the archives we have? One answer is to leave the subject alone and focus instead on the system that constrained, reframed, and killed him. Heather Love’s recent archaeology of deviance studies and queer theory, Underdogs (­2021), suggests rethinking ­system-​­level or sociological analysis as a kind of respect for the dead. Love rehabilitates the work of Erving Goffman, known for his oddly chilly tellings of social abjection. Consider his account of a perceptibly disabled person’s anxiety upon meeting new people: “­The blind, the ill, the deaf, the crippled can never be sure what the attitude of a new acquaintance will be, whether it will be rejective or accepting, until the contact has been made” (­1986, 24). The moment portrayed is one of obvious tension and emotional heft, but Goffman describes it in the language of formal rules: not as a person not knowing, but as a class of people being unable to know. What seems to matter to Goffman is not people living within systems of stigma and hierarchy, but instead the system itself and the influence it exercises upon its subjects. I have always loved Goffman, but with reservations; as a person who has experienced abjection I never saw myself in his writing and wondered if I should. Love answers this concern by arguing that Goffman’s focus on rules over individuals does not neglect the lived experience of subjects but instead acknowledges their opacity. As Love notes, “­the blank, empty selves that circulate in Goffman’s writing are designed to repel the incursions of both lay observers and social scientists” (­44). This reading of Goffman shows a way forward. We can see the rules and systems and forms of control that operated within Roman elite culture, but we cannot see Elagabalus’ soul. We can know what happened to him, and we can know how people whose voices were preserved felt about what happened to him. But the boy himself is a blank slate. Like others working on Elagabalus, I would love to know how he felt about his gender, his god, and his job. But I do not know those things, and Elagabalus deserves biographers who acknowledge that. That said, how unusual is the injustice here? Elagabalus died a horrible death and cannot speak the way we feel he ought to, but younger people faced worse fates all the time in ancient Rome without even leaving a trace. The idiosyncratic details that make Elagabalus so sympathetic were luxuries; few people were described in such detail or exercised the sort of power that made anyone want to tell stories about them. To my mind, the best way to think through these problems of narrating silenced lives is Saidiya Hartman’s theory of “­critical fabulation” (­2008, 11), which arises from close study of enslaved Black subjects in archives sparser and more hostile than those discussed here. I could follow Hartman in acknowledging that any story I told about Elagabalus would “­enact[] the impossibility of representing the lives of the [subjects] precisely through the process of narration” while still “­illuminat[ing] the contested character of narrative, history, event, and fact” (­12). I could then imagine Elagabalus happy, or frightened, or trans, and interrogate how Imperial historiography reduced emperors to stock tropes and their assassinations to fairytale punishments. This, however, would be obscenity. Hartman describes “­captives,” not [subjects], and she embraces the fabula as a tool to “­imagine what cannot be verified” in order to recover scraps of experience from a­ ll-​­encompassing regimes of exploitation and death (­11). The reparative 419

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work of critical fabulation addresses a thoroughgoing erasure to which Elagabalus was never subject, and analogizing Severan imperial politics to a slave trade seems immoral. Elagabalus was not destroyed by such a regime, after all, but many of his contemporaries (­including people he owned) were. As hard as it is to reconstruct Elagabalus’ subjectivity from a numismatics program, how dare we call anyone with a numismatics program silenced? Hartman’s defense of fabulation is ambivalent, but it draws its normative force from conditions and cruelties to which Elagabalus was never subject, and treats the fabula as a last resort for historians with sparser sources than I. Let’s end there. I do not know what went through Elagabalus’ mind just before his death, whether he “­realised Elagabalus was just a big stone” (­y Prado 2010, 259) or cursed his grandmother, or imagined later generations exalting his name. I wish I did, and I wish he could tell us, but my greater expectations for Elagabalus reflect if anything his status in history as the kind of person who usually gets to talk. Hierarchical societies condition the possibility of an inner l­ ife—​­of emotions, intellect, sensitivity to ­pain—​­on circumstances of birth. Elagabalus was noble enough to merit sympathy and powerful enough to deserve autonomy; we can pity him without seriously interrogating our affective attachments to the society that worshipped and destroyed him. But should we? Our discomfort with Elagabalus’ silencing should perhaps call us not to think about this particular boy’s incredible life, but instead and finally to ask why his death is so much more interesting than so many others.

Suggestions for Further Reading For methodologies of historicizing ancient sexuality, Halperin 1989 and 2002 remain vital. Outside the ancient Mediterranean, Dinshaw 1999 and Doan 2013; outside h­ istory-­​­­as-​­discipline Love 2007. For Roman cinaedi see Sapsford 2022, Walters 1997, Williams 1999. This chapter has restricted itself to male homoeroticism but for love between Roman women Brooten 1996, Hallett 1990. On Elagabalus, Icks 2012 is indispensable for both reign and reception, but other authors consider specific aspects of Elagabalic representation. On religion Rowan 2012, on Elagabalus as literary trope Bittarello 2011.

Notes 1 Many thanks to Ella, Sara, and especially Kirk (­he knows why) for their patience and collaborative spirit. Sarah E. Bond, Nicole Julia Giannella, and Cat Lambert read drafts and provided invaluable guidance. All translations, and errors, are my own. 2 Cinaedus is a Latin term denoting effeminate men who enjoyed being penetrated; I discuss it in more detail below. 3 As, for example, Peralta 2020. 4 Halperin 1989 and 2002, Marchal 2019, Sapsford 2022, Williams 2010. 5 Personal correspondence between author and Andrew Riggsby, December 16, 2021. 6 Dio does, at 45.26.4, depict Cicero decrying the “­cinaedism” (­κιναιδίαν) of Marc Antony, but even that term never recurs in Dio’s own voice or outside of the Republican context.

Works Cited Arrizabalaga y Prado, Leonardo de. 2010. The Emperor Elagabalus: Fact or Fiction? Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Bartsch, Shadi. 1994. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. ­Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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How to Do the History of Elagabalus Betancourt, Roland. 2020. Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bittarello, Maria. 2011. “­Otho, Elagabalus and the Judgement of Paris: The Literary Construction of the Unmanly Emperor.” Dialogues d’Histoire Ancienne 37: ­93–​­113. Brim, Matt. 2020. Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brooten, Bernadette J. 1996. Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. —​­—​­—​­. 2003. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “­Sex.” New York: Routledge. Butler, Shane, ed. 2016. Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clarke, J.R. 2006. “­Representations of the Cinaedus in Roman Art: Evidence of ‘­Gay’ Subculture?” In ­Same-​ ­Sex Desire and Love in ­Greco-​­Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West, edited by Beerte C. Verstraete and Vernon L. Provencal, 2­ 71–​­298. New York: Routledge. Dinshaw, Carolyn. 1999. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, ­Pre-​­and Postmodern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Doan, Laura. 2013. Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War. ­Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 1999. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by Henry Louis Gates and Terri Hume Oliver. New York, London: Norton. Duggan, Lisa. 2000. Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Gleason, Maud. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and S­ elf-​­Presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1986. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hallett, Judith P. 1989. “­Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in Latin Literature.” Yale Journal of Criticism 3: ­210–​­228. Halperin, David. 1989. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge. —​­—​­—​­. 2002. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hancock, ­Ange-​­Marie. 2004. The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. New York: New York University Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “­Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12: 1­ –​­14. Hay, John Stuart. 1911. The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus. London: Macmillan. Hoppe, Trevor. 2017. Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness. Berkeley: University of California Press. Icks, Martijn. 2012. The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ingleheart, Jennifer. 2015. “­Introduction.” In Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, edited by Jennifer Ingleheart, 1­ –​­35. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jordan, Mark D. 2011. Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kemezis, Adam. 2014. Greek Narratives of the Roman Empire under the Severans: Cassius Dio, Philostratus and Herodian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2016. “­The Fall of Elagabalus as Literary Narrative and Political Reality.” Historia 65: 3­ 48–​­390. ­Levin-​­Richardson, Sarah. 2019. The Brothel of Pompeii: Sex, Class, and Gender at the Margins of Roman Society. New York: Cambridge University Press. Love, Heather. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —​­—​­—​­. 2021. Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press. Manders, Erika. 2004. “­Religion and Coinage: Heliogabalus and Alexander Severus: Two Extremes?” ­Talanta 26: 1­ 23–​­138. Marchal, Joseph A. 2019. Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures before and after Paul’s Letters. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Zachary Herz Noreña, Carlos. 2011. Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osgood, Josiah. 2016. “­Cassius Dio’s Secret History of Elagabalus.” In Cassius Dio: Greek Intellectual and Roman Politician, edited by Carsten Hjort Lange and Jesper Majbom Madsen, 1­ 77–​­192. Leiden: Brill. Peralta, ­Dan-​­el Padilla. 2020. “­Epistemicide: the Roman Case.” Classica: Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos 33: 1­ 51–​­186. Pérez, Hiram. 2015. A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitandesire. New York: New York University Press. Richlin, Amy. 1993. “­Not Before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love between Men.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3: ­523–​­573. Rowan, Clare. 2009. “­Becoming Jupiter: Severus Alexander, The Temple of Jupiter Ultor, and Jovian Iconography on Roman Imperial Coinage.” American Journal of Numismatics 21: ­123–​­150. —​­—​­—​­. 2012. Under Divine Auspices: Divine Ideology and the Visualisation of Imperial Power in the ­Severan Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rubin, Gayle. 1984. “­Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory on the Politics of Sexuality.” In Pleasure and Danger, edited by Carole S. Vance, 2­ 67–​­319. Boston, London: Routledge. Sapsford, Tom. 2022. Performing the “­Kinaidos”: Unmanly Men in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sommer, Michael. 2004. “­Elagabal: Wege zur Konstruktion eines ‘­Schlechten’ Kaisers.” SCI 23: ­95–​­110. Taylor, Rabun. 1997. “­Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7: ­319–​­371. Traub, Valerie. 2002. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Vout, Caroline. 2007. Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walters, Jonathan. 1997. “­Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought.” In Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner, ­29–​­43. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Williams, Craig. 2010. Roman Homosexuality, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winterer, Caroline. 2002. The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, ­1780–​­1910. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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29 QUEER INTERSPECIESISM, OR OPPIAN’S WILD LOVE Mario Telò

“­It is a pity that classicists are so unfamiliar with Oppian,” said Simon Goldhill (­2004) almost 20 years ago. Relegated to the province of minor, “­late,” erudite literature, though widely appreciated in the Byzantine and Renaissance periods, Oppian’s work on fishing (­Halieutica)—​­dedicated to the emperor Marcus Aurelius (­­121–​­180 CE) and his son Commodus (­­161–​­192 CE)—​­remains underappreciated despite some important recent scholarly work.1 As Goldhill added, Oppian’s “­bizarre combination of tales of fish and eroticism…should be meat and drink to ­post-​­modern literary critics.” When Goldhill laments the scholarly reluctance to grapple with “­the sexy excitement of fish for Oppian,” the risqué excitement reflected for example in Alphonso Lingis’s zoophilic lyricism,2 he hints at the distinctive quality that suffuses Oppian’s epic ­versification—​­baroque, campy, cute, richly “­decadent,” alluringly awkward. The queer atmospherics of the Halieutica are disparately and diachronically felt, as suggested, for example, by its appeal in both the sexually free court of Lorenzo de Medici, to whom a Latin translation of the poem was dedicated, and in the scholarship of classicist A.S.F. Gow, who occasionally tended to Oppian’s flamboyantly twisted imperial Greek in what reads like philo­logy-­​­­as-​­sublimation.3 In this chapter, I want to approach Oppian’s animal epic as queer and trans* form through a reading that participates in and c­ lings—​­intimately, erotically, ­queerly—​­to the wild interspecies fantasy of two of the most “­bizarre” episodes of this episodic animal epic.4 These contiguous, wondrously surreal scenes of ­fish-​­livestock flirtation and, especially, m ­ ollusk-​­plant mingling are symptomatic of the sexy contradiction of this ­late-​­antique (­­proto-​­postmodern ­and -​­posthumanist) literary product, which, while ostensibly imparting techniques of anthropocentric mastery, feeds on the s­ elf-​­ironizing potential of the g­ enre—​­can ichthyological poetic didaxis ever be taken seriously?—​­to expose human animals’ disavowed animality, to “­twist,” that is, bend and break, the barrier of speciesism. As Dana Luciano and Mel Chen have observed, queerness confronts the human with its ­inhumanity—​­both “­animal” and “­monstrous” (­Freccero 2017, 431)—​­and dethrones the human from its privileged subject position. Additionally, it exposes the human as merely the conceptual instrument for “­disciplinary dehumanization and regulation” (­Luciano and Chen 2015, 191), for the ontologized racialization that underlies “­the violence of humanization.”5 As challenges to the “­natural” equivalence of subjecthood and humanity with heteronormativity, or as emotional and carnal bonds that defiantly embrace the unbound disorder of desire, queer relations thrive on unsettling the hierarchical illusion of human ­self-​­distancing from animality. In turn, intimacy with 423

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-36

Mario Telò

n­ on-​­human companions, and symbiotic attachments to ­non-​­human friends (­pets or not), also enable us to inhabit possible spaces of queer (­un)­­becoming—​­or of wild becoming with (­Haraway 2008). Theorists of what has been called “­the queer wild”—​­especially Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o (­2018)—​­have contributed to “­multiplying our visions of what might count as sex, expanding the roster of conceivable pleasures, as well as of socialities (­or antisocialities) imagined to follow from them” (­Coviello 2017, 511), while Carla Freccero has made the case for a “­queer animal theory,” which “­asks us to attend to the embodied, affective interrelationality across… categorical divides, not in the encounter between discrete entities, human and n­ on-​­, but as constitutive…of subjectivity and relationality themselves” (­2017, 439). In tracking fishy quests for alien, weird (­xeinos) ­loves—​­creeping impossible, ­non-​­procreative, ­non-​­penetrative ­desires—​­Oppian’s epic dramatizes the singular plurality of the animot, casting sexuality as an (­in)­human, that is, human and ­non-​­human, queer and trans* crossing, an ongoing negotiation of ­intra-​­and interspecies attachments.6 As with capitalistic technologies of meat production, the biopolitical possession of the marine inhuman claimed by fishing feeds on disavowed ­animal-​­human intimacy.7 Even before consumption, the violent, if sensually charged, encounter of animal surfaces with the organs of human perception, the ritualized techniques of piscatorial seduction and capture, enacted in the contortions and snares of baroque epic form, bespeak “­intimate possibilities, fleshy entanglements, and visceral connections we might still name as sex”8—​­sex being etymologically, physiologically, and psychoanalytically a kind of “­cutting.” Located in the interstices of didactic discourse, the two episodes of interspecies intimacy that I will discuss in the next section intimate the open secret of fishing, a repressed wild desire, a desire for the wild and for the wild to desire us back: zoophilia or “­bestiality,” as it is called in the heterosexist catalog of perversions, where it customarily appears as homosexuality’s twin sin. Yet ­zoophilia—​­in Oppian and ­elsewhere—​­can easily reinscribe the anthropocentric domestication or domination it apparently contests in replacing distance with (­excessive) closeness. Discussing Donna Haraway’s idea of becoming with in h­ uman-​­dog relations, arguably conceived of as “­love relationship[s] that we experience as unconditional but that sto[p] short of sexual engagement,” Jack Halberstam has critiqued her refusal of the “­possibility that the ­human-​­animal bond is in any way erotic or in any way imposed on the animal” (­2020, 160). In inviting his readers to spy, eavesdrop on, and thus participate in the trysts of n­ on-​­human sea and land creatures, in tapping into his reader’s zoophilic ­desires—​­actual or allegorical of other ­fantasies—​­Oppian’s representation of “­wild love” evinces the disavowed “­imposition” that inheres in animal (­eroticized) companionship. Can we think of a zoophilia that, queerly and “­ferally,” circumvents this hierarchical imposition expressed by and coincident with the representational level? The queer poetic form of Oppian’s wild trysts, as we will see, materializes the “­interspecies” as a twisting of biological ontology (­or, we could say, a biological hauntology), a reflection of “­how the human/­animal/­plant triad is unstable and varies across time and space” (­Livingston and Puar 2011, 5). The interspecies is equivalent to the trans­species—​­a breaking down of species distinctions accompanied by the emergence of novel, unstable synergies, differentiations, and undifferentiations beyond the classificatory constrictions of speciesism. This transspeciesism manifests itself in the experimental undoing and redoing, unbinding and rebinding, disjoining and rejoining not just of physical anatomies, but also of syntaxes, in the unruly intimacies of “­late,” campy, queer poetic form, and in its ghostly embodiments of the proximities and fantasized, yet n­ ever-​­fully realized, mergings of sexual or ­para-​­sexual acts. I conceive this chapter’s experiment in radical formalism as an exploration of the relationship between ancient queer images of the animot and modern views of queerness. In The Descent of Man (­1871), “­Darwin worked hard to subdue the queer potentialities of his evolutionism” (­Brooks 424

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2021, 324). However, Darwin’s account is disrupted by accidents, anomalies, and, in particular, “­intersexualities, transformations of sex[,] and ­non-​­reproductive sexual behaviors in human and ­non-​­human animal subjects” (­Brooks 2021, 326)—​­“­wild” acts that he tries hard to keep in the epistemological closet of irrelevance and marginality as relics of a primitive undifferentiation, we could say, of p­ re-​­Oedipal promiscuity or a genital chôra.9 For example, Darwin alludes to one of the most bizarre moments in Aristotle’s biological works, his account of queer or trans(*) hens, which begins with the observation that animals can alter not just behaviors but also some bodily parts (­tôn moriôn enia): [They] crow (­kokkuzousi), imitating the males, and attempt to mount, and their crest and tail (­­orrho-​­pugion) rise up (­­ex-​­airetai) so that one would not easily discern that they are females; to some of them also a kind of small goad has grown (­­ep-​­anestê). Some of the male chickens have also been seen, after the death of the female, to tend to the chicks caringly, leading them around (­­peri-​­agontes) and raising them, so that they no longer try to crow or mount. Among the birds, there are also some effeminate ones (­thêludriai) from birth (­ek genetês) so that they even subject themselves (­­hupo-​­menein) to those who try to mount them. (­Aristotle, History of Animals 8.49, ­631b5–​­18. Cf. Darwin 1868, 51n53) For Aristotle, who converts purported empirical observation into binarist discourse, queer female sexuality is interpreted as a matter of anatomical metamorphosis from one pole to another. However, what is queerer in this process of trans animality is the contestation of dimorphism through multiplicity, a ­re-​­arrangement of genital locations, the ongoingness of process, the suggestive unfinishedness and tensile persistence that constitute one conception of trans* realness.10 Phallic prostheses seem to proliferate in the hens’ feminine bodies through an overdetermined masculine stretching out and up in the most unexpected corners: not in front, but behind; above rather than below. Thanks to an autopoietic arousal that generates impressions of solid flesh, a supplemented void, the organ singled out by the word pugion in the compound ­orrho-​­pugion (­translated as “­tail”), an anus, tends toward a resexualization as a penis (­or “­lesbian phallus” [Butler 1993, ­55–​­56]), while the voice entrusts its butch tune to an iterated sound ­kok-­​­­kok-­​­­kok-​­kok (­kokkuzô), both the announcement of a ­sex-​­change and a phallic interpellation. Pushing against Aristotle’s and Darwin’s normative framing, we can read this genital creativity and the disruption of heterocentric hierarchies of care brought about by nursing males as motions toward ­trans-​­animal unbecoming (­as well as gender plasticity or even gender abolition [Amin 2022; Bey 2022]), glimpses of what has been called the “­queerness of nature”—​­in the words of Karen Barad, “­a desiring radical openness, an edgy protean differentiating multiplicity, an agential dis/­continuity” (­2012, 29). Oppian’s interspeciesism, epitomized by the figure of the besotted octopus, resonates with contemporary queer new materialisms and posthumanisms, but also with “­countersexuality,” the term that Paul Preciado borrows from Michel Foucault to advocate for “­somatic communism.”11 While I use Oppian to heed animal queerness, or countersexualities, like Stacey Alaimo, I do not intend to “­toss queer animals into the ring of public opinion to battle the still pervasive sense that homosexuality is unnatural” or “­to locate the truth of human sexuality within the already written book of nature” (­2010, 55 and 60). Rather, I intend to construe desire as intrinsically queer desire, as an (­in)­human perverse animation, a wayward motile form that is always ­trans-​­animal, drifting athwart like late style. We could say that Oppian’s style is exquisitely queer because it instantiates late style, a style that, in the words of Edward Said, is “­wayward and eccentric,” “­bristling, difficult, and ­unyielding—​ ­perhaps even inhuman” (­2006, 10 and 12). As Said observes, concerning Adorno’s commentary on 425

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Beethoven’s late style, “­lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal” (­2006, 13)—​­a definition overlapping with many formulations of queerness as antinormativity. Yet aesthetic lateness also encompasses uncanny convergences of before and after, impressions of achronic synchronies, whereby an archê (“­origin”) is a­ n-​­archically stretched forward into the future, and the future is perverted into the hauntological return of an apparent anteriority. Anticipating at once Darwin’s (­normativizing) discourse of ancestral perversions, of primordial undifferentiation, and the à venir of ­ever-​­expanding ­trans-​­animalities (­human and ­non-​­human), of ever looser sexual and categorial minglings, the desires that creep into the twisted folds of Oppian’s wild form enact the futurepasts or pastfutures of stylistic lateness. For Said, “­lateness…is a kind of ­self-​­imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it” (­2006, 16). As we will see, the temporal o­ ut-­​­­of-​­jointness of formal l­ ateness—​­complementary to the queer irony of Oppian’s ichthyological ­didaxis—​­also aligns creeping, or “­creepy,” interspeciesism with queer fugitivity and with possibilities of defiant exile and ­self-​­exile not just for ­non-​­human animals, but also for racialized, traditionally ­de-​­humanized humans. In the following analysis, through the convergence of a hyperformalistic reading and various strands of queer and trans* theory, I first consider intimations of zoophilia and transspeciesism. Valorizing the queerness of “­creepiness” through the crawling of fish onto the land, I move on to exploring how Oppian’s “­wild love” thematizes the negotiation of the sexual and the asexual that is, to an extent, always at stake in the erotic encounter. In the last turn of the argument, I linger on the clinginess of the octopus to the olive tree as a suggestion of d­ eath-​­driven fugitivity, of a rebellious, a­ nti-​­colonial trans* becoming.

*** In the midst of book four of Oppian’s Halieutica, which opens with an invocation to “­liquid” (­hugros) Eros, readers are bewilderingly immersed in the depths of marine and terrestrial erotics, in a tangle of formal and affective hapticities that feels playful, “­cute,” and disturbing (­4.­264–​­306): Other fish are seized by a desire (­erôs) that is foreign (­xeinos), not familiar (­­en-​­ dêmios) for the sea (­halmês), one that awakens in them a lust for the earth, alien to the water (­exalon)—​­such an arrow of foreign (­­allo-​­dapês) love strikes the octopus and the r­ ock-​­loving race of the seabreams. The octopus loves (­phileousin) Athena’s plant shoots, and it directs its desire (­erôta) onto gray green leaves; it is a great marvel (­thauma) for its mind to be dragged by arboreal longing (­pothôi) and to find delight in the oily plant’s branches. Wherever near the sea (­halos) there is a s­ hiny-​­fruited (­aglaokarpos) olive tree (­elaiê), blossoming (­tethaluia) on the shore at neighboring angles, there the octopus’s mind is drawn, just as to a footprint the impulse is drawn of a Cnossian, ­keen-​­scented dog, who, on the mountains, tracks a wild beast’s curved step, discovering it thanks to his nose’s faultless message, and swiftly captures it and does not fail but brings it close to his master. Thus, an octopus immediately recognizes that a blooming olive tree is near; it emerges from the abyss and crawls (­anherpei) onto the shore; rapturous (­kanchaloôn), it approaches the trunk (­premnoisi) of Athena. 426

265

270

275

280

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First, jubilantly (­agallomenos) around the root’s base it coils, spinning (­eileitai strôphômenos) like a young man who lovingly surrounds (­­amph-​­agapazei) his nurse as soon as she arrives, and is entwined (­pleketai) around her, and lifts (­aeirei) his arms onto her chest (­kolpois),285 desiring to embrace her neck and shoulders. Thus, it twirls around (­peri…helissetai), the trunk taking pleasure (­chairôn) in the shoot. Then, leaning on the top of its suckers (­kotulêisin), it crawls up to the top (­hupsos’ ­an-​­erpuzei), desirous, and around (­amphi) the bristly foliage it folds itself (­ptussetai), holding sometimes one branch (­kladon), sometimes another, just as a man (­anêr)290 coming back from abroad greets the friends (­hetairous) who come his way, gathered together, encircling (­helissomenos peri) their necks; or as around (­amphi) tall fir trees the ivy’s humid spiral (­helix) spirals (­helissetai), and stretching itself out from the root, it crawls (­herpuzei) and flows around (­­peri-​­rrheei) the branches in every direction. 295 Thus, full of joy (­gêthosunos), it throws itself around (­­peri-​­ballet’) the olive tree’s oily twigs (­orpêkas), altogether similar (­paneikelos) to someone kissing. But when of its desire (­erôtos) the octopus has released itself, it crawls back (­apherpei) again into the bosom (­kolpon) of the sea, having filled itself (­plêsamenos) of love (­philotêtos) and of olive longing (­pothoio). The deception of desire (­erôtos) catches the octopus too, as know 300 the fishermen; for tying to lead the olive tree’s branches, the most attractive (­­eu-​­phueas) ones, they drop it in the midst of the sea and from the boat they drag the octopus. But even when it sees this, the octopus does not remain indifferent but rushes and clings (­­amph-​­eplexen) to the friends (­hetairous) that are the branches (­ptorthous). And, later, not even when it is dragged (­helkomenos) into the fishing booty, does it let go of the bonds of desire (­desma pothôn) until it is inside the boat; and not even when it is dying does it hate the olive tree. In the account of the octopus’s arboreal longings, which will be the primary focus of my analysis, the reader is lured into the realm of tentacular embodiment through a domestic mediation, a canine becoming.12 Likening the octopus’s erotic adventure to canine ­hunting—​­inevitably, a metonym of human hunting, of which fishing is a ­subcategory—​­the narrator implicitly establishes an intimate bond between the scene’s molluskan protagonist and the poem’s implied reader. Recognizing themselves in their instrumentalized terrestrial companion, readers soon find themselves transferred, as though in a jump cut, beneath the sea, where following the octopus’s surreal journey, they are pressed to sympathize with it, to partake of its soft and adhesive muscular tissue, to share its flowing mobility, and especially to join its wild romance. This identification is conducive to disidentification, the queer mode of (­un)­becoming theorized by José Esteban Muñoz (­1999), to a shedding of the human skin, a barrier as constricting as the dry land that bars the octopus from earthly pleasures. The isolated position of the enjambed ­ex-​­alon (“­alien to the sea”) at the beginning of line 266 underscores not only the octopus’s isolation, but also the temptation 427

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of ­self-­​­­exiting—​­an impulse caught between the poles of relationality and ­anti-​­relationality. The triangulated repetition of al in halmês, allodapês, ­ex-​­alon (­­264–​­266)—​­a designation of alterity that resonates with the “­saltiness” (­­hal-​­) of the ­sea—​­curls the tongue and loops with the octopus’s oscillation between a wish for radical alterity outside the sea and the sea’s very incarnation of this ­alterity—​­at least from an anthropocentric viewpoint. The reader’s subjectivity is exposed to the concomitant deterritorialization of becoming dog and ­octopus—​­or of becoming dog to become octopus (­hunter and ultimately prey), a molluskan becoming embedded in the very motions, articulatory and q­ uasi-​­sexual, of a tongue. Even though any sex arguably imbricates the human in a kind of tentacular corporeality, becoming an octopus amounts to a marked figuration of the fantasy of “­wild” ­sex—​­of making love like an octopus or with an octopus. In her trenchant analysis of the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher—​­in which the (­male) director romantically and tragically bonds with a (­female) octopus encountered during his diving ­excursions—​­Sophie Lewis observes, “­One might to be tempted to say, exultingly, that there is no time when a human is more o­ ctopus-­​­­like—​­libidinous, umbrageous, vulnerable, radiantly sexy, ­omni-­​­­potentialized—​­than when she is in love” (­2021). An image of overdetermined, hermaphroditic genitality, the octopus is a queer ­symbol—​­its intricate, tentacular multiplicity titillating the human imagination with wild erotic acrobatics, but also with an unruly contestation of inside and outside, with a bizarre convergence of concave and convex surfaces, of sticking out and taking in.13 Intimacy with the undulating body of the octopus makes us ardently intimate with water itself. We touch and are touched by aquatic elementality; we are enwrapped in a liquid embrace and “­brought to orgasm by a biome,” as Lewis puts it (­2021). The morphological hermaphroditism of the ­octopus—​­regardless of biological ­gender—​­is a promise of ­hyper-​­or ­non-​ ­genital sex, of “­cephalopod cuddles,” of a distributed, impersonal erotic hapticity that can “­was[h] binary gender away” (­Lewis 2021). Provocatively, Lewis adds that “­to be touched, tongued, by the octopus”—​­that is, by “­prehensile ­G-​­spots, diffuse brains densely bedecked with kisses, great floating mucus membranes, liquid predators”—​­is also scary, and “­nothing could be scarier, except perhaps good sex.” To an extent, the octophobic fear of sex is, ultimately, fear of the ­queer—​­which encompasses “­horror at bottoming,” and “­contempt for gender ambiguity and nonprocreativity” (­Lewis 2021).14 Heeding the affective modulations of poetic form, the yokings, and unyokings figured by the accumulated enjambments, we perceive the queer, turbulent insistence of an interspecies ­impetus—​­a continuous trans* striving to slide over. The looping movement of desire, the pull (­helketai “[it] is dragged”) of the interspecies fantasy that mobilizes the octopus is not just a projection but even a (­­quasi-​­)­experience of transspecies ­intercourse—​­of its strain, its jolts, its twisted ­pleasures-­​­­in-​­pain. At the beginning of 266, the isolated adjective ­ex-​­alon ­slips—​­punningly, ­para-­​­­etymologically—​ ­from exiting the sea into the “­leap” of the root of ­ex-​­allomai, a suggestion of molluskan border crossing, while the formal stutter of “­­ex-​­alon allodapês” intimates the breakdown of distinctio verborum and other categorial taxonomies, transmitting to the reader’s voice and eye the strain of transspecies relocation, the unsettling force of undifferentiation. This interspecies unbecoming seeps into the very experience of reading through the phonic attraction of tethaluia (“­blossoming” 273), the epithet of the olive tree, to the word for sea (­thalassa), but also through the messy tangle of morphological (­mis)­alignment in line 272, in which the contiguity and deceptive agreement between aglaokarpos and halos delineate the animal/­plant cyborg, at once salty and lubricious, ligneous and gelatinous. The illusionistic power of enjambment in lines ­268–­​­­269—​­where Athena is separated from the shoots of the tree sacred to ­her—​­seems momentarily to shift the octopus’s erotic attention from vegetal to (­super)­human femininity. However, the apparent interspecies heterosexuality of 428

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this bond is uprooted by Athena herself, who was born from the head of a de facto trans parent and inhabits a genderqueer body and habitus. When the octopus, rising up (­­an-​­herpei) from the abyss in buoyant sexual elation (­kanchaloôn, agallomenos), approaches “­Athena’s trunk” (­premnoisi…Athênaiês), it seems to unveil the goddess’s male ­genitals—​­her arboreal lesbian or trans ­phallus—​­initiating a queer encounter of phallic protuberances, jumbling tentacles with bole and branches.15 In the first mention of the octopus’s vegetal predilections, the olive branches that seduce ­it—​­narcissistically? homoerotically?—​­display, with only the thin concealment of a consonant, their genital nature: thalloisin/­phalloisin. Exceeding this obvious phallicism, the octopus is a genital aporia, amounting, in a sense, to an organ capable of both penetration and suction (­­Cohen-​ ­Vrignaud 2012, 35, ­41–​­42, 54)—​­a “­mutating somatheque,” in Preciado’s words (­2021, 41). Two lines later, as we encounter again the octopus’s aroused ascent from the depths of the sea (­hupsos’ anerpuzei liliêmenos 289), the narrative ­close-​­up on its suckers (­kotulêisin 288) revisits the anatomic configuration of the animal/­vegetal rendezvous, supplementing the earlier penile contacts and interweavings with a marine invagination. Or, abandoning the logic of the imagistic revision, we could read the muscular tissues provoking “­the sliding suctions of octopus eros” as “­glands of ­lust—​­anatomies pumped like priapic erections, contracting poses and shifting with held violence from one pose to the next with the vaginal contractions of labor pains.”16 The two similes that frame the octopus as a “­mutating somatheque”—​­the first comparing it to a young man (­kouros) throwing his arms around a nurse’s bosom, the second to a returning exile greeting his ­comrades—​­partake in this genital queering and trans*ing. The mention of the feminine, ­quasi-​­mammarial suckers retrospectively unsettles the roles scripted in the first simile, unmasking the gender trouble of the Oedipal, ­female-­​­­bosom-​­seeking kouros. We are enticed to reimagine the octopus’s flesh as the soft caring arms, maternal yet sexual, of a ­nurse—​­grammatically both male (­trophon) and female (­­pro-​­molousan)—​­and to linger on the equivalence of phallus and breast (­kolpois) as interchangeable counterparts of the tree trunk that the mollusk tenderly clings to. This interchangeability is the outcome not simply of the breast’s symbolism as a primary fetish, or of the queer indistinction of parental and erotic attachments, but also of the biopolitical malleability of sexual organs, of the ­trans-​­adaptability of animal parts (­human and n­ on-​­human). The second simile, in turn, complicates or trans*-​­es the semblances of female ­homosexuality—​­of marine breasts pressing upon Athena, or the nurse’s bosom, which has already suppressed the previous impression of ­para-­​­­heterosexuality—​­by shifting back again to the precarious homoerotic contours of a hetareia that supplants, in this implicit framework of Odyssean nostos, the embrace of the wife with that of comrades (­or even suitors). The octopus’s plurality in singularity, expressed in its genital assemblages and interspecies inclinations, is enfleshed in baroque circuits of form, an excessive aroundness or the excess of aroundness as such.17 Both the excessively long words agallomenos (­282) and amphagapazei (­284) contain the “­excess” (­agan) of a tentacularity that turns, rotates, twirls, spins, and spirals, and, through the accumulation of these very motions, ­in-​­sists, that is, sticks, or, to an extent, clings to the page, as manifested in the persistence of the prepositions ­peri-​­ and amphi-​­, which signpost the flexuous contortions of molluskan corporeality, of water currents, and of versification itself (­­282–​­296): peri…/…eileitai strôphômenos…/…amphagapazei,/­amphi…pleketai…/…peri…helissetai…/…amphi…/…helissomenos peri…/…helissetai amphi…/…helix…/…peri-​­rrheei…/… peri-​­balletai This wild circularity spreads the insistence of queer jouissance, with each “­around” preposition or prefix spiraling around the other, marking the prehensile conations of curled appendages, which 429

