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1. Ancient Sexuality at a New Crossroads:
Beyond Binarism
Let me say, first of all, that I feel deeply honored at being asked to deliver the keynote address
for this ground-breaking workshop. The organizers have drawn up an agenda that engages with
many pressing questions in the domain of ancient gender and sexuality, and they do so at a
timely moment, when substantial works of scholarship have just appeared and handling
sensitive topics in the classroom is becoming a serious pedagogical concern. I eagerly await
tomorrow’s presentations and expect to learn a great deal from all of you, both those who have
already made significant contributions in this area and the younger scholars bringing fresh
perspectives to it.
Those familiar with my book Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (2005; 2nd ed. 2013)
are no doubt aware that its colloquial style and direct second-person address are, for a
classroom text, unorthodox. When I was approached by the publisher, more than a decade ago,
about writing a textbook on ancient sexuality for college use, I first envisioned producing a
conventional overview, straightforward, objective and concise. Furthermore, I assumed there
would be no need to expose readers to theoretical controversies raging at the time, such as the
debate over essentialism vs. constructionism and corollary arguments over the postmodernist
turn. Before I had gotten halfway through the introduction, though, I realized I was wrong on
both counts. I could not take a disengaged stance, because aspects of Greek and Roman
sexuality were being dragged into contemporary debate—in the courts, as in the 1993 Colorado
case Evans v. Romer, or on the internet, for example the sundry websites proclaiming that
certain ancient historical personages were “gay.” For my target audience, undergraduate
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2. students, ancient sexuality and gender were implicated in modern discourses that bore directly
upon their private lives. If I hoped to connect with those students in a meaningful way, I had to
speak to them as I would in a classroom setting, unpretentiously, reassuringly, tempering what I
knew might be upsetting material with the occasional joke, and above all explaining in detail,
not as an authority figure but just as another inquiring mind, why we frequently do not know.
That brought me to my second change of strategy: these students needed as background the
whole theoretical picture—feminism, Dover and Foucault, the sexuality wars, the
ethnographer’s dilemma, and, in the second edition, Davidson and gay identity politics–
conveyed in language easily accessible to undergraduates. My justification for touching upon
such abstract issues was a mounting awareness that ancient sexuality and gender as a field of
study is actually driven not only by its relevance to current affairs but also by the passions, and
the corresponding energy, which that relevance generates. More than in most other subfields,
controversy is its life’s blood. A short review of its history will show why.
While contributions to the understanding of ancient sexuality were being made long
before this area of classical studies was organized or even legitimated, its inception is
conventionally dated to the 1978 publication of K. J. Dover’s Greek Homosexuality and the
simultaneous appearance in English translation of Michel Foucault’s La Volunté de savoir,
volume 1 of the History of Sexuality. Of the two works, it was that of Dover, already an
internationally respected Hellenist, that had the greatest initial impact upon the discipline of
classics, and it was his identification of dominance/submission as the axis upon which Greek
sexuality pivoted that had the utmost explanatory value. Because it negated romantic and
nostalgic endeavors to “normalize” ancient desire as identical to ours—that is, ideally reciprocal
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3. and egalitarian—it generated a surge of attempts to rethink Greek erotic texts. Cross-cultural
application of Dover’s insight also clarified what up until then had been an inexplicable Roman
use of obscene imagery in seemingly incongruous contexts. If sexual and social domination
were metonymically equivalent, any reference to the former would have to imply the latter. To
me, therefore, Roman hegemonic discourse as found in satire and invective became
considerably more transparent, while the role such discourse had played in generating popular
stereotypes of imperial decadence meant that vigorous correction of older readings was now in
order. Accounts of women’s sexual impropriety, blamed upon lack of supervision exercised by
male kin, were an obvious place to start. Eradicating the colorful myth of the “emancipated”
blue-blooded matron as formulated by J.P.V.D. Balsdon, or Moses Finley’s even more insidious
“silent [but inwardly seething] women of Rome,” seemed nothing less than an obligatory
gesture of feminist sisterhood.
