odesofmeddea
diane's ruminations
23, ill tries of essays | so dead or alive tomie returned after all
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laughing my ass off LET ME GO MY OWN WAY → COME BACK TO ME ????
haunt me, take any form
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haunt me, take any form
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When I was a child looking
at my parents’ lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.
— LOUISE GLÜCK, “Telemachus’ Detachment.”
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queer classics: a speculative reading list
well i said i would so: my rec list for queer classics scholarship! this comes from my own experience with the subfield of queer classics during my time as a graduate student and my current life as an independent researcher.
i'll put it under a cut because it's long and because (gasp!) i capitalized more formally while i was writing it. if you find this resource useful and want to support an underemployed colleague, my ko-fi is here.
This list mixes multiple different kinds of scholarly resources, including academic books and articles, public-facing scholarship, blog posts, and conference recordings. It does not include primary source material (i.e., ancient texts themselves) – in part, because I think far more ancient texts are open to queer readings than those that make up the existing ‘canon,’ and in part because this reading list is more focused on methodology than it is on any one ancient source.
I’ve marked which texts are available for free online (*) and which are available with a JSTOR account or Academia.edu account (**). Most academic books or articles should be variously available in academic library systems. I have PDFs of the majority, so if you’re having trouble finding something, feel free to reach out!
Foundations of Gender and Sexuality Studies in Classics
These are some foundational works for thinking about gender and sexuality in the Greek and Roman worlds, which I would categorize under a methodological approach akin to LGBTQ+ studies. The primary distinction for me is that these works provide crucial information about systems of sexuality and relevant sources, but are often a) older and b) don’t use queer theory (or use it in a very limited way). This is by no means exhaustive, but it’s just a short selection of things that get cited often in queer Classics.
Sandra Boehringer, Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (2021; originally published as L’Homosexualité dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine, 2007)
Kenneth J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (1978)
Judith P. Hallett and Marylin B. Skinner (ed.), Roman Sexualities (1997) **
David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (1990)
David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin (eds), Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (1990) **
Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (2010; 2nd edition)
John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (1990)
Queering Classics
As I mentioned above, these are selected primarily because I think they’re extremely valuable examples of queer Classics methodology. The ground that they cover in terms of sources, authors, time periods, etc. is not meant to be universal. My aim is moreso to show what queer Classics can be and what it can do; the methods can be applied to any source you want!
Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (2017) **
Marcus Bell and Eleanora Colli, “Queer Theory and Classics” (2022) *
Shane Butler, “Homer’s Deep” in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (2016) and “The youth of antiquity: reception, homosexuality, alterity” in Classical Receptions Journal (2019) **
Cyberantiquities, “Sappho’s Yuri of Absence” (2023) *
Kay Gabriel, “Specters of Dying Empire: The Case of Carson’s Bacchae” in Tripwire: a journal of poetics *
Erik Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (2000) **
Ella Haselswerdt, “Sappho’s Body as Archive: Towards a Deep Lez Philology” in Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics (ed. Mathura Umachandran and Marcella Ward; 2023)
Ella Haselswedt, Sara H. Lindheim, and Kirk Ormand (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory (2023)
Tom Hendrickson, “Gender Diversity in Greek and Latin Grammar: Ten Ancient Discussions” *
Maxine Lewis, “Queering Catullus in the Classroom: The Ethics of Teaching Poem 63” in From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom (ed. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy; 2014) **
Tom Sapsford, Performing the Kinaidos: Unmanly Men in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures (2022)
Sebastian Matzner, “Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past” in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (ed. Shane Butler; 2016)
Ky Merkley, “Writing trans histories with an ethics of care, while reading imperial Roman literature” in Gender & History (2023) *
Melissa Mueller, Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading (2023)
Kelly Nguyen, “Queering Telemachus: Ocean Vuong, Postmemories and the Vietnam War” in International Journal of the Classical Tradition (2021) **
Walter D. Penrose, Jr., Postcolonial Amazons: Female Masculinity in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit Literature (2016)
Queer and the Classical - Their website hosts video recordings from two conferences (2021 and 2022) and two seminar series (2020 and 2021) that brought together queer researchers and artists in the field, in order to bring about new and radical ways to imagine, think, and feel future engagements with the queer and the classical. Strongly recommended that you take a look at their wide selection of video recordings! *
Vanessa Stovall, “‘Quid Si Comantur?’: Pic(k/t)ing out Entangled Epistemologies of Ex(cess) in (Em)bodied Techne” (2021) *
Allison Surtees and Jennifer Dyer (ed.), Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World (2020) **
Trans in Classics - Trans in Classics is a working group of the Society for Classical Studies that seeks to provide a community and source of advocacy for trans folx within Classics and to promote and produce scholarship that discusses trans-identities, issues, and readings. Currently their site hosts announcements on relevant events and publications. *
J. L. Watson, “Reframing Iphis and Caeneus: Trans Narratives and Socio-Linguistic Gendering in Ovid’s Metamorphoses” in Helios (2021)
Queer Theory Recommendations
These are some authors in the field of queer theory whose work nominally has nothing to do with Classics. I would argue that an important part of queer Classics methodology is exposing oneself to queer scholarship outside of Classics. Here are some great starting points!