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ceaselessly, voraciously pursue ­trans-​­intimacy through serial muscular distensions and contractions, the teasing touch of twisted ­undulations—​­of marine flesh and ­desire—​­that reach out, tickle, and caress. Every glimmer of an enfolding approach signaled by the recurring language of circuitousness disassembles the very idea of ­genitality—​­a biopolitical ontology or an “­anatomopolitical technology” (­Preciado 2018, 29)—​­into intimations of relational ­intra-​­action,18 into fragmented materializations of q­ uasi-​­abstract bonding, a rhizomatic process rather than a unified act, into rippling rhythms of adhesion, into a kind of p­ ost-​­sexual jouir (­rather than enjoyment).19 This jouir is the effect of ­para-​­etymological glossing that binds chairôn (“­besotted, enjoying” 287) at the end of the line to the phonetically similar cheiras aeirei (­285) in the same ­position—​­as though sexual arousal coincided with the tension of a somatic projection, with the stretched temporality of adhesion. Just as the octopus seeks to fasten itself to the olive plant, floating, spinning around it, like ivy (­­293–​­295), climbing toward a provisional, never closed, never finished interspecies assemblage, the queer form of the scene proceeds through a kind of a­ nti-​­representational, disorienting circling around. Within the space of 20 lines, the description of the octopus’s terrestrial escapade gives way to a simile; the descriptive level resumes to be interrupted again by another simile; and this trajectory is repeated twice. Poetic form does not simply spiral around ­itself—​­or fold upon itself in a kind of invagination20—​­but it seems to cling tentacularly to the analogical approximations of a ­never-​­fully comprehensible inhuman otherness. The aroundness of transspecies hapticity is like the as that introduces the s­ imile—​­a marker of contact, of adhesion, but also of the impossibility of a permanent convergence, merging, or fusion: between animal and vegetal, between epic representation and the “­reality” of marine queerness. When we read about the p­ ost-​­orgasmic nostos of the octopus, repairing into the bosom of the sea as into an ancestral, p­ re-​­Symbolic world, the affective wave of formal aroundness—​­relational but also ­non-­​­­relational—​­continues to ripple through. A striking ambiguity emerges in line 299, where the participle plêsamenos, governing pothoio (“­desire, longing”), becomes trapped in a semantic tension between “­fulfilling” and simply “­filling,” in this case, between satiation and being filled, again and perpetually with desire. That the octopus may depart both satisfied and unsatisfied is suggested by the h­ yper-​­simile “­utterly similar to someone who kisses (­kuneonti paneikelos)” (­297), which visualizes an alternative, ­plant–​­animal form of buccal ­intimacy—​­a kind of ­non-​­or ­quasi-​­kissing ­kiss—​ ­but also the chagrined discovery of the impossibility of an encounter of lips, of amorously bridging the gap between species and moreover categories of life and animacy, as we see, for example, in the romance between an embodied c­ is-​­man and a disembodied, digitally created female voice in Spike Jonze’s film Her (­2013). This impossibility may lead, by default, to an unequal assimilation. The ­para-​­etymological resonance of the olive tree’s twigs, orpêkas (­297), with herpô—​­the verb consistently used of the octopus’s ­crawling—​­pulls the vegetal toward the molluskan. While branches become tentacular, tentacles, after their provisional aroused hardening, resist morphing into the wood. It is as though, while wrapping itself around the branches, the octopus envelops itself, and embraces its own tentacles (­or testicles?) in an ­auto-​­erotic gesture,21 which enacts the domesticating power of phytophilia as well as zoophilia, a love that, instead of tending toward mutual deterritorialization, subsumes the animal/­plant into a hierarchical instrumentalizing engagement. It is the motion of aroundness that supplies the most obvious point of intersection between the octopus’s arboreal affair and Oppian’s second scene of wild love, the sea breams’ creepy attraction to goats, the most sexual terrestrial animal (­4.­320–​­334): [The sea breams] fawn upon (­­peri-​­sainousin) the horned crowd (­homilon), and lick around (­amphi) them and pour themselves around (­amphi) them, gathered together, continuously jumping up and down; and amazement seizes 430

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the shepherds as they learn this for the first time; and not unwillingly, the goats welcome (­dechnuntai) the enamored chorus (­choron), and no satiety (­koros) of pleasure takes hold of them. Not as much, in the roofed stables of the shepherds, do kids exultantly (­­peri-​­kanchaloôntes) welcome (­dechontai), with much joy and happiness, their mothers when they return from pasture, when the whole place (­chôros) all around resonates with the joyous cries of the little ones, and the herdsmen’s heart laughs. Thus, the seabreams flutter around (­­peri-​­sperchous’) the horned flocks. When the goats have had enough of marine baths, and return into their stalls, then the seabreams, in much pain, all closely follow together to where the laughter of the top of the wave circles the land. Is there ­actual—​­or, I should say, ­conventional—​­sexual contact between the sea breams and the goats they are infatuated with? Can the ­pleasure-­​­­in-​­pain of the sexual encounter reside precisely in the destabilization of the distinction between touch and n­ on-​­touch? A verb disjointed by tmesis, “­licking around” (­amphi…lichmazousi), visualizes tongues continually rolling around rather than on the faces of the goats. There is an imagistic infiltration of ­human-​­canine companionship/­erotics, as blatantly announced by another around verb, the earlier ­peri-​­sainousin (“­they fawn around”). Yet this domesticating interruption of erotic wildness carries the suggestion of ­non-​­touching touch, or of asexual sex. What is striking in the linguistic texture of these lines is the semantic triangulation of three ­words—​­choron (“­Chorus” 323), koros (“­saturation” 324), chôros (“­place” 328)—​ ­which dramatize a playing around with the same letters and sounds in different combinations, a circling around an impossible referent through the undulating motions of an e­ ver-​­transitioning signifier, translating verbal form into a continuing lapping at or around the reader’s face, erotic and filial, as well as canine, fishy, marine, and caprine. This ­hyper-​­affective liquid ­motility—​­erotic and ­non-​­erotic, sexual and ­non-​­sexual, haptic and ­quasi-­​­­haptic—​­pulsates in the expansive, invasive body of the long participle peri-​­canchaloôntes (“­joyously receiving” 326), which bears a salty, marine relic (-­​­­alo-​­) and heavily occupies the end of the line with its jouissant aroundness, within the synonymous circuit of dechnuntai (­324) and dechontai (­327). Connecting this “­aroundness” with the “­crawling” movement of the octopus out of the sea, I suggest reading it as a figuration of “­creepiness”—​­a “­sexual energy…both invasive and excessive…constantly invading other personal spaces” (­Kotsko 2015, 10) or a label we apply “­to discipline others and to maintain norms of relationality” (­Alexander 2017, 77), to curb the queerness of desire, its reluctance to be calcified in bounded social form. In one of his experiments in queer autotheory, Creep: A Life. A Theory. An Apology, Jonathan Alexander remarks (­2017, ­26–​­27, 73, 120, 122, 129): I’m very aware that my gayness has, historically…put me in the company of those all too readily identified as creepy.… For much of the twentieth century, homosexuality and creepiness went hand in hand, bedfellows in the popular imagination that saw queer sexuality as a threat to normalcy…. It’s that which doesn’t belong but somehow sticks around.… I like the furtive thing, the somewhat covert expression of desire. The subtle glances. Catching an eye, turning away, wondering if I was found out…. My predation is generally harmless, just a fleeting creepiness at the corners…. We creep on each other all the time, wondering about each other’s lives.… 431

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Sea breams “­creep on” the goats, ostensibly the creepiest of livestock, whose strabism, according to a ­late-​­antique author, is the instrument of their stalking, their frantically lascivious, queer gawking (­equivalent to the sea breams’ salivating), which creeps us out.22 But more than creep us out, Oppian’s epic form circulates the sense of our own creepiness, which may coincide with our own fishiness, goatiness, or dogginess, our queeranimalities. Creepiness, a persistent lingering where one ostensibly does not belong, especially where one is in danger, is a ­death-​­driven feeling, an intertwining of Eros and Thanatos that queerly captivates the octopus not only at sea when it falls into (­or seeks out) the fishermen’s trap, but also earlier when it takes to land, sexually inebriated. Before detailing the fishermen’s cruel use of olive wood to draw the octopus into their ships (­­300–​­307), the narrator momentarily reassures us that, after its foreign tryst, after dissolving into an ejaculatory flow (­295), the octopus will head back into its submarine ­home—​­a maternal bosom circling us back to the nurse of the Oedipal kouros. Yet its wild exit into an inhospitable, incompatible world cannot be disentangled from the thought that it may not safely reach its destination, from the prospect, that is, of a lethal ­self-​­exit, of a petite mort confused with death itself. This s­ elf-​­exit unfolding through wild eros resembles the s­ elf-​­shattering central to the Laplanchian reading of the Freudian death drive, which looks ahead to Lee Edelman’s No Future (­Bersani 1995; Edelman 2004; Telò 2020). Edelman’s alignment of the queer with the death ­drive—​­in its Lacanian more than its Freudian ­configuration—​­is an attempt to articulate a revolutionary desire without falling into the normative trap of futurism. As C. Heike Schotten observes, “­the advocacy that queers accede to the deathly positioning to which they are always already relegated by reproductive futurism is not some sort of…antipolitical vision, nor is it an advocacy of suicide” (­2018, ­109–​­110). Rather, as Afropessimists have elaborated, what has been taken as an embrace of death is rather an embrace of the ­dead—​­that is, of those whom colonization and its ordinary legacy through ongoing, everyday racialization has construed, and continues to construe, as dead. The queer death drive can be seen as “­an affirmation of the survival of the presumptively dead, the ­always-­​­­already-​­disappeared.”23 Rather than subscribing to the liberal fantasy of reparation, recognizing and inhabiting the “­dead” position in which the Symbolic, in order to exist, constitutively positions the Black (­as well as the queer) is the framework for conceiving emancipatory lifedeath. In Oppian’s context, the desire to escape ­pre-​­emptively from the deadly capture of fishing through the death of interspecies, interspatial ­love—​­an amorous ­self-​­annihilation to foreclose the fate of being ­annihilated—​­exemplifies the “­fugitive form of dissident critique” or “­radical resistance to sovereign politics” that is offered by queer lifedeath (­Schotten 2018, 110, 147, 168). Stephen Best has read the suicides of African slaves in the Middle P ­ assage—​­throwing themselves into the sea to avoid landing in a brutally inhospitable land to (­re)­produce future ­slaves—​­as moments when “­agency is expressed as a refusal of the possibilities of social action that have been shaped and organized by colonial power” (­Best 2018, 15). In Frederick Douglass’s novella, The Heroic Slave (­1853, ­16–​­17), the protagonist hides in the woods, finding precarious refuge from his master in a tree: Up I climbed, and hiding myself as well I could, I, with this strap…lashed myself to a bough.… I had scarcely got fastened to my natural hammock, when I heard the voices of a number of persons.… If I descended, I should probably be discovered by the men; and if they had dogs I should, doubtless, be ‘­treed’.… I decided to hold my place in the ­tree-​­top.… The men…began with their axes…to attack the trees. The slave seeks liberation from an act of posthumanist bondage, escaping by strapping himself to a possible vegetal protector, in a way, ­re-​­enacting, and taking control over, the lethal torture 432

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of “­being treed,” never completely safe from the recrudescent violence of his colonial masters. The octopus amorously clings to the olive tree, to refashion, ­pre-​­emptively take possession of, its destiny of death on olive wood. When, at the end of the episode, Oppian reports that the octopus willfully approaches the fishermen’s ­olive-​­wood lure and “­does not let go of the bond of desire” ([oud’] desma pothôn ­an-​­iêsin 306)—​­defying the instrumentalization that would deny it ­desire—​ ­we feel the queer insistence not only of pothos, but also of a transspecies bond. The sinewy grip of the octopus tightly holding on to the b­ ranch—​­before and after its d­ eath—​­halts the breach of interspecies division, homologous to the necropolitical demarcation between colonized and colonizers; it converts the bondage of slavery into an ­anti-​­hierarchical, unbound bond of undifferentiation, into the defiant clinginess or stickiness of queer lifedeath, into the camaraderie of a trans* assemblage, of trans* (­in)­animations.24

Suggestions for Further Reading On queerness, transness, and the inhuman, Barad 2012, 2015; Chen 2010, 2015; Freccero 2010, 2011, 2017; Luciano and Chen 2015; Terry 2000; on queerness and zoophilia, see Freccero 2010, 2017; Halberstam 2020; Rosenberg 2017; Rudy 2012; on transpeciesism and trans(*)-​­speciesism, see Barad 2015; Chen 2015; Hayward 2012; Hayward and Weinstein 2015; Kelley 2014; Livingston and Puar 2011; Sullivan 2006; on queerness and/­as ferality, Coviello 2017; Halberstam 2020; Halberstam and Nyong’o 2018; on tentacularity as becoming with, see Haraway 2016; on the asterisk of trans* and the starfish, Halberstam 2018; Hayward 2008, 2012; on queerness and creepiness, see Alexander 2017.

Notes 1 Kneebone (­2020) seems to me to underplay the eroticism of the poem. Discussing the scenes that I will be concerned with in this chapter, Kneebone locates their function in a desire to instill “­­self-​­constraint” in readers. 2 Lingis 2011, 39: “­In embracing a woman or a man we sense the commonality of her or his life and our own. But also the life in us understands the life in other species.... Our life is by nature destined to...gaze into the gaze of owls and octopods...creep...with caterpillars and silverfish. We trot like horses, crouch like cats, slink and crawl like snakes and worms.” 3 The first edition of Luca Lippi’s Latin version of Oppian’s Halieutica was published in 1478. Gow 1968, 63 evinces blatant phallic symbolism in textual criticism on the Halieutica. 4 On trans* form, see Telò 2023, ­Chapter 4. I agree with Chen 2010, ­289–​­290 that “­the opposition of trans and queer suggests a false dichotomy” and that “­just as gender and sex are unavoidably linked, so too are trans and queer.” 5 So Jackson 2020, 46, who sees “­animalization and humanization of the slave’s personhood” not as “­mutually exclusive” but “­mutually constitutive.” 6 Animot is the neologism, punning on the French plural animaux, that Derrida (­2008) famously coined to push against the homogenizing singularity of the word animal, which erases the diversity between and within species. 7 On the disavowed “­bestiality” of the meat industry, see G. Rosenberg 2017. 8 Thus G. Rosenberg 2017, 476, speaking of meat production. 9 On the Platonic chôra as a ­pre-​­or ­non-​­Symbolic space of sexual undifferentiation, see esp. Burchill 2017. 10 On ­trans-​­animality, see Kelley 2014 and Hayward and Weinstein 2015. On trans realism, see Lavery 2020; unfinishedness need not compromise realness: see esp. Halberstam 2018a and b. 11 Preciado 2018, 21 includes “­intersex bodies, transgender and transsexual bodies…the horny and the frigid, the sexually disabled…hermaphrodykes etc.” For Preciado, “­countersexuality asserts that sex and gender are complex bodily cybertechnologies”; “­making the most of Haraway’s teachings,” it “­appeals to an urgent queerization of ‘­nature’” (­­36–​­37).

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Mario Telò 1 2 On becoming dog as a “­meaningful instance of transspecies becoming,” see esp. Freccero 2011. 13 As Donna Haraway puts it, “­tentacularity is symchthonic, wound with abyssal and dreadful graspings, frayings, and weaving, passing relays again and again, in the generative recursion that make up living and dying” (­2016, 33). For the use of “­tentacularity” in trans* studies, see, e.g., Hayward and Weinstein 2015. 14 On reproductive futurism in the approach to animal sexuality, see also Stephen 2010. 15 An extra twist is the unmarked assimilation of masculine grammatical gender to biological gender. In other words, while we conventionally take poulupos as a male octopus (­as I do in my analysis), we cannot exclude the possibility that it designates an octopus of indeterminate biological gender; see also Lewis 2021 on the female octopus of My Octopus Teacher. See Freccero 2010 for a discussion of Derrida’s chatte (“­female cat”), to whom in “­The Animal That Therefore I Am” (­Derrida 2008) he initially refers with le chat (­gramatically masculine, semantically indeterminate); as she puts it, the discovery of Derrida’s chatte as the object of identification in the dynamic of a ­human-​­inhuman mirror stage “­queer[s] the intersubjective erotics of a h­ etero-​­narcissism in the making.” 16 Thus, Lingis 1994, 30, describing the “­foreign bodies” of bodybuilders. 17 See Hayward 2019: Just as Oedipus is not one but many (­he is the one, singled out, but marked and traversed nonetheless by a potent multiplicity), the octopus may be an exemplary figure for a multiple visuality, a multiplicity of visualities signaled by its eyes and legs. 18 On “­­intra-​­action” as “­the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” in the starbrittle, see Barad 2014, 228. 19 On jouir, see Nancy 2017. 20 On discursive invagination, see esp. Derrida 2011, 1­ 23–​­127. 21 On the pronouncement that begins with il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel—​­“­there’s no such thing as sexual relationship because one’s jouissance of the Other taken as a body is always inadequate” (­Lacan 1999, 144)—​­see Badiou and Cassin 2017. 22 On the strabism of goats, see Isidorus, Etymologies 12.1.14. Alexander 2017, 31 observes about his own creepiness: “­I was a creepy kid. Or at least that’s what I’m told. Physically, the odds were already stacked a bit against me.” 23 Schotten 2018, 1­ 09–​­110. See Marriott 2021, Edelman and Wilderson 2021 and Edelman 2023. 24 See Hayward and Weinstein 2015, ­196–​­197: “­The sticky tentacularity of ‘*’ signals not the primacy of ‘­human’…but the eventualization of life.… Trans* is not not ontological but is rather the expressive force between, with, and of that enables the asterisk to stick to particular materializations.”

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30 SAPPHO’S BODY, QUEER ABSTRACTION, AND LESBIAN FUTURITY Ella Haselswerdt

Sappho’s ­Corpus-­​­­in-​­Pieces Though Sappho’s fragments are often noted for their rich materiality, sensuality, and affective intensity, actual bodies can be difficult to locate in the corpus.1 The poems are rich in ­subjects—​ ­featuring, for example, a notably high number of pronouns when compared to other archaic ­lyric—​ ­but direct, physical descriptions of people are rare. As Eva Stehle puts it, the beauty of Sappho’s women is typically “­deflected,” onto the landscape, or onto other immediate surroundings: “­song, scents, flowers, rich cloth, enclosed places all reflect the woman’s erotic attractiveness” (­Stehle 1996, 220). The most salient thing about Sappho’s lover Anaktoria in fragment 16 is that she, like Helen, is gone (­line 16); and when Sappho’s longing conjures her presence later in the poem, she describes only “­her lovely [ἔρατόν] step / and the motion of light on her face” (­lines ­17–​­18). That is, her attractiveness is described not as an inherent aspect of her physicality, but rather as a matter of how she moves through the world, takes up space within it, and reflects it back to the viewer; the woman herself remains a cipher. In fragment 31, we are offered a vivid, visceral, ­first-​­person account of the speaker’s body being ravaged by love, lust, jealousy, or some heady stew of all three, but beyond a “­smile” and a “­laugh,” we are painted no portrait of the object of affection. And, as observers as early as Longinus have noted, the portrait of the speaker’s own body is in fact a catalog of its fragmentation and dissolution (­On Sublimity 10.1), rather than an affirmative description. This tension between bodily presence and absence is clearly discernable in the extant poetry, but the heavy fragmentation of the text naturally exacerbates the effect, as we are confronted simultaneously with the materiality of the papyri that remain alongside the absence of what has been lost. A similar tension between presence and absence inheres in the poetry’s elusive creator, a figure with an outsized impact on the history of sexuality but who herself remains, and will always remain, a cipher. Indeed, a slippage has emerged between the idea of the poet’s fragmentary corpus and her elusive body. Page duBois riffs on this pun in her 1995 book Sappho Is Burning, which refigures Foucault’s history of sexuality from a feminist perspective: she titles its third chapter, on fragmentation, “­Sappho’­s-­​­­Body-­​­­in-​­Pieces.” That is, fragmented poetry has become strongly associated with the fragmented biography of the personage behind them. While positivist biographical reconstructions of archaic and even classical poets will always be a minefield, the stakes feel particularly high when it comes to Sappho. As “­she” is putatively (­one 437

DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-37

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of) the only female ancient poets, even the most radical postmodernists and new critics may feel a pang at completely dismissing any interest at all in the subject position of the author. I will not discuss here the many attempts to argue that Sappho, the woman who lived in the archaic period on the island of Lesbos, was either chaste or heterosexual (­for that see, for example, DeJean 1989; Haselswerdt Forthcoming; Mueller 2021). What I am interested in for the sake of this chapter is what it means to cling to Sappho as an emblem of modern lesbianism at a moment when the identity category is fraught with attempts to pit cis lesbians against trans women, and trans lesbians in ­particular—​­a rhetoric that came into its own in Janice Raymond’s 1979 transphobic screed but has never gone away, and that, as of the writing of this chapter, in fact, seems to be gaining new traction. Trans scholar Susan Stryker suggests that the first victim of the TERF assertion that trans lesbians are, by their nature, predatory, may have been the trans singer and activist Beth Eliot, who was hounded by accusations of harassment in the early 1970s. She was ultimately expelled from the Daughters of Bilitis in 1972, “­not because of any accusations against her but on the grounds that she wasn’t ‘­really’ a woman.” (­Stryker 2008, 103) The Daughters of Bilitis was a lesbian association named after a fictional lover of Sappho’s. Raynor would go on to title a chapter of her book “­­Sappho-­​­­by-​­Surgery”, the implication, in the context, being that trans women were trying to deceptively and wrongfully manipulate their way into an exclusive club meant only for cis women. Reinvestment in Sappho as a sort of u­ r-​­lesbian ­foremother—​­and, indeed, a reinvestment in the category of “­lesbianism” ­altogether—​­can feel like a turn toward not only antiquity but to an exclusionary essentialism that many of us in the queer community would prefer to unequivocally repudiate. But as Lisa Moore argues in her essay “­The Future of Lesbian Genders,” lesbianism has been and remains a useful category for [I]ntertwined lesbian, trans, and woman of color feminist work on gender that has deeply shaped current critical fields sometimes supposed to have supplanted the lesbian. It is in their interaction with ‘­the lesbian,’ variously understood, that these fields have broken new ground in gender theory. (­Moore 2016) Moore focuses in particular on how lesbianism in modernity, in many of its various localized and ­community-​­specific incarnations, has in fact always contained within it the capacity for recognizing a wide variety of genders. Therefore, “[n]ew understandings of gender, race, and the human… actually make the term “­lesbian” more useful and yes, sexier than ever” (­Moore 2016). I argue that the desire for a queer lesbian Sappho can be productive, for classicists trying to imagine ­non-​­positivist identification with antiquity, and, further, for those of us interested in ­non-​ ­essentializing, meaningful and, embodied experiences of g­ ender—​­that celebrate bodies as a site of sensing and feeling, a locus of interpretation conditioned by its individual experience, and a means of connection with others, while resisting a pernicious ­faux-​­scientism that tries to categorize them. The contention I put forth here is that contemporary art, more specifically contemporary artists’ books that simultaneously transmit and respond to the fragments of Sappho while playing in the interstices between embodiment and abstraction, are particularly ­well-​­suited to helping us think and feel our way with and through these related tensions. Johanna Drucker, who wrote the book on artists’ books, argues that to qualify as such a project must “­interrogate… the conceptual or material form of the book as part of its intention, thematic interests, or production activities” (­Drucker 2004). As will be clear, I give broad scope to how I conceive of such interrogation, and many would dispute classifying some of the works I will discuss here as “­artists’ books;” but I am less 438

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concerned with querying the boundaries of this category than I am with thinking about how various artists have leveraged the interaction between Sappho’s corpus and its medium of transmission to create works that honor the fragments’ queer intimacy and affective excesses while resisting a positivist approach to their creation and creator. That is, the interventions offer a particularly fruitful, and particularly queer, way of reconciling the fragments’ “­somatic abundance,” to use a phrase of j/­j hastain’s, with their elusive and fragmented bodies, both those who reside in the poems and the poet’s own. All of these projects create a body for Sappho, and, in doing so, create a site of ­non-​­normative desire and potential identification. Attention to these experimental books is salutary for classicists of all stripes, and especially for philologists. By concretely enacting the book form’s latent expressive capacities beyond simply the transmission of text, they allow us a fresh perspective on the primary medium of our discipline. And by exaggerating the relationship between text and flesh, the projects remind us that no formal decision is neutral. The interventions discussed in this chapter will be considered in the context of “­queer abstraction,” a mode in contemporary art that is intentionally underdefined; as David J. Getsy warns at the beginning of his “­Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction,” “­you will be frustrated and fruitless if you go searching for a singular definition of ‘­queer abstraction’—​­let alone anything resembling a style, an iconography or a movement” (­Getsy 2019, 1). But [I]n its forgoing of representation and its embrace of afiguration, abstraction makes room for a different kind of sedition against the imposition of normativity. Rather than rendering recognizable bodies, abstraction stages relationships among forms and their contexts, allowing us to see differently the ways in which those relationships can unfold. That is, abstraction is about relations, and a queer investment in abstraction can be a way to allegorize social relations through a playing out of formal relations. (­Getsy 2019, 2) Furthermore, “­abstraction, as a mode of visual poiesis, both conjures new visualizations and rebuffs viewers’ impulses to recognize and categorize” (­Getsy 2019, 2), allowing embodied queer energies to resonate without fitting into clear identitarian boxes. Similarly, artist Ashton Cooper describes queer abstraction as “­an investment in indeterminacy that allows for an expansive sense of e­ mbodiment—​­which includes, but is not limited to, the slipperiness of gender, affect, desire, and language.” (Cooper et. al. 2017, 287) Or, if you would prefer a pithier formulation, queer abstraction shows us “­How to be a pervert with no body,” per the subtitle of artist and writer Travis Jeppeson’s article on the topic (­Jeppeson 2019). That is, the interventions that I will discuss recognize that while by now Sappho’s body has been thoroughly abstracted from that of any particular woman who resided on Lesbos during 42nd Olympiad, this abstraction need not be tantamount to a dematerialization, and it still allows for encounters marked by recognition and ­non-​­normative desire. By simultaneously interrogating the book form and the lacunae in Sappho’s corpus, these projects create queer new ways of thinking about and feeling with the poet and her legacy. This dynamic resonance between presence and absence, when mapped onto the projects’ mode of weaving together antiquity, modernity, and futurity, brings to mind not only queer abstraction, but also queer time: the anachrony that inheres to desiring and identifying across vast expanses of time has itself been theorized as queer, as a disruption of normative, linear, teleological approaches to history and historicism.2 Elizabeth Freeman has argued that “­nonsequential forms of time… can fold subjects into structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye” (­Freeman 2010, xi). By embracing anachronistic relationships marked by embodied desire and 439

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identification across vast expanses of time, each of the projects discussed in this chapter enlists intertemporal collaborators in the construction of queer futures. As José Esteban Muñoz wrote, “­hope as a critical methodology can best be described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (­Muñoz 2009, 4). I engage these works, then, with a hopeful eye toward ways that they can bring us closer to what Muñoz described as a “­potential utopia in the realm of the n­ ot-​­yet.” It is important to note here that out of the four case studies ­presented—​­Sappho Fragments by Rose Frain; Poetry of Sappho, a collaboration between John Daley, Page duBois, Anita Cowles Reardon, and Julie Mehretu; Sapphopunk: how Sappho almost became a stone femme a fiction in honor of otherness an experiment in dignity or Sappho’s queer biography by j/­j hastain; and a ­fifth-​­century Attic hydria by a painter in the Polygnotos ­group—​­only hastain’s project explicitly figures itself as “­queer.” However, per Getsy once again, Queer engagements… have never been delimited by intention. Queer reading practices and patterns of interpretation have always identified objects of love, desire, and engagement far and wide… many abstractions contain inadvertent logics and sites of cathexis for queer viewers looking for ways to see otherwise… queer possibility can be located (­as well as hidden) anywhere. (­Getsy 2019, 7­ 0–​­1) My goal here, then, is not to argue that particular interventions were created with queer intentions, but rather that when artists attempt to materially and nonfiguratively capture the dynamics of absence and presence that inhere within Sappho’s poetics and in the material conditions of the poetry’s reception, the results reverberate with the potential for queer identification. My hope is that attention to such approaches might bring us closer to an expansive, ­non-​ ­positivist, ­non-​­essentializing mode of understanding “­Sappho” as a once and future emblem of queer lesbian identity. Second, I suggest that the analysis in the first section of the chapter might lead us toward a more expansive way of understanding embodiment within Sappho’s fragments themselves, inasmuch as they are intertemporally constituted and operating on wavelengths beyond figuration. I will conclude with a reading of Sappho fragment 146 (“­no honey nor honeybee for me”), informed by the preceding interventions. That is, I will proceed in a manner that is itself recursive: reading how the dynamics of the fragments are embodied in the art objects, and then reading the queer abstraction therein back into the fragments. This anachronistic collaboration both draws new resonances out of the ­much-​­read poetry while offering an open, dynamic, and ­future-​­oriented mode of (­queer, lesbian) identification with Sappho.

Sappho Fragments No paratextual apparatus greets the initiate who encounters Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women, a project created by the ­mixed-​­medium visual artist Rose Frain in 1989, that now resides in the rare books library in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Instead, after opening a white box, they will find a pair of white gloves resting on a billowy bed of white gauze, an intimate invitation to be physically enveloped by the piece (­­Figure 30.1). The fabric unfurls not to reveal a bound book, but an assemblage of delicate, ­rough-​­edged handmade pieces of paper, infused with bits of ephemera. A fine silver thread; a piece of grass; a small flower; a feather. Some sheets are engraved with Suzy Q. Groden’s (­1965) translations of Sappho’s poems. This is not a comprehensive collection of the fragments; in fact, it lacks most of the greatest hits. There is no hymn to Aphrodite (­fragment 1), no priamel valuing whatever one 440

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­Figure  30.1 Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women. © Rose Frain. Photo credit Ella Haselswerdt.

loves most over the fleet of ships and the host of cavalry (­fragment 16). Frain’s curation is personal and idiosyncratic. Though the piece is not figurative, it is wholly corporeal. Many of the sheets feature a light pink or purple wash, its shape reminiscent in turn of a womb, a vagina, or a bruise. Some sheets are barely able to hold themselves together; fragments of paper are connected with threads and ribbons of mottled gauze, a fabric that functions in the piece as equal parts bandage and boudoir. Fragility obliges the reader to handle the project tenderly. As artist Chitra Ganesh says, queer abstraction traffics in [T]he discomforts or the fragilities or the failures of embodiment as a point of entry into thinking about an alternative narrative space, a different kind of imaginary… which reverberates against one’s own stream of consciousness, one’s formation of ­narrative—​­life narrative, art narrative. (­Cooper 2017, 297) It is relevant to note here that there is an ambiguity to the work’s title: “­Sappho Fragments,” rather than “­Sappho’s Fragments,” that is, an invitation to imagine the pieces in the box not only as pieces of poetry but also as pieces of the poet herself. While carefully handling the poet’s fragmented corpus and abstracted body, the reader’s own body enters an erotic and visceral “­narrative space.” 441

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The piece as a whole displays a material sensitivity to its indirect responses to the text (­­Figures 30.2 and 30.3). At one point, the letters [swee], from the famous fragment about the bittersweetness of love, peek through one of the paper’s o­ rifices—​­or are they lacunae? Triangles recur throughout in various orientations, some in palimpsest. One seems to be fashioned from a mixture of paper pulp and red human hair (­from where on the body, it is not clear). The triangle’s form, in its outline, is an abstraction of the triangularity of erotic love in Sappho’s poetry, a radical distillation of the nature of eros: the geometric abstraction stands in for the lover, the beloved, and that which keeps them apart. By fusing the particularity and embodied immediacy of hair with such a form, Frain activates a reverberation between the conceptual and the sexual (­­Figure  30.4). Frain works with and in a number of materials that are coded as feminine (­the dainty white gloves, the gauze) that seem to link the “­reader” and the ­book-­​­­as-​­poet in a queer lesbian encounter, one that is marked by invitation and open resonance rather than strict identitarian categorization. The “­book,” as it were, asks to be read both forward and backward. When you reach the end of the pile and encounter the ­future-​­oriented fragment 147 “­they will remember us later on I say,” you must slowly make your way back to the beginning, replacing each piece until they are restored to order. That is, in the process of “­reading” you must dismember and then reassemble the corpus. The entire experience is dazzling, a sensation of being transported decades and centuries while also completely inhabiting one’s body in the present ­moment—​­a feeling of accidentally

­Figure  30.2 Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women. ©Rose Frain. Visible text from Sappho translated by Suzy Q. Groden. Photo credit Ella Haselswerdt.

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­­Figure  30.3  Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women. ©Rose Frain. Visible text from Sappho translated by Suzy Q. Groden. Photo credit Ella Haselswerdt.

intercepting a tender love letter from another dimension and discovering that you, in fact, are the lover intended. The project collapses the time that intervenes between the distant past and the present, drawing the poet, artist, and reader into an anachronistic collaboration.

Poetry of Sappho A 2016 limited edition (­only 426 copies produced) essentially complete version of the fragments was produced by Arion Press, with prints by Julie Mehretu. Mehretu is a ­high-​­profile lesbian contemporary artist, who was born in Addis Ababa Ethiopia, and moved to the United States as a child. She is typically known for her ­large-​­scale murals, which consist of layered, gestural tangles of lines and shapes. Sappho’s poems, in a new translation by John Daley, are framed by all of the paratextual elements expected in a traditional academic volume, and apart from its ­self-​­described “­deluxe” production values, that is exactly what the tome is: an introduction to Sappho and her reception history by renowned scholar Page duBois, is illustrated with recently discovered woodcut prints by Anita Cowles Reardon from the 1880s. These images depict a familiar vision of antiquity: berobed figures, apparently denizens of archaic Lesbos, accompanied by the lyre, aulos (­a double flute), and writing tablets, are shown gathering together in a musical and literary society. Originally intended to illustrate her husband’s volume of Sappho and Alcaeus, Reardon’s woodcut prints represent a clear vision of who the poems’ creators were and how they came to be. The neat 443

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­Figure  30.4 Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women. © Rose Frain. Photo credit Ella Haselswerdt.

clear lines suggest a transparent and direct relationship between antiquity and the present, giving the introduction a distinctly retro feel (­­Figure 30.5). But the fragments themselves are regularly punctuated by ­two-​­page spreads of Mehretu’s images, which in their abstract virtuosity vault the edition into the bleeding edge of contemporary art. Many, true to form, feel monumental, even though relegated to the pages of a book: densely scrawled lines convey movement and rhythm, at times seeming almost cartographic, charting courses and energies that radiate with a centrifugal force. It is as though Mehretu explodes the precise, dainty lines of the Reardon woodcuts. In Mehretu’s prints, the pulsating desire and throbbing potentiality of Sappho’s minuscule fragments are translated into an unruly affective tangle (­­Figure 30.6). But some of the images are more i­ ntimate—​­we get a taste of this in the cover art, suggestive of an urgently scrawled, indecipherable ­hand-​­written language, drawing the viewer into a conspiratorial conversation; these figures recur throughout. Occasionally images verge on the figurative: for example, the print situated immediately after Sappho’s fragment 16, discussed in the introduction. The ­cross-​­hatched lines seem to suggest the graceful movement of a figure that is itself absent, nothing more than blank space. If the print could be construed as an illustration, it would seem to be more representative of Anaktoria’s “­lovely walk” and “­light moving on her face” than the woman herself, suggesting an aesthetic affinity with Sappho. The book is an intertemporal collaborative project with both living and dead ­creators—​­one that moves backward and forward through time in an attempt to capture and express (­as well as to 444

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­Figure  30.5  From The Poetry of Sappho. Copyright 2011.  Published by arrangement with Arion Press.