Foucault had meanwhile shifted his attention to antiquity and the elite male desiring
subject. In The Use of Pleasure, volume 2 of his History of Sexuality, he probed the ethical
aspects of classical Greek institutionalized pederasty, and in volume 3, The Care of the Self, he
examined the increasing anxiety over sexual relations emerging during the Hellenized Roman
Empire. The posthumous French publication of both treatises in 1984 was followed shortly
thereafter by an explosion of work in English: a single year, 1990, saw the appearance of two
sole-authored books, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality by David Halperin and The
Constraints of Desire by Jack Winkler, along with two collections of innovative essays, Before
Sexuality, edited by Halperin, Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin, and a special ancient sexuality-
themed issue of the journal differences, overseen by David Konstan and Martha Nussbaum.
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4. Although not all of this research was inspired by Foucault, and much was the product of
investigative projects begun before his work on antiquity became broadly available,
consciousness that Greek and Roman culture was suddenly the object of widespread interest
within the larger academic world, and that the alterity of the past was a core theme of
postmodern discussion, propelled endeavors to expand upon or nuance the picture he had
presented. Ancient texts heretofore studied only by a pedantic few, such as Artemidorus’
Oneirokritika, pseudo-Lucian’s Amores, and the five canonical Greek novels, quickly became
fashionable subjects of dissertations and journal articles due to their importance as witnesses
to imperial-age shifts in erotic protocols and mentalité.
If the four volumes published in 1990 marked the emergence of ancient sexuality as an
independent subfield, the unpleasant dispute that broke out in the following year revealed a
latent power struggle over assumptions and conclusions. While many concerns surfaced during
the period of the “sexuality wars,” one fundamental issue seemed to underlie them all: who
owned the ancient sex/gender system, or, more precisely, how was it to be given meaning in
the contemporary world? For historicists like Halperin and Winkler, radical divergence between
past and present should be used as leverage to demolish homophobic assumptions about the
“naturalness” of both gender and heterosexuality. At a time when public fear of AIDS had
mobilized conservative hostility against gays, that directive had considerable appeal. Yet it
posed a threat to feminists such as Amy Richlin (1991), who had already laid claim to perceived
continuities between ancient and modern culture as proof of ubiquitous female oppression. At
some risk to their own careers, furthermore, Richlin and other feminist classicists had
abandoned a decorous “objectivity” to engage in the overtly political application of scholarly
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5. findings. Now it appeared that the primary beneficiaries of that activism, queer theorists, were
using the tools feminists had honed to undercut the epistemological certainties on which a
feminist engagement with antiquity rested. Fueled by genuine outrage on both sides, the bitter
exchanges that followed corroded academic alliances and even personal friendships. Yet the
passion driving those exchanges enabled participants to realize an abstruse and complicated
goal within a short time: through stringent analysis, they disentangled from ancient sexual
notions the constraints of enforced masculinity, and the corresponding bogy of the gender-
deviant kinaidos/cinaedus, that shored up elite Greek and Roman male behaviors. Discovering
that prescriptions against gender nonconformity were not necessarily responses to actual
sexual conduct but served instead as a means of policing aristocratic boundaries exposed a
hitherto mystified tactic of hegemony. Unfortunate as that academic quarrel may have been,
the conceptual refinements it produced greatly advanced progress.
But where does the notion of “gender deviance,” however refined, leave the gay man
who looks to antiquity in order to validate his sense of identity? For James Davidson, Dover’s
dominance-submission axis, which Foucault had elaborated into a “principle of isomorphism
between sexual relations and social relations” (1986: 215) and which Halperin seemingly
encapsulated in reducing Greek sex to “phallic action” (1990: 102), effectively nullified all other
forms of homoerotic affect or practice. In a series of trenchant studies, culminating in his 2007
book The Greeks and Greek Love, Davidson sought to correct what he labeled “sodomania,” an
unhealthy obsession in the scholarly literature with aggressive and penetrative acts. In his
conception of “Greek Love,” criticism of the kinaidos is directed at lack of self-restraint, rather
than a desire to be penetrated per se, and emphasis falls upon reciprocity and romantic pair-
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6. bonding between near coevals, aligning ancient Greek homoeroticism suspiciously, at least in
the eyes of his critics, with the model of companionship prevailing among urban gay male
couples in the Western world. Dissenting reviews of the volume provoked ad hominem on-line
responses from Davidson and his supporters, creating a second, though mercifully more
contained, wave of acrimony.
