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
Introduction: Queering Classics
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
BRINGING TOGETHER GENDER ANALYSIS AND CLASSICS
This volume was inspired by the recognition of two different yet connected needs that we found through our work in classics and in gender studies. In 2015, the Women's Network (WN) of the Classical Association of Canada (CAC) sponsored two panels at the CAC annual meeting, hosted by the University of Toronto. The topic, chosen by the WN membership, was ‘Gender B(l) ending in Greek and Roman Culture and Society’ and the panels consisted of seven papers – including both Agri's and Begum-Lees’ contributions in this volume. The interest in and attendance at these panels indicated a need for analyses of the ancient world that do not assume a cisnormative, masculinist and largely heterosexual lens in order to better understand the various social and political roles occupied by people who did not seem to identify as cisgender men. From gender studies, we were driven by the need for a clear history of gender diversity that reveals both the existence and successes of gender-diverse and transgender people long before our current era's emerging recognition. The authors of the essays in this volume develop these concerns in their explorations of gender diversity, sexual diversity and the politics of the power of representation in the ancient world.
The discipline of classics has a long scholarly tradition which, for the bulk of its history, has been a history of men. With the exception of a few early works on women in the ancient world, women were treated largely as footnotes or extensions of the men to whom they were attached, if they were mentioned at all. The rise of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s – a movement focused on labour rights, family structure, sexuality and identity politics – had a broad and significant impact on academic work. Not only did scholars increasingly focus on studying women's history, women and culture, and the socio-politics of sex and sexuality, but the discipline of women's studies was developed as a sustained critical response to this new focus and became increasingly integral to understanding any aspect of academic enquiry.
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- Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World , pp. 1 - 26Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020