­Figure  30.6  From The Poetry of Sappho. Copyright 2011.  Published by arrangement with Arion Press.

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contribute to) both Sappho’s poems and the powerful reverberations they’ve affected throughout the ages. Though one may argue about whether they succeed, Mehretu’s prints strain to explode the traditional, gilded book form they inhabit, suggesting that such staid media is incapable of containing or expressing the energies of the fragments.

Sapphopunk Few would agree to call this intervention an “­artists’ book” per Drucker’s definition, and in its abundant narrativization of Sappho’s story some may question thinking of it as an “­abstraction.” But Sapphopunk: how Sappho almost became a stone femme/­a fiction in honor of otherness/­an experiment in dignity or Sappho’s queer biography by artist j/­j hastain offers yet another way of transmitting and responding to Sappho’s corpus and Sappho’s body. This slender book, about 5.5 x 6.5 inches, has a ­cut-­​­­and-​­paste sensibility that makes it reminiscent of an elevated zine. Hastain’s project not only transmits translations of Sappho’s fragments, underlined throughout the text but also builds a world and emplots a short erotic narrative around them. For example: The young woman whom S has chosen, willingly begins to close her eyes to S’ insistence, but before this student closes eyes completely, she mouths to S (­but makes no sound): “­Your hair is so beautiful pinned back like that. You look so strong. You are everything I have ever dreamed of. You touch me so deeply. I need you. I trust you. I shall be ever maiden for you.” S ties the young woman’s hands while singing the words “­my muse with beautiful hair” into this woman’s open mouth. Hastain’s text overflows with the artist’s own embodied responses to the fragments, subsuming and saturating them with flesh and fluids. Further, the artist’s archaic Lesbos abounds with anachrony while maintaining the fragments’ interest in materials and environment. Consider this description of Sappho, often, as above, called S in the narrative: Sometime S wears robe, sometimes ­non-­​­­form-​­fitting dresses, but mostly she wears ­linen-​ ­dense pant suits. In the rooms where she instructs, time passages simultaneously to the changing light: never one without the other. One of the primary studies is the conjuring capacities of the relationship of mood to weather. Interestingly, hastain employs but queers many of the tropes present in later ancient testimonia that have historically been used to de-​­sexualize and un-​­queer Sappho and her poetry: for example, in hastain’s story Sappho acts as schoolmistress of a transient group of young female initiates, who will go on to marry men; Sappho herself has a husband; Sappho falls desperately in love and lust with a person named Phaon, and not long after, falls off of a cliff. But here Sappho’s “­school” is a surreal, ­honey-​­drenched, visceral, and deeply erotic consortium, one that will transcend any of the mundane sexual encounters the women might have with their husbands, an institution that subverts rather than serves the status quo. And Phaon is no longer a beautiful male ferryman, as Ovid suggested, but is instead a genderqueer initiate, who expands Sappho’s conception of the erotic gendered power imbalances within queer interactions,

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­Figure  30.7  Collage from Sapphopunk, © j/­j hastain.

and introduces her to sensual experience that transcends Aphrodite. The two play with and within both established and seemingly invented categories of lesbian gender identity, like “­stone butch,” “­stone femme,” and the less familiar “­land butch.” In this richly realized phantasmagoric world, where does abstraction come in? The morning after an intense sexual encounter with Phaon, Sappho awakens to a dear John letter, of sorts, where Phaon announces that they are leaving Sappho, but also leaving her some of their “­paintings:” “­three for your women, one for you, and one of me.” Five images follow in the book, not paintings, but collages: assemblages of body parts, wings, eyes, and flowers (­­Figure  30.7). The final image, presumably the one “­of” Phaon (­­Figure 30.8), contains within it few images that I am able to parse. Just as Sappho has bequeathed us a version of her body from antiquity in the form of her fragmented and contested corpus, Phaon leaves their body to Sappho, translating it into the medium of painting, which is then translated into an abstract assemblage of parts printed on the page. That is, though while hastain’s project arguably exists largely within a traditional “­book” format, it does query its own mediality, and, particularly relevant in this context, depicts and abstracts queer bodies while shifting into a visual medium to make manifest the affective excesses of the text. Sappho, simultaneously bereft and enraptured by her loss of and longing for Phaon, as well as a deep and visceral mother’s love for ­Cleis—​­a moment of, in hastain’s words, “­somatic abundance”—​­slips and falls off of the cliff.

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­Figure  30.8  Collage from Sapphopunk, © j/­j hastain.

Collage is a practice that can render figuration into abstraction. In another account of their collage practice, hastain makes clear that they find the abstracting power of this artform particularly useful for escaping essentializing notions of gender: Some of these [collages] were created in the red light of what I call My Cave… In a cave, it is dark. This darkness enables a he and a she to share a body in ways that are not at all at odds with one another. This is not necessarily a male he; this is not necessarily a female she. Are these lovers? Are they two of many aspects of a singular, the myriad in singularity? Touch and union predate distinction. Instead of being a historicized weapon, in a cave a pronoun can be a validating reflection, the experience of reverberation, a place in which staring can occur. When an umbilical state is our sense of place (­as with a cave), is the zone by which we mature a visual version of tone? (­hastain 2014) Indeed, Sappho Fragments might be understood as a ­mixed-​­media collage, and The Poetry of Sappho as a sort of intertemporal collaborative collage. Collage emerges in these works as a means of deconstructing the normative body and reassembling it in a way that reflects the reverberations of desire and kaleidoscopic possibilities of gender. 448

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Sappho Lisant Before moving on to an analysis of the final case ­study—​­a ­fifth-​­century BCE Attic ­hydria—​­I will take a moment to consider the limits and opportunities of “­abstraction” versus “­figuration.” This object, which features what many would identify as a standard classical female domestic ­type-​ ­scene, may appear to be strictly figurative, similar to (­and indeed, most likely directly inspiring) Reardon’s woodcut prints discussed above. But, per Getsy, [T]here are degrees of hybridity between abstracting visual practices and representational ones. Indeed, one could say that any representation is at least a little abstract and any abstraction, however reductive, can never fully excise the symbolic or the figurative… it is not a contradiction if an abstraction alludes to a figure, incorporates a found object that is recognizable for what it once was, or twists a recognizable image into a work that operates in relation to histories of abstraction. As well, the appropriation and queer adoption of recognizable images, objects, and artworks have been useful tools to question received meanings and to draw out suppressed possibilities. (­Getsy 2019, 68) Having identified an embodied, material sensitivity to the dynamics of the fragments in contemporary ­mixed-​­media and visual interventions, in this section I ask what might be gained by attuning oneself to this potentiality in an ancient ­object—​­one that, indeed, precedes artistic concepts of abstraction and figuration, and may freely reverberate between these modes. The vase in question is a famous one, often called “­Sappho Lisant,” currently on display at the Athenian National Archaeological Museum (­­Figure 30.9). 3 In its central image, a woman sits, shoulders slightly hunched, as she gazes down at a book roll, which she seems to contemplate silently; her mouth remains closed. One woman stands behind her, labeled Nikopolis (­nominative case); the woman just to her right, holding out the lyre, is tagged with the name Kallis (­nominative case); and the woman furthest to the right, with her hand, draped sensuously over Kallis’ shoulder, is unnamed. All of the women are draped in flowing garments. Woven crowns hover above the scene. Also on the vase (­though imperceptible in the printed image), in the triangulated space between the woman’s face, the scroll, and the chelys lyre, is an inscription reading ΣΑΠΠΩΣ: our poet’s name in the genitive case. I will return to genitive, and to the broader scene depicted, below. But first, I consider the scroll gripped in the central woman’s hands (­­Figure 30.10). What is most unusual about this otherwise typical vase is that the woman at the center of the scene reads from a scroll containing actual, legible Greek, not just dots or nonsense characters, as is the case in similar reading vases. This is the only extant ancient vase depicting a woman reading with real Greek on the scroll, and indeed, it is likely the richest of the few r­ eal-­​­­text-­​­­on-​­scroll Attic vases that remain.4 Letters run vertically down the right and left sides of the scroll, and horizontally down the center panel, creating two sets of text, orthogonally juxtaposed and apparently syntactically discrete. Along the sides of the scroll, running vertically (­with some embodied interventions): ΠΤΕΡΟΕΤΑ [hand] ΕΠΕΑ [hand] πτερόετα ἔπεα “­winged words”

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­Figure  30.9  ­Fifth-​­century BCE ­red-​­figure Attic hydria, attributed to a painter from the Polygnotos group. National Archaeological Museum, Athens, photographer: Giannis Patrikianos. © Hellenic ministry of culture and sports/ Hellenic organization of cultural resources development (­H.O.C.RE.D.).

And on the central face of the scroll, running horizontally: ΘΕΟΙ ΗΕΡΙ ΩΝ ΕΠΕ ΩΝ [thumb]ΑΡΧ ΟΜ 450

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­Figure  30.10  C ­ lose-​­up of ­fifth-​­century BCE ­red-​­figure Attic hydria, attributed to a painter from the Polygnotos group. National Archaeological Museum, Athens, photographer: Giannis Patrikianos. © Hellenic ministry of culture and sports/ hellenic organization of cultural resources Development (­H.O.C.RE.D.).

ΑΙΑ [thumb] ΙΝ [hand] ΝΤ [hand] Τ [hand] Ν[hand] θεοί, ἠερίων ἐπέων ἄρχομαι… “­gods, I begin [with] airy/­early words” The literary pretentions of this text will be immediately apparent. The sides of the scroll unmistakably evoke the “­winged words” of epic, one of Homer’s most commonly deployed hexameter formulae in the Iliad and the Odyssey. But the significance of the text in the center panel of the scroll poses more of a puzzle. What does it mean for words to be ἠερίος? In archaic poetry, the word means “­related to the early morning, to dawn.” Later, in the fifth century, it also gains the apparently related meaning of “­misty” or “­airy” (­Beekes 2010, 510). Unlike the Homeric formula on the scroll’s margins, there are no extant instances of ἔπος modified by the adjective ἠέριος anywhere else in the ancient Greek literary corpus. There is also no consensus about how should we interpret the relationship between the phrases. Is “­winged words,” written on the outside of the scroll, meant to be the title of a collection, of which the scroll’s depicted contents represent the first poem? On this reading, “­airy/­early words” serves as a gloss of “­winged words,” a plausible thought, considering the potential congruence between words that are “­airy” and words that are “­winged.” But there’s no evidence of titles being inscribed in this way, and if we imagine the scroll as a real object, such an arrangement doesn’t make much practical sense. It is possible that, as Dmitri Yatromanolakis suggests, there is a tension between the phrases, indicated by their orthogonal orientation. Winged words may serve as a metonymy for Homeric epos, here relegated to the margins, and contrasted with what lies inside the fold, a sort of lyric “écriture féminine” (­Yatromanalakis 2007, 163). In Homer, words that are winged are words that fly fast and true, they’re words that hit their mark. It may be relevant to consider in this context 451

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the fact that the few times in Homer that unspoken words are described as unwinged, they are failing to emerge from the mouths of women in particular. This interpretation aligns well with a ­long-​­established seam in Sappho scholarship that argues the poet intentionally uses Homeric epos as a foil for her own poetry. The adjective ἠεριων would seem to convey a more hazy, ephemeral quality, a seeming reference to the insubstantiality of the world evoked in Sappho’s poems. But I also want to note that both sets of texts are obscured, interrupted, and enveloped by Sappho’s hands and thumbs, linking the phrases via their entanglement with the body. Her thumbs frame the ­first-​­person verb ἄρχομαι[α], “­I begin” serving as a sort of embodied punctuation. It is worth noting the way that temporality factors into the scene. That is, the woman reads a set, inscribed text, words that have been composed in the past; at the same time, she is being offered a lyre, as though she might sing them in the future. Perhaps “­winged words” are about the past, the intrusion of the body into the text about the present, the airy early words, and the eternal inchoative of “­I begin” about the endless possibilities of the future. From this perspective, Sappho’s “­book” is in fact an intertemporal collage, fragmented texts imbued with, and entangled with, the body. Acknowledging that these questions will inevitably remain unresolved, I want to return to the genitive ΣΑΠΠΩΣ and consider what it means for any of these elements to be “­of Sappho.” It is not terribly unusual for a vase to feature a tag inscription in the genitive case; the suggestion is that we can understand an elided εἰκών: an “­image” or “­representation” of Sappho. But it is interesting in this particular context, given the fact that the other named women in the scene are marked in the nominative case. The genitive has always struck me as the queerest case: oblique, open, and sensuous: graspable but more than you can grab. Yatromanalakis suggests that the “­of Sappho” inscription’s proximity to the scroll may serve to attribute the text within it to the poet (­Yatromanalakis 2007, 154). But perhaps it also folds the entire ­scene—​­the women, the lyre, the crowns, the text, the ceramic vase ­itself—​­into the idea of “­Sappho,” a presence that exceeds any individual woman, or any set of texts. In fact, the question arises whether we should think of the woman in the center as Sappho at all. Perhaps she is just a devoted reader, a philologist who summons the scene via her loving attention to the text. It is further possible that the “­scroll,” lacking the sag of papyri in the middle, may in fact be a stone funereal marker, no scroll at all. In this scenario, the fragmented, somatically entangled text is in some sense itself a representation of Sappho’s body and Sappho’s corpus. The vase then depicts not “­Sappho Reading” but a woman reading and grappling with the work of a l­ong-​­dead, but still materially immediate, poet. A better title might be “­Reading Sappho.” If the viewer is invited to identify with the scene, then it may not be an identification with the poet Sappho, but rather with the sensuous sensory embodied intertemporality that inheres to her (­here, already) fragmented poetry. These readings must remain only open possibilities rather than definitive interpretations, but they suggest that some of the dynamics of queer abstraction identified in the preceding interventions may be active here, with the vase existing as an intertemporal, interpersonal, somatic, material collage: with “­of Sappho” serving as the glue.

Wise Sappho: Honey and the Bee Finally, as promised, I turn recursively back to Sappho’s fragments themselves, specifically the tiny poem 146: μήτε μοι μέλι μήτε μέλισσα (“­no honey nor bee for me”). What would it mean to bring the sensibilities of queer abstraction to bear here? In some respects, this may seem like an odd choice for the current undertaking, in that the fragment does not contain within it any explicit references to homoerotic desire, nor any explicit references to the body. It is most often cited for its striking alliteration and proverbializing tone. Indeed, the interpretation of the fragment as a proverb 452

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was predetermined by the context of its transmission. It first appears in a ­first-​­century BCE rhetorical treatise called On the Figures of Speech by the grammarian Tryphon as an example of a proverb, or παροιμία. Three centuries later, the lexicographer Diogenian (­6,58) interprets the phrase like so: ἐπί τῶν μὴ βουλομένων παθεῖν τι ἀγαθὸν μετὰ ἀπευκτοῦ About those unwilling to experience anything good with the bad. On this standard reading, the bee serves as a ­stand-​­in for its sting; or, per Anne Carson’s commentary, the whole thing serves as “­a renunciation of things aphrodisiac” (­Carson 2001, 379) Despite the ambivalence of eros throughout Sappho’s corpus, its famously ­sweet-​­bitter quality, a direct renunciation of pleasure because of the pain that can accompany it seems out of place. While the corpus certainly need not present a fully coherent sensibility, it is worth considering whether the rather anodyne interpretation we’ve been left with isn’t telling us the whole story. So, for a moment I want to leave aside Trypho and Diogenian and all of the other ancient ­proto-​ ­philologists who have attempted to domesticate this fragment into a banal commonplace expression and move to what I believe may be a reception and reinterpretation of the poem by a far less celebrated ancient female poet, Nossis. She was a writer of Hellenistic epigrams, who lived in southern Italy in the third century BCE; she claims Sappho as a foremother, and her epigrams are similarly concerned with Aphrodite, and with female erotic experience. In a poem commonly thought to be the sphragis (­a sort of programmatic signature) of one of her collections, she writes: ἅδιον οὐδὲν ἔρωτος, ἃ δ᾽ ὄλβια, δεύτερα πάντα ἐστὶν ἀπὸ στόματος δ᾽ ἔπτυσα καὶ τὸ μέλι. τοῦτο λέγει Νοσσίς: τίνα δ᾽ ἁ Κύπρις οὐκ ἐφίλασεν, οὐκ οἶδεν κήνα γ᾽ ἄνθεα ποῖα ῥόδα. Nothing is sweeter than desire. All other delights are second. From my mouth I spit even honey. Nossis says this. Whom Aphrodite does not love, knows not her flowers, what roses they are. (­Transl. Skinner 2009, my emphasis) Like all Hellenistic poetry, this poem, when it is (­but rarely) read, is mined for metapoetic imagery; more specifically, since Plato, bees are often employed as symbols for poetry, flowers for poems, or their inspiration (­Skinner 1989). But here I will consider the poem as a response to Sappho 146. Nossis brings a sort of punk aesthetic to Sappho’s demur, not only in the extremity of the act of spitting but also in the transformation of the warm mmmm of Sappho’s mēte moi meli mēte melissa into percussive plosives (­apo stomatos d’eptusa). But the crucial thing about this poem for my current purposes is that Nossis spurns honey because it is not sweet enough. She rejects the honey metaphor for eros in favor of the purity of a radical, pure, erotic experience, one that isn’t mediated by honey as a ­stand-​­in, or, for that matter, by a bee as a proxy: Nossis wants to be the bee herself, to bury herself in the flowers, to discover “­what sort of things they are.” That is, the rejection is a proxy for an even deeper commitment to eros. H.D., the penname for the modernist poet Hilda Doolittle, has her own version of Sappho 146. Published in her collection Hymen in 1921 the poem was one of several “­fragments” by H.D., 453

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imagistic ­re-​­imaginings of scraps of Sappho. This poem was originally titled “­Not honey” and later given the title “­Fragment 113 / ‘­Neither honey nor bee for me.’—​­Sappho,” and is structured as a sort of extended priamel. With her erotic, repetitive, heady description of pollination, she elaborates on the tension inherent to the brief Sappho ­fragment—​­that is, the warm sensuality of the phonetics coupled with the apparent rejection it communicates. Not honey, not the plunder of the bee from meadow or ­sand-​­flower or mountain bush; from ­winter-​­flower or shoot born of the later heat: not honey, not the sweet stain on the lips and teeth: not honey, not the deep plunge of soft belly and the clinging of the g­ old-​­edges ­pollen-​­dusted feet; not ­so–​­ though rapture blind my eyes, and hunger crisp dark and inert my mouth, not honey, not the south, not the tall stalk of red ­twin-​­lilies, nor light branch of fruit tree caught in flexible light branch; not honey, not the south; ah flower of purple iris, flower of white, or of the iris, withering the g­ rass–​­ for fleck of the sun’s fire, gathers such heat and power, that ­shadow-​­print is light, cast through the petals of the yellow iris flower; But while Sappho’s fragment breaks off after the rejection, H.D. offers an alternative in the poem’s final stanza: but if you turn again, seek strength of arm and throat, touch as the god; neglect the ­lyre-​­note; knowing that you shall feel, about the frame, no trembling of the string 454

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but heat, more passionate of bone and the white shell and fiery tempered steel. (­H.D. 1921, ­33–​­34) The invocation and rejection of honey and the bee is not, for H.D., a repudiation of the erotic. Rather, the rejection has a sort of incantatory power that delivers her something deeper, something purer. An essay called “­The Wise Sappho” written by H.D. about Sappho around this same ­time—​ ­which, perhaps not incidentally, was around the same time she met Bryher, the woman who would be her romantic partner, life companion, and c­ o-​­parent for the rest of her life, and to whom, along with her daughter, she dedicated the collection Hymen—​­seems to elaborate on this idea: [I]t is not warmth we look for in these poems, not fire nor sunlight, not heat in the ordinary sense, diffused, and comforting (­nor is it light, day or dawn or light of s­un-​­setting), but another element containing all these, magnetic, vibrant; not the lightning as it falls from the thunder cloud, yet lightning in a sense: white, unhuman element, containing fire and light and warmth, yet in its essence differing from all these, as if the brittle ­crescent-​­moon gave heat to us, or some splendid scintillating star turned warm suddenly in our hand like a jewel, sent by the beloved. (­H.D. 1982, ­57–​­58) For H.D., Sappho provides a portal to experience that transcends everyday sensation, but requires the incantatory evocation and denial of everyday sensation to delineate its contours; consider once more Longinus’ discussion of Sappho’s fragment 31’s sublimity. Each denial, each refusal, builds until she can access an intensity of sensation that transcends metaphor. The poem brings to mind Sapphopunk, where yet again a rejection of honey corresponds with a rejection of essentialism. There, Sappho ultimately embraces a lesbianism beyond the binary, which does not fully abandon, but transcends the h­ oney-​­drenched eroticism of the cult of Aphrodite over which she presides, for a purer, deeper experience of eros, marked by the simultaneous embrace of “­somatic abundance” and the rejection of figuration’s capacity to represent it. Let us return now to our little fragment: the mmms become a hum that gently vibrates the body, that elides the difference between the honey, the bee, and the singer, the warm labials building and folding in, a sort of incantation transcending meaning and image to enter a realm of pure erotic intensity, grounded in but not constrained by the body. It now seems relevant to consider that the bee may not in fact be invoked for its sting, but for its own d­ esires—​­the etymology of melissa, after all, seems to be μέλι λείχω: ­honey-​­licker (­Beekes 2010, 925). The latter term will eventually gain a valence of illicit eroticism. So the poem may not in fact be a renunciation of the “­­sweet-​­bitter,” as it has long been interpreted. Perhaps the speaker wants deeper pleasures, experiences of pure intensity, not muddled by figuration, not expressible via standard metaphors or conceptions of relationality, but achievable only via the evocation and dismissal of the same. Perhaps the phenomenon is best summed up by H.D. in “­The Wise Sappho” when she writes that … Sappho has become for us a name, an abstraction as well as a pseudonym for poignant human feeling, she is indeed rocks set in a blue sea, she is the sea itself, breaking and tortured and torturing, but never broken. (­H.D. 1982, 67) 455

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Sappho is a figure that resists figuration, slips through the cracks of metaphor, simultaneously creates, experiences, and represents an eternal embodied desire that normative formal modes cannot quite capture, offering “­a different kind of imaginary… which reverberates against one’s own stream of consciousness, one’s formation of ­narrative–​­life narrative, art narrative,” to quote artist Chitra Ganesh on queer abstraction once more (­Cooper 2017, 297). An appreciation for Sappho’s disruptive capacity can shake us free from the constraints of normative scholarly habits and positivist reconstructions. If lesbianism has a future, it is one that embraces the identity’s long history of recognizing the fluidity and diversity of the genders that can flourish within it. The projects discussed in this chapter show that a turn toward Sappho need not be a turn toward a foreclosed past that has already been written. Rather, our desire for antiquity, and antiquity’s desires, can be mobilized toward a future that is more open, more expansive, and ultimately, more queer.

Suggestions for Further Reading Mueller (­2021) argues that recognizing the queer affect present in Sappho’s fragments is more productive than trying to reconstruct the ancient woman’s sexuality. duBois (­1995) remains an important feminist intervention concerning the poet’s role, or lack thereof, in the history of sexuality as it emerged in the m ­ id-​­twentieth century. Gubar (­1984) is still useful for thinking with and through modern lesbianism’s collaborative approach to Sappho’s fragments. For more on the political implications of various ways that Sappho’s sexuality has been formulated in the last two centuries, see, e.g., DeJean (­1989) and Haselswerdt (­forthcoming). Getsy (­2019) is likely the most programmatic exploration of queer abstraction, but see also the roundtable discussion between several contemporary artists led by Cooper (­2017). Moore (­2016) makes the case for continued investment in lesbian theory alongside queer theory, posthumanism, trans* theory, Black feminism, etc., with a particular focus on the lesbian history of the sonnet.

Notes 1 I have presented portions of this project at a CA panel organized by Emilio Capettini, at the Queer and the Classical Seminar organized by Marcus Bell, Eleonora Colli, and Nicolette D’Angelo, at an SCS panel organized by Patrick Crowley and Verity Platt, to the Columbia Classics Colloquium organized by Valeria Spacciante and Brett Stine, and to my colleagues in the UCLA Classics Department. I thank the audiences at all of these venues for their many thoughtful interventions. Thanks also to Kirk Ormand and Sara Lindheim for their helpful engagement and advice. 2 For more bibliography on queer time, see Lindheim’s further reading in this volume. 3 Yatromanalakis provides a rich analysis of this vase that has in many ways enabled my reading here (2007, 146–164). I also rely on his reconstruction of the scroll's text. 4 See Immerwahr (­1964) for an overview of “­book rolls on Attic vases.”

Works Cited Beekes, Robert. 2010. Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill. Carson, Anne. 2001. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Vintage. Cooper, Ashton, Loren Britton, Kerry Downey, John Edmonds, Mark Joshua Epstein, Avram Finkelstein, Chitra Ganesh, Glendalys Medina, and Sheila Pepe. 2017. “­Queer Abstraction: A Roundtable.” ASAP/­Journal 2.2: ­285–​­306. Daley, John, Page duBois, Anita Cowles Reardon, and Julie Mehretu. 2011. Poetry of Sappho. San Francisco, CA: Arion Press.

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Sappho’s Body, Queer Abstraction, and Lesbian Futurity DeJean, Joan. 1989a. “­Sex and Philology: Sappho and the Rise of German Nationalism.” Representations 27: 1­ 48–​­171. DeJean, Joan. 1989b. Fictions of Sappho, ­1546–​­1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Drucker, Johanna. 2004. The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Books. duBois, Page. 1995. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frain, Rose. 1989. Sappho Fragments. Edinburgh: S ­ elf-​­published. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Getsy, David J. 2019. “­Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction.” In Queer Abstraction, edited by Jared Ledesma, ­65–​­75. Des Moines, IA: Des Moines Art Center. Groden, Suzy Q. 1965. Poems of Sappho. Translated by Suzy Q. Groden. Indianapolis, IN: ­Bobbs-​­Merill Co. Gubar, Susan. 1984. “­Sapphistries.” Signs 10.1: ­43–​­62. Haselswerdt, Ella. Forthcoming. “­Sappho and Ideology: Towards a Deep Lez Philology.” In Forgetting Classics: Critical Ancient World Studies, edited by Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward. London: Routledge Press. hastain, J/­j. 2015. Sapphopunk: How Sappho Almost became a Stone Femme a Fiction in Honor of Otherness an Experiment in Dignity or Sappho’s Queer Biography. New York: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing. H.D. 1921. Hymen. New York: Holt. H.D. 1982. Notes on Thought and Vision & The Wise Sappho. San Francisco, CA: City Light Books. Immerwahr, Henry R. 1964. “­Book Rolls on Attic Vases.” In Classical, Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies in Honor of Berthold Louis Ullman, edited by Charles Henderson, Jr., ­17–​­48. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Immerwahr, Henry R. 1973. “­More Book Rolls on Attic Vases.” Antike Kunst 16.2: 1­ 43–​­147. Jeppeson, Travis. 2019. “­Queer Abstraction (­Or How to Be a Pervert with No Body.” Mousse. January 16th, 2019. https://­www.moussemagazine.it/­magazine/­­queer-­​­­abstraction-­​­­travis-­​­­jeppesen-​­2019/ Moore, Lisa. 2016. “­The Future of Lesbian Genders.” Genders 1.1. https://­www.colorado.edu/­genders/­ 2016/­05/­19/­­future-­​­­lesbian-​­genders Mueller, Melissa. 2021. “­Sappho and Sexuality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, edited by Adrian Kelly and Patrick Finglass, 3­ 6–​­52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: 10th Anniversay Edition. New York: New York University Press. Skinner, Marilyn. 1989. “­Sapphic Nossis.” Arethusa 22.1: ­5–​­18. Skinner, Marilyn. 2009. “­Aphrodite Garlanded: Erôs and Poetic Creativity in Sappho and Nossis.” In Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, edited by Lisa Auanger and Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, 6­ 0–​­81. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stehle, Eva. 1996. “­Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense: A Response to Hallett on Sappho.” In Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, edited by Ellen Greene, ­143–​­149. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stryker, Susan. 2008. Transgender History. New York: Seal Press. Yatromanolakis, Dmitri. 2007. Sappho in the Making: The Early Reception. Cambridge: Center for Hellenic Studies.

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31 MEDEA’S GHOSTS Cherríe Moraga and Queer Ecologies Nancy Worman

Cherríe Moraga’s long, dense play entitled The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (­1999/­2001) reinvents the original Greek hero as a Chicana lesbian, outcast in a n­ ear-​­future dystopia in which the former U.S. territory has been divided along racial and ethnic lines. Unlike Euripides’ Medea, Moraga’s plot is effectively a ghost story, with the murderous mother wandering mentally from her present existence in an asylum and the other characters haunting her, while a chorus of ancient Aztec deities moves in and out of the action. In this spectral past Medea had been exiled for her sexuality to the borderlands outside of Phoenix, Arizona, a trashed and barren place for those who don’t or won’t belong. There she lived with her lover Luna and her son ­Chac-​­Mool, intermittently hassled by Jasón, who is in Moraga’s ­play—​­as Jason is in Euripides’—​­an imperious opportunist. While some scholars have highlighted Moraga’s emphasis on the violent consequences of ethnic prejudice, some on her ­anti-​­nationalist stances, and others on her treatment of the theme of infanticide, I closely track those details of Moraga’s play that unsettle familiar humanist notions of embodiment and identity. In this way she shapes what we might think of as an anticipatory (­if quite chilling) take on queer futurity, by which I mean both queerness as potentiality in the sense theorized by José Esteban Muñoz among others and the disaffirmation of bourgeois futures in the form of offspring.1 The richness of Moraga’s Medea intervention is such that characters and settings tread the edges of the human in a manner that anticipates later work on queer ecologies and phenomenologies (­e.g., Ahmed 2006; ­Mortimer-​­Sandilands and Erikson 2010). I juxtapose this focus with attention to embodied aesthetics, taking cues from such insights as those of Tanya González (­2007), who argues that A Hungry Woman is an investigation into the “­disaffirmative” powers of gothic aesthetics. I thus focus on the queer, abject, and yet potent physicality of Moraga’s character, as well as considering more briefly how her figure throws into sharp contrast aspects of Euripides’ hero. Such a thesis hinges on the fact that abjection, as Julia Kristeva has theorized it, challenges the boundaries of the self in its sensory, physical inhabitation.2 Another contribution to my situating of this chapter at the intersection of aesthetics and politics is the attention that scholars of drama such as Wendy Arons (­2012) pursue in relation to queer ecologies in theatrical performances in particular. As she notes, the intersection of queerness and ecology is theorized variously but aims generally at mutually illuminating engagements. Thus the queer theory perspective might open up new angles on n­ ature-​­culture or h­ uman-​­thing divides, DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-38 458

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while awareness of the fraught history of theorizing about the environment has affordances for thinking about orientation and identity. This would include, as an influential example, the apprehension of human inhabitation as continuous with other creatures and materials, what Jane Bennett has termed “­an array of bodies” (­2010, ­112–​­113). By this, she means that the human subject as an isolated individual at the top of an ontological hierarchy is a fantasy, an insight that Moraga’s play suggests is very ancient in indigenous traditions. Queer ecology in the hands of such theorists thus challenges the category of “­nature” as ­man-​ ­made and seeks other means of understanding how ecosystems work as a “­mesh,” to use Timothy Morton’s favored term (­2010, 274).3 Morton himself points out that Judith Butler anticipated this debate (­as so much else), in her deconstruction of the ­inside-​­outside binaries structuring conventional notions of the self (­following Kristeva among others) in Gender Trouble (­1990) and her questioning of the “­naturalness” of the ­nature-​­culture divide as well as its masculinist presumption of nature as a passive surface in Bodies That Matter (­1993). Morton also notes that Kristeva’s theorizing of abjection has been enduringly useful for ecocritical perspectives, since it focuses in on what goes ­missing—​­gets ­abjected—​­in keeping nature “­pure.” The emphases in such critiques are obviously political, as they reveal how the privileging of the human over all other materialities has led to environmental devastation and the disenfranchisement of both peoples and other life forms. This type of queer ecocritical awareness assumes that identity is a construct, a conceit based ultimately on exclusion, operating in a manner parallel to humanist hierarchies inherent in the ­nature-​­culture divide.4 One might then wonder what is so special about Medea in this regard, since if all embodied selves are enmeshed in this way, her strangeness might just uncover this state as given. But maybe that is precisely the point: Euripides’ Medea prods the edges of the human by presenting the eponymous character as chafing at the confines of her mortal existence, while Moraga’s “­hungry woman,” a midwife and healer by trade, is a paradigm of bodily dissonance. She trails multiple shadowy inhabitations through the play, not only because she is surrounded by ­phantasms—​­including cosmic and mythic ­mothers—​­but even more prominently because she herself dwells in a twilight world, whether in her institutionalized present or her ­tequila-​­laced, alienated, ravenous, and furious past. As her former selves and loved ones hover around her, they voice in strikingly enmeshed terms the creaturely experiences of aging, hungry loving that borders on the vampiric, materializing ­body-​­stuff convergences, as well as the sensory distresses of radical displacement that result from her many losses. This includes her past activism, by which Moraga, in a pointed renovation of the sorcery and heroism of the ancient Medea, gives the infanticide a keen political edge. In Euripides’ play, Medea’s heroic fierceness drives a strikingly global critique: women are always at a disadvantage, though braver and cleverer; and if the ways of the world flowed in reverse, they would be celebrated as they ought to be.5 Furious at being effectively caught in her husband’s plot, Euripides’ Medea is fueled by a totalizing outrage such that she also stage manages the action of the play. In Moraga’s ghost world the bulk of the action unfolds as if within Medea’s ­head—​­or rather, her visions and memories materialize onstage.6 The harshly dystopic n­ ation-​­state of Atzlán incarcerates child killers instead of sending them off on winged dragons; Moraga’s play conjoins Medea’s queerness with her ­anti-​­nationalist stance, from which vantage there is neither home nor future for lesbians and their offspring. In both plays disparate objects, textures, and sensory effects cluster around the figure of Medea herself, charging her presence with a material saturation that contributes to a sense of her as oddly/­queerly oriented and situated at the edges of the human. Moraga’s play foregrounds such ­multi-​­sensory details from early on in the action, setting up an unnerving sense of bodily strangeness, aberrant tactilities, and queer inhabitations. I hazard this last (“­queer inhabitations”) in both the narrower and the broader sense first theorized by Eve 459

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Kosofsky Sedgwick, who glosses queerness as “­the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning.”7 Sara Ahmed’s shaping of a queer phenomenology is also helpful here, insofar as it offers a means of articulating how such inhabitations sit athwart the heteronormative constructs of bourgeois culture and family.8 Finally, I consider Moraga’s imagery of resistance from the prospect of Jack Halberstam’s meditation on wildness as a means of rethinking past and imagining future epistemologies in relation to identity and especially sexuality. Given the colonialist predations that Moraga’s Medea suffers for her ethnicity and orientation, it is useful that Halberstam emphasizes not only the productive, anticipatory, and queer potentialities of wildness as a chaotic force but also its weaponizing by masculinist colonialisms that make the disenfranchisement of and violence against all others (­including black and brown people as well as female, queer, etc.) the order of the day.9 If Halberstam’s aim is ultimately the theorizing of a novel epistemology and thus an alternative history of sexuality that centers at least in part on a materialist being with the ­non-​­human, this is a perspective that Moraga’s Medea also anticipates.10 And although one could take issue with the indigenous elements that frame her play as essentializing and uncritically nostalgic, these elements do contribute to a queer ecology of ­sorts—​­that is, a sensory orientation and mode of experiencing that is contiguous with the natural world rather than preying upon it. In what follows I take a close look at the different means by which The Hungry Women shapes embodiment and inhabitation in this contiguous, pastiching, emergent relation to the stuff of the world. The first section of this discussion tracks the imagery of ingestion in the opening scene of Moraga’s play through to some later moments that reveal how her Medea takes into herself the world outside and finds herself to be connectedly, fluidly situated in relation to time and space. The second section considers at greater length what the affordances might be of reading Moraga from the prospect of the alternative epistemologies offered ­above—​­queer futurisms, phenomenologies, ecologies, and ­wildness—​­focusing especially on Muñoz’s tracing of spectral aesthetics and Halberstam’s positing of a postnatural sense of wildness as disaffection and errancy.11 Both Muñoz and Halberstam offer ways of reading Moraga’s play as pushing at the boundaries of conventional, “­recognizable” identities and modes of being. Both also do so most especially by foregrounding (­like Moraga) intensely embodied orientations and what Peter Coviello (­2013) has called (­borrowing from Thoreau) “­unyarded” inhabitations, meaning the deviant, elusive expressions that exceed conventional notions of identity. From this prospect we can see, for instance, that Moraga’s Medea is not simply bisexual, whether or not her personal history supports this label. Rather, she is “­hungry” and a denizen of ­borderlands—​­as she herself says, “­the last one to make this crossing” (­2001, 46). And although when she says this she is indicating most proximately something sexual, the image is also interleaved with her lost status as a political warrior, her maternal intensities, her “­serpent skin,” her proximity to death, goddesses, ghosts… At the end of my discussion, I take one more pass at thinking through the play’s commitments, since the central pivot for my analysis is an attempt to understand what the bodily inflections resulting from exile and (­dis)­orientation may contribute to a queer ecology that positions infanticide as a fitting retort to the colonialist ruination of lands and people. Again, one could take issue with Moraga’s deployment of ancient Aztec ­imagery—​­as well as her adherence to conventional gender b­ inaries—​­as essentializing and romanticizing female and indigenous experiences (­cf., e.g., Haraway 1988; Butler 1993; Spivak 1999), but only if one assumes that she positions such prospects as not only a but the answer to the ravages of New World conquest and violence. I would suggest that the play instead fosters multiple embodied perspectives, always situated and partial, as well as continuous with ­non-​­human creatures and things.12 As such it leaves in suspension not 460

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only relations between the living and the dead but also those between lovers and others, male and female, present and past.