While that storm has now subsided, many bystanders may well be wondering whether
the next tempest is already looming on the horizon. Happily, the answer I’m prepared to give
this evening is “probably not.” The internal pressures that precipitated such bitterness finally
seem to have dissipated, allowing combatants to take deep breaths and rein in their defenses.
Before Dover, ancient sexuality was, even for classicists, in the closet. Past sexual mores were
an “open secret” bottled up in the classroom and sidestepped in academic exchange. Given its
relevance to the contemporary gay movement, however, the subject matter of Greco-Roman
eros was already churning with subsurface tensions. The closet, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
demonstrated so trenchantly (1990), generates its energy through repression: precisely
because the applicability of past to present had never been affirmed in the scholarship, much
less negotiated, the claims upon it made by various interested parties could not be handled
diplomatically. The speed with which ancient sexuality was validated as a sphere of inquiry,
once Dover’s enabling pioneer investigation appeared, thus added impetus to the clashes that
followed.
Almost a decade has passed, though, since Davidson’s final challenge to received
opinion and almost twenty-five years since the sexuality wars began. We have already entered
into a period of rational reassessment in which the discipline of classical studies as a whole,
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7. having taken stock of the disputes over ancient sexuality, is busy integrating their outcomes
into larger schemes of cultural poetics. I am basing that judgment on a second series of four
books, all published since 2012, all as volumes in series designed to explore major premises of
current classical scholarship and demonstrate their relevance to the modern world. Each, then,
has an explanatory mission for a wider audience. Two expressly take up gender as a point of
inquiry, while the other two limit their scope to ancient sexuality. Because the two subjects,
though conceptually differentiated, are inextricably linked, however, it is not easy to separate
them in actual discussion, and, for my purposes, I will treat gender and sexuality as a unit.
The earliest of these publications, Brooke Holmes’ 2012 Gender: Antiquity and Its
Legacy, appeared in the prestigious Oxford University Press “Ancients and Moderns” series,
intended to trace the impact of ancient ideas upon contemporary intellectual debates. In three
case studies, Holmes shows how the present academic discourse on gender is pervaded by
notions of nature and the sexed body, dichotomies of masculinity and femininity, and mythic
exemplars of women’s role in the community drawn directly from Greek and Roman texts. One
essential task of the researcher in gender studies, she concludes, is to offset appeals to ancient
precedent with reminders of ruptures and discontinuities in mentalité, permitting the latter to
challenge and destabilize global assumptions. In the following year, Lin Foxhall, in Studying
Gender in Classical Antiquity, published in the Cambridge “Key Themes in Ancient History”
series, noted that social conservatives have habitually relied upon classical models to support
defenses of traditional gender hierarchies (2013: 2–4). The impact of that ideological legacy,
invoked over and over in the past, is still a residual substrate of present thought patterns. Since
Foxhall’s introduction is one of our morning session readings, we can explore the consequences
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8. of her findings at greater length tomorrow. Taken together, the recent works of Holmes and
Foxhall point to the reception of ancient gender systems in academic research as a newly
developing interest of classicists.
Compilation of “companions” to authors, historical periods, and literary genres, aimed
chiefly at advanced students and specialists in related academic areas, is right now hugely
trendy among textbook publishers. Consisting of thirty-seven chapters surveying specific issues,
approaches, and topics, the Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, edited by
Thomas K. Hubbard (2014) is a representative specimen of its kind. After four methodological
overviews of feminism, masculinity, body studies, and Foucauldianism, its entries deal with
patterns of sexuality, whether institutionalized (marriage, pederasty, prostitution) or aberrant;
social contexts of expression, such as religion and the symposium; marginalized practices like
magic; conventions of representation in literary, subliterary, and visual genres; and the
reception of ancient sexuality from early modern times to the present. Essays reflect emerging
fashions in the field insofar as they address sexual experience, as far as sources allow, among
subsets of the population (ethnic minorities and slaves) and are skewed chronologically toward
late antiquity.
