Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Dedication
- Introduction: Queering Classics
- I Gender Construction
- 1 Gender Diversity in Classical Greek Thought
- 2 Blending Bodies in Classical Greek Medicine
- 3 Birth by Hammer: Pandora and the Construction of Bodies
- 4 Life after Transition: Spontaneous Sex Change and Its Aftermath in Ancient Literature
- II Gender Fluidity
- 5 Neutrumque et Utrumque Videntur: Reappraising the Gender Role(s) of Hermaphroditus in Ancient Art
- 6 Intersex and Intertext: Ovid’s Hermaphroditus and the Early Universe
- 7 Que(e)r(y)ing Iphis’ Transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
- 8 Ruling in Purple … and Wearing Make-up: Gendered Adventures of Emperor Elagabalus as seen by Cassius Dio and Herodian
- III Transgender Identity
- 9 Allegorical Bodies: (Trans)gendering Virtus in Statius’ Thebaid 10 and Silius Italicus’ Punica 15
- 10 Performing Blurred Gender Lines: Revisiting Omphale and Hercules in Pompeian Dionysian Theatre Gardens
- 11 The Politics of Transgender Representation in Apuleius’ the Golden Ass and Loukios, or the Ass
- 12 Wit, Conventional Wisdom and Wilful Blindness: Intersections between Sex and Gender in Recent Receptions of the Fifth of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans
- IV Female Masculinity
- 13 Christianity Re-sexualised: Intertextuality and the Early Christian Novel
- 14 Manly and Monstrous Women: (De-)Constructing Gender in Roman Oratory
- 15 The Great Escape: Reading Artemisia in Herodotus’ Histories and 300: Rise of an Empire
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
6 - Intersex and Intertext: Ovid’s Hermaphroditus and the Early Universe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Dedication
- Introduction: Queering Classics
- I Gender Construction
- 1 Gender Diversity in Classical Greek Thought
- 2 Blending Bodies in Classical Greek Medicine
- 3 Birth by Hammer: Pandora and the Construction of Bodies
- 4 Life after Transition: Spontaneous Sex Change and Its Aftermath in Ancient Literature
- II Gender Fluidity
- 5 Neutrumque et Utrumque Videntur: Reappraising the Gender Role(s) of Hermaphroditus in Ancient Art
- 6 Intersex and Intertext: Ovid’s Hermaphroditus and the Early Universe
- 7 Que(e)r(y)ing Iphis’ Transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
- 8 Ruling in Purple … and Wearing Make-up: Gendered Adventures of Emperor Elagabalus as seen by Cassius Dio and Herodian
- III Transgender Identity
- 9 Allegorical Bodies: (Trans)gendering Virtus in Statius’ Thebaid 10 and Silius Italicus’ Punica 15
- 10 Performing Blurred Gender Lines: Revisiting Omphale and Hercules in Pompeian Dionysian Theatre Gardens
- 11 The Politics of Transgender Representation in Apuleius’ the Golden Ass and Loukios, or the Ass
- 12 Wit, Conventional Wisdom and Wilful Blindness: Intersections between Sex and Gender in Recent Receptions of the Fifth of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans
- IV Female Masculinity
- 13 Christianity Re-sexualised: Intertextuality and the Early Christian Novel
- 14 Manly and Monstrous Women: (De-)Constructing Gender in Roman Oratory
- 15 The Great Escape: Reading Artemisia in Herodotus’ Histories and 300: Rise of an Empire
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter examines the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus from book 4 (285–388) of Ovid's Metamorphoses, whose two bodies are merged into one. A series of connections can be drawn between the transformation of Hermaphroditus and the representation of the primordial universe at the beginning of the Metamorphoses, and specifically the representation of cosmological chaos, where basic elemental oppositions such as the hot and the cold and the wet and the dry are confounded and mixed together. Likewise the Hermaphroditus narrative may be seen to undermine the ontological stability of gendered corporeal form, while the presentation of Hermaphroditus as protohuman also serves to destabilise the concept of cosmological and human evolution, or more specifically the assumption that the world moves from a state of chaos and unity to one of stability, multiplicity and division.
Ovid therefore uses the Hermaphroditus narrative not only to collapse the distinction between apparent gender categories, but also to question the notion that it is possible to hold a fixed and stable view of both the cosmos and the literary text purporting to depict it. On the one hand, Ovid's Hermaphroditus narrative stands alongside the other stories of corporeal transformation which occupy the largely ‘mythological’ section of the text; on the other, Ovid uses various features of this narrative to link this specific transformation with the ‘scientific’ opening and the description of the primordial universe. The Hermaphroditus narrative thus also highlights how the apparent boundaries and distinctions which exist in terms of textual genre are as fluid and unstable as those which are perceived to exist between genders. Ovid conveys this through the use of multiple allusions to ‘scientific’ discourses and specifically to accounts of ‘intersex’ beings in Empedocles, Plato's Symposium and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. In this way Ovid's portrayal of Hermaphroditus performs an ontological and interacting epistemological role, as it expresses the breakdown of corporeal distinction and stability through blurring the divisions between truth and falsehood. Ovid also extends this idea to human social structures by subverting the use of opposition as a basic organising principle across the cultural spectrum.
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- Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World , pp. 95 - 105Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020