Medea on the Inside One of the most striking things about Euripides’ Medea is her isolation, both from the sensory worlds of other characters in the play and in some extended sense from the human. Even the chorus can’t quite reach her, as Medea remains utterly resistant to the will of others and distanced from them by her singular orientation as ­semi-​­divine and yet caught in patriarchy’s vicious grip. As Melissa Mueller (­2001) has pointed out, Medea is unique in her manipulation of homosocial practices to suit her own ends, negotiating aristocratic friendship (­philia) bonds and gift exchange usually reserved for men. The play thus appears to calibrate relations between her and other characters as occurring as if at a ­curious—​­or perhaps queer in Sedgwick’s broader ­sense—​­distance, one that cannot even be bridged, it turns out, by actual human proximity. Moraga’s refashioning of the Medea story reorients her isolation and liminality by making her queer (­in the narrower sense), racially mixed, and edging toward madness. The play opens with a brief song performed by a chorus of four warrior women from Aztec myth, who represent the four directions (­North, South, East, and West) and as the play opens flank a statue of Coatlicue, goddess of generation and destruction. The female chorus members are dressed as ­living-​­dead and ­human-​ ­animal, with skull faces, claws, and bare breasts and feet. These four actors also play characters central to the action of the play, so that the ancient framing and ­near-​­future setting intermingle in ways that conflate and expand times, places, and subjectivities. A prison guard (­also the chorus member “­North,” in black) sets the scene as taking place in “­the near future of a fictional past, dreamed only in the Chicana imagination” (­2001, 10) and Medea, whom the stage notes describe as “­possessing a dark and brooding allure, akin to obsidian,” sits in a psychiatric hospital. A nurse (­also “­East,” in red) enters and hands her a tray of food, responds vaguely to her sense of being lost in time, and then leaves her alone. The bowl on the tray contains oatmeal, which leads Medea to muse, with a gesture toward the whole skewed dystopia in which she finds herself, “­I could talk to the man on the Quaker Oats box but she did not leave me the box or the man, just the mush” (­11). She then moves from a tender thought about her son ­Chac-​­Mool’s first food and word to her own mouth: I live inside the prison of my own teeth. My voice can’t escape this wall of ­maize-​­white tiles sealed shut. ‘­Perfect masonry,’ Luna’d always say…about my teeth. I wish I had a mouth of corn, sweet baby corn. A mouth of baby teeth sucking at virgin purple pezones.13 How do I live now without her breasts? Her words encapsulate a whole lost world, which she holds as if caught inside her own ­mouth—​ f­ rom dead child to prison walls built of teeth, from “­sweet baby corn” to suckling at the breast… of her lover Luna. If Euripides’ character begins life offstage in a wave of howling, her body remote as a rock, Moraga’s Medea offers something like the opposite: not only is she vividly, solely present, but she also carries the soft stuff of l­ife—​­the bits and pieces of her ghost w ­ orld—​­in her mouth. As Priscilla Ybarra (­2016) has pointed out, Moraga repurposes the “­hungry woman” figure from the Aztec creation myth to shape a critique of patriarchy as necessarily deadly for women and thereby children. From my vantage, Medea’s “­unyarded” embodiment appears both caught out by such brutal hierarchies and yet resistant to their exigencies. Moraga’s use of the Aztec myth 461

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effectively resituates the mush of the world, especially earthy, generative stuff like corn and by implication breast milk, within the body of Medea. This move suggests how her own generative and destructive capacities run counter to the destruction of families and lands by nationalists like Jasón. It also opposes this masculinist prospect with alternative, queer subjectivities that merge with the (­post)­natural world as a mode of resistance. In this same scene Medea says to the Nurse when she asks her to cover the ­one-​­way mirror in the ward, “­The mirror is cold, impenetrable. You can never get inside it unless you are a child or a muerto. I am neither, no longer, not yet….Tiny ghosts live inside me” (­12).14 She adds that only children or the dead can “­get inside” the mirror, while she first presses her face against it and then spits on it. The Nurse responds, “­Tell your girlfriend, not me” noting that she visits on Saturdays; but Medea rejects this, instead invoking an inhabitation that we can recognize (­with Deleuze and Guattari) as a minoritarian assemblage: “­No. I only want to be an Indian, a Woman, an Animal in the Divine Ecosystem” (­12).15 Note as well that this assemblage is rooted in an ecology that counters normative humanist hierarchies in favor of wild convergences. Similarly, in the following scene interlocking flashbacks from a year earlier unfold from this setting in the ward, in which Medea languishes on an unmade bed while her girlfriend and grandmother both urge her to return to work (­as a midwife) and to life. She refuses their pleas, alternately replying to Luna, “­I’m a rabid dog” and “­Work! I suck off the creations of other women” (­16), while to Mama Sal she says, “­I feel my hands as liquid as the river” (­18). In Scene Five, Medea is back in the hospital ward, where she sits topless, holding her breasts at the nipple and looking for liquid, alone except for the occasional interjection of the Nurse or Jasón in ghost form. She describes her attachment to her infant son as “­consummated, there in the circle of his ruby mouth” (­31), an intensely sexual conjoining that echoes the way she moves in the first scene of the play from “­baby teeth” to her lover’s breasts. This “­ring of pure animal need” is a ­would-​­be “­natural” image, were it not for the ways in which such tactilities merge with queer (­or, alternatively, violent) ones. Much later on, as ­Chac-​­Mool has decided to return to Atzlán and his father, Medea’s haptic fluidity gives way to a nightmare: “­All the babies, they’re slipping through my fingers now. I can’t stop them. They’ve turned into the liquid of the river and they are drowning in my hands” (­86). The original Hungry Woman was an earth mother with mouths all over her body, “­in her wrists, elbows, ankles, knees,” as Luna explains at a midpoint in the play (­44). Medea’s contiguity with this famished figure includes fantasies of ingesting ­Jasón—​­“­make him shiver,” she prays to Coatlicue, “­within the folds of my serpent skin” (­51)—​­the experiencing of desire as insatiability, as well as another turn on her meditating her own pregnancy. Later Luna envisions C ­ hac-​­Mool before birth as “­a he/­she clinging ­fish-​­gilled and hermaphrodite inside her liquid belly.” But then this image converges with another that, again like Medea’s musings in the opening scene, encapsulates a potent queer sensuality: “­The blood was only under her tongue, I found. A small pool behind the bottom row of her teeth, a dam holding back the ruby kiss, the original name of which she once spilled into my mouth” (­87). The circularity and fusion of these images equate birthing and c­ hild-​­nurturing with an intensely embodied and enmeshed queer attachment; this is echoed by Luna’s oracular shaping of the scene of discovery, which resulted in their exile: I am awake to the sound of screaming 462

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her voice, too, she is screaming I can’t remember when they merge Medea’s voice with my own only opening my mouth…. (­64)

It is also reinforced in the staging of bodies, most particularly in the paired scenes of Medea holding ­Chac-​­Mool in a pieta embrace as he dies, just as he holds her as she drifts off at the drama’s end. In keeping with this sense of circularity is a temporal pleating in which the past and the future are interleaved in a present that is not one. The action as a whole is framed by the mythic chorus in their ancient ritual dress who also play contemporary characters with minimal costume changes; in addition, the scenes all fan out from the empty ­time-​­space of the asylum and are thus filled with past selves. More pointedly and uniquely, this spectral present situates Medea in a fluid relationship to time and space, such that she enfolds past and future while racheting around her borderland ­no-​­place. In the Epilogue, Luna captures Medea’s errancy as trace presences and ­multi-​­sensory mergings, which Moraga’s use throughout of a hybrid dialect intermingling Spanish and English with Aztec coordinates here most pointedly reinforces:

In her absence she is all the disguises she wore. She is the flood of fever that fills my veins with a woman’s passing perfume. She is la música flamenco, the gypsy allure, the lie. She is the painting of a woman fractured and defiant. Cueva of clay opening como flor. Coyolxauhqui’s unnamed star sister. She is renegade rebozo, el tambor’s insistence, a warrior’s lament. Slender hips of silk. She is silk. (­93)

This ­after-​­scene also reinforces the sense that Medea experiences this slippage of self as unmooring rather than freeing, so that while the play leaves ambiguous whether she actually kills her son, she is lost to herself nonetheless. Or is she? When Luna visits and tells her that she dreamt of an agave plant exploding from a vagina, Medea wonders who is ­who—​­to which Luna responds, “­Maybe it was all you. You giving birth to yourself” (­95), which makes Medea smile. From this angle it appears that Medea’s transcendence, if such it can be called, takes place not via dragon chariot but by means of an increased sense of transference and connection, between Medea and things, Medea and Medea, Medea and Luna, Medea and C ­ hac-​­Mool, forging a queer and posthuman ecosystem that extends far beyond the individual. Luna brings actual flowers, which Medea rejects but the Nurse happily carries away, exclaiming over their beauty. Then ­Chac-​­Mool appears; Medea thinks him a ghost but also instructs him, “­Touch yourself better, if you’re beautiful” (­97)—​­an eerie kind of care of the self that reinforces the sense that such 463

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unboundedness can also lead to the circularity noted above, as with Medea giving birth to herself. In navigating this involuted route, Medea responds to ­Chac-​­Mool’s presence accordingly: “­If you had been my son, the dark of your eyes would mirror me. And we would blend together sexless” (­98). The embrace with which the play ends, with ­Chac-​­Mool now holding the sleeping Medea in the same pieta pose in which she held him in the final scene, effectively stages the convergences and involutions that the language tracks through all of their embodied, materializing details. In this play where nothing and everything happens, we are left with an impression that runs curiously parallel to that of Euripides’ ­tragedy—​­namely, that Medea subsumes plot and characters in her vastness and intensities.

Medea’s Futures I make a pitch in the introduction to this discussion about the extent to which Moraga’s play might be put in productive conversation with more recent queer theorizing, much of which has an avowedly utopian cast that looks to better futures. But what kind of future does Moraga’s play in fact inhabit and/­or gesture toward? It is, as acknowledged, explicitly dystopian, resettling Medea in the trashed and devastated borderland of a n­ ear-​­future Phoenix, now detested host to outcasts from a homeland for which they had once fought. Medea herself is in some ways a rather ­old-​­fashioned and ­backward-​­looking diva, so overly greedy for sex, affection, and admiration that she subsumes others in what could be recognized as the smothering approach to relationships for which both mothers and lesbians are routinely mocked. Jasón, for his part, updates Euripides’ character more in the specificities of his nativist aspirations than in his core attitudes, which are just as exploitative and conventionally misogynist as in the original. And yet Moraga orchestrates, in a distinctly dense, pastiching, and emergent manner, a parallel world that situates queer disaffection in relation to both political resistance and the mysteries of ancient myth and ritual. As I touch on in the introduction to this discussion, Tanya González (­2007) makes use of gothic literary aesthetics to analyze the ways in which Moraga deploys infanticide as a means of imagining novel familial relations unavailable under patriarchy. She points to the deployment of gothic elements by African American writers, as a “­mode of resistance” that pushes back against the dominant discourses; and she follows Linda ­Holland-​­Toll (­2001, 8) in regarding such “­disaffirmative” strategies as a means of countering the happy ending and thus the reaffirmation of the status quo.16 This also entails rejecting the insulting and entrapping labels that patriarchal (­and white supremacist) regimes impose upon women, especially women of c­ olor—​­hence the sense one gets of Medea exceeding such categorizations, a uniquely resistant and deviant inhabitation that, again, Moraga repurposes from Euripides in order to envision a queer, wild, and posthuman ecological outlook that also renews ancient indigenous modes of being. From this perspective, then, Moraga’s futurist aesthetics fosters affective and sensory extensions that turn to Greek and Aztec antiquities as potent guides for disrupting conventional roles and social dictates and for signaling the revolutionary potential of queer nonconformity. While such a formulation may seem like wishful thinking for such a violent character, Moraga herself has a fierce retort: what if infanticide were not a revenge for individual infidelity, but rather a response to misogyny by someone who “­refuses to forget that her ­half-​­life is not a n­ atural-​­born fact” (­2000, 147). Moraga’s engagement with mythic figures such as Coatlicue and La Llorona, the eternally weeping mother of ­pre-​­Hispanic mythology, underscores a central cultural terror found also in ancient Greek myth: that wronged mothers and lands may turn on or otherwise lose their children and refuse to recover, to rejoin and conform to h­ uman-​­and especially ­man-​­imposed limitations. Moraga’s Medea thus cannot reconcile herself to the ­half-​­life with which she has been left; like 464

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Euripides’ character but with a more overtly political emphasis, she is pinched by the confines imposed on her, in the ancient play by marriage and exile, in the postmodern one by heterosexual marriage and apolitical lesbian domesticity in exile. The Hungry Woman may offer resistance to the “­natural” order of things in this violent form, but the world in which Medea’s desperate action is taken also exacts more explicit punishment than the (­brutal enough) present of ­twenty-​­first century America for those deemed “­unnatural.” Within this dystopic reconfiguration, misfits by gender, orientation, and/­or ethnic mix are not only exiled but effectively reduced to Agamben’s bare life (­1998), a ­no-​­place without rights or recourse. But it is also from the prospect of this borderland, “­this wasteland where yerbas grow bitter for lack of water” (­15), that those ­misfits—​­most especially ­Medea—​­look back at the nation that they struggled to bring into being with a baleful regard and imagine a different, better world. When Jasón comes to wrest ­Chac-​­Mool from her with the claim most central to convention understood as nature, “­The boy needs a father,” Medea snaps back, “­The man I wish my son to be does not yet exist” (­69). She resists most of all the thought that ­Chac-​­Mool would inevitably grow up to regard her as a woman, as she puts it, “­A thing. A creature to be controlled” (­70). And when Jasón threatens court action, she responds, “­Which courts? Those patriarchs who stole my country? I returned to my motherland in the embrace of a woman and the mother is taken from me” (­71). The alternative ways of being and relating that Medea sketches here are, I should note, still in the grip of conventional gender binaries; and although this is offset somewhat by the suggestion that there could be some future way of inhabiting manhood, here and elsewhere Medea’s queerness does not quite slip this noose. She does repeatedly question labels, including “­woman” and “­lesbian,” but her chafing at them largely sustains gender categories and often seems to spring more from the excesses and intensities of her persona, as discussed in the previous section. It thus remains a question as to whether the play envisions any true alternatives to gender categories and roles, along lines sketched by Sedgwick and elaborated in different directions by Muñoz and Halberstam (­among others). Halberstam (­2020, 24) draws an analogy to Franz Fanon’s famous monograph Black Skin, White Masks ([1958] 1967) for the insight that the only means by which one may fully refuse racial hierarchies is to reject the binary (­in this case essentially ­master-​­slave) altogether. This rejection includes that of objectification, as Medea herself recognizes in her horror that her son might grow up to occupy conventional male subject positions to the extent that he participates in reducing her to a thing. But this awareness also can be seen, as Halberstam asserts with Fred Moten (­2003), as the object talking back; and, as I argue above, Medea exceeds the human in this regard as well. So one conclusion here could be that Moraga’s play shows evidence of the struggle both for human status within conventional ontologies as they stand and for modes of existence that elude such categorizations, remaining “­unyarded”—​­which is to say, wild. In Cruising Utopia Muñoz argues, in a manner productively in conversation with Halberstam’s earlier work and contributing to the focus in Wild Things, that the present state of mainstream gay politics is “­homonormative,” by which he means in part the “­aping of straight relationality” and most especially that of the “­toxic ideological formation known as marriage” (­2009, 21).17 From his perspective, this indicates a lack of imagination, an inability to recognize that “­gay marriage is not natural”—​­but then nor is marriage “­natural” for anyone, as he also notes. Against this pragmatism Muñoz urges awareness that ­queerness “is not yet here,” invoking Agamben’s (­1999) notion of potentialities, and opposing this awareness to the “­autonaturalizing temporality that we might call straight time” (­22). This “­natural” time takes the present as given and the future as only imagined in the form of progeny; as such it is distinctly ­anti-​­utopian.18 The temporal shifts and breaks that Moraga orchestrates in her play effectively ­stage-​­manage a means of questioning such normative notions of time, as they pertain in particular to the bourgeois family and its victims. While it is not 465

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clear that these temporal disruptions open up possible ways ­forward—​­ways out to what Muñoz calls the “­horizon” of new modes of being19—​­they do also serve to disrupt clear identity distinctions, as the ancient Aztec chorus members enter and exit different characters in the p­ resent-­​­­as-­​ ­­near-​­past, as mother and lover and mother and son trade roles. Muñoz also follows Roland Barthes’ insight that the utopian may reside in the quotidian, in fleeting moments of daily life, such that “­squinting” toward queer horizons includes recognizing that art (­in this case poetry) often seeks to capture what he terms an “­affective excess.” It is this excess that makes possible apprehensions of potentialities, of “­a ­forward-​­dawning future that is queerness” (­2009, 23). This brings me back to Moraga’s Medea, not only to recall how excess marks her character but also to ponder whether the moments of affective intensity that the play so vibrantly orchestrates are in some sense utopian, insofar as they offer a window onto what could be otherwise. Moraga herself says, in a forward to the 2001 volume in which A Hungry Woman was published, that she thinks of myth as “­an opening into the past…that could provide a roadmap to our future” (­2001, ix), but this general insight is not my primary point here. I am thinking instead of close bodily encounters like the “­ruby kiss” that Luna says Medea “­spilled into [her] mouth,” deeming their bond in the blood of menstruation “­a marriage of the most bitter, s­ weet-​­lipped kind” (­87). Blood in Moraga’s play in fact seems to attain an altogether different register than it possesses in more “­normal” settings, as it only surfaces in relation to the female body, as generative and positively sexy. At an earlier point in the play, Medea confronts Luna over the waning of their relationship, recalling a past that feels present in its intensity, when, she says, “­you used to drink from me as if you yourself didn’t taste the same coppered richness when you brought your own bloody fingers to your mouth.” And then she says bitingly, in response to Luna’s assertion that such changes are normal, “­I loathe normal” (­43). Other such moments of affective excess are more obliquely sensual, the most extended instance of which involves blood only by implication, in this case the scene in which ­Chac-​­Mool gets a tattoo. He sits blindfolded and tells the tattoo artist of his love of the moon, “­A thin brushstroke in the sky”; he wakes up, he says, “­in the middle of the night wishing for something” (­­19–​­20). The artist responds, “­What? Manhood?”—​­to which he replies, “­No. ­Full-​­grown innocence. Such lightness of flesh that I could rise above my bed and fly to the moon” (­20). Toward the end of the scene, he relates that he has heard “­about the piercing of skin as a prayer,” of tattooing as a means of communicating with ancient gods: “­I pray as you cut….At the center of pain there is always a prayer. A prayer where you get up to leave and a whole army of people is there to carry you away” (­21). An early scene in Euripides’ play features Medea railing against the conditions that circumscribe women’s lives, most especially marriage, and threatening death for her enemies. The chorus of Corinthian women responds by envisioning a world in which the rivers would flow backward, justice would “­turn about” (­στρέφεται), men’s deviousness be exposed, and “­honor come to the race of women” (­ἔρχεται τιμὰ γυναικείωι γένει) (­­410–​­415). We may be tempted to claim, in other words, that even the ancient play includes flashpoints at which characters offer glimpses of different futures, or at the least do not regard present ideological formations as natural and inevitable. The chorus’s vision could even be counted as utopian, despite the sustaining of rigid gender binaries; but it would be difficult to find any moment in the action of the drama that shapes the affective alternatives that punctuate A Hungry Woman. Even instances of intimate intensity, as when late in Euripides’ drama Medea murmurs over her children in loving detail (­­1038–​­1043, ­1069–​­1075), are hedged about by violence. In this case, she hands over poisonous gifts to them to carry to Jason’s princess wife as she ponders whether to kill them too, while the Corinthian women look on in horror.20 Compare, for instance, a succession of very short scenes in Moraga’s drama that are pleated like different sides of the same fold (­­60–​­63). First Luna is considering her own genitals in a mirror while she and Medea flirt around her inspection, which ends with Medea’s head between Luna’s 466

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legs. Then a guard appears and confronts them about the nature of their relationship, to which Luna parries that they slept “­as sisters”; then sirens wail and police headlights flash while Medea stands as if cradling a baby, asking Luna, “­Do you smell my baby’s death?” When Luna responds, “­I can’t,” Medea says, “­Open the holes in your face and breathe. The breeze smells of sulfur.” And soon she continues, “­A dead child weighs nothing in your arms. He is light as balsam wood, hollow inside.” This close interweaving of sex and death and of bodies and things, together with the temporal pleating that hinges sexual intimacy to the death of an infant in some alternative version of Medea’s infanticide, is profoundly unnerving, but in a manner very different from Euripides’ scene. Moraga situates the “­dead baby” moment in a surreal and menacing ­no-​­place, flanked by the explicit intimacies of gay female sex on one side and the chorus entering to chant about La Llorona with “­­cold-​­blooded babies at her breast” on the other (­63). Rather than feeling the trap of violent necessity closing, as is the case in Medea’s intimate handling of the children in the ancient play, this is postmodern gothic at its most disorienting. It is also electrifying, as a command like “­Open the holes in your face” calls forth some monstrous and novel inhabitation, some means of taking in the stuff of the world that perforates the edges of the body and human inhabitation.21 And gothic aesthetics, as González urges, shapes a means of refusing the “­normal” in a manner that parallels Halberstam’s theorizing of ­wildness—​­unsurprisingly, as it turns out, since many years ago Halberstam (­1995) also discussed horror and gothic aesthetics in similar terms. I want to return, by way of some kind of conclusion, to the question of queer ecologies. From the prospect of postcolonial theorists such as (­most notably) Guyatri Spivak, Moraga’s framing of her drama in relation to ancient indigenous ritual practices can appear romanticizing and essentializing, as I note in the introduction. Spivak (­1999, 60) calls the idea that ­so-​­called Third World ethnicities are available as objects of investigation a “­confection,” meaning a fabrication resting on assumptions about a kind of “­natural” direct access to indigenous pasts. From her perspective, it is not only dominant elites (­e.g., anthropologists) who participate in this fantasy but also anyone who might step forward as an “­authentic ethnic” to give voice to local experiences and histories. So there is one concern. The other is what it opens out onto, which more directly confronts Moraga’s fashioning of this “­Aztec” awareness of the earth as a female presence in noisy lamentation at the human (­male) tendency to plunder and disrespect. It is a powerful vision and one mobilized in the service of an admirably feminist and queer ecocritical urgency. The difficulty is whether this move is itself appropriative and distorting, as well as whether it relies implicitly on untenable claims about this indigenous contiguity with other life forms and lands as a type of ancient e­ co-​­awareness, a queer ecology before the fact. Unlike the plays that Wendy Arons (­2012) analyzes from the prospect of queer ecological thinking, A Hungry Woman does not populate the stage with other beings than human ones, except in the hybrid embodiments of the chorus of ancient female warrior figures who represent the orientations North, South, East, and West. We might also take note of the emphatic clustering of affective energies around the moon/­Luna by both Medea and C ­ hac-​­Mool, although this sometimes comes close to a form of goddess worship. But Arons, like Muñoz, also emphasizes aesthetic excess as a feature of this queer awareness, and it may be in this regard that Moraga’s play participates in a ­forward-​ ­looking sensibility that goes beyond what might otherwise look like nostalgia for a purportedly better and mostly lost past. In the opening scene, interspersed with Medea’s exchanges with the Nurse, are Luna’s solitary meditations on her lover’s sleeping habits and her face: There’s something to read in that. Only language I know is worry lines, a brow that looks like the valley floor in planting season. I’d trace my finger like a dumb plow along those furrows, but I could only guess at what Medea was thinking. (­14) 467

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The merging of this sensual lovers’ contact with field and plow is conventional in some ­sense—​­in fact looming in the ancient Greek imaginary, as Page duBois exposes in Sowing the Body (­1988). And yet it is also radical in its reconfiguration of masculinist conceptions of ­nature-​­culture binaries as a phallic imprinting on a passive surface, to invoke Butler (­1993) again. Here instead the “­valley floor” of Medea’s face is a surface vibrant with agency, to be traced by a female reader whose “­dumb plow” fails at this ­would-​­be phallic gesture. Instead of mastery over nature/­woman, in other words, the relationship between valley and plow, brow and fingertips, is symbiotic and definitely queer. And feminist: Medea’s brow contains thoughts alright, in fact, a whole mythic history centering on a radical response to the violent curtailment of female power under patriarchy, which Moraga turns to furious purpose. I think that even Euripides’ Medea contains, if in a more adumbrated form, a ­proto-​­feminist awareness, insofar as Medea seeks to redeploy the tools of patriarchy to serve her own ends and she and the chorus lament its devastations with an eye to alternatives. And while her ultimate way out of its grip is ­child-​­killing, the violent reversal of the mandated role for women that haunts so many Greek myths, this is in itself radical. Thus both dramas in their distinctive ways stage Medea’s nonconformity as embodied resistance, a failure to be normatively female or even only human. Moraga’s play offers this as a form ­of—​­maybe the core ­of—​­a queer rebellion that refuses the oppressive configurations of the present. With Arons (­and Muñoz) I urge in the end that while literary representations that engage queer ecological fantasies or futurisms may be just t­hat—​­fantasies/­not yet ­here—​­they also offer ways of seeing otherwise and looking toward the horizon.

Suggestions for Further Reading For contextualizing Cherríe Moraga’s work, a good place to start is the seminal edited volume Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983; a more recent study of her work alone is ­Yarbro-​­Bejarano 2001. Readings of A Hungry Woman are not as plentiful as one might wish; the most adventurous piece I read for this chapter was González 2007, although Ybarra’s 2016 is also interesting for its environmental emphasis. For queer ecologies, the volume Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. ­Mortimer-​­Sandilands and Erickson 2010 is usefully capacious, while the Theater Journal volume Queer Research in Performance, ed. Farfan 2012 focuses more narrowly on various modes of performance. On queer futures and potentialities, Muñoz 2009 and Halberstam 2020 offer creative and productive perspectives.

Notes 1 E.g., Arrizón 2000; Foster 2002; González 2007; Ybarra 2016. On queer futurity, see especially Muñoz 2009 and cf. Edelman 2004 and Bliss 2015. Bliss critiques ideas about queer futurities from the prospect provided by Black feminist theory, taking cues from Hortense Spillers’ groundbreaking essay “­Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” 1987, most crucially that Blackness and especially the Black female undergird (­by exclusion) European and “­New World” notions of humanity. Such insights dovetail in useful ways with Moraga’s similarly groundbreaking work on such collective efforts as This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color 1983. 2 Kristeva [1980] 1982; see also Ahmed 2004. Cf. Halberstam’s 1995 insight that bodies that societies class as monstrous are patchwork and that this captures something essential about the provisional quality of identities themselves, especially those that inhabit borderlands of various sorts; cf. Harpham 1982 on hybridity and the grotesque. See also M ­ inh-​­ha 1989. 3 The enmeshment that Morton 2010 envisions sounds much like Deleuze and Guattari’s [1980] 1987 concept of the rhizome, but he is critical of their metaphor as “­soft and squishy” because organic (­I take it):

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Medea’s Ghosts: Cherríe Moraga and Queer Ecologies “­Organic palpability has so often been adapted to authoritarian masculinism” (­276). This is, quite obviously, a tendentious characterization of A Thousand Plateaus, if such it is meant to be. 4 As Morton 2010 also notes, Derrida 2002 anticipated much of the current discussion in his essay “­The Animal that Therefore I Am”, including a means of recognizing the nonhuman subjectivity as an arrivant, which shapes a sense of stranger subjectivities as “­incoming” in a way that has resonance for a play full of ghosts. 5 This famous play has a large bibliography, but some relevant scholarly contributions for my discussion are Foley 2001; Gabriel 1992; March 1990; Mueller 2001; Pucci 1980; van Zyl Smit 2002. 6 Cf. Heiner Müller’s Medeamaterial and its powerful staging by Theodoros Terzopoulos, in which the one actor who plays Medea says and does everything. 7 Sedgwick 1993, 8. See also 2003. 8 Ahmed 2006. 9 Halberstam 2020, ­7–​­8, who calls wildness “­the entropic force of a chaos that constantly spins away from biopolitical attempts to manage life and bodies and desires,” citing Wynter 2006 on what she terms the “­coloniality of being.” 10 Halberstam 2020, 10 also quotes ­Gómez-​­Barris 2017 on what she calls “­the ­fish-​­eye episteme,” meaning something like the opposite of the ­gods-​­eye view fantasy so central to western masculinist humanisms; see Haraway’s 1988 earlier critique as well as Scheman’s 1995. 11 The phrase “­place of disaffection” that Halberstam 2020, 13 quotes is from T. S. Eliot (“­Burnt Norton,” 17). 12 Again, see Haraway 1988 on what she calls “­situated knowledges.” 13 Sp. “­nipples.” 14 Sp. “­dead person.” Note that “­neither, no longer, not yet” and “­tiny ghosts” captures a sense of borderland inhabitation common to tragic heroes, who tend to call themselves ghosts or nothings, most notably Sophocles’ Electra and Philoctetes (­Electra ­1165–​­1167, Philoctetes ­946–​­947, 951); see Worman 2021, ­140–​­144, ­163–​­165. 15 Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 273–286, e.g. 16 See again Bliss 2015, 90, whose “­hope against hope” critique of futurities hinges on “­rejecting the tacit assumption that the world, as it is, is a fundamentally acceptable place.” See also Gumbs 2011 on the potentialities of a queer Black futurity, which follows Muñoz in emphasizing the stifling, in fact sometimes literally deadly, limits of the present. In response to Edelman’s (­white, gay male) pessimism around the very notion of the future, she posits instead “­a Black, and therefore deviant, future” (­112). 17 Muñoz 2009, 218n. 7 calls attention to this engagement in a footnote, citing especially Halberstam’s 2005 monograph, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. 18 Cf. Edelman 2004, with whom Muñoz engages here. 19 Muñoz 2009, 22 takes his cue at least in part from Husserl’s [1913] 1991 “­horizons of being” in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy. 20 See Worman (­2021, ­112–​­116, ­136–​­138) on the bodily intimacy and ­multi-​­sensory intensities of this scene in relation to what comes before and after it. 21 Compare here the lives and stories that Saidiya Hartman 2019 gathers in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, where she foregrounds what she calls “­practices of intimacy and affiliation” (­221) that she thinks foster aesthetic extravagance and excess as a mode of resistance.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Arrizón, Alicia. 2000. “­Mythical Performativity: Relocating Aztlán in Chicana Feminist Cultural Productions.” Theatre Journal 52.1: 2­ 3–​­49. Arons, Wendy. 2012. “­Queer Ecology/­Contemporary Plays.” Theater Journal, Queer Research in Performance 64.4: ­565–​­582. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bliss, James. 2015. “­Hope Against Hope: Queer Negativity, Black Feminist Theorizing, and Reproduction Without Futurity.” Mosaic Special Issue: Queer/­Affect 48.1: ­83–​­98.