Lastly, Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World, edited by
Mark Masterson, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and James Robson (2015), is part of the Routledge
“Rewriting Antiquity” series intended to provide a transcultural and transhistorical perspective
upon leading issues. Accordingly, this volume begins by recognizing the cultural influence of the
Near East upon the ancient Mediterranean world and stressing local dissimilarities between
Israelite or ANE notions of gender and Greco-Roman thinking on those matters. In a
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9. representative essay, Stephanie Budin isolates one erroneous scholarly imposition of a present-
day perspective upon the past. Current Western schemes of gender link production of new life
with the birth process and invite interpretation of female figurines as all-powerful mother
goddesses of life and death. Mesopotamian and Egyptian beliefs instead invest males with
primary reproductive capacity and grant them the dominant role in creation of new life. Female
agency is erotic: by stimulating male heterosexual desire, the female sets the creative process
in motion. Maternity, though, is ontologically less privileged. The mother does not influence the
child’s heredity by contributing seed, as Hippocratic doctors later theorized, but rather molds
and nourishes a life already generated by the male. That gender reassignment has practical
consequences for understanding the prominent part sexuality, especially phallic sexuality, plays
in ANE religion. Pursued further along those lines, Budin’s isolation of a geographic and culture-
specific reproductive model might have corollary significance for ancient social history. For
example, Greek observers found it remarkable that Egyptian families, instead of exposing
unwanted infants, raised all of their children. In Eastern Mediterranean societies, one might
postulate, paternal prestige, enhanced as it was by numerous children, trumped economic
considerations, whereas desire to protect inheritance caused Greek and Roman households to
limit offspring to the minimum needed to insure family survival.
In the Masterson-Rabinowitz-Robson anthology, work on gender and sexuality in the
ancient Near East concentrates on specific contrasts with Greco-Roman sexual ideology, on the
one hand, and with contemporary ideology on the other, and it also explores paraphilia, i.e.
behavior that oversteps conventional limits. Investigations of Greek and Roman sexuality aim at
modifying and clarifying knowledge of established subtopics: pederasty, prostitution, female
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10. desire, masculine identity and habitus, rape in warfare. Another forthcoming collection, Kirk
Ormand and Ruby Blondell’s Ancient Sex: New Essays, is characterized in advance blurbs from
OSU Press as “post-Foucauldian,” comprised of chapters that explore the “culturally specific
discourse about sexual matters” articulated in Greek and Roman texts and visual materials.
These essays treat sexual depictions on a cognitive plane, as features of Foucauldian discursive
systems dissociated from the social realities they purport to illustrate. Representations are
studied within their own conceptual economies among discrete arrays of signifiers.
Nevertheless, the final chapter in the volume, David Halperin’s epilogue “Not Fade Away,”
implicitly corrects fellow contributors who take the premise of alterity too far by insisting that
identification with the past is a valid concern of queer historical scholarship—which lays the
groundwork for eventual reconciliation with Davidson’s position, though I’m not sure either
Halperin or Davidson is ready for that yet.
But are there signs that the field is evolving theoretically, or is it merely concerned at
this stage with summing up prior achievements, correcting ancillary misapprehensions, and
venturing still further into the realm of the sign? Early indicators suggest a general theoretical
shift as well. The next great struggle may involve the repudiation of what Holmes has
characterized as persistent binarism within the disciplinary literature:
The scholarship in the field of ancient sexuality represents some of the most rigorous,
sophisticated and probing research on classical antiquity of the past two decades. But
the terms in which the debates unfolded can feel like forced disjunctions: acts or
identities; sexuality or gender; penetration or self-mastery; the past as continuous with
the present or the past as completely alien. Now that the smoke has settled, it’s easier
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11. to see that these binaries, like others that we’ve considered, offer false choices (2012:
109).
Recent work suggests that the “unqualified binarism” of ancient sex-gender systems is
no longer taken for granted. Roman gender, according to Dominic Montserrat (1999: 154), is
not a fixed bodily state but must be regarded as a “shifting cultural category” of relations
among power, agency, and biology, in which assignment of individuals is determined primarily
by one’s place in a hierarchy, rather than by physical sex. Holt Parker’s 2001 Arethusa article
“The Myth of the Heterosexual: Anthropology and Sexuality for Classicists” goes even further.