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006) **
Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism (2022) **
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993) - Really, the secret with Butler is that basically whatever you read of theirs first is going to be immensely confusing BUT the more you read, the more you understand what they’re doing. Their work is very referential (both to itself and to its theoretical predecessors), so it takes time and investment to work through. If a whole book seems to daunting, a good starting point might be an early essay like "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" (1990) * or one of their interviews (like this one with Artforum) *, where they tend to be more straightforward.
Paisley Currah, Sex is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (2022)
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003) **
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999)
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) **
Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024)
Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005) and The Queer Art of Failure (2011) **
Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007) **
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (2005) and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) **
Paul Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto (2000) **
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1993)
Monique Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman” (1981) *
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Black Sunday (1960) // The Grapes of Death (1978)
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to those to whom i owe feedback: will be here with ask replies and post texts in a day! having a wee trouble with work, time allotment, and some personal business. gotta manage those and then come back. kisses <3
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are you normal or are you jealous dean winchester
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anna akhmatova tr. by judith hemschemeyer, “poem without a hero” (1990) // harrison allen, “report of an autopsy on the bodies of chang and eng bunker; commonly known as the siamese twins” (1875)
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“Poetic language is distinct from language as used for ordinary communication—but not because it may involve a so-called departure from a norm: it is almost an otherness of language.”
—Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language
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sometimes i copy paste your rlly long analysis posts into a text to speech program and just. lay on the floor and listen to them and it’s so lovely :3 ty for putting so much effort into those
-@transfemmesam
oh my god, you do?? this made me feel really special 😭 thank you sm and lots of love, tons of love <3
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naw goddam it the old man's coming for me 😭
the reason they tell you to keep your writing concise is because if you make a sentence with too many clauses, victo hugo comes back from the dead reanimated by pure carnal desire for you
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when i point out things like manipulation coercion emotional abuse etc etc. in samdean purview i don't imply a condemning connotation behind these terms, by the way, and i don't see the mutual abuse that both sam and dean occasionally enact upon each other as something that contorts the situated power dynamic.
i.e. when dean controls sam or robs him of his agency i don't immediately insinuate sam's position to be that of the unilateral victim - although he technically is, in some ways, dean's victim, there's always a spatial permit in letting him construe and reciprocate the damage received in his own way. when he abuses dean and is objectively verbally cruel or denigrating towards him, he's as much of a wounder and a manipulator and a jealous appropriator - in cases where he wants dean entirely and only to himself. the appropriation and possessiveness go as far as torturing other beings or corrupting a human soul, planning on murdering benny or killing dean's biological daughter from another woman, the daughter and benny being a threat to his position of the primal importance in his brother's life, thus robbing dean of any alternative. sam does, in fact, have this sadistic faculty reared and nurtured in him, the very faculty that s1-9 he would often resort to when forced or provoked and is otherwise rendered defenseless.
it's different from when i say that john ruined dean and mean it not in a neutral uncritical way, because john as a father was omnipotent in relation to his sons, and he abused that power ghastly for his own convenience. it's different from when i assert that lucifer mentally and sexually tortured sam for eons and has broke and rebroke his extant already-whacked personality, adding trauma on trauma, simply because he enjoyed demolishing him. with sam and dean, however detriment, there's always another basis of evaluation because there's a different nucleus of emotional input and intent that in its provenance is not manichean but instead very deeply human and therefore must be a panoply of manifestations, moral or not, logical or inadequate, often irrationally both. oh. they're also in love with each other, so the question of split-up is factually out of the equation and is not a desirable solution for their ongoing conflict.
#prev:#op how are you a better psychologist for these fictional characters than my psych is for me 😭#I pay him!#that's right i think erik kripke should pay ME#i could make a fortune on being a wincest shrink
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father is a god and a wound and a murderer
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Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic GL. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri. Toxic yuri.
Hey guys. Guess what I’m thinking abt
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