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Nancy Worman Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. Coviello, Peter. 2013. Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in ­Nineteenth-​­Century America. New York: New York University Press. Deleuze, Giles, and Félix Guattari. [1980] 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “­The Animal that Therefore I Am (­More to Follow).” Translated by David Willis. Critical Inquiry 28.2: ­369–​­418. duBois, Page. 1988. Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foley, Helene P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Foster, David W. 2002. “­Phoenix as Dystopia in Cherríe Moraga’s Hungry Woman.” Hispanic Journal 23.2: ­91–​­101. Fanon, Franz. [1958] 1967. Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Farfan, Penny, ed. 2012. “­Queer Research in Performance.” Theater Journal, Queer Research in Performance 64.4: 3 pages (­unnumbered). Gabriel, Ayala H. 1992. “­Living with Medea, Thinking with Freud: Greek Drama, Gender, Concealments.” Cultural Anthropology 7.3: 3­ 46–​­373. González, Tanya. 2007. “­The (­Gothic) Gift of Death in Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (­2001).” Chicana/­Latina Studies 7.1: 4­ 4–​­77. ­Gómez-​­Barris, Macarena. 2017. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gumbs, Alexis P. 2011. “­Speculative Poetics: Audre Lorde as Prologue for Queer Black Futurism.” In The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism, and the Speculative, edited by Sandra Jackson and Julia E. Moody Freeman, 1­ 30–​­146. New York: Peter Lang. Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2020. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “­Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3: ­575–​­599. Harpham, Gregory. 1982. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton. ­Holland-​­Toll, Linda. 2001. As American as Mom, Baseball, and Apple Pie: Constructing Community in Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Husserl, Edmund. [1913] 1991. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, translated by R. Rojcewicz. New York: Springer. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. March, Jenny. 1990. “­Euripides the Misogynist?” In Euripides, Women and Sexuality, edited by Anthony Powell, ­32–​­75. London: Routledge. Mastronarde, Donald. 2002. Euripides: Medea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ­Minh-​­ha, Trinh. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moraga, Cherríe. 2000. Loving the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó por Sus Labios, 2nd ed. Boston, MA: South End Press. Moraga, Cherríe. 2001. The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea. Albuquerque, NM: West End Press. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1983. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. ­Mortimer-​­Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. 2010. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Medea’s Ghosts: Cherríe Moraga and Queer Ecologies Morton, Timothy. 2010. “­Guest Column: Queer Ecologies.” PMLA 125.2: 2­ 73–​­282. Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mueller, Melissa. 2001. “­The Language of Reciprocity in Euripides’ Medea.” American Journal of Philology 122.4: ­471–​­504. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Pucci, Pietro. 1980. The Violence of Pity in Euripides’ Medea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Scheman, N. 1995. “­Feminist Epistemology.” Metaphilosophy 26.3: 7­ 7–​­90. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. “­Queer and Now.” In Tendencies, ­1–​­20. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “­Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, Culture and Countermemory: The “­American” Connection 17.2: ­64–​­81. Spivak, Guyatri. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Van Zyl Smit, Betine. 2002. “­Medea the Feminist.” Acta Classica 45: 1­ 01–​­122. Worman, Nancy. 2021. Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ­Yarbro-​­Bejarano, Yvonne. 2001. The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ybarra, Priscilla S. 2016. “­Ecology and Chicana/­o Cultural Nationalism: Humility Before Death in Cherríe Moraga’s Millenial Writings.” In Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment, 1­ 39–​­168. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

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32 SPECULATION ON CLASSICAL RECEPTION Queer Desire and N.K. Jemisin’s “­The Effluence Engine” Mathura Umachandran Heartbreak versus the Future1 It requires enormous structural privilege to write about the future, or as Lee Edelman (­2004) saliently ­oracle-​­d, certain kinds of futures. Such writing implies that there is enough in the way of material and spiritual resources right now to imagine time differently than the moment you are currently inhabiting. My essay is dedicated to a moment of heartbreak when the present seems so bleak as to not warrant such futural exercises. Nevertheless, galvanized by those like Mariame Kaba (­2021) who maintain hope as a discipline, I take up speculation as an impulse that can deal with the present, which can break out of its impasses with imagination and desire. Speculation, I hold, is a way of thinking about the future that answers to the conditions of the present. Speculative historiography, therefore, demands that we think in surprising ways about how time works, that is, the ethical sakes of how we write futures as they relate to the present. Carrier bags and effluence are the speculative spark points for the ­knowledge-​­making enterprises I put under scrutiny here, namely how we relate to time and how we tell stories. These metaphors differently bring attention to waste and the irrefutable interdependency of the living and the dead. The last part of this essay proposes Afrofuturism as a speculative practice of storytelling that can indicate (­not dictate) a more just queer Classics, one that is no longer beholden to the disciplinary reflexes and anxieties that have coursed through and structured classical reception studies. Watchwords for this essay: care and desire as scholarly as well as personal sensibilities.2 Above all, a desire to ensure that whatever else queerness in conjunction with Classics does, we do not repeat the epistemic and material harm that previous disciplinary structures have enabled or generated. This must therefore be, I wager, a stance of radical inclusivity, requiring us “­provincialize” the classical as a starting point, following Chakrabarty (­2000) and Padilla Peralta (­2022a) to reject complicity with the assumed universality of the classical. In accepting an invitation to chart one possible future of queer Classics, there arises for me an internal confrontation between how to survive in the crumbling ivory tower as a ­dark-​­skinned queer person of color and how to offer any chart whatsoever for classical reception, history of sexuality, or the entwinement of the two subdisciplines. Naming this conflict and grounding it in a subject, furthermore, implicates positionality as necessary to the future of any version of the discipline and its subfields but particularly to queer Classics. Elsewhere I have thought out loud about DOI: 10.4324/9781003184584-39 472

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how to craft a discipline that is explicitly oriented toward justice. In that analysis, I described a “­­so-​­called discipline of Classics,” so that I could indicate my reluctance with granting any further epistemological heft to the current discipline and to probe my own anxieties around disciplinarity itself (­Umachandran 2022). Consider this present essay a sister piece. Starting from a footing that there is a future for the discipline known as Classics, I want to formulate some methodological means for taking on the past through ourselves, in which the imagined self is capacious, mutable, and multiple. I imagine writing to and for queers first and foremost, for whom ideas and practices about community are fractious coalitions at best. Queer, genderqueer, trans, and ­non-​­binary students and scholars deserve to have epistemological and methodological frameworks in which they are visible and ­affirmed in their own temporalities. How do we make that discipline a reality and build on the work that is already underway (­Surtees and Dyer 2020) toward a ­queer-­​­as-­​­in-​­liberatory discipline?

Compulsively Victorianizing In the following examination of a dynamic I have noticed in Classics, classical reception studies, and ancient study of sexuality, I do not want to imply that there is an absence of alternative approaches, objects, sources, and methodologies in play, especially under the aegis of “­queer Classics.” Queerness, in conjunction with the classical and classical reception studies, beckons on an excitingly open field of study, one that is not stuck in the compulsive loops that I address here. The present volume with its juicy stimulations and invitations bears witness to the fact that scholars in the field are already doing so much more than dutifully carrying out ­Victori-​­manic scholarly afterlives. So, without wishing to reground the outsized importance of this one narrow slice of classical reception history or concede to it any more space, I take this obsession as a potent example of how Classics construes itself as universal. When the historiography of ancient sexuality studies is told as one that is irrefutably inflected by the Victorians, the consequence is to make it seem as though this is all the history of scholarship that can be told. It furthermore asserts that the daisy chain of identitarian impulses at play here (­of Victorian gentlemen scholars with their ancient homosexual counterparts, of ­twentieth-​­century theorists and historians of sexuality choosing to go directly to antiquity and to go via the Victorians) as naturalized habits of disciplinarity. In fact, what queer classical reception studies has done so well and has potential to do more of is theorize its relation to its objects as particular and subjective. What is at stake in the following is dissolving the intimacy of the classical and the universal, that is, a project of clearing grounds to unleash a queerer Classics.3 Shane Butler (­2019) traces the entwined development of classical reception studies since the 1990s with the study of ancient sexuality. It is instructive to review this account of a twinned disciplinary formation as well as where Butler gets to by the end of it because it is meaningful for the overall aim in this essay to indicate what future might be staked for queerness within disciplinary frameworks of the classical. Specifically, I want to linger here in order to offer my own view about how classical reception studies gets past its compulsion to Victorianize. As anyone who has acted compulsively understands, it is not enough to enjoin them to simply stop the act (“­don’t worry!”)—​­you have to get to the bottom of where and why the compulsion exists. What is it with (­specifically British, specifically male) classicists and the compulsion toward British, Victorian, elite men and their homosexuality? As will become clear, I diverge from Butler in choosing not to return to the Victorians, compulsively or otherwise, and specifically to a particular kind of Victorian intellectual producer that has dominated the study of ancient sexuality and classical reception studies in its thrall. 473

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Butler offers a lucid account for this tendency to veer toward the same object over and again, once more with feeling. He observes the intimate connections between the ­Foucauldian-​­inflected study of ancient sexuality as it encountered classical reception studies in the work of David Halperin and Charles Martindale respectively. As reception studies and the study of ancient sexuality collided and overlapped, Butler recounts, one consequence was the enshrining of historicism as a privileged method. Such valorizing of (­New) historicism not only reiterates the way in which the parent discipline understands itself to be as modern but also, Butler suggests, enables a highly charged elision between ancient past and present scholar, or, brings to the fore “­the sexualized question of scholarly agency” (­Butler 2019, 376). Naming how “­Greek love” has been construed not just as object of study but also as a metaphor through which a particular kind of scholar figures his (­and it is resolutely his) understanding of his own relationship with the past, Butler demonstrates the Victorians’ outsized hold on the disciplinary imagination of classical reception studies as a function of male homoerotic desire. Offering a way out of this historicist impasse, Butler proposes thinking with Victorian writer and cultural historian John Addington Symonds. He freely admits that, in biographical terms, Symonds is hard to differentiate from the elite ­public-​­school boys and Oxford Classics dons who constitute the ensemble of his account. Butler suggests that in a lifelong engagement with Achilles, rendered polymorphous in gender as well as sex, “­offering an almost dizzying variety of possible pleasures” (­Butler 2019, 401), Symonds discovered a “­principle of perfect reciprocity” in an idealized male friendship with Achilles (­Butler 2019, 402). Taken as a metaphor for reception in which the older and wizened ­scholar-​­Patroclus is allowed a fleeting but complete moment of engagement with Achilles, the beautiful youth of the past, Symonds formulates a model for classical reception that holds the desires of the scholar and the agency of the object on equal terms. What this model might mean for the classical reception scholar: no more sighing after Ariadne, no more measuring and lamenting the temporal ­distance—​­for Butler, Symonds holds out the promise of more equal encounter. Heralding Symonds, I suspect, and the reiteration of elite male homosexual desire as a good model for doing classical reception is not to the benefit of the future of classical reception studies. Effectively returning to Symonds shorts the circuits of critical possibility and clips us back into the Victoriana compulsion. And that clipping in is significant not only because this is a conversation between some of the most powerful players in classical reception studies whose voices carry sway. A second jeopardy in reprising of a Victorian object of study has to do with the disposition of the classical reception scholar himself. Throughout this essay, Butler rightly takes Simon Goldhill to task for presuming to speak for an imagined “­us,” a community of readers and scholars in the present, as well as presuming to speak for the past itself. The failure of imagination here is the presumption to speak on behalf of or to the history of homosexuality as though that history was not one riven with oppression and discrimination, as though heterosexual scholars could intervene with authority assumed from a dominant social position. Since the dominant layer of classical reception studies is stuck on looping back to the Victorians, it renders the actors available to everyone to speak on. And so the question that arises here is: for and by whom is the history of ancient sexuality written? Butler’s conclusion allows us to think about what is overshadowed or diminished by continuing to linger with the Victorians. Issuing a rallying cry for queer solidarity, Butler enjoins: A number of us, queer and otherwise, have gone along with this, perhaps convinced that, if we want finally to get the past off our backs, we must never be seen, in our relationship to the past, to be on our backs. But surely the time is long overdue to retire these metaphors 474

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and the grammars they wrest from our ­bodies—​­or, barring that, to pursue the good queer strategy of making them fully our own. (­Butler 2019, 403) It is useful to think about how queer scholars resist being trapped in historiographies of the classical that exclude us. I take it seriously when Butler asks us to “­retire” or undo the metaphors and grammars of being “­on our backs,” and support the idea that a “­good queer strategy” is subversion. How should we subvert this rhetorical position so that we are no longer in a relationship of compliance, complicity, or submission to the past? I pause here to recall the ­path-​­breaking 1980s lesbian pornographic magazine On Our Backs based in San Francisco. As Gayle Rubin recently reiterated (­2022), this motley crew of ­out-­​­and-​­proud, ­sex-​­positive dykes and queers asserted the right to pleasure and visibility as a basic political right in a climate of ­anti-​­pleasure feminism that trafficked in the politics of respectability. Recalling On Our Backs’ radical assertion of this right, we are well reminded that there is a rich contemporary history of desire that does not have to make recourse to the coordinates, strategies, and objects that classical reception studies has traditionally valorized. I am suggesting that we can directly address the latent lesbophobia and queerphobia that implicitly structures the inherited epistemology of classical reception studies. In focusing on the Victorians once more and making them the site at which we continue to theorize, we foreclose the possibility that taking other approaches that could provide us with openings to more emancipatory dwelling in, with, and against time. Queer classical reception must depart from the naturalized habits of thinking and intellectual coordinates that it has inherited, and must instead look to lesbian, queer, trans, and ­non-​­binary thinkers and artists whose ideas about the future that are not locked into place by virtue of privileging the classical. This is not merely an exercise in guarding against disciplinary sterility and it certainly should not be extractive as a ­knowledge-​­making enterprise. But, as queer scholars dedicated to liberation work, we can make an intentional choice to assert a right to a future that we ourselves are making with theoretical resources that serve us, that confirm our place in the worlds to come.

Carrier Bag Theorizing for classical reception I now move to consider what other objects and narratives we could attend to other than those which classical reception studies has privileged in its disciplinary formation. I turn to Ursula K. Le Guin’s celebrated 1986 feminist manifesto, “­The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” to charge up an argument about storytelling that is, I suggest, useful for us as we think about making relationships to the past that forefront ethical choices. Le Guin was herself a ­much-​­decorated master of fiction of all kinds: speculative and science fiction, such as The Left Hand of Darkness (­2018), offer room for philosophical experimentation as well as compelling plots. Her literary critical reflections give us insight into how this master craftswoman conceived of the work that fiction could do. I want to think with and ultimately beyond Le Guin’s argument here, to arrive at N.K. Jemisin’s short story which showcases the futural orientations from which I hope queer Classics can draw. Let me briefly offer the main beats of “­The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Le Guin draws on a proposition by anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher (­1979) that the first tool of human ­community-​ ­making was not a weapon but a container. This is a consequential shift from thinking about early social groupings as ­hunter-​­gatherers to gatherers in the first instance. Le Guin grafts this proposition onto a theory of fiction in calling for a shift away from heroic narratives about civilization. If the totem of patriarchal myth is the spear, Le Guin proposes instead the carrier bag as a metaphor for making narratives that do not thematize domination. A carrier bag mode 475

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of storytelling represents the intentional divestment from reiterating ­self-​­justifying stories that patriarchal civilization tells itself and imposes on the world. Implicit in her argument is an insistence therefore also on the power of fiction itself that can be used to buttress or resist political arrangements. Le Guin nestles a speculative story of her own into this argument. She imagines a ­pre-​­historic scenario to show, as well as tell, what she intends by framing a carrier bag theory of fiction: It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a ­wild-​­oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while and then I found another patch of oats… No, it does not compare, it cannot compare with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood sprouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain. (­Le Guin 1986, 165) The ­so-​­called “­Hero” narrative swamps the oat patch with its spectacular drama of killing. Le Guin’s complaint is that the focus on patriarchal, heroizing narrative absorbs and subordinates all other actors and narrative possibilities: “­it cannot compare with how I thrust my spear.” Furthermore, in the fictional scenario of the oat patch, Le Guin emphasizes the mundane repetitiveness of ­life-​­making activity. The radical move is to propose this mundanity as the source of more complex, interesting stories. What makes for “­a really gripping tale” after leaving behind violence and domination as thematic touchstones? That is the challenge of the carrier bag theory of fiction. Bringing a carrier bag ­sensibility—​­or a “­bag lady” disposition as Donna Haraway (­2008, 157) would have ­it—​­to classical reception buttresses my argument for divesting from “­Hero”-​­ic narratives of scholarship and the inherited objects that are considered valuable to pay attention to. Such a sensibility would open up a far more varied set of objects, depending on what each scholar put in their personal carrier ­bag—​­a scrap of silk, a bug in amber on a chain, a good knife, a bandage might go in mine. While I will not go all out here and formally dub a carrier bag theory of classical reception for reasons indicated below, I do want to note that meaningfully feminist and queer approaches to reception studies will develop their own ­methodologies—​­and here I mean to indicate that we have permission to abandon historicism, even temporarily, in order to find ways of inquiring about and relating toward the past that welcome or invite complexity. When we do away with the “­Hero”-​­ic narratives of classical reception, what are we left with? Taking inspiration from Le Guin’s own tactic in the story of the oat patch, I leap toward speculation as the mode of fiction that I want to attend to as well as the mode of knowledge production. Speculation is explicitly presented in “­The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” not in relation to fantasy, or rather, the fantastical in the pejorative sense. This is evident in the way that Le Guin hones in on what (­science) fiction is, giving us not exactly a definition but certainly a differentiation, tucked in toward the end of the essay. Le Guin maintains: If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s (­killing) arrow mode of the Techno Heroic, and primarily redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far 476

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less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact, less a mythological genre than a realistic one. It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality. (­Le Guin 1986, 170) While Le Guin’s pessimism about myth must surely be up for interrogation (­it is unfair to construe myth as exclusively discursive or trafficking with the symbolic), I draw attention to what Le Guin notes are the harms of linear historiography: “­Time’s (­killing) arrow” proposes civilizational progress as inherently violent. The shift to explicitly ­non-​­violent metaphors for ­culture-​­making decouples, or perhaps ­de-​­instrumentalizes, “­science and technology.” Once science fiction has been untethered from the demands to narrate triumphant civilizational narratives, the effect is not only a more ambitious imaginative project of knowledge production (­the opening up of a “­narrow rigid field”) but also fabricates a closer relationship to reality and its representation. I pause here over the ­counter-​­intuitive connection between science fiction and realism. The neatness of the rhetorical mirroring in the statement “­it’s a strange realism, but then it’s a strange reality” (­Le Guin 1986, 170) occludes the formal and representational innovations that Le Guin is proposing for science fiction. Science fiction in the mode of the carrier bag pays better attention to particular qualities, textures, and dynamics of a material world that it seeks to describe, and reciprocates the complexity (“­strange”-​­ness) it finds by taking up more complex representational strategies. Le Guin’s “­strange realism” therefore carries over into the mimetic realm the desire not to dominate the world. Ultimately, this sensibility both grounds science fiction in the ­here-­​­and-​­now and gives it the capacity to speculate. Fiction in a speculative and ­non-​­dominant mode can therefore be understood as running experiments with history, taking material from the present. Alive to the strangeness of reality, speculative strategies of representation such as Le Guin proposes here, can form critical as well as imaginative relationships with reality. If carrier bag theorizing gets me much of the way to wresting queer Classics and queer classical reception studies toward more ­open-​­ended historiographies than those inherited stories and objects, I offer here a disclaimer or two. The first note of caution I sound is around Le Guin’s idea of the human in the decentering of the “­Hero” and heroic narratives. Le Guin’s theory allows her to enter “­humanity” for the first time, a social category from which she perceives she has been disbarred by virtue of being a woman. Furthermore “­human” as a social category does not hold her interest because of its entanglement with violent exclusions of difference and its privileging of heroic (­male) subjects. It might seem that carrier bag sensibilities of approaching and narrating the world have direct liberatory consequences. But Le Guin’s categorical difference from “­human” rests on a particular idea of “­woman.” I want to articulate the unspoken parts of this differential, namely around ­white-​­ness and ­cis-​­ness.4 The vision of the oat patch and the stories that arise thence are to do with caretaking, ­child-​­rearing, and ­life-​­sustaining in ways that are aligned with binary gender. By virtue of not being male “­Hero”-​­ic activities, these are implicitly heteronormative ideas about what work is proper to “­woman.” If we scrutinize binary gender essentialist ideas at work here, we might also see how Le Guin’s ­self-​­articulation as “­woman” leaves out how others, especially queer, Black, trans, and ­non-​­binary subjects have historically and ongoingly been disbarred from the category of human. It is a relatively simple point but one worth reprising that the liberation of white women does little for others who are harmed by oppressive systems that, for instance, generate exclusionary ideas of the human. Carrier bag theorizing has supplied the ­push-​­off point in arguing for the value of speculative fiction, but we need to find theories that are insistently and persistently watchful of the multiple vectors in which the idea of the human has itself been wielded as a tactic of civilizational disciplining. The importance of narrative in addressing the silences of the past has been significantly 477

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taken up in Black Studies, particularly in Saidiya Hartman’s now widely cited strategy of critical fabulation. For my purposes here, I understand the critical part of such projects as addressing the material problem of who has counted as a human subject and who has been (­violently) excluded from humanity (­see Rankine in this volume). The ­pre-​­historical inhabitants of Le Guin’s fictional oat patch, in other words, are as white as the “­Hero” she rejects.5 Where gender as difference comes under conceptual pressure in Le Guin’s theory and fiction, race does not constitute a similar analytical priority. For speculative fiction to achieve the emancipatory potential that carrier bag theorizing sets out, we must seek out those frameworks that critique whiteness and cisness, especially as they appear in the guise of feminist epistemologies. Therefore, I make a move to Afrofuturism as one such framework and specifically to the example of a short story by N.K. Jemisin, going with Le Guin and beyond her by making a conceptual priority of queerness and Blackness.6 Without belaboring the point, it is not that Afrofuturist aesthetics tout court or the story I discuss hold all the answers to the conceptual ills and injustices that beset queer Classics and classical reception studies. Rather they demonstrate to us an orientation of the future of these disciplines toward justice and the redress of historical exclusions and silences. The absence of Black stories, actors, and histories of ­scholarship—​­these are not accidents of the ­knowledge-​­making practices of Classics and classical reception studies but rather are generated by ­long-​­held ideological arrangements. To imagine a different future, we must pick up and intentionally commit to alternative epistemologies. The one I propose here is Afrofuturism, whose critiques are essential to reframing the white imagination of Classics.

Effluential Storytelling American writer N.K. Jemisin is hailed as one of the most important voices in science fiction today. Though she mostly works on ­long-​­form narrative prose (­standalone novels, or novels in duology or trilogy format), the short story as a genre has provided her with room for narrative experimentation. How Long‘­Til Black Future Month? is a short story collection, and I focus on one story in the following section. “­The Effluent Engine” (­Jemisin 2018, ­75–​­112) offers precisely the kind of conceptual laboratory that is useful to think through some of the questions around narrative, form, method, and historiographical critique that I have framed thus far. Furthermore, “­The Effluent Engine” is useful for me in making no direct connection to Greece or Rome. Rather than invalidating its relevance for thinking through the disciplinary futures, I hope that this choice of story provincializes the classical and aligns with my insistence that the epistemological tools that we use for critique can (­and should) be drawn from outside the discipline. Such is the motivation for turning to a writer whose ­self-​­identified “­activist” agenda is not beholden to returning to privileged moments of the ancient ­Greco-​­Roman past (­Jemisin 2018, ­xii-​­xiii).7 Jemisin’s reimagining of the historical fortunes of Haiti in “­The Effluent Engine” is an excellent distillation of the kind of challenge Afrofuturist narrative can mount.8 Eurocentric political theory and philosophy of history has habitually failed to grapple with the significance of the Haitian slave revolt. As historian Sibylle Fischer points out, [i]n Europe, the dates and names associated with the Age of ­Revolution—​­1789, 1848, Robespierre, Napoleon, ­Hegel—​­eventually became metonymic with the history of modernity. Although the fortunes made on the colonial plantations and through the slave trade played an important part in the rise of the bourgeoisie in many European regions, 478

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the Caribbean plantation and the political upheavals in the colonies rarely make it into the ­canonical histories of modernity and revolution. (­Fischer 2004, 7) Thus Arendt and other prominent Eurocentric theorists of human freedom in the twentieth century have continued to seriously undervalue the political agency and significance of organized slave revolt on Saint Domingue.9 In vehement contradiction to the elevation of Europe as the first and best template for human freedom and emancipation, thinkers in the Black radical tradition have asserted the world historical importance of the Haitian Revolution, no more succinctly put than by Martinician poet and political thinker Aimé Césaire: “­To study ­Saint-​­Domingue is to study one of the origins, one of the sources, of today’s western civilization.”10 “­The Effluent Engine” participates in this tradition of radical Black thought, upending Eurocentric ideas about human freedom and the paths of revolutionary action by finding alternatives sites for theorizing these concepts and dramatically ­re-​­narrating them as found in locations of queer pleasure, Black ingenuity, and the Caribbean. A brief synopsis of “­The Effluent Engine” provides a good starting point for the following discussion. Set in a recognizable New Orleans, Jemisin imagines an alternative historical timeline in which the slave revolt on Saint Domingue led by Toussaint L’Ouverture against the French was carried through and beyond the revolutionary moment (­­1791–​­1804). In Jemisin’s story, technological progress is the key factor that has altered the timeline as well as the ­long-​­term outcome of the Haitian Revolution: “­dirigibles” (­airships) run across the Caribbean islands and the US mainland, the latter which is still a ­slave-​­owning society with concomitant hierarchies of race. The future of the fledgling independent nation of Haiti, seeking to outdo both superpowers breathing down its neck, depends on the ability to turn the waste product of rum distillation into a source of energy for their airships. The protagonist is debonair Haitian intriguer Jessaline Dumonde who ventures to Louisiana in order to get material equipment and ­know-​­how from Norbert Rillieux, a ­light-​ ­skinned Creole scientist who might be able to help Haiti get ahead. When he proves unwilling to help because of the precarity of his position or a distaste for Jessaline as a Black woman, Jessaline the ­ever-​­resourceful spy turns to his far more capable sister Eugenie. Making a hasty escape from New Orleans after her cover is blown and the plans for the refining equipment are stolen by a shady white supremacist cabal, Jessaline offers Eugenie a lifetime of queer joy, ­self-​­fulfillment, and liberty in free Haiti. “­The Effluent Engine” provides an opening to a timeline in which Haiti in the contemporary moment is not at the merciless whim of centuries of US political sanctions, punitive international economic policies, and internal turmoil. Jemisin hooks into this vast historiographical canvas by alluding to Jessaline’s parentage, making her the daughter of the Haitian Revolution’s most iconic revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture himself. The optimistic goal of such a retelling is to divert the story of the Haitian Revolution away from tragedy and toward a more profound critique, namely that we can write modernity as more than the exclusive temporal or ­chrono-​­political province of Western historiography. Jemisin underscores her intervention into global modernity with a conspicuous anachronism: throughout the short story, she refers to Haiti and Haitian rather than Saint Domingue. She thereby not only alerts us to the speculative project (­the story is not taking place in “­our” timeline) but also insists that we think about Haiti and Haitians in our present as the narrative unfolds. Against the backdrop of a sweeping revisioning of the Haitian Revolution and the jostling of international competition, Jemisin makes it clear that above all this is a queer love story between fiercely smart dark and ­light-​­skinned Black women (­the story’s final glorious flourish of 479

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a sentence: “­And [Jessaline] wondered why she had ever bothered with plans and papers and gadgetry, because it was clear that she had just stolen the greatest prize of all” Jemisin 2018,112). She makes Jessaline and Eugenie’s blossoming love affair central to the vision of an ongoingly free Haiti. It is, after all, the place where Jessaline promises Eugenie that liberatory impulses, experiments with alternative social arrangements, and queer desire can flourish, telling her that “ in my land it is not uncommon for a woman to head a family with another woman, and even raise children if they so wish” (­Jemisin 2018, 96). It is important that the plot in which a free Haiti tentatively moves toward autonomy hinges on a queer romance, and specifically the capability of both women to think imaginatively about their lives and their bodies beyond heteronormative scripts. Indeed, these capabilities for ­self-​ ­determination are expressed in how Jessaline and Eugenie respectively navigate the worlds of politics and science, the former as a ­class-​­crossing, ­sea-​­hopping, intriguer and the latter as canny enough in her translation of distillation theory to extractor prototype to give Haiti a crucial advantage in the technological arms race. I make a move now to think more closely about how “­effluence,” as a waste product in the rum distillation process, articulates the ­anti-​­heteronormative and ­anti-​­colonial politics of the plot, that is, its queerness. Effluence, as I demonstrate, lays waste to clear divides between nature and science, bodies that are valued intrinsically versus bodies that are valued for instrumental use only. Jemisin’s effluential storytelling, I propose, recruits queerness to frame alternate possibilities to narratives of history, such as that of Western modernity, that have been o­ ver-​­represented. The spy and romance plots culminate simultaneously in a showdown at the Rillieux mansion. After various failed acts of subterfuge to steal the plans and parts for a methane extractor, two agents of the Order of the White Camelias stage an ­all-​­out attack to take the plans and turn the race for technology to the advantage of the United States against France. One of these agents overhears a moment of tension between the two women and while Eugenie escapes, the agent lays out to Jessaline in crude terms the ­racialized-​­sexual economy of his American supremacist ideology: “­I heard you Haitians were [unnatural],” he said coming into the light, “­but this? Not at all what I was expecting.” After ­non-​­consensually touching Jessaline’s breasts, he goes on, “[g]entlemen need gentlewomen… Your kind are hardly that, being good for only one thing” (­Jemisin 2018, 104, emphasis in original). The agent divides the world into binary categories, the better to make hierarchical relations within it and retain power over it: men and women, black and white. What can be made sense of within these binary hierarchies is rendered as civilized human behavior (­as in the shorthand “­­gentle-​­”) but also paradoxically as natural. In the agent’s sneer about the “­unnatural”-​­ness of Jessaline and Eugenie’s intimacy, he in fact realizes that there are phenomena such as the love of two Black women that fall far outside of this hermeneutic frame and therefore beyond his control. The implied threat that ­dark-​­skinned Black women are “­only good for one thing” constitutes the violent response to those things that upset the rigid limits of this ­worldview—​­they must be used and then discarded. To challenge this disposability of human life, as well as the binary logic upon which heteronormative social relations rest, I understand Jemisin’s ­effluence—​­the uneven, unmanageable, remainder, the useless l­eftover—​­as generative of queer possibilities of freedom. As Eugenie discerns by sniffing, as a material substance, effluence is a blend of gases including hydrogen sulfide (­Jemisin 2018, 85). As the byproduct of the rum distillation process, it is tied up with the cultivation of sugarcane as a monocultural crop. The ­industrial-​­scale production of rum therefore requires the colonial disciplining of the land and the extraction of labor power, enacting the logic of the plantationocene. Moreover, effluence makes the city actively ­unpleasant—​­the story opens: “­New Orleans stank to the heavens” (­Jemisin 2018, 75)—​­if not actually toxic to live 480

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in. How then are we to construe effluence as queer? Jemisin’s descriptions of effluence as revolting can be mapped directly onto how queerness has historically been understood as disgusting, an affront to the “­natural” (­reproductive) order of things. To spell this out, both queerness and effluence are normatively conceived of as contaminants.11 Until the discovery that methane could be extracted and used as an energy source, Jemisin indicates that effluence was at best an inconvenience and at worst an environmental disaster. When Eugenie takes methane as something valuable from effluence as this gross waste product, we do not have to hurry to impart instrumental value to it. Rather, it remains this queer thing that reshuffles and unsettles any understanding of a binary relationship between nature and technology. Sliming its way through the interstices of concepts of nature, it demands that we reckon with where we are and how we can think about freedom and ­unfreedom—​­I suggest that effluence is the site of thinking about liberatory possibilities precisely because it is unnatural, the throwaway substance, the thing that might evade being locked into the schema of instrumental value. Queer desires retrieve and remake value from what has been thrown out as useless. But effluence also insists that queer liberatory possibilities cannot simply sweep away or ignore the historical forces of colonial governing and damage to the land or narrating of the world. Instead, Jemisin suggests, our sites of reimagination are going to be with the impure, or with what is held to be disgusting. There is where we might have to seek there the possibilities of transformation. Getting out hands dirty, we queers might have to also be ingenious and resourceful at the end of one world and in the imagining of others.

… Queer as in Liberation This essay started life as a keynote talk at the first “­Queer and the Classical” conference held online in 2021, in which I also engaged with the “­Carrier Bag” essay (­Umachandran 2021). In that talk, I probed a binary between life and death that Le Guin uses to differentiate types of storytelling (“­life oriented” storytelling originates from the oat patch, “­death oriented” storytelling celebrates the “­Hero” and civilizational violence). I used the figure of the mushroom to feel out a fuzzier line between types of narrative, thinking through parasitic and decompositional processes way that mushrooms make their way through the interstices of life and death. I called that a queer way of working through the world, and sprang from there to think about complex relationships to the past. While the mycelial model of Classical reception deserves its own ­full-​­length elaboration as a methodological intervention, I have continued thinking alongside the “­Carrier Bag” essay as a significant intervention in thinking narrative, the purposes of critique, and the epistemological stakes of temporality for queerness. All of these, I submit, remain issues pertinent to queer Classics and classical reception studies. In reaching here for Jemisin and effluence, I have moved to make a priority of ­race-​­conscious and ­gender-​­expansive criticism in the name of exploring the possibilities of “­where next?” for queer Classics and classical reception. Recruiting science fiction as an analogy for disciplinary transformation, I have proposed Jemisin’s short story as a development from Le Guin’s template for writing feminist narratives of the past issuing an urgent ­reminder—​­for those who want to redraft classical ­reception—​­that feminist and queer futures must be uncompromisingly attendant to the un/­making of racial hierarchies too. Queerness under the sign of the classical has the chance to redress, repair, and ­re-​­do relationships to the past in alternative ways than the parent discipline has directed. Speculation, as I propose it, is one of these ways. Jemisin’s speculative commitments, as showcased in “­The Effluence Engine,” allow me to set out a different stall for triangulating between science fiction, queerness, and classical reception. I 481

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am intervening in an already vibrant scholarly seam of investigation in classical reception studies that starts from the premise that Classics and Science Fiction have much to say to one another. Far from disagreeing with the idea that there is a rich conversation between Classics and Science Fiction (­Rogers and Stevens 2015; Rogers and Stevens 2018), queerness (­as ever) complicates matters in the most delightful way. A common gesture is to turn to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus as a way of insisting that the classical was vitally present at the birth of science fiction. Appealing to a conspicuous classical presence in a canonical text as a point of departure, however, reiterates reception studies’ conservative tendencies to skew toward tradition, single authorship, and the model of “­influence.” Once the influence model has been reinstalled (­ancient text, author, symbol, gloss found in later text), it is much more difficult to make the case for the kinds of imaginative feminist, queer, and ­anti-​­racist work critiques as I have been calling for. Effluential storytelling, as I have organized it here as in kinship with Afrofuturism, therefore eschews models of influence and tradition. Speculative critique of this kind will appear inadequate to those who demand to see proof of the operations of the classical as legitimate reception work. Afrofuturism is one such powerful speculative project, one that can hold the racial contingencies of cultural formation up to scrutiny alongside inquiring about how we understand these as functioning in and on the present. Speculative critical enterprises, as I have been arguing, cannot be undertaken with a purist (­read: fascist) commitment to futurism but from honoring and attending to the muck and the mess, the effluence, of the past. What can we glean (­glean in that old sense of ­magpie-​­picking and collecting and sorting detritus) from the past to build more just futures? It is a question that queer Black people and queer n­ on-​­Black folks of color, as well as other violently marginalized people, have articulated for themselves time and again. Grappling with such an inquiry might well involve, for some, invoking once again the elite British homosexual men as the place for building more just futures. In thinking critically about how the normative gestures of Classics and classical reception studies rehearse and reprise one another, however, I have disavowed the whiteness that makes only certain historical subjects visible, and I have instead directed my attention to what else is possible. As Kodwo Eshun insists, Afrofuturist narratives have an ability to reshape and reorder history, querying ideas such as progress and humanism that have from their inception made a priority of Eurocentric subjects. He writes, “­By creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear time of progress, these futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory” (­Eshun 2003, 465). For Eshun, the key moves for redrafting history to make room for black subjects are anachronism and complexity. That is the challenge that Afrofuturism frames for classical reception. From here, what speculations can we make about the disciplinary futures of queer Classics and classical reception studies? Or if we gather the threads laid out here, we could ask “­what might a queer, Afrofuturist, ­effluence-​­driven classical reception look like?” As Marchella Ward saliently reminds us time and again, if queer Classics and classical reception is one of the strands of ­knowledge-​­making that is oriented toward justice, it must tell stories about the past that enables it to narrate and makes claims on futures that are more survivable than the present. The wildest, most ambitious horizon to aim for is to take up a part in making more livable futures. But when we consider disciplinary futurity for its own sake, speculative thinking in the way that I have indicated in this essay admits different texts, audiences, and cultural producers to the table. “­Different” as in femmes/­QTPOC to the front, as the organizing slogan goes, an invitation issued to people who have traditionally been relegated to the margins, the footnotes, or the acknowledgments. Which cultural texts are worthy of attention, and what new methodological frameworks do we need to 482

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borrow in order to do justice to them? Who will be involved in ­discipline-​­making when we make the concerted effort to bring attention to popular venues and vernacular forms, and how do we make space for these ­knowledge-​­makers without demanding that they contort to respectability politics and gentrified k­ nowledge-​­making practices? In fact, bringing serious scholarly attention in this way exposes the regimes of cultural value to which Classics and classical reception studies have been wedded. Fans, fan cultural producers, and online fandoms offer a joyful realization of the experiments with narrative that are essential to speculation. Fans have their own carrier bags, the cultural tchotchkes that they collect, cherish, and elaborate on. I turn to carrington, who relies on Black science fiction theory Samuel R. Delaney’s theorizing of the “­paraliterary” to insist that fans are an integral part of the cultural production of science fiction texts. So, we might not only point to how queer Classics thrived online before moving into the traditional venues of scholarship but also how fandom as a site of cultural production has energized queer classical reception.12 We might consider fanfiction and particularly the ­sub-​­genre slash fiction (­narratives about two characters in romantic and or sexual relationships) as a good example of effluential storytelling, promiscuously and without permission from parent narratives taking liberties to see what else a story might yet yield. Thus, Spock and Kirk might have as much to teach us about the dynamics of queer intimacy and power as Alexander and Hephastion, and better still, to set these two pairs reverberating with one another. Consider Plutarch’s comment that Alexander’s grief at his beloved’s sudden death at Ecbatana was “­uncontrollable” alongside the image of Kirk slumped on the other side of the protective glass at the end of The Wrath of Khan.13 Introduce the specters of Achilles and Patroclus as the erotic models for Alexander’s ­self-​­fashioning, and we can meaningfully think through the queer functions of fan ­fiction—​­ancient and future, historical and science ­fictional—​­as effluential reception. If Classics and classical reception were to take queer pasts and queer futures together in complex ways, I want to offer one further example of how Black speculative fiction might effect such disciplinary transformation. I can imagine a class in ancient political theory and its reception that is conceptually abundant, finding space for Octavia Butler’s dystopian forecasting (­Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents) to brush up against Plato’s Republic. Moving out from there, this speculative syllabus might work through recent advances in the queerness of Plato’s fashioning of Socrates and put these into dialogue with Butler’s queer ­family-​­making (­the Patternist novels), and experiments with otherness of all kinds (­Xenogenesis). In staging such an encounter, we are not seeking applications or influences of the classical. Giving these a wide swerve, we would recognize the dialogue between Plato and Butler’s science fictive and narrative experiments as its own vibrant political form. This speculative syllabus, which is ­cross-​­listed with Africana Studies as well as with English, is ­co-​­taught and encourages creative writing as well as creative thinking. How would students respond to writing assignments that would ask them to meditate on justice, or utopia, or family as a concept convened by Octavia Butler as well as Plato? What would thinking about relationships to time as adventures in science fiction permit to us in this classroom, working our way through a speculative syllabus?

Further Reading carrington (­2016) immaculately brings together the theorizing of fandom with critiques from and of Black studies and speculative fiction. Naimon (­2022), an episode of the mini podcast series from Tin House books, features pleasure activist, doula, and writer adrienne maree brown. Thinking between Octavia Butler and Le Guin, maree brown offers a robust rebuttal to my reading of Le 483

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Guin in this essay. The Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London showed “­In the Black Fantastic” (­June 29, ­2022–​­to September 18, 2022), exploring the critical and aesthetic work that the speculative can do in the hands of Black artists such as Nick Cave, Hew Locke, Wangechi Mutu, Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, and others. Curator Ekow Eshun has intentionally eschewed “­futurisms,” ­Afro-​­ and otherwise, for “­fantastic” as the key term for this exploration. An array of sources including critical essays are gathered in the beautiful exhibition catalog Eshun (­2022). Thomas (­2000) and Thomas (­2004) are invaluable treasure troves and good starting points for the genre. For the uses of speculation for writing history Hartman (­2019) is unmatched.

Notes 1 I presented parts of this essay at the ‘­Queer and the Classical’ conference organized by Marcus Bell, Eleonora Colli, and Nicolette D’­Angelo—​­my thanks to them for that opportunity. I would like to thank Sukaina Hirji and Valerie Hoagland for their eternal encouragement and readiness to get loud in the streets about utopia and Star Trek. Jessica Wright turned me on to the genius of N.K Jemisin many years ago. Ella Haselswerdt has shown infinite comradeliness; with thanks to Kirk Ormand and Sara Lindheim for their editorial support. Lastly my fungal love vaster than empires for Hannah Silverblank, without whom this essay and its mushroom analysis would not exist. 2 Rosa dos Ventos Lopes Heimer, Marcela Terán, and Tatiana Garavito 2022, organizers of London based, ­migrant-​­led solidarity network Apoyo Comunitario describe the kind of care I envision, leaning on Fiona Robson’s vision of care ethics. They emphasize care as a praxis of the collective rather than (­or, as well as) the individual, and as relational rather than transactional. 3 This can also be pitched as the phobic inclination of the classical to ­over-​­represent. For a pungent analysis of this as a colonial tendency of the discipline, joining the mimetic problem of representing some subjects at the material expense and violent silencing of others, see Padilla Peralta (­2022b). 4 The aim of this discussion is not to make a straw woman theorist of Le Guin. For what it is worth, the “­Carrier Bag” essay is surely not the most radical moment of gender ­re-​­visioning in Le Guin’s oeuvre. For that we could turn to her extraordinary idea of kemmer, the cyclical appearance of sex drive and gendered bodies in The Left Hand of Darkness, or her bold theorizing and acts of ­auto-​­critique in the essays “­Is Gender Necessary” and “­Is Gender Necessary, Redux.” So Mayer and Shin (­2023) have recently brought together a comprehensive collection of Le Guin’s feminist writings and explorations of gender. On Le Guin’s complex theorizing of gender, see Yarber (­2020). 5 Khader (­2005, ­110–​­127) points out that even when Le Guin indicates racial difference, such as in the black protagonist of The Left Hand of Darkness Genly Ai, she is not interested in how racial difference produces material or epistemological difference. Writes Khader with respect to Le Guin’s conspicuous disinterest around the historical and material conditions of Ai’s Blackness, … No one can deny the important contribution to the SF canon by interrogating hegemonic representations of Otherness and by refusing to demonize Otherness as either a metaphor for darkness or a signifier of inferiority. Nonetheless, Le Guin refuses to politicize her conceptualization of Otherness and visions of ­cross-​­cultural encounters. (­113) 6 With an alternative set of political aims and theoretical ­co-​­ordinates, Afropessimism mounts a different kind of challenge to the epistemologies and historiographies of the classical. See Rankine (­forthcoming). 7 By contrast, see for instance Jemisin’s desire to think with the ancient Egyptian past in her novels The Killing Moon (­2012) and The Shadowed Sun (­2012), also known as the “­Dreamblood Duology.” 8 The coining of the term Afrofuturism is commonly attributed to critic Mark Dery (­1994). Nnedi Okorafor (­2019) reminds us that Afrofuturism is hotly contested conceptual territory, whose genealogy and relation to parent genres such as science fiction and speculative fiction must be differentiated. Thus Okorafor rejects what she finds a clumsy labelling of her work as Afrofuturist and places herself in genres such as Africanfuturism of Africanjujuism. Where Barber charts a historiography of Afrofuturism to the contemporary moment, the death of Afrofuturism (­Lewis 2008, ­139–​­153) and the “­post” Afrofuturism moment has been long heralded.

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Queer Desire and N.K. Jemisin’s “The Effluence Engine” 9­ ­Buck-​­Morss (­2009) offers trenchant critique of the figure of Haiti haunting of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Beckett (­2013) traces the omissions of the Haitian Revolution in the liberal tradition of Western political thought from Rousseau onwards, up to and including Arendt’s The Origins of Freedom. 10 Translated from Cesaire 1961, 21. Lecznar (­2020, 197–222) draws out the implications of Césaire’s political thought around Haiti and world historiography specifically via tragedy. 11 The recent efflorescence of feminist waste studies (­as a strand of ­post-​­humanist ecological inquiry) has articulated dirt, discard, excess, and waste in pungent critiques of modernity. See Mehrabi (­2020,­138–​­154). 12 This connection I owe to Lena Barsky whose thinking on fan, fandoms, and online ­self-​­fashioning is pathbreaking. 13 The second appearance of Star Trek in this essay is more than just my personal preference. In fact, Star Trek is enormously significant to the formation of theorising around fans and fandom. As brief illustration: the cover image of Journal of Fandom Studies. Founded in 2012, it bears an image of light skinned hand giving the “­Live Long and Prosper” Vulcan salute (­unusually, the hand is shown in reverse, i.e. outer palm towards the viewer).

Works Cited Beckett, Greg. 2013. “­The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti.” Journal of Haitian Studies 19.2: 5­ 5–​­74. ­Buck-​­Morss, Susan. 2009. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Butler, Shane. 2019. “­The Youth of Antiquity: Reception, Homosexuality, Alterity.” Classical Receptions Journal 11.4: 3­ 73–​­406. carrington, andré m. 2016. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. Duluth: University of Minnesota Press. Césaire, Aimé. 1961. Toussaint Louverture. La Révolution Française et le Problème Colonial. Paris: Présence Africaine. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dery, Mark.1994. “­Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery, ­179–​­222. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eshun, Ekow. 2022. In the Black Fantastic. London: Thames & Hudson. Eshun, Kodwo. 2003. “­Further Considerations of Afrofuturism.” The New Centennial Review 3.2: 2­ 87–​­302. Fischer, Sibylle. 2004. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fisher, Elizabeth. 1979. Women’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Haraway, Donna. 2008. “­Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms.” Material Feminisms 3: ­157–​­187. Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. New York: W.W. Norton. Jemisin, N.K. 2018. How Long ‘­Til Black Future Month? ­75–​­112. New York: Hachette. Kaba, Mariame. 2021. “­Hope Is a Discipline: Mariame Kaba on Dismantling the Carceral State.” The Intercept (­blog). March 17, 2021. https://­theintercept.com/­2021/­03/­17/­­intercepted-­​­mariame-­​­kaba-­​­abolitionist-​­organizing/. Khader, Jamil. 2005. “­Race Matters: People of Color, Ideology, and the Politics of Erasure and Reversal in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 16.2: 1­ 10–​­127. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1986. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, ­165–​­170. New York: Grove. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2018. The Left Hand of Darkness. London: Gollancz. Lecznar, Adam. 2020. “­The Tragedy of Aimé Césaire.” In Classicisms in the Black Atlantic, edited by Ian Moyer, Adam Lecznar and Heidi Morse, 1­ 97–​­222. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, George E. 2008. “­Foreword: After Afrofuturism.” Journal of the Society for American Music 2.2: ­139–​­153.

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Mathura Umachandran Lopes Heimer, Rosa dos Ventos, Terán, Marcela and Garavito Tatiana. 2022. “­Embodying Collective Care Through Decolonial Feminist Praxis.” Engenderings (­blog). January 24, 2022. https://­blogs.lse. ac.uk/­gender/­2022/­01/­24/­­embodying-­​­collective-­​­care-­​­through-­​­decolonial-­​­feminist-​­praxis/. Mayer, S. and Shin, S. (­eds.). (­2023) Space Crone. London: Silver Press. Mehrabi, T. 2020. “­Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab: Rethinking Waste, Decomposition and Death Through a Feminist Queer Lens.” Australian Feminist Studies Journal 35.104: 1­ 38–​­154. Naimon, David. 2022. “­Crafting with Ursula: Adrienne Marie Brown on Social Justice & Science Fiction.” Between the Covers. Produced by Tin House. Podcast. MP3 audio, 2:38:00. May 9, 2022. https://­tinhouse. com/­podcast/­­crafting-­​­with-­​­ursula-­​­adrienne-­​­maree-­​­brown-­​­on-­​­social-­​­justice-­​­science-​­fiction/. Okorafor, Nnedi. 2019. “­Africanfuturism Defined.” Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog (­blog). October 19, 2019. http://­nnedi.blogspot.com/­2019/­10/­­africanfuturism-​­defined.html. Padilla Peralta, ­Dan-​­el. “­Kehinde Wiley’s Classicisms.” Conference presentation, January 8, 2022. Society for Classical Studies 2022 convention, San Francisco, CA. Padilla Peralta, ­Dan-​­el. 2022b. “­Let Me Clear My Throat.” Lecture, Harvard University, Cambridge M.A., April 7, 2022. Rankine, Patrice. forthcoming. “‘­A Loss of Faith Brings Vertigo’: Black Lives, the Classics, and Three Ancient Sites for Reflection on Productive Failure.” In Forgetting Classics: Critical Ancient World Studies, edited by Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward. London: Routledge Press. Rogers, Brett and Stevens, Eldon, eds. 2015. Classical Traditions in Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rogers, Brett and Stevens, Eldon, eds. 2018. Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy. London: Bloomsbury. Rubin, Gayle. 2022. “­On Our Backs: A Retrospective”. Lecture, Cornell University Library, Ithaca N.Y., April 22, 2022. Surtees, Allison and Dyer, Jennifer, eds. 2020. Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thomas, Sheree Renée, ed. 2000. Thomas Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Grand Central. Thomas, Sheree Renée, ed. 2004. Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. New York: Grand Central. Umachandran, Mathura. 2021. “­Carrier Bag Theory of Queer Feeling, or, Coming to Critique” Lecture, ­February 20, 2021. https://­queerandtheclassical.org/­­qatc2021-​­archive Umachandran, Mathura. 2022. “­Disciplinecraft: Towards an ­Anti-​­racist Classics.” TAPA 152, 1: 2­ 5–​­31. Yarber, Ryan. 2020. “­Beyond Gender: Exploring Ursula K. Lel. Guin’s Thought Experiment in the Left Hand of Darkness.” Ryanyarber.com July 30, 2020. https://­ryanyarber.com/­2020/­07/­30/­­beyond-­​­gender-­​ ­exploring-­​­ursula-­​­k-­​­le-­​­guins-­​­thought-­​­experiment-­​­in-­​­the-­​­left-­​­hand-­​­of-​­darkness/

486

LOCORUM INDEX

Aeschylus Agamemnon 11: 84 182: 88 1109: 87 1564: 87 Choephoroi (Libation Bearers) 32-41: 86 269-277: 85 313: 87 527-533: 83-84, 85 542: 87 543-545: 84, 85 545-546: 86 546-549: 84 549-550: 84-85 896-898: 85, 86 899: 83, 85 900-902: 83, 85 928-929: 86 Eumenides 658-661: 223 736-738: 223 737: 202 741: 87 753: 87 795-796: 87 Apuleius Metamorphoses 4.11: 282 4.23: 282 4.24: 282 4.26: 281-282

7.5: 282, 283 7.8: 282, 283 7.11: 283 Aristophanes Acharnians 117-122: 204 639-640: 203-204 Birds 826-831: 203 1164-1167: 212 Clouds 355-356: 204 Ecclesiazusae (Assemblywomen) 17-18: 210 58-59: 210 60-63: 209 65-66: 209 86-87: 207 102-104: 211 112-114: 211 121: 209 124-126: 211 132-146: 209 147-160: 209 163-167: 209 166-167: 211 204: 209 213: 209 216: 210 221-228: 210 243-244: 209 246-253: 209 276-277: 209

487

Locorum Index 285: 209 289-293: 209 298-299: 209 311-326: 209 327-357: 209 358-371: 209 383-388: 207 385-387: 211 399: 207 427-429: 211 431-434: 207 456-457: 211 Frogs 52-57: 204 Knights 1329: 203-204 Lysistrata 160-166: 207 452-460: 207-208 591-597: 207 705-780: 208 865-869: 207 881-882: 207 884-888: 207 954-955: 207 1000-1002: 204 1124: 207 1296-1315: 208 Thesmophoriazusae (Women at the Thesmophoria) 173-174: 208 235: 204 574-654: 204 Aristotle Historia Animalium 553a17-22: 293 631b5-18: 425 Poetics 1449a21-22: 133 1459b37-1460a: 133 Politics 1326a14-16: 221 1342b: 131 Rhetoric 1390b: 111 Aristoxenus fr. 81: 127 Callimachus Hymn to Apollo 47-54: 157 Catullus 16.2: 409 23.7-23: 96-97 23.7: 97

63.1, 4: 132 63.7-8: 132 63.21-22: 133 63.27: 133 63.60-63: 134-135 63.78,80: 133 67.19-30: 98-99 67.45-48: 99 97: 101 Cicero pro Archia poeta 2.3-5: 44 6.16: 45 6.39: 45 12.1: 45-46 12.4: 46 13.6-7: 45 15.7-9: 45 Dio Cassius 79[78].6: 411 79[78].11: 411 79[78].14: 411 79[78].30: 411 79[78].31: 41 80[79].9.3: 412 80[79].11: 411, 412 80[79].13.2.4: 412 80[79]14.4: 412, 414 80[79].15.2-3: 412 80[79].15.3: 416 80[79].16.7: 412 80[79].20: 412 Diogenian 6.58: 453 Euripides Bacchae 64-71: 130 94-100: 203 120-129: 131 Medea 410-415: 466 1038-1043: 466 1069-1075: 466 Galen On the Usefulness of Parts 1.2: 225 3.5.K: 225 Hebrew Bible Esther 7.1-6: 372 Hephaestio of Thebes

488

Locorum Index Apotelesmatika 1.2: 251 Herodian 5.5.5: 415 Herodotus 3.80: 204 4.191: 418 5.37: 204 Hesiod Theogony 565-567: 306 567-602: 307 886-900: 202 924-926: 202 Works and Days 50-52: 306 53-105: 307 116-119: 289-290 117-118: 291 391: 298 695-698: 288 699: 288-289 702-705: 288 Hippocrates Oath: 224-225 Homer Iliad 1.306-307: 32 1.337-338: 32 1.348-350: 32 1.355-356: 32 1.428-430: 32 9.417-18: 109 9.658-668: 38 16.99-100: 37 18.22: 33 18.26-27: 33 18.34: 33 19.59-60: 31 19.245-246: 32 19.283-300: 32 19.297-298: 33 19.300: 33 19.315-337: 33 22.139-144: 35 22.261-267: 34 22.345-347: 34 24.1-12: 404 24.3-8: 35 24.40-44: 37 24.585-586: 33 24.676: 32 Odyssey 6.101: 325 6.135: 325

Horace Odes 4.1: 399 4.10: 399 Satires 1.8: 56 IG (Inscriptiones Graecae) ii2 2346.109: 211 Juvenal Satires 2.93-98: 63 3.279-280: 405 9.102-113: 193-194 9.133: 395 Libanius Progymnasmata 8.3.2: 34 Longinus On the Sublime 10.1: 326, 437 40.1: 326 Lucian Dialogues of the Courtesans 5: 22 5.2: 276 5.3: 276, 277 5.4: 276, 277 Lucretius De Rerum Natura 4.1037-1287: 297 5.775: 295 5.780-781: 295 5.783-784: 294 5.791: 294-295 5.979-800: 295 Martial Epigrams (de Spectaculis) 1.90: 71-72 1.90.1-4: 74 1.90.6: 74 1.90.7-8: 74 1.96: 398-399 7.67: 71-72, 398 7.67.1-3: 75-76 7.67.4-8: 75 7.67.9-12: 76 7.67.5: 73 7.67.14: 75 7.67.15: 73 7.70: 71-72 7.70.2: 76 8.40: 56

489

Locorum Index 9.27: 399 11.61: 76 11.71: 399 14.48: 398 Nossis (in Greek Anthology) 170: 453 Oppian Halieutica 4.264-306: 426-430 4.295: 432 4.300-307: 432 4.306: 433 4.320-334: 430-431 Ovid Metamorphoses 2: 223 7.745-746: 279-280 9.726-728: 74 10.83-85: 126 Petronius Satyrica 9: 278 1.4: 278 29.3-4: 236 29.8: 233 34.10: 238 39.14-15: 235-236 42.4: 232 42.7: 232 43.1-2: 237-238 43.2: 239 43.4-5: 238 43.7: 238-239 43.8: 238 45: 231 46: 230 46.3: 231 56.6: 237 60.4-5: 54 67.10-11: 233 68.4-69.2: 230 68.8: 236 69.2: 238 71.1: 233 71.3: 232 71.6: 232 71.9: 233 71.11: 233 73.6: 234 74.15-16: 232-233 75.4-5: 230, 234 76.5-9: 234-235

76.8: 239 79: 278 80.3: 279 80.6: 278 105.3: 236 116.7-9: 237 127.1: 278-279 141.3: 237 141.5: 237 141.7: 236-237 Phaedrus 4.16.11-14: 79 Phanocles fr.1: 126 Pherecrates Petale fr. 143: 204 Pindar Pythian 2.72: 107 fr. 76: 203-204 Plato Charmides 155a-d: 361 Meno 76c: 361 Republic 398d: 127 414e-415c: 370 492a5-e6: 370 561c: 371 Symposium 209b: 361 209c: 361 Pliny the Younger Panegyricus 25.2: 417 Priapeia 10: 56 13: 55 20: 55 33.1-2: 65 Pseudo Hippocrates Elagabalus 1.5: 411 2.2: 411 5:3: 412 5.4: 412 5.5: 412, 414 6.6: 412 7.2: 412 8.1: 412 Historia Augusta Caracalla 7.1: 411 Letter from Paitos to Artaxerxes: 221

490

Locorum Index Macrinus 9.5: 411 Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 10.93.1: 153 Rhetorius Compendium 1.1: 251-252 Sappho fr. 1.21-24: 322 fr. 16: 307-309, 319-320, 323-324, 444 fr. 16.1-2: 308-309 fr. 16.1-4: 325 fr. 16.3-4: 308-309, 321, 323 fr. 16.6-8: 321 fr. 16.7-9: 307, 323 fr. 16.8: 321 fr. 16.10-11: 307, 321 fr. 16.11: 308, 321 fr. 16.15-16: 321, 323 fr. 16.16: 437 fr. 16.17-18: 321, 325, 437 fr. 16.17-20: 309 fr 16.32: 323 fr. 31.7: 21-22 fr. 44: 307-309 fr. 44.5-8: 308 fr. 44.13-14: 308 fr. 44.14-18: 308 fr. 47: 129 fr. 49: 128 fr. 105a: 307 fr. 126: 322 fr. 142: 322 fr. 146: 440, 452 fr. 147: 442 fr. 160: 322 Scribonius Largus Compositiones Epistula 5: 221 Seneca the Elder Controversiae 7.4.7: 395 Seneca the Younger de Clementia 3.5: 417 de Otio 4.1-2: 46 de Tranquilitate Animi 2.12: 405 Epistulae Morales 52.12: 395

95.20-21: 221 114.1.11: 48 114.11.7-9: 48 114.13.1-3: 48 Natural Questions 16.1-3: 47 17.4: 47 Silius Italicus Punica 2.120: 280 Sophocles Ajax 364-367: 110 1155: 110 Inachus: 115 Philoctetes 145-146: 113 226: 114 228: 113 367: 114 535-538: 110 745-746: 115 838-839: 113 956-957: 108 997-999: 108 1195: 115 1326-1328: 354 Strabo 16.4.14: 418 Terence Heauton Timoroumenos (Self-Tormentor) 1: 170 1-2: 169, 171 5: 169 19: 169 22-24: 169 36: 170 53: 170 59: 170, 171 62-63: 170 66-68: 174 67-69: 170 69: 174 70: 170 71: 174 73-74: 170, 174 75: 170, 171 77: 175 90: 175 90-94: 174 93-95: 173 97-98: 173 101: 175 102-108: 173

491

Locorum Index 109: 171 110-112: 171 113: 174 115-116: 171 136-139: 175 139-145: 174 146: 175 162: 175 168-172: 170 187: 170 208-209: 171 212: 170 213-216: 171 220-222: 171 230-244: 175 239-240: 172 420-425: 173-174 443: 175 455-464: 176 464-466: 174 479-480: 174 496-497: 174 518-521: 170 574-577: 171 621: 172 628: 172 667: 170 831: 172 839-841: 172 917: 172 979: 176 1033-1044: 172 1035-1037: 171, 172 1045-1050: 175, 176 Phormio 39-50: 167 Theophrastus Investigation into Plants 2.1: 292 Tibullus 1.1.15-20: 55 1.1.31-32: 157 1.1.41ff.: 158 1.1.55-56: 158 1.1.59ff.: 158 1.2: 158 1.3.9ff.: 158 1.3.85ff.: 158 1.4.41-42: 156 1.4.47-48: 156 1.4.83: 157 1.5.21ff.: 158 1.5.25-26: 161 1.6: 158

2.1.1: 155 2.1.1-10: 154, 155 2.1.16: 155 2.1.31ff.: 154-155 2.1.34: 155 2.1.37-46: 155 2.1.59: 155 2.1.61-66: 155 2.1.71-76: 155 2.2.1-6: 155 2.2.11: 155 2.2.18-22: 155 2.3.1-10: 156 2.3.11-14: 157 2.3.15-24: 157 2.3.19-20: 157, 159 2.3.32: 157 2.3.35-46: 158 2.3.47-60: 159 2.3.50: 158 2.3.61-67: 159 2.3.68ff.: 159 2.3.79-80: 159 2.4.3-4: 159 2.4.13-21: 159 2.4.27-30: 159 2.4.33-34: 159 2.4.39-52: 160 2.5.23: 156 2.5.39ff.: 155 2.5.50-56: 155 2.5.57-60: 156 2.5.87: 156 2.5.91-94: 156 2.5.109-111: 156 2.5.120: 155 2.6.1-4: 160 2.6.9: 160 2.6.11-14: 160 2.6.19-20ff.: 161 2.6.19-28: 161-162 2.6.28-30: 160, 161 2.6.29ff.: 161 2.6.39-40: 161 2.6.45ff.: 160 2.6.52: 160 Vergil Aeneid 11.457: 280 11.537-538: 280 11.581-582: 280 11.654: 280 11.659-660: 280

492

Locorum Index 11.661-662: 280 11.821-822: 280 11.823: 280 Georgics 1.121-124: 290-291 1.127-128: 291 1.181-186: 292 1.297-299: 297 1.493-497: 294 2.10-13: 291, 292 2.65-72: 291

2.140-142: 293-294 2.514: 294 2.523: 294 2.538: 291-292 4.153-154: 293 4.197-202: 293 4.499-500: 297 Vettius Valens Anthologia 1.1: 250 1.39: 250-251

493

INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes Aaliyah (After Antigone) (play by Kamal Kaan) 267–68 abjection 2, 43, 50n4, 92, 95–98, 100, 143, 231, 340, 408, 419 ableism 150, 258 absence 138–52 abstraction, queer 8, 437–57 Achilles 4, 29–41, 108–12, 309, 353; and Briseis 29–33, 37, 39n13, 39nn15–16, 404; and Patroclus 4, 29–40, 331, 401, 403–5, 474, 483; “wild” 4, 29–41 Act of 1971 266 Actor-Network Theory 267 Adam (biblical character) 364–65 Adams, J. N. 74, 80n5, 100, 397 Admetus 353–54; Apollo and 157–59, 162, 163n9 adolescence 5, 14, 154, 168–74, 353; see also puberty; teenagers; specific topics, e.g., ephebes Adonis 179, 181, 192, 334, 366–67; Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women 440–444 Adonis (magazine) 334, 339, 342 adoption 112, 223, 230, 233, 274 Adorno, Theodor 425–26 adultery 71–72, 99 Aeschylus: Agamemnon 82, 84–88; Choephoroi (Libation Bearers) 83–87, 89n1, 117n12; Eumenides 83, 87–88, 89n1, 202, 223, 324; Lykourgeia, (lost tetralogy) 206; Myrmidons (lost tragedy) 40n31, 401; Oresteia 82–91, 223

affect/affect theory 129, 142, 145, 313–14, 387, 394, 439; “affect-genealogies” 218; see also queer affect affiliation 44, 48–49, 217, 222, 294, 312–13, 469n21 African Americans 343, 371, 464; see also entries beginning with Black Afro-Fabulation 148 Afrofuturism 8, 472, 478, 482, 484, 484n8 Afropessimism 43–44, 50n6, 432, 484n6 Agamben, Giorgio 465 Agamemnon 29, 31–33, 39n21, 82, 84–88, 231 Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 82, 84–88 Agathon 102, 208 agency/agencies 44, 46, 89, 94, 112, 142, 189, 197–98, 268, 321, 384, 418, 468, 474; of Aphrodite 284n5; concept of 53–68 passim; entangled agencies 434n18; nonelite queer 181; political 192, 372–73, 479; queering of 60–62; sexual 192; slaves and 232, 235–36, 432–33; women and 172, 303, 307–12 Agrippina (mother of Nero) 223 Ahmed, Sara 4–5, 16–17, 128, 145, 163, 388n6, 458, 460, 468n2 AIDS see HIV/AIDS Ajax (Sophocles) 108–15, 117n2 Alcibiades 102, 366 Alexander, Jonathan 431, 433, 434n22 Alexander the Great 58, 483 Amazons 279–81, 324–25, 404 ambiguity, gender 211, 428

494

Index Amin, Kadji 425; Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History 6, 218–19, 224–27, 231, 383, 388 anachronism 18, 29, 34, 45, 226, 284n6, 289, 319, 324, 397, 439–40, 443, 479 Anaktoria 128, 309, 320–26, 437, 444 anal sex 15, 96, 348, 399, 409, 412; pegging 71–72, 76; see also sodomy anatomy: dissection 222–23; Greeks’ understanding of 206; in Italian Renaissance 222–23 Anatomy of Influence, The (Bloom) 377 ancestorship/crip ancestorship 257–67 Anderson, Fiona 349 Anderson, Michael 198 androgyny 22, 252, 283, 318, 324 animacy 430; and speculative inter(in)animacy 144–46 animality 115, 423, 425, 433n10 animals 31, 34, 36, 43, 58, 113, 130, 157–58, 234, 287–98 passim 308–9; interspeciesism 8, 423–36; see also specific animals/by description, e.g., snakes anthropocentrism 262, 423–24, 428 anthropology 206, 240, 274, 328n6, 337, 402–3, 467, 475 Antigone 90n3; Aaliyah (After Antigone) (Kaan) 267–68 Antigone (Sophocles) 115, 267–68 Antigone Jr./Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (Harrell) 139, 147–49 Antigone Sr. (Harrell) 148–49 antihumanism, Black 218 anti-racism 482 anti-Semitism 370, 372; see also Nazism anti-teleology 226; see also queer unhistoricism anti-trans activism 202, 204, 205 anti-trans ideology 207, 212n4, 238 anus 97–98, 101–2, 192, 425 aphrodisiacs 453 Aphrodite 204, 209, 275, 308, 322, 324–26, 349, 440, 446–47, 453, 455; agency of 284n5; see also Venus apocalypse 296, 385 Apollo 22, 37, 82–89, 108, 126, 163n7, 223, 263, 334, 365–67, 379; and Admetus 157–59, 162, 163n9 appropriation, cultural 305 Apuleius: Metamorphoses 275, 281–83 Arca 388 archaeology 53–66, 194, 255n1, 376–77 Archaic period 31, 108, 126, 316–17, 324, 326, 358n14, 437–38, 443, 446, 451 archers: Scythian 207–8; see also huntresses; warriors architecture 4, 260; Japanese 381; Western 381

Arendt, Hannah 479, 485n9 Ariadne 183, 193, 474 Aristarchus of Samothrace (Alexandrian critic) 404–5 Aristophanes 318; Acharnians 202–4, 206, 210; Birds 202–4, 206, 210, 212; Clouds 204; Ecclesiazusae (Assemblywomen) 203, 207–11; fluidity of time and space in 213n5; Lysistrata 202–4, 207–9, 212n4; Thesmophoriazusae (Women at the Thesmophoria) 203–4, 206–9; and trans foundations of Athens 5, 202–14 Aristophanes of Byzantium (Alexandrian critic) 404–5 Aristotle 111, 117n16, 225, 262, 292, 293, 425; History of Animals 425; Poetics 133; Politics 131, 221; Rhetoric 111 Armstrong, Richard 103 Arons, Wendy 458, 467–68 arousal 425, 430 Arrizabalaga y Prado, Leonardo de 415 Arrow’s Flight, An (Merlis) 348, 352–58 art: and artists’ books 8, 438–39; Black 484; contemporary 438–39, 444; live 140, 143, 147–48; Roman 53–68, 179, 198, 335 “art of failure” 106–19; see also under Halberstam, Jack artifacts 53, 61–63, 260–61, 293 artists’ books 8, 438–39 Arvin, Newton 339 ascesis 340, 352 Asclepius 220, 223, 247, 355 asexuality 202, 205, 273, 275, 282, 284n5, 426, 431 Åshede, Linnea 4, 8, 53–68, 187, 189, 199n3, 199n10, 199n13 assimilation 129–30, 266, 274, 338, 372, 410 astrology 6–8, 243–56 asyndeton 356 Athena 45, 87, 90n7, 202–5, 208, 210–11, 324, 351, 426, 428–29 Athens: trans foundations of 5, 8, 17, 202–14; see also under democracy: Athenian athletes 397–400; draucus 397–400, 406n6; and muscle culture/photography 331–46; Roman soldier-boxer 336 Atreidae 109 attachment genealogies 6, 218–19, 222, 224–27 Attic hydria, red-figure 440, 450, 451 Attis 22–23, 127, 132–35, 180 authority: divine 82–91; see also power autochthony 227n8 autotheory 110, 112, 431 Babylonian astrology 244, 246–47 Bacchae (Euripides); see under Euripides: Bacchae

495

Index Bacchanalia 385 Bacchus 130, 154, 159, 382–83; see also Dionysus Baker, J. A. 35–36 baetyl (sacred stone) 411–12 bandits 275, 281–83 Barad, Karen 53, 58–62, 66, 425, 433, 434n18 barbarians 18, 113, 187, 266 Barnes, Djuna 37 baroque form 423–24, 429 Barrow, Rosemary 187, 198, 263–64 Barthes, Roland 90n8, 348, 466 Bartman, Elizabeth 179–80 Bassa 4, 69–81 Bataille, Georges 88 bathroom bills 208 BDSM 343–44 beards 55, 57, 60, 209, 283; and beardlessness 55, 64, 204, 206, 283, 395, 401 beauty, Form of (Platonic) 366 Beccadelli, Antonio 401 Bech, Henning 402–3 Beckett, Greg 485n9 Beckett, Samuel 83 Bell, Julia 382–83 Bell, Marcus 1, 4–5, 8, 138–52; “INFERNO: Catastrophically Queer” 385–88, 388nn8–9 Bell, Tyler 185 belonging 47–49, 109, 114–15, 129, 138–39, 141, 225, 230–31, 305, 384; queer 6, 230 (see also queer kinships); Roman 47, 254; structures of 439 Bennett, Jane 61, 459 Bennett, Judith 77–78 Bentham, Jeremy 364 “berdache” 15–16 Berlant, Lauren 139, 141–42, 373, 389n12; Cruel Optimism 141–42 Bernal, Daniel 245, 248–49 Bersani, Leo 124, 128, 175, 177, 240, 432 Best, Stephen 49, 432 bestiality 424, 433n7 bewilderment 142 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 4, 92–96, 100 biases 70, 79, 318, 343 Biggs, Penelope 111 Bildungsroman (literary genre) 166 Bilitis (Daughters of Bilitis) 438 biology 42, 205–6, 257–63, 267–68, 269n11, 274, 289, 380 biopolitics 259, 269n5, 386, 424, 429–30, 469n9 birds 35, 45, 108, 161, 163n4, 203–4, 425; see also under Aristophanes: Birds

birth: childbirth 230; male/fantasies of male-only 218, 222–24, 361 bisexuality 19, 77, 79, 125, 255n6, 312, 460 Björk 383 Black antihumanism 218 Black bodies 341–42 Black feminism 8, 139, 227, 456, 468n1 Black kinship 261 Black studies 259, 261, 264, 277–78, 483 Black women 43, 260, 344, 479–80 Black[ened] queer classical 42–52 Blackness 43, 49, 468n1, 478, 484n5 Blanshard, Alastair J. L. 6–7, 331–46, 373n2 Blondell, Ruby 103, 285nn7–8 Blood, H. Christian 281 Bloom, Allan: The Closing of the American Mind 363, 368–73 Bloom, Harold 376–77 Bodies That Matter (Butler) see under Butler, Judith: Bodies That Matter body/bodies: Black 341–42; effluence and 480; illegible, in context with Greek tragedy 114–16; lesbian 7, 316–30; queer 53, 65, 384, 387; without boundaries 53–68; see also anatomy; embodiment; specific topics, e.g., muscle culture bodybuilding 338, 340–41, 398 Boehringer, Sandra 24n1, 70, 72–75, 78–80, 80nn3–4, 277, 285nn7–8, 285nn11–12, 317, 328 boi, the term 285n12 Bond Stockton, Kathryn 177, 240, 283 Boyle, A. J. 166, 177 Boyle, Casey 44–46 Bradley, Katherine 7 Bradley, Keith 282 Bradway, Tyler 6 Braund, Susanna Morton 63 Brennan, Chris 244, 246, 249, 254, 255n2 Brett, Philip 125–26, 135 Briseis (Achilles’ captive woman) 29–33, 37, 39n13, 39nn15–16, 404 Britain’s imperialist kin-making 264–66 brotherhood see siblinghood bullying 114 Burton, Lewis G. (DJ) 388n8 butch lesbians 75, 78, 276, 446–47 butch masculinity 79 Butler, Judith 16–17, 42, 44, 48–49, 90n3, 141, 206, 240, 275, 416–17; Bodies That Matter 124, 206, 240, 425, 459–60, 468; Gender Trouble 16, 23, 48–49, 51n23, 124, 128, 206, 240, 322, 328, 416–17, 459; see also performance, gender as/gender performativity

496

Index Butler, Octavia 483–84 Butler, Shane 38, 123, 127, 135, 409, 473–75; and “Deep Time” 263; on queer philology 8, 393–407 Byzantine period 413, 423 Caesar, Julius: birth of 223 Callimachus: Hymn to Apollo 157–59, 163n9 Calvi, Marco Fabio 221 Camilla 280–81, 285n16 canon, literary 140, 363, 368, 371, 376 Capettini, Emilio 5–6, 347–59 capitalism 106, 112, 240, 253, 319, 333, 424; and linear time 248; post-industrial 19; racist hetero-patriarchal 385; see also neoliberalism Cardano, Girolamo 223 Carlà-Uhink, Filippo 24n2, 78, 212 carrier bag metaphor 472, 475–78, 481, 483, 484n4 Carson, Anne 144–45, 314n1, 326, 328, 328n7, 453 Cassandra 87, 349 castration 156, 180, 189, 399; castrato singing voice 126; Hedwig and the Angry Inch (musical and film) 126, 179–80, 198n1; see also Attis; eunuchs; galli Catullus 4, 22–23, 92–105, 127, 132–35, 180, 409 cena Trimalchionis (Petronius) see under Petronius: cena Trimalchionis Césaire, Aimé 259, 479, 485n10 chain metaphor 159, 262–63, 268 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 408, 472 Chambers, Leonard 343 charmed circle 181, 189, 191–93 chastity 72, 76, 282–83 Chen, Mel 423, 433 Chesi, Giulia Maria 4, 43, 82–91 Child, the (as symbol of futurity) 154, 161, 167–68, 175–77, 177n14, 284n1 See also Edelman, Lee; reproductive futurism childbirth 230 childlessness 230, 232, 234, 239 children: Bildungsroman (literary genre) 166; and child-rearing 154, 274–75, 477; “children’s liberation” 218; see also specific topics, e.g., adoption Choephoroi (Libation Bearers) (Aeschylus) see under Aeschylus: Choephoroi choral dance 324–25 chosen family 6, 218, 224–25, 227, 267–68, 274 Christianity/Christians 93–94, 372–73, 401; Christian writers 60, 126, 367; conservative 350–51; early 361–62, 365; Hellenism and 361–68; and late nineteenth-century culture 363–68; see also Jesus

chrononormativity 5, 134, 168–69, 172; see also reproductive futurism; straight time Cicero 18, 166, 227n2, 285n17, 393–94, 402, 409, 420n6; definition of humanities 4, 42–52; pro Archia poeta 4, 42–52; Tusculan Disputations 45–46 cinaedus/cinaedi 8, 14–15, 395, 397, 400–401, 405, 406n3, 420, 420n2, 420n6; Elagabalus as 408–11, 413, 415, 417–18 cisness 72, 74, 203, 207–08, 211, 430, 438, 477, 478 citizenship 44–49, 112, 202–3, 207–11, 213n5, 265–67, 417; sexual 144 civil rights/civil rights movements 258, 342–43 Clarke, J. R. 410 Clarke, Michael 34–35, 39n20 Clarke, W. M. 29, 36–37 Classical period 37–38, 318–19, 358n14, 437–38 classical reception/classical reception studies 6–8, 29, 38, 139–40, 217–18, 226–27, 257–68 passim 314, 332, 403; astrology and 243, 245–47, 249, 252–53; carrier bag theorizing for 475–77; faux-natural narratives of 376–90; speculation on 472–86 Cleisthenes 202–5, 208, 211 Clitipho 168, 171–72 clitoris 72, 74, 191–92 closet see under Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: Epistemology of the Closet Closing of the American Mind, The (Bloom) 363, 368–73 Clouds (Aristophanes) 204 club spaces 4, 6–8, 376–90 Clytemnestra 83–89, 90n6 collage 447–48, 452 collectivity 305 Colli, Eleonora 1, 4, 6–8, 376–90 colonialism 43, 62, 146, 149–50, 343, 432–33; anticolonial thought 8, 259–60, 426, 480; see also postcolonial theory “coloniality of being” 469n9 colonization 220, 265, 372, 432–33 comedy: duplex 168; New 97, 168, 171; and trans foundations of Athens 5, 202–14; see also individual names, e.g., Aristophanes; Terence comic freedom of speech (parrhēsia) 212 “coming out” 30, 111, 360, 372 compassion 34 comradeship, queer 278, 283, 403 Comstock Law of 1873 338–39 conceptual metaphor: theory of 219 concubines 32, 38, 39n13, 303 confession, practice of 14, 92–95, 100, 103

497

Index “Confession (II)” and “Confession (III)” (poems by Hồ Xuân Hương) 309–11 Confucianism 310 conservatism: Christian 350–51; Classics’, 6, 128; of magazines 339; nineteenth-century 361–62, 370–73; of reception studies 382; rural 211 consumer culture 333 Cooper, Ashton 439, 441, 456 Cooper, Edith 7 Cooper, Emmanuel 344 Cornarius, Janus 221 Corps à corps, journal de Sida (1987) [= Mortal Embrace: Living with AIDS (1988)] (Dreuilhe) 348; see also Dreuilhe, Alain Emmanuel Corythus 354, 356 countersexuality 425, 433n11 courtesans 168; see also Lucian: Dialogues of the Courtesans COVID-19, 258, 388n4 credula spes 161–62 Creep: A Life. A Theory. An Apology (Alexander) 431 creepiness 426, 431–33, 434n22 crip ancestorship 257–67 crisis ordinariness 142, 144–47, 149 critical fabulation 419–20, 477–78 Croesus 230, 233 cross-dressing 55, 78, 204, 206, 210, 276, 283, 404; see also drag Cruel Optimism (Berlant) 141–42 cruising for gay sex 240 Cruising Utopia (Muñoz) see under Muñoz, José Esteban: Cruising Utopia Cruz, Ariane 343–44 cultural appropriation 305 culture wars 368 cunnilingus 71–72, 76, 80n6; see also oral sex Cusick, Suzanne G. 125 Cybele 22, 127, 131–34, 180 cyborgs 42, 50n2, 58, 404, 428 Cyclops (Euripides) 113, 117n13 cyclops myth 113–14, 117n13 Cyparissus 179, 189–92; fresco of 190–91 D’Alessio, Giambattista 322–23 Daley, John 440, 443 dance: choral 324–25; postmodern 140, 149 D’Angelo, Nicolette 1, 6, 217–29, 388 D’Angour, Armand 135 Dante: Inferno 355 Daphnis and Chloe (Longus) 14, 387 darkness, in queer aesthetics 115–16 Darwin, Charles 262–63, 363, 424–26 Daughters of Bilitis 438

Davidson, James 15, 29, 36, 205 dawn 156, 234, 311, 451, 455, 466 de Beauvoir, Simone 205 de Lauretis, Teresa 1, 16–17, 338 death: continuity in face of 232; and immortality 65, 308; and lifedeath 432–33; suicide 108, 110, 432 death drive 8, 92, 95–96, 103, 432; see also under Edelman, Lee: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive Death in Venice (Mann) 369 “Deep Time” 263 deidealization 224 Delaney, Samuel R. 483 Deleuze, Gilles 174–77, 381, 387, 462, 468n3 democracy 87, 107, 110–11, 361, 371; Athenian 202–4, 207, 212, 363; see also equal rights/ equality denarius 245, 412–13 Derrida, Jacques 88, 112, 145, 433n6, 434n15, 434n20, 469n4 Dery, Mark 484n8 destiny/fate 348–57; see also astrology deus ex machina 353 Devecka, Martin 7, 287–99 Dialogues of the Courtesans (Lucian) see Lucian: Dialogues of the Courtesans Diana 275, 277–80 diaspora: and diasporic imagery 304–6, 313; queer 303–15; Sikh 306; Vietnamese 304–306, 312; see also Afrofuturism didactic poetry 111–12, 159, 245, 287–89, 293–94, 296, 298, 424 dildos 74, 285n11 Dinshaw, Carolyn 135, 163n12, 410, 420 Diogenian 453 Dionysia: City (festival) 107, 117n1; Rural (festival) 175–76 Dionysus 22, 60, 73, 126–27, 129–32, 135, 170, 213n7, 324, 362, 379; as gender-fluid 203, 206; see also Bacchus; Euripides: Bacchae; maenads Diotima 179, 361, 366–67 disability/disability studies 2, 258–59; and ableism 150, 258 dissection, human 222–23; see also anatomy Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Amin) 6, 218–19, 224–27, 231, 383, 388 divine authority 82–91 Dixon, Suzanne 273 Dodds, E. R. 131–33 Dodson-Robinson, Eric 308 domination 46, 111, 231, 237, 265, 286, 386, 424, 475–76

498

Index double consciousness 320, 417 doubt, artifice of 82–83, 87–89 Douglas, Gavin 124 Douglass, Frederick 432–33 Dover, Kenneth 14–15, 38n2 drag 205–6; see also cross-dressing draucus 397–400, 406n6; see also athletes Dressler, Alex 44, 46 Dreuilhe, Alain Emmanuel: Mortal Embrace 348–52, 355–57, 357n5, 358nn8–9 Drucker, Johanna 438, 446 Du Bois, W.E.B. 260 DuBois, Page 125, 135, 308, 437, 440, 443, 456, 468 Duggan, Lisa 163, 284n2, 416–17 Dunleavy, Katherine 53–57, 60, 64, 66 dysphoria, gender 284n6 dystopia 113, 258, 483; The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (Moraga) 6, 8, 458–68 Early Modern period 13, 19–20, 32, 220, 223–24, 394–95, 406n4 Ecclesiazusae (Assemblywomen) (Aristophanes) 203, 207–11 Echion 230–31, 238, 240n2 Echo: Narcissus and 181–183 ecocriticism, queer 459, 467 ecologies, queer 8, 458–71 ecstasy 36, 88, 129–30, 132, 135, 175, 324 Edelman, Lee 92, 117n14, 348–49, 352, 356–57, 373n7; No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive 2, 5, 8, 16, 19, 112, 128, 154, 160–62, 167–68, 177, 240, 255, 284n1, 296, 357n4, 429n16, 432, 472; see also Child, the; reproductive futurism effeminacy 40, 47–48, 51n22, 281, 396–97, 409, 412, 420n2, 425 effluence 480–82 “The Effluence Engine” (Jemisin) 481–82 Eidolon (journal) 21 ejaculation 99–100, 432 Elagabalus 8, 408–22, 412, 414 elective affinities 112, 218, 224–26 Electra (Sophocles) 115, 469n14 El-Enany, Nadine 265 Eliot, Beth 438 emancipation 43, 113, 116, 259, 432, 475, 478–79; see also “coming out” embodiment 2–4, 16, 23; the torn body as embodied critique of values 113–14; see also specific topics, e.g., performance, gender as; trans* identities emotion, stickiness of 145 Endymion 179, 181, 192–93; Selene and 183–84, 187, 191–93

Enlightenment 124, 126, 361, 371, 377, 379 enslavement see slavery ephebes 134, 170, 283; see also adolescence; puberty; specific topics, e.g., beards: beardlessness epics 245; see also Iliad; Odyssey Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick) see under Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: Epistemology of the Closet equal rights/equality 204–6, 212n3, 278, 371, 403; see also democracy Erasmus 361, 395 erasure 34, 110, 146, 280, 343, 419–20 erection 55, 58, 179–92 passim 207, 429; see also Priapus Erickson, Bruce 468 eros (Socratic/Platonic) 369–70 Eshun, Ekow 484 Eshun, Kodwo 482 essentialism, gender 253, 477 Esther (biblical character) 372 ethnographies 294, 409 etiology 30, 37, 202, 347–59, 396 eugenics 6, 258, 263, 266 Eumenides (Aeschylus) see under Aeschylus: Eumenides eunuchs 204, 255n6; see also Attis Euripides 113, 203–4, 208–9, 371; Alcestis 163n8; Bacchae 127, 129–32, 135, 203, 206, 208; Cyclops 113, 117n13; Hecuba 143–46; Hippolytus 227n8, 284n5; Medea 18, 89n2, 227n8, 458–68; Melanippe the Wise 207; Philoctetes 113; see also Queer Euripides: Re-Readings in Greek Tragedy (Olsen and Telò) Euripides is not a Genius I am (Hedva) 143 Eve (biblical character) 372 Fabrica (Vesalius) 223 fabulation 148, 220, 415, 419–20, 477–78; AfroFabulation 148 failure, “art of” 106–19; see also under Halberstam, Jack family/families 274; critiques of 227; familial continuity 232; family abolition 218; nuclear 112–13, 161, 261, 267, 273–74; rejection by 6, 273; traditional 273–74; see also chosen family; genealogy; kinship; queer family; specific topics, e.g., reproductive futurism fanfiction 483 Fanon, Franz 259, 269nn5–6, 465 fantasies 100, 158, 210, 321, 398, 418, 424, 428 Fantuzzi, Marco 29, 32, 38n3, 39n15, 39n27, 40n31 fascism 362, 370, 393, 482

499

Index fate see destiny/fate fatherhood or paternity: founding fatherhood 218, 220, 222; of genetics 220; of medicine 6, 217–29; see also parenthood fellatio 398–99; see also oral sex female masculinity 16, 75–76, 78–80, 84, 90n4; see also under Halberstam, Jack femininity 72, 74–76, 204, 251–52, 255n6, 276–79, 303–4, 338, 341, 428; see also specific topics, e.g., effeminacy; femmes; performance, gender as feminism: anti-pleasure 475; Black 8, 139, 227, 456, 468n1; and feminist theory 2, 205–6, 468n1; gaga 18; lesbian 17, 128, 319; materialist 316–30; TERFs 438; white 222; women of color 314 femmes 84, 147–48, 416, 440, 446–47 ferox 29–38; see also wildness Ferrier, Kathleen 125 festivals 206, 275, 385; dramatic 206, 208; Thesmophoria, women-only 203–4, 206–10; tragic 107; see also by name: Dionysia; Oschophoria; Skira fetishism 7, 93, 207, 218, 429 fiction: and carrier bag metaphor 472, 475–78, 481, 483, 484n4; speculative 8, 477–78, 483, 484n8; see also by author or description fin de siècle cultural politics 361, 364, 372 Fischer, Sibylle 478–79 Fisher, Elizabeth 475 Florence, Italy 394 flourishing 106, 232, 480 Form of beauty (Platonic) 366 Foster, Reginald 397 Foucault, Michel 4, 13–15, 19–20, 24n1, 51n19, 117n8, 125, 129, 209, 376–79, 401, 425; The Care of the Self 98, 388n5; and discourse of sexuality 93–94, 98, 360; the “DoverFoucault model” 15; and genealogy 218, 226, 269n5; Great Paradigm Shift, idea of 30–31, 70, 360; on heterotopias 384, 388n5; Hermeneutics of the Subject 98; historicism of 13–15, 19–20, 23, 103, 205, 226, 397, 474; History of Sexuality 13–14, 19, 30–31, 38nn6–7, 77, 87, 92–95, 103, 205, 318, 340, 360, 394, 437, 474, and passim; on memory 110; and psychoanalysis 4, 92–105; and Socratic politics 362–63, 373; and subjectivity 4, 13–15, 92–105; The Use of Pleasure 94, 98, 102–3; see also under Halperin, David: Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography Frain, Rose 440–44 Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (Shelley) 482 Freccero, Carla 226, 424 Fredrick, David 4–5, 7, 179–201

freedom, human 479; see also emancipation freedom of speech, Athenian (parrhēsia) 212 Freeman, Elizabeth 6, 123, 128, 134–35, 162, 177, 230, 255, 284, 439; and “chrononormativity” 5, 134, 168–69, 172 Freud, Sigmund 100, 102–3, 168, 191, 199n15, 432; ahistoricism of 23, 92; Beyond the Pleasure Principle 4, 92–95; see also psychoanalytic theory; specific topics, e.g., death drive future/futures 472–73; queer 391–486 (see also queer futurity) futurism, heteronormative reproductive see reproductive futurism futurity 5, 18, 112; see also Child, the (as symbol of futurity); Edelman, Lee: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive; queer futurity fututor/fututrix 72, 74–76, 80n2, 80n6 gaga feminism 18; see also under Halberstam, Jack: Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal Gale, Monica 291, 294 Gale, Thomas 222 Galen 221–23, 225, 227n6; Commentary on the Oath 225; On The Usefulness of Parts 225 galli 131–32, 281 galliambic verse 5, 123, 132–33 Galton, Francis 262–63, 266 Ganesh, Chitra 441, 456 Ganymede 180, 245 Gardner, Hunter 153, 158, 163, 164n21 gay identity 93, 340; vs. queer identity 3–4, 16 gender: binary 17, 30, 146, 149, 154, 203, 251, 324, 328; essentialism 198, 253, 477; as performance/gender performativity 5, 16, 48–49, 138–52 passim 198, 205–6, 276, 328, 409; plasticity 425; race and 49; role reversal 180; sex and 42, 276; social dimension of 206; and ungendering 222; see also nonbinary gender; specific topics, e.g., indeterminacy; intersectionality gender ambiguity 211, 428 gender dysphoria 284n6 gender essentialism 253, 477 gender expression 47–48, 204, 206, 208, 210 gender fluidity 2, 16, 23, 211, 251, 255n6, 274, 328, 456; of Dionysus 203, 206 gender identity 16–17, 20, 23, 70, 77–78, 205–6, 252, 413; lesbian, categories of 446–47; sexuality vs./sexuality and 16, 205; as stable 212; see also identity gender non-conformity 202, 252 gender performativity see performance, gender as gender theory 208, 438 Gender Trouble (Butler) see under Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble

500

Index gendered spaces 308–9, 314 genderqueer people 16–17, 22–23, 73, 179, 251, 429, 446–47, 473 genealogy/genealogies: and ancestorship 257–67; of attachment 6, 218–19, 222, 224–27; politics of 218; queering kinship against 257–72 generation: mother and father’s roles in; “two-seed” theories of 220; spontaneous 7, 287, 289, 292–96, 298 Genet, Jean 218 genetics 220, 233, 258–65 passim 268, 313 gennaios anêr (“noble man”) 111 genocide 205, 343; cultural 258 George, Demetra 246, 254, 255n2, 255n4, 255n8 Georgics (Vergil) 287–99 Gerhard, Jane 192 Gesner, Johann Matthias 361 Getsy, David J. 439–40, 449, 456 ghosts 138–52 passim Gillies, Grace 22–23, 73, 77, 198 Gill-Peterson, Jules 218, 227 Glissant, Édouard 259 glitch/glitches 382, 388 goats 157, 245, 430–32, 434n22 Goffman, Erving 419 Goldberg, Jonathan 226–27 Golden Age/golden age 47, 159, 287–99 Goldhill, Simon 85, 89, 113, 117n1, 423, 474 González, Tanya 458, 464, 468 Gopinath, Gayatri 306, 313–14 Gow, A. S. F. 423, 433n3 Gowers, Emily 169–70, 174, 177, 177n3, 177n8 Great Paradigm Shift 30–31, 70, 360 Grecian Guild Pictorial (magazine) 334, 339, 341 Greece, ancient, three periods of see Archaic period; Classical period; Hellenistic period Greek love 367–68, 474 Greenwood, Emily 218, 264, 269n8, 380 Gregory, Justina 33–34 Grewal, David: Network Theories of Power 196–97 grief 29–37 passim 39nn17–18, 39n23, 96, 139–49 passim 173–74, 232, 483; and grief work 149; pathologizing of 405 Groden, Suzy Q. 440, 442–43 Gros, Frédéric 93, 103, 362 Grote, George 364 Grote, John 363 grotesque, the 4, 92–102, 340, 343, 468n2 group sex 277, 385 Les Guérillères (Wittig) 7, 316–30, 327 guilt 87–88, 174–75, 350 Gurd, Sean Alexander 135; Iphigenias at Aulis 404, 406n7 Güthenke, Constanze 257, 263 gymnasium, Greek 71–73, 134, 180

Habermas, Jürgen 260 Habsburg empire 223 Hafner, Katie 258 Haiti/Haitian Revolution 478–80, 485nn9–10 Halberstam, Jack 207, 424, 433, 433n10, 465, 467, 468n2; on female masculinity, and book Female Masculinity 16, 75–76, 78–80, 90n4; Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal 78, 80, 80n8; The Queer Art of Failure 6, 106–16 passim 125, 319; In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives 4–5, 106, 123–24, 131, 133–34, 154, 160, 163, 319, 324, 469n17; Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability 79; Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire 29–31, 35–36, 38, 38n5, 39n8, 150, 173, 177, 424, 433, 460, 465, 468, 469nn9–11 Halieutica (Oppian) 6, 8, 423–36 Hall, Radclyffe 317 Halperin, David 3–4, 13–16, 19–21, 124–25, 181, 474; How to Do the History of Homosexuality 20, 23, 284n4, 341, 408–9, 420; One Hundred Years of Homosexuality 14–15, 20, 29–30, 38n2, 40n29, 70, 394, 420; Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography 92, 94, 103, 284n3, 340 hamartia 116 Han, Irene 7, 24n3, 316–30 handkerchief model of time (Serres) 225 handmaidens of Nausicaa 325, 328n15 happiness 116, 364, 384–85; see also flourishing hapticity 426, 428, 430–21, 462 Haraway, Donna 53, 58–62, 65–66, 433n11; Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature 42; “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” 65, 460, 469n10, 469n12; Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene 58, 62, 227, 261, 296, 433, 434n13; When Species Meet 58–59, 62, 424, 476 Harrell, Trajal 139, 147–50 Hartman, Saidiya V. 146, 150, 261, 419–20, 469n21, 477–78, 484 Haselswerdt, Ella 1–9, 21–22, 437–57 hastain, j/j 439–40, 446–48 haunting 142, 145 H.D. 453–55 healing 113, 116, 243, 246, 248, 250, 253–54, 367 hebephilia 78 Hector (character in Iliad) 29, 31–37, 39n16, 39n21, 308–9 Hecuba (Euripides) 143–46 Hedva, Johanna 143–46, 149

501

Index Hedwig and the Angry Inch (musical and film) 126, 179–80, 198n1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 43, 379, 478, 485n9 Heidegger, Martin 130, 296, 402 Hejnol, Andreas 261–63, 267, 269n11, 380 Helen 38, 208, 307–9, 319–24, 326, 349, 437 Hellenistic period 50n14, 180, 206, 331, 453; and Christianity 361–68; see also astrology Hephaestio of Thebes 245 Heracles 110–11, 172, 335, 352–53, 355–56, 358n18; see also Hercules Hercules 336, 365; and Hylas 401; see also Heracles hereditarianism 265 hermaphrodites 318, 462 Hermaphroditus 22–23, 59, 65–66, 179–89, 191–93, 198, 199n10, 199n13; satyr and 183–85; and Silenus 186–87, 189; sleeping 187–89, 192, 206 Hermes 247, 250, 253, 367 Herodotus 18, 117n12, 204, 227n2, 417–18 heroic narratives 475–77, 481 Herter, Hans 57 Herz, Zachary 8, 408–22 Hesiod: Theogony 202, 227, 306–7; Works and Days 287–91, 297–98, 298n1, 306–7 heteronormative reproductive futurism see under Edelman, Lee: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive; reproductive futurism heteronormative reproductive temporality 5; see also chrononormativity; straight time heteronormativity 2–7, 92, 153–63, 166, 199n9, 304, 314, 368, 423; adulthood, idea of successful 5, 106, 283; alternatives to social forms of 231 (see also queer family; queer kinships); assumptions of 77; and body styles 340; cisheteronormativity 208, 211; constructs of 460; gaze 191; gender binary 146, 149, 154; and heterocentric hierarchies of care 425; paradigms of 326, 328; and queer performance 138, 144–46, 149; and race 477–80; symbolic 5; systems of 372–73; see also specific topics, e.g., biases; charmed circle; family; homophobia; kinship; marriage; Other, the; reproductive futurism; time: normative heterotopias 384, 388n5 hierarchy/hierarchies 53, 129, 134, 146, 222, 231, 251, 278, 364, 380, 385, 419–20, 423–25, 430, 480; binary 480; of care, heterocentric 425; faux-biological, of races 263, 268; and female homoeroticism, non-hierarchical 317, 319, 321, 323, 327; humanist 459, 461–62; interwoven 193; queer chosen family model as adverse to 225; racial 263,

268, 416, 465, 479–81; social and spatial 193, 196; tree and ladder metaphors 260–62, 268, 380; unmaking 138 Hillier, Bill 194, 198 Hippocrates/the Hippocratics 6, 217–29 Hippocratic Corpus 220–21, 225; Generation 220; The Nature of the Child 220 On Regimen 220 Hippocratic Oath 218, 224 Hippolytus 275, 280 Hippolytus (Euripides) 227n8, 284n5 historicism 13–19, 23, 103, 205, 226, 397, 439, 474, 476; Freud’s ahistoricism 23, 92; and queer unhistoricism 18, 218, 225–27 historiography 110, 157–58, 285n17, 409–10, 415, 419, 472–73, 477, 479, 484n8, 485n10 history of sexuality 1, 3, 8, 13–14, 23, 30, 103, 437, 456, 460, 472; and homosexuality 394; see also under Foucault, Michel: History of Sexuality HIV/AIDS 7, 124, 138, 144, 274, 347–59, 362, 372 Hồ Xuân Hương 7, 303–15 Holland-Toll, Linda 464 Holmes, Brooke 224, 226, 263–64, 268 Holy Roman Empire 223 Homer 126; Iliad of 4, 29–41, 109, 308–9, 325, 328n8, 401, 404, 451; Odyssey of 39n15, 50n7, 109, 113–14, 126, 325, 328n8, 328n15, 451 homoeroticism/homoerotic desire 204, 275, 317–18, 322, 337, 363, and passim; ancient Greece and 7; and canonical literature 371; and classical reception studies 452; female 24n1, 69, 279, 317–19, 327–28; and homosocial pedagogy 366; male 318, 368, 474 homohistory 226 homonormativity 134, 274, 284n2, 312, 465 homophobia 15, 19, 37, 43, 231, 360, 365–68, 381, 393, 396; and HIV/AIDS 347–59, 362, 371–72; of Roman literature 77 “homosexuality,” the word 394, 403 homosociality 18, 39n13, 112, 275, 278–81, 298n1, 361–68, 372–73, 461; and comradeship 278, 283, 403; and homosexuality 363, 366, 373; of marriage in Greek tragedy 39n11; see also under Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire honey 126, 130, 132, 234–40, 291, 440, 446, 452–55 honeycomb 232, 234–40 hope: credula spes 161–62; queerness as about futurity and 154 Horkheimer, Max 126

502

Index Hostius Quadra 47–49, 51nn19–21 Housman, A. E. 398–400, 404–5 How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Halperin) see under Halperin, David: How to Do the History of Homosexuality “human” as social category 477 humanism 42–52, 394–95, 482; and Black antihumanism 218; see also posthumanism humanities 4–5, 42–52, 257, 363, 368 humor 66, 98, 170, 187, 209, 310; see also comedy Hungry Woman, The: A Mexican Medea (play by Cherríe Moraga) 6, 8, 458–68 Hunt, Ailsa 56, 60, 64–66 huntresses 275, 277–81; see also Amazons hydria (water jar) 440, 450, 451 Hygeia 220 Hylas 180, 401 idealism 231, 361, 364, 370, 373 identity/identities 53–68 passim; biology and 259; and “coming out” 30, 111, 360, 372; construction of 259; fixed, undoing 82; formation 7, 240, 341; “homosexual” 318, 360; and identity languages 248, 254; individual 88–89; politics of 341; and self-identification 77, 124, 208; subversion of (see under Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble); see also by description, e.g., gay identity; gender identity; queer identity; trans identities; individual names for their solutions to the question of identity, e.g., Haraway, Donna; specific topics, e.g., astrology; indeterminacy Iliad (Homer) see under Homer: Iliad of illness: in Sophocles 107–16 passim; see also HIV/ AIDs; medicine immigrants 265–66, 304, 372; see also diaspora; refugees immortality 65, 308 imperialism 304, 364, 381; Britain’s imperialist kinmaking 264–66 impotence 55–56, 60, 63, 92, 99–100 In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (Halberstam) see under Halberstam, Jack: In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives “In the Black Fantastic” (art exhibition) 484 in vitro fertilization (IVF) 274 inclusivity 2, 19, 253, 305 incoherence, homosexual/homosocial 361, 363–64, 372 indeterminacy 2, 8, 45, 58–59, 354, 403–4, 434n15, 439 indigeneity 62, 269n11, 317, 343, 459–60, 464, 467

inequality 259, 268 infanticide 458–60, 464, 467 Inferno (Dante) 355 “INFERNO: Catastrophically Queer” (Marcus Bell) 385–88, 388nn8–9 inheritance 111, 116, 154, 173, 175–76, 210, 220, 223, 232, 236–37, 257–58, 260, 319, 324; false logic of 261, 263–66, 268, 269n15 inter(in)animacy, speculative 144–46 intersectionality 13, 208, 341, 344, 413 intersexuality 17, 425, 433n11 interspeciesism 8, 423–36 intertemporality 7, 440, 444–45, 448, 452 intimacy, queer 231, 439, 483 invisibility 93, 144, 182, 343, 366–67 Ionic verse 5, 123, 131–33 Iphis 74 Islam/Muslims 260–61, 372 Jackson, Moses 398–99 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman 43, 49, 50n4, 433n5 Jarman, Derek 350, 358n11 Jauss, Hans Robert 218, 332 Jemisin, N. K. 475, 478–82, 484n1, 484n7 Jesus 361, 365, 367; see also Christianity Jewish American politics 370, 372 Jews see Judaism/Jews Jim Crow laws 261 Johnson, David 333–34, 339–40, 344 Johnson, Mark 219 Johnson, Patrick 341 Johnson, Walter 236 Jonze, Spike: Her (film) 430 Jordan, Mark D. 418 Joshel, Sandra 236 Jouanna, Jacques 225 jouissance 94, 96, 103, 154, 175–76, 429–30, 434n21 Jowett, Benjamin 363–67, 370, 373 Judaism/Jews 260; Jewish American politics 370, 372; see also anti-Semitism Julian Laws/Augustus’ marriage laws 163n2 Juvenal 63, 193–94, 196, 284, 395–96, 400–401, 405 Kaan, Kamal: Aaliyah (After Antigone) 267–68 Kahan, Benjamin 30–31, 37, 40n32 Kamen, Deborah 75, 80, 80n6, 199n8 Kelly, Laural 252–53 Kennedy, Rebecca Futo 266 Kim, Annabel 317 kinaidos see cinaedus King, Helen 206, 217, 220–22, 224, 227nn5–6 kink 169, 274, 343–44, 386 kin-making 7, 261, 264–66, 382

503

Index kinship: Black 261; with the Greeks and Romans 268; heteronormative 18; imagining 261; practices of 275; queering, against genealogy 257–72 (see also queer kinships); in Rome 240; universal 295; see also family/families; queer kinships Koedt, Anne 192 Konstan, David 166, 285n10 Kristeva, Julia 96, 98, 103, 458–59, 468n2 Lacan, Jacques 4, 83, 102–3, 130, 164n13, 166, 169, 174–75, 177n12, 199n15, 432, 434n21 ladders, hierarchical metaphors of 260–62, 268, 380 Lakoff, George 219 Lane, Melissa 364, 366, 370, 373 Lardinois, Andre 318–19 lateness/late style 425–26 Latour, Bruno 225, 267 Lavery, Grace 17, 433n10 Le Guin, Ursula K. 380, 472, 475–78, 481, 483, 484nn4–5 Leduc, Violette 317 Lee, Wendel 341–42 Leonard, Zoe 140 Les Guérillères (Wittig) 7, 316–30, 327 Lesbian and Gay Classical Caucus (LGCC) 21, 24n4 “lesbian phallus” 425 lesbians/lesbianism 78; butch 75, 78, 276, 446–47; categories of lesbian gender identity 446–47; cis 438; destiny and mission of 322; and female homoeroticism 24n1, 69, 279, 317–19, 327–28; future of 456; and intertemporal kin-building 7, 303–15; and lesbian desire 326; lesbian feminism 17, 128, 319; modern 77, 438, 456; tribadism 69–81, 317; see also individual names; specific topics, e.g., sexual identities Lesbos, island of 276, 303, 318, 438–39, 443, 446 lesbos, the word 318 Letter from Paitos to Artaxerxes (ps. Hippocrates) 220 Levanti, Drew 245–46, 248–49, 252–53 Levin-Richardson, Sarah 75, 80, 80n6, 199n8, 409 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 39n12 Lewis, Charlton T. 397–99 Lewis, David M. 208 Lewis, George E. 484n8 Lewis, Sophie 6, 218, 227, 261, 268, 428, 434n15 libido 16, 39n9 light 376–90 passim; liminality 130, 250, 461; “the motion of light on her face” 309, 320, 325, 437 Lindheim, Sara H. 1–9, 153–65 Lingis, Alphonso 423, 433n2, 434n16

live art 140, 143, 147 logical consistency 82–91 Longinus 326, 437, 455 Longus: Daphnis and Chloe 14, 387 Lorde, Audre 312 Lorenz, Katharina 193 Lot’s wife (biblical character) 372 love: Greek 367–68, 474; Platonic 361; “wild” 6, 8, 423–36 Love, Heather 128, 135, 150n1, 227n4, 408, 415, 419–20 love songs see Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women “low theory” 106–7 Lucian: Dialogues of the Courtesans 22, 275–77; Megillus and Demonassa 276–77, 279–80, 284n6, 285n8, 285n12 Luciano, Dana 423, 433 Lucretius 287, 290, 294–95, 297 Lykourgeia (Aeschylus) 206 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 202–4, 207–9, 212n4 Macdonald, Helen 35–36 MacLean, Rose 181, 193 maenads 130–32, 175, 180, 183–84, 186, 193, 208, 382–83 magazines: early male muscle mags 6–7, 331–46; see also by name maidens 85, 308; handmaidens of Nausicaa 325, 328n15 male gaze 179–80, 187, 367 male-only birth, fantasies of 218, 222–24 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (Spillers) 222, 268n1 manhood 35, 154, 277, 321, 404–5, 410, 418, 465–66; marriage as transition to 283; see also masculinity manliness 50n11, 73, 75, 282; see also masculinity Mann, Kristin 4, 69–81 Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice 369 manumission 232–33, 236 Marathus 156–58, 163n6 marginalization/marginalized people and groups 2, 20, 111, 246, 267, 275, 281–84, 285n17, 305, 333, 371, 408–10, 415, 482; see also by description marriage: alternatives to 274–80 (see also queer kinship); Augustan marriage legislation 275; childless 230, 234; heterosexual/ heteronormative 154, 265, 274–75, 277, 280; homosociality of, in Greek tragedy 39n11; ideology of 285n10; Julian Laws/ Augustus’ marriage laws 163n2; language of 277; Megillus and Demonassa 276–77, 279–80, 284n6, 285n8, 285n12; same-sex 274, 276; as transition to manhood 283

504

Index Martial 4, 56, 65, 397–401, 404; queer subjectivities in 69–81 Martindale, Charles 124, 135, 218, 262, 264, 403, 474 martyrdom 361, 365, 372 Marx, Karl/Marxist language 4, 227, 316, 319 masculine women 69, 276, 416; see also female masculinity masculinism 361, 364, 459–60, 462, 468, 468n3, 469n10 masculinity: ancient Greek 209; butch 79; dominant, performance of 180; Greek military 111; hegemonic 276, 282; and hypermasculinity 55, 282; performance of 282, 409 (see also performance, gender as); political 209; trans 79; see also female masculinity; manhood; manliness; performance, gender as masochism 93, 157, 164n13, 168, 174–75, 177n15; see also BDSM Masten, Jeffrey 394–95, 406 mastery 8, 45–49, 50n17, 98, 124, 197–98, 209, 238, 264, 423, 468 materialist feminism 316–30; see also Wittig, Monique materiality 59, 61, 65, 168, 322, 437 matricide 82–83, 85–88 Matthias Gesner, Johann 361 Matzner, Sebastian 226–27 Maudling, Reginald 265–66 McCarty, Kevin 384 McKittrick, Katherine 6, 259–60, 263–64, 266–67 Medea: The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (play by Cherríe Moraga) 6, 8, 458–68; see also under Euripides: Medea Medici, Lorenzo de’, 393–94, 423 medicine: ancient 6, 97, 217–29, 245; and race 259; western 191; see also Hippocrates Megillus and Demonassa 23, 276–77, 279–80, 284n6, 285n8, 285n12 Mehretu, Julie 440, 443–44, 446 Melville, Herman 363–68; Billy Budd 363–65, 367–68; Moby Dick 83; Sailor 363 memory 6, 110–11, 305–6, 323 Mendel, Gregor 220 Menon, Madhavi 1–2, 16, 226–27 menstruation 466 Mercury 58, 243–56 Merlis, Mark: An Arrow’s Flight 348, 352–58, 352–58 metalepsis 226 Metamorphoses (Apuleius) 275, 281–83 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 74, 126, 163n9, 223, 245, 279–80, 285n16 meter 5, 123; see also galliambic verse; Ionic verse; Sapphic verse

metronormativity 134 Milbern, Stacey Park 261, 267 Mill, John Stuart 364 Miller, Paul Allen 4, 23, 92–105, 164n13, 164n15, 373 Milner, Alfred 257–58 mimesis 89, 208, 367–68 Miscellanea (Poliziano) see under Poliziano, Angelo: Miscellanea misogyny 153, 172, 232, 283, 307, 322, 464 Mizer, Bob 334–38, 342, 344 Moby Dick (Melville) 83 mode (Phrygian, Mixolydian) 131 Molina, Natalia 305, 314 Monette, Paul 340, 350 money: corporealization of 226; denarius 245, 412–13; as parthenogenic 231–32; queer kinship and monetary value 230–42; tetradrachm 411–12 monogamy: and non-monogamy 164n14, 277 monsters/the monstrous 84, 113–14, 117n13, 261, 292, 468n2 Moore, Christopher 361 Moore, Lisa 438, 456 Moraga, Cherríe 6–8, 458–68 Morris, Michael J. 245–46, 248–49 Mortal Embrace (Dreuilhe) see Dreuilhe, Alain Emmanuel: Mortal Embrace Moten, Fred 144, 465 motherhood/maternity 222, 279, 325; earth as mother 289; “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (Spillers) 222, 268n1; Nature as mother 222; see also individual names; matricide Motherload (Hedva) 143–47 Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) 316 Mueller, Melissa 4, 29–41, 129, 438, 456, 461 multiculturalism 247 Mulvey, Laura 189–91 Muñoz, José Esteban: Cruising Utopia 5, 8, 16, 20, 130–35 passim 138–41 passim 144–50 passim 154, 160–63, 240, 341, 384, 465; see also queer futurity; straight time Murphy, Michelle 289 muscle culture/photography 331–46 Muses 159, 297 musicality, queer 5, 123–37 musicology/queer musicology 125–26, 135 Myrmidons (lost tragedy by Aeschylus) 40n31, 401 narcissism 112, 349, 429, 434n15 Narcissus 179, 192–93; and Echo 181–183, 183 nationalism: queer 352; and xenophobia 266 Nature, as mother 222 Nauman, Bruce 140 Nausicaa, handmaidens of 325, 328n15

505

Index Nazism 50n1, 362, 370–71 Neal, Jess 343 Nealon, Christopher 218, 227 neaniskos 285n12 Nehamas, Alexander 94 Nemesis 5, 153–65 neoliberalism 129–30, 284n2, 362; see also capitalism Neoptolemus see Pyrrhus/Neoptolemus Nero 223, 418 network centralization, paradigms of 196–97 Network Theories of Power (Grewal) 196–97 New Comedy 97, 168, 171 New Historicism 14, 474 Newton, George 350 Nguyen, Andrea 304–5, 314 Nguyen, Jessica 313 Nguyen, Kelly 7–8, 303–15 Nietzsche, Friedrich 379 Nikolaev, Alexander 399 Nin, Anaïs 317 No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Edelman) see under Edelman, Lee nonbinary gender 23, 73, 77, 92, 95, 250, 252 Nooter, Sarah 117n2, 123, 135 Nossis 453 Nyong’o, Tavia 114, 148–49, 222, 424, 433 O’Bryhim, Shawn 96–97 obscenity 96–97, 100, 102, 413; and Comstock Law of 1873 338–39 octopus 8, 423–36 Odyssey (Homer) see under Homer: Odyssey of Oedipus at Colonus (Oedipus Coloneus) (Sophocles) 117n7 oikos 325 Okorafor, Nnedi 484n8 Old Comedy see Aristophanes Oliver, Jay 7, 273–86 Olsen, Sarah 1, 18, 89, 163, 227n8 On Our Backs (magazine) 475 One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (Halperin) see under Halperin, David Oppian: Halieutica 6, 8, 423–36 oppression: structures of 317; systems of 477; see also by description, e.g., colonialism; patriarchy; slavery optimism 2; Cruel Optimism (Berlant) 141–42; see also queer futurity oral sex 72–73, 75–76, 80n3, 80n6, 418; see also cunnilingus; fellatio oratory 46–49, 50n14 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 82–91, 223 Orestes 4, 82–89, 90nn6–7 orgasm 207, 428, 430; ejaculation 99–100, 432; female 72, 74, 191–92 orgiastic celebrations 129, 385

Orientalism 222, 260–61 Ormand, Kirk 1–9, 13–25, 38n2, 39n11, 51n19, 103, 212, 227n8 Orpheus 123, 126, 297 Orrells, Daniel 7, 360–75 Oschophoria festival 206 Other, the/otherness 180–81, 260–61, 317–19, 343, 430, 440, 446, 483, 484n5; othering 23 Ovid: Metamorphoses 74, 126, 163n9, 223, 245, 279–80, 285n16 Padilla Peralta, Dan-el 227n3, 227n5, 472, 484n3 pagans/paganism 60, 362, 365 Pan 45 pansexuality 312 pantomimes 412 paradigms 38, 220, 356, 410, 416; Great Paradigm Shift 30–31, 70, 360; heterosexual, rejecting 274; of network centralization 196–97 paranoid readings 18, 349–50, 362, 367, 372 parenthood 154, 274; see also fatherhood; motherhood; specific topics, e.g., adoption; reproductive futurism Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (Harrell) 139, 147 Park, Katharine 222–23 Parker, Emma 303, 314 Parker, W. Holt 66n2, 322–23 parrhēsia (Athenian freedom of speech) 212 parricide 282, 285n17 paternity see fatherhood patriarchy 6, 31–32, 43, 146, 166–67, 202–11 passim 218, 227n8, 250–53, 281, 303–4, 307, 311–14 passim 322–28 passim 376–77, 461, 464–65, 475–76; curtailment of female power under 468; racist hetero-patriarchal capitalism 385 Patroclus, Achilles and 4, 29–40, 331, 401, 403–5, 474, 483 patronage, imperial 181 Paul, Kathleen 265 pederasty 96, 126, 134, 277–78, 285n12, 361, 364, 388, 401, 403; and pederastic desire 230–32, 283; and pederastic kinship/kinmaking 7, 218–19, 225, 230–42 pedophilia 78 pegging 71–72, 76 Peloponnesian War 108, 213n5 Pencil of Nature, The (Talbot) 331 penetration model (of ancient sexuality) 14–15, 181–82, 187, 189, 192 Penthesileia (Amazon queen) 404 people of color 265, 274, 332, 372, 384; women of color 314, 464; see also specific topics Pepperell, Julian 42 Peraino, Judith 126–27, 134–35

506

Index performance, gender as/gender performativity 5, 16, 48–49, 138–52 passim 205–6, 276, 328, 409 performance, queer see queer performance Persius 402 pessimism 2, 108, 162, 469n16, 477; see also Afropessimism; queer pessimism Peters, Erica 304 Petersen, Lauren Hackworth 193 Petronius: cena Trimalchionis of 230–42; Satyrica 7, 54, 230–42, 275–79, 281, 283 Phaedrus (Plato) see under Plato: Phaedrus Phaedrus (Roman fabulist) 79 Phalen, Peggy 139–41, 146 Philaenis 4, 69–81 Philoctetes 4; see also Euripides: Philoctetes; Merlis, Mark: An Arrow’s Flight; Sophocles: Philoctetes; Tempest, Kae: Paradise philology: classical 135; queer 8, 393–407 philosophy/philosophers: and politics 362–63, 370, 373; biology and 261; see also by name phở 7–8, 304–6, 312–14 photography 144; muscle photography 331–46 Physique Pictorial (magazine) 334–44, 335, 336, 342 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde) 363–64, 366–68, 373 Pindar 108, 204 Piros, Elliott 7, 230–42 “Pixarvolt” films 107, 113 placemaking 305, 314 plants 58, 273, 287, 289–98 plasticity 42–43, 50n3, 328n6, 425 Plath, Sylvia 317 Plato: Apology 362–63, 366, 368, 370–71; Gorgias 109, 117n5; Laws 112, 126, 361, 365; Phaedrus 94, 102, 112, 361, 369; Republic 112, 126–27, 362, 364, 369–71, 404, 483; Seventh Letter 362; Symposium 94, 100, 102, 285n7, 318, 361, 366–67 pleasure: sexual 191–92, 283, 366, 412–13; use of 92, 100, 102–3 (see also under Foucault, Michel: The Use of Pleasure) pleasure principle: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 4, 92–95; Catullus beyond 92–105 Plotinus 130 Poetics (Aristotle) 133 Poetry of Sappho, The (2016 edition w/ prints by Julie Mehretu) 445 Polak, Clark 333–34 Politics (Aristotle) 131 politics: and agency 192, 372–73, 479; philosophy and 362–63, 370, 373; queer 363, 373; “radical” 43, 208, 362, 369–70; Socratic 362–63, 371–73; see also by description, e.g., democracy; Jewish American politics

Poliziano, Angelo: Miscellanea 393–94, 396–98, 400–402, 404–5 polyamory 273 Polygnotos Group 440, 450, 451 Pompeii 55, 58, 65, 409; Roman house in 5, 179–201; the Virtual Pompeii Project (VPP) 194 Pope L. 140 pornography 338–39, 344, 401, 405, 475 Poseidon 113 positionality 124, 284n3, 384, 472 postcolonial theory 2, 42–52, 257–72, 303–15, 360–75, 376–90, 458–71, 472–86 posthumanism 42–52, 58–64, 66, 423 postnatural, the 30–31, 38n5, 460 poststructuralism 206 power: “a female shadow power” 222; imbalance of 15, 319, 409, 446–47; network theories of 196–97; queer 198; “ritual of” (memory as) 110; structures of 93, 142, 210, 266–67, 322, 344, 388; see also Foucault, Michel; specific topics, e.g., colonialism; hierarchies; oppression; patriarchy Praxagora 207, 209–11, 213n5 Preciado, Paul B. 429–30, 433n11; Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era 110, 145, 425 Priapea/Carmina Priapea (collection of anonymous poems) 55–56, 60, 64–65, 66n2 priapism 63 Priapus 53–68, 54, 61, 64; Priape de Rivary 57 privilege 23; the charmed circle 181, 189, 191–93; economic and sexual 211; and writing about the future 472–73 Problem in Greek Ethics, A (Symonds) 333, 361; see also Symonds, John Addington promiscuity 358n8, 358n20, 415, 425 pronouns 133–35, 169, 198n2, 209, 276, 328, 413, 437, 448 psychoanalytic theory 2, 5, 16–17, 39n9, 167–68, 332, 402–3, 417, 424; film theory 189; and fetishizing of penis 207; see also Edelman, Lee; Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques Puar, Jasbir 150, 312–14, 424, 433 puberty 78, 233, 255n6, 283, 339; see also adolescence; teenagers; specific topics, e.g., ephebes public sex 144, 385, 389n12 Pyrrhus/Neoptolemus 33, 82, 107–9, 111–13, 117nn8–9, 353–56 Pythian odes (Pindar) 108 queer/queerness definitions of 16–17, 53, 82, 106, 124, 284n3; to “queer” something 53; resistance to determinations of meaning 357n4, 408 queer abstraction 8, 437–57 queer affect 5, 123, 125–26, 456

507

Index Queer Art of Failure, The (Halberstam) see under Halberstam, Jack: The Queer Art of Failure queer belonging 6, 230 queer body see under body/bodies: queer queer diaspora 303–15 queer ecocriticism 459, 467 queer ecologies 8, 458–71 Queer Euripides: Re-Readings in Greek Tragedy (Olsen and Telò) 1, 18, 89, 163, 227n8 queer family 227, 231, 275, 281, 480, 483; see also chosen family; queer kinships queer form 169, 430 queer futurity 8, 123, 129–30, 132, 162–63, 384, 458, 468n1; lesbian futurity 437–57 passim; queerness as about futurity and hope 154 queer identity 53–68, 333, 340–41, 344; vs. gay identity 3–4, 16 queer intimacy 231, 439, 483 queer kinships 6–7, 215–99, 312–13; and (crip) ancestorship 257–67; in ancient literature 7, 273–86; fluidity of 274, 279; against genealogy 257–72; and kin-making 7, 261, 264–66, 382; monetary value and 230–42; in the Philoctetes 111–13; in Vergil’s Georgics 287–99; see also queer family queer musicality in classical texts 123–37 queer pedagogy 166–78 queer performance 1, 4–5, 8, 138–39, 142–50 passim 378, 385–88 queer phenomenology 5, 460; see also Ahmed, Sara queer politics 363, 373 queer power 198 queer receptions 3–4, 7–8, 23, 138, 152, 301–90 queer studies 21, 69, 139, 142, 150, 231, 314, 360, 388; the institutionalization of 218; the temporal turn in 226; the unhistoricist turn in 226 queer subjectivities 3–4, 27–214; in Martial 69–81; see also specific themes, e.g., queer kinships queer time/temporalities 3–6, 138–51; and lateness 425–26; and lesbian futurity 437–57; and queer astrology 243–56; in comedies of Terence 166–78; in Tibullus Book 2, 5, 153–65 queer unhistoricism 18, 218, 226–27 “Queering History” (Goldberg and Menon) 226 queerphobia 138, 252, 475 Rabelais, François 100, 222, 227n7 race: critical race theory 2; and faux-biological hierarchy of races 263, 268; and gender 49; kink and 343–44; and medicine 259; and performativity 49;and race-making 146; as social, not biological, category 259; See also by description; specific topics, e.g., hierarchies; intersectionality

racism 4, 19, 50n7, 261, 263–68, 313; and antiracism 482; Cicero and Seneca’s definitions of humanities and 4, 42–52; racist heteropatriarchal capitalism 385 Rankine, Patrice 4, 42–52, 478, 484n6 rape 55, 96, 207, 279, 412; see also sexual violence rave spaces 6–7, 376–90 Reardon, Anita Cowles 440, 443–44, 449 rebellion 468 reception/reception studies see classical reception/ classical reception studies; queer receptions reciprocity 31, 93, 103, 321, 474 red-figure Attic hydria 440, 450, 451 refugees 209, 303–4, 313 rejection, by families of origin 6, 273 relationality 251, 263–64, 269n14, 274, 280, 424, 428, 431, 455, 465; disobedient 259–60, 264, 266–68 religion: Judeo-Christian 401; non-Christian communities and faiths 372; see also specific religions Renaissance period 218, 222–23, 262, 361, 393, 397, 405, 423; and anatomy 223; culture of 222, 227n7; Italian 126, 222 reparative readings 2, 18, 222, 419–20 reproductive futurism 112, 154–55, 167–68, 175–77, 274, 281–83, 432, 434n14; and the Child 154, 161, 167–68, 175–77, 177n14, 284n1; see also under Edelman, Lee: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive respectability, politics of 475 Revermann, Martin 264 revolutionary desire 432 rhetoric 44–46; critiques of 109; metalepsis 226 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 111 rhyton 63–64 Richlin, Amy 13, 15, 66, 77, 80n3, 181, 192, 198, 237, 318, 397, 399, 409–10 Ricks, David 377–78 Riley, Bob 342 Rochberg, Francesca 244–45, 248, 254 Roman art see under art: Roman Roman belonging 47, 254 Roman emperors 223, 236, 239, 341–342, 411–20, 423; see also Elagabalus Roman Empire 18, 93, 223, 245, 281; Imperial period 54, 61; Republican period 420n6 Roman house in Pompeii 5, 179–201 Roman identity 47, 166, 254 Roman novels 276–83 passim Roman soldiers 342; Roman soldier-boxer 336 romance, ancient: Daphnis and Chloe (Longus) 14, 387 Rubin, Gayle 39n12, 181, 408, 475 Ruffell, Isabel 5, 8, 17, 202–14

508

Index Ruin, The (poem) 350, 358n11 Russell, Donald 266 sadism 93, 168, 189–90; see also BDSM Said, Edward W. 425–26 Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Halperin) see under Halperin, David: Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography same-sex marriage 274, 465 Sapp, Jann 220, 222 Sapphic Slashers (Duggan) 416 Sapphic verse 5, 123, 127–28, 323 Sappho 6, 8, 21–23, 437–57; desire in poetry of 7, 316–30; and hearing Sappho backward 127–29; and the lesbian body 7, 316–30; The Poetry of Sappho (2016 edition w/ prints by Julie Mehretu) 445; Vi Khi Nao’s re-imagining of 7–8, 303–15 Sappho Fragments: love songs to Adonis and the community of women 440–44 Sapphopunk 440–48, 455 Sapsford, Tom 5, 123–37, 405, 409–10, 420 Saturnalia 385 satyrs 179; and Hermaphroditus 183–85 satyr plays 40n31, 113, 133 Satyrica (Petronius) see under Petronius: Satyrica Sawday, Jonathan 222 Scanlon, Julie 326 scapegoating 361 scatology 209 Schneider, Rebecca 144 Schotten, C. Heike 432 Schrenk, Lawrence 309 Schwartz, Bob 335 science: ancient 218; history of 219–20, 226, 246, 254, 257 science fiction 8, 258, 472–86; see also Afrofuturism scopophilia 189, 191–92 Scribonius Largus 221 Scythian archers 207–8 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 7, 360–75; Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire 31–32, 39n9, 39n12; Epistemology of the Closet 7, 17, 19–21, 23, 30, 36, 38nn6–7, 70, 77–78, 80, 124, 360–75, 417; Tendencies 2, 124, 127, 133, 168, 177, 177n15, 319, 459–61, 465 Seghal, Tino 143 segregation 202, 206, 208, 210, 342 Selene see under Endymion: Selene and self, care of 93–94, 217, 362, 463–64; The Care of the Self (Foucault) 98, 388n5 self-control 73, 75–76 selfhood 107, 111, 115, 231, 239–40 Seneca the Elder 396

Seneca the Younger 4, 42–52; Epistulae Morales 44, 48; Natural Questions 4, 42–52 Serano, Julia 205 Serres, Michel 225 Severus Alexander 412–13, 418 sex (biological): and gender 42, 276 sex strike, in Lysistrata 202–3, 207 sex work 179, 204, 278, 409, 411–12; see also courtesans sexology 93, 333, 369 sexual identities 23, 103, 106, 127, 213n6, 328, 394; in ancient Rome 198; female 77, 192, 317; male 360–61, 368, 372; modern 7, 14–15, 77; non-normative 199n9; and sexual orientation 40n32; see also Great Paradigm Shift sexual liberation 358n8 sexual orientation 37, 40n32, 78, 318, 354 sexual pleasure 191–92, 283, 366, 412–13 sexual revolution 360 sexual violence 92, 233; see also rape sexuality 13, 93; compulsory 275, 284n5; gender identity and/gender identity vs. 16, 205; history of (see history of sexuality); incorporative model of 30; pre-modern conception of 317, 327; and sexuality studies 13, 473; see also specific topics and descriptions, e.g., pansexuality; penetration model (of ancient sexuality) “sexy boys” 180, 187, 189, 191–93 shadows 6–7, 108, 372, 376–90 passim Shakespeare, William 20, 331, 371, 377, 394 shame 22–23, 30, 47, 107, 110–11, 114, 157, 171, 276, 340, 356, 367, 384 Sharpe, Christina 150, 261, 267 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus 482 siblinghood 275, 277–81; see also family/families; kinship Sikhs/Sikh diaspora 306 silence/silencing 16, 29, 87–88, 155, 179, 318, 320, 327, 393, 416, 419–20, 477–78, 484n3 Silenus, Hermaphroditus and 186–87, 189 Silverblank, Hannah 6–8, 243–56 Sirens 114, 123, 126, 134 Sissa, Giulia 14, 89, 103, 322 “sissy” 337, 341, 355 situated knowledges 460, 469n12 Skinner, Marilyn B. 13, 23, 180, 199n4, 240n1, 453 Skira festival 210–11 slash fiction 483 slave play (BDSM) 75, 343–44 slavery/enslavement: and Afropessimism 43–44, 50n6, 432, 484n6; and agency 232, 235–36, 432–33; antebellum 236, 261, 432; chattel 222, 236, 343; and faux-biological

509

Index hierarchy of races 263; Haitian Slave Revolt 478–79; and manumission 232–33, 236; master-slave relationship/dichotomy 43–44, 465; in muscle mag depictions 335–336, 341–44, 342; and pederastic kin-making 7, 230–42; Roman 230–42 and passim; and suicides in the Middle Passage 432; young male slaves 230–42 snakes 84–86, 90n4, 108, 352–56, 358n19, 433n2 social constructions 258, 267, 317, 417; see also performance, gender as/gender performativity social media 138 social roles 47, 100, 173 Socrates 361–62, 368–73; and Alcibiades 102, 366 sodomy 15, 20, 38n6, 348, 351, 372, 394–95, 397–400 Soja, Edward 5 soldiers see Roman soldiers; warriors solidarity 175, 268, 474, 484n2 Sontag, Susan 116, 348, 357n6 SOPHIE 141–42, 145, 388 Sophocles 106–19; Ajax 108–15, 117n2; Antigone 115, 267–68; darkness in 115–16; Electra 115, 469n14; and the Greek art of failure 106–19; and illness theme 107–16 passim; The Lovers of Achilles (satyr play) 40n31; Oedipus at Colonus (Oedipus Coloneus) 117n7; Philoctetes 82, 107–16, 117n1, 117n5, 117n7, 117n9, 353–54, 358n18, 469n14; Tereus 114–15; Trachiniae 115 soteriology 364–65 space 5, 193–98; fluidity of 213n5, 460, 463; and gendered spaces 308–9, 314; hierarchies, social and spatial 193, 196; club spaces 4, 6–8, 376–90; reconsideration of (Halberstam) 5 (see also under Halberstam, Jack: In a Queer Time and Place); Space Syntax 194, 198, 199n18 Sparkly Kat, Alice 245, 253–54 Sparta 208–9, 213n5 speculative fiction 8, 477–78, 483, 484n8 speculative inter(in)animacy 144–46 Spiegel, Francesca 4, 43, 106–19 Spillers, Hortense 218, 227; “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” 222, 268n1 Spivak, Guyatri 460, 467 spontaneous generation 7, 287, 289, 292–96, 298 Star Trek 483, 484n1, 485n13 stickiness of emotion 145 Stoicism 46, 247, 365 Stonewall riots 332, 349, 351, 357n3, 360 storytelling: effluential 478–81; queer 248–50; see also Afrofuturism; fabulation; fiction

straight time 5, 129, 134, 154, 156–57, 160, 162, 328n5, 465; see also chrononormativity; reproductive futurism Strauss, Leo 369–73 Stryker, Susan 438 subalterns 416–17 subjectivities, queer see queer subjectivities suicide 108, 110, 432 Sullivan, Nikki 87, 433 Sullivan, Shirley Darcus 90n6 Summerfield, Arthur 339 surrogacy 274 Symonds, John Addington 7, 38, 333, 361, 364–65, 394, 403, 405, 474 Talbot, William Henry Fox: The Pencil of Nature 331 tamquam favus 232, 234–40 Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō 381 Taylor, Rabun 284, 395, 406n3, 406n6, 409 teenagers 78, 134, 174, 179, 411, 414, 417–19; see also adolescence; puberty; specific topics, e.g., ephebes teleology 77, 157–58, 168, 177, 217–18, 263–64, 348, 357n4, 384, 403, 439; and antiteleology 226 (see also queer unhistoricism) Telò, Mario 18, 89, 96, 112, 168, 240; on Oppian’s Halieutica 6, 8, 423–36 Tempest, Kae: Paradise 107–10, 115–16 temporal drag 123, 128 temporality; see also time; queer time/temporalities; straight time Tendencies (Sedgwick) see under Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: Tendencies Terence 5, 166–78 TERFs 438 Testo Junkie see under Preciado, Paul B.: Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era testosterone 212n4, 285n12 tetradrachm 411–12 textual mind 83, 88 “Theban pair” 279 Thesmophoria (women-only festival) 203–4, 206–9 Thesmophoriazusae (Women at the Thesmophoria) (Aristophanes) 203–4, 206–10 thingliness 144, 146 Tibullus 5, 55, 153–65 time: fluidity of 213n5, 326–28, 460, 463; handkerchief model of (Serres) 225; linear 153, 190–91, 248, 482; normative 154, 161, 163, 324, 328n5 (see also chrononormativity; reproductive futurism; straight time); queer (see queer time/ temporalities)

510

Index “tomboys” 75 tools 42, 44–48 totalitarianism 362, 370, 373, 395 Trachiniae (Sophocles) 115 tradition-building 260, 264 tragedy, ancient Greek 39n11, 82, 89, 107, 140–41; Greek tragic festivals 107; the illegible body in context with 114–16; queer performances of 139, 147–50; queer receptions of 138–50; see also Aeschylus; Euripides; Sophocles Trainspotting (Welsh) 116 trans*, 8, 16–17, 23, 24n2, 423–29 passim 433, 433n4, 434n24, 456; trans* studies 19, 150, 434n13 trans experience 3, 17, 205–6, 212 trans foundations of the comic state/Athens 5, 202–14 trans identities 23, 24n2, 78, 205–6, 212, 284n6 trans masculinity 79 trans men 78–79, 273, 276, 285n12 trans people 17, 77, 205–6; of color 274; in different cultures 206; see also trans men; trans women trans realism 433n10 trans theory 2–3, 16, 426, 456 trans women 17, 281, 413–15, 438 trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) 438 “transgenderism” 284n6 transhumanism 50n3 translation 205; scholarship as 79 transmasculine identity 285n12 transphobia 381, 438 transsexualism 205–6, 433n11 transspeciesism 424, 426, 428, 430, 433, 434n12 transvestism see cross-dressing Traub, Valerie 124, 226–27, 410, 415 trauma 146, 248, 252, 273; see also healing trees and ladders, hierarchical metaphors of 260–62, 268, 380 tribadism 69–81, 317 Trojan horse 316, 326, 328, 350–52, 357n7 Trojan war 29, 109, 114, 144, 307, 348–52, 355–57 Trung Bảo 305 Turner, Mark 394 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 7 Umachandran, Mathura 8, 472–86 unbecoming 31, 107–8, 111, 114, 145, 425, 428 ungendering 222 unhistoricism, queer 18, 218, 225–27 universalism 50n11 universalization 305, 323, 361 Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Phalen) 139–40, 146

Unnamable, The (Beckett) 83 utilitarianism 364 utopianism/utopian future 2, 5, 19–20, 23, 92, 148, 154, 282, 292–94, 324–25, 367, 378; heterotopias 384, 388n5; queer 384–85; and worldmaking 48, 384 vaginoplasty 412 ventriloquisms 226 Venus 80n5, 102, 160, 189, 192, 293; in astrology 243–44, 249, 251, 253; Sleeping 189–90; “unnatural” 71–72, 74; see also Aphrodite Vergil: Aeneid 124, 280, 285n16, 394; Georgics 287–99 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 89, 289 Vesalius, Andreas: Fabrica 223 Veyne, Paul 13–14, 231–32 Vi Khi Nao 7, 303–15 Vicarello Goblet 56 Victorian era 8, 38, 357, 363–68, 372–73, 413, 473–75 Vietnam 7–8, 303–15 Vim (magazine) 339–41 Virdi, Jaipreet 258–60 Virgil see Vergil virginity 14, 99, 279, 289, 324; Vestal Virgins 412 virility 33, 66, 75, 78, 100, 398 Virtual Pompeii Project (VPP) 194 voyeurism 63, 93, 189–91, 336 vulnerability 428; of political elites 180; male 207–8; of marginalized subjects 409 Vuong, Ocean 314 Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew 181, 193 Ward, Marchella 6–8, 139, 227, 227n3, 257–72, 388, 482 Warner, Michael 274, 389n12 warriors 275, 324–26, 338; see also Amazons; huntresses; soldiers; individual names/ characters, e.g., Hector Wells, Ida B. 260 Welsh, Irvine: Trainspotting 116 Westcott, Glen 35 Weston, Kath 6, 225, 227, 231, 261, 274 Whiggish histories 220 White, T. H. 35–36 white feminism 222 white supremacy 253, 261, 264, 380, 464, 479 whiteness 259, 265, 331–32, 341, 343–44, 380, 478, 482 Wikipedia 219–20 Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Halberstam) see under Halberstam, Jack: Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire

511

Index Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest 398; The Picture of Dorian Gray 363–64, 366–68, 373 Wilderson, Frank B. III 43–46, 48, 50n6 wildness 6, 8, 423–36; ferox 29–38; “wild” Achilles 4, 29–41; see also under Halberstam, Jack: Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire Williams, Craig 13, 237, 280, 406n3, 409–10, 418, 420 Williamson, Judith 348, 356 Windrush scandal 265 Winkler, John J. 13–14, 70, 117n8, 117n10, 320 Winterer, Caroline 257 Wittig, Monique 7, 17, 316–30; Les Guérillères 7, 316–30, 327; “The Trojan Horse” 316, 326 Wolf, Rhea 245, 249, 252–54 Wollstonecraft, Mary 205 women of color 314, 464; see also people of color Wong, Alice 258–60

Wong, Michael L. 289 Wood, Elizabeth 125–26, 135 Wood, Thelma 37 Woolf, Virginia 20 worldmaking 48, 384 Worman, Nancy 6–8, 114, 117n5, 308, 458–71 Wynter, Sylvia 259 Xenogenesis (Butler) 483 xenophobia 266 Xenophon 93 Yatromanolakis, Dmitri 451–52, 456n3 Youd, David 5, 135, 166–78 Zeitlin, Froma 14, 70, 82, 199n4, 203 Zeus 37, 87–88, 131–32, 157, 203, 289–91, 306–7 zoophilia 423–26, 430, 433, 433n7 Zuckerberg, Donna 21

512