Parker contends that our own sexual taxonomies—and by “our” he means those of present-day
classicists—blind us to the way sex was conceived in antiquity. It is not simply that our
categories, based on whether persons have relations with those of their own sex or not (a
“surprisingly rare system anywhere in the world,” he remarks), still influence our approaches to
Greece and Rome. The real problem is that the classification “homo/hetero” itself, unlike other
broadly defined social groupings such as race, is dualistic and therefore ostensibly related to
the “natural” and fundamental division of mammals into two sexes. But, Parker goes on,
“biological sex is not in fact binary”; physiologically intersexed animals are common and
separately accounted for in some cultural classification systems. Analogously, cultures may
assign distinct sexual status to human beings of ambiguous biological condition, such as
hermaphrodites or eunuchs. Finally, cultures need not necessarily ground sexual categories
primarily upon gender, as we do, but can incorporate other factors such as age, social rank,
ritual category, or power relations. Anthropological fieldwork establishes that existing cultures
may recognize three or even more genders, with prescribed rules about who sleeps with whom.
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12. Parker’s observations are not just of academic interest; their pedagogical applicability
becomes evident as soon as we introduce Catullus 63 to undergraduates. In a new collection
entitled From Abortion to Pederasty and devoted to presenting difficult material to Classics
students, Maxine Lewis (2014) explains how she uses the poem as a teaching tool to raise her
students’ awareness of the complexities of sex and gender and to make her classroom
hospitable to transgendered persons. Standard English, she notes, has no pronominal
vocabulary for gender identities apart from the ostensible dyad “she/he.” Catullus, on the other
hand, constructs Attis’ gender as fluid, as constantly shifting between the two polarities and
arguably, at some points, both/and. To better convey the notion of a vacillating gender status
when speaking of the protagonist, Lewis proposes adopting the gender-neutral pronouns “zie,”
“nu,” and “hir” employed in the transgender community. With its repeated efforts to delimit
Attis’ sexuality by negation (sine viro, 6; notha mulier, 27; vidit sine quis…foret, 46; vir sterilis,
69), the poem appears to challenge the biosocial framework of gender binarism, a prospect
alien enough to our own beliefs and even more foreign to ancient mindsets. Thus Catullus 63
can serve as a touchstone text for a newly emerging queer-friendly society in which
transgendered individuals can locate themselves within a positive conceptual matrix instead of
being defined by what they are not. Bringing the poem into a classroom in which many students
have already watched the first season of Transparent should be an intriguing experience.
While antiquity, with its more somatically flexible approach to gender, offers us a
purchase upon modern biologically-grounded gender binarism, our own sexual taxonomies
permit us better to interrogate the ancient terminological and ideological binaries of
activity/passivity and penetrator/penetrated. The contemporary Western model of sexuality is,
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13. as we realize upon reflection, indifferent to distinctions of agency. In the confines of the
bedroom, who penetrates whom, or even whether penetration occurs at all, does not matter:
all forms of foreplay and copulation are contained within the same category of “sex.” Hence the
two sexual paradigms, ours and antiquity’s, are inversely parallel: we regard as sheer
preference what the ancients considered a litmus test of normalcy, just as our defining criterion
of identity, sexual object choice, was for ancient males only a preference. From an
epistemological perspective, their unmarked case is our marked case and vice-versa, or, in
Aristotelian terms, one system’s necessity is the other system’s contingency.
If present-day gender binarism errs in not leaving sufficient room for individuals who do
not properly fit within a notional male-female dichotomy, the ancient penetration model was
equally restrictive in limiting “proper” sex to acts involving insertion of a male organ. The most
salient proof of the model’s conceptual inadequacy is the anomaly of female desire. Within a
passive/penetrated framework, is it possible for women to act sexually, either with one another
or even with a male partner? Page duBois (1995: 14) has intriguingly suggested that female-
female genital contact, which posed no threat to contamination of the lineage by bastards, may
have seemed irrelevant to classical Greek men and perhaps was not even considered “sex.” In
contrast, the imaginative gyrations performed by writers of the Imperial Age in attempting to
wrap their minds around the doings of a hetairistria or tribas (witness Lucian’s Dialogues of the
Courtesans 5) shows that under different cultural circumstances the idea of a woman-desiring
woman, once broached, can undermine the stability of established gender arrangements. Most
recently, Deborah Kamen and Sarah Levin-Richardson (2015 and forthcoming) have been calling
attention to Roman paradoxes of agency involving penetrated figures. Having observed the
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14. notional contradiction of ostensibly “passive” partners, both male and female, who lust for
penetration and exhibit desire through bodily movements, they propose expanding the Roman
conceptual map of sexuality to include, in addition to the main axis of penetration, a secondary
axis of agency comprising types such as the fellator and fellatrix, the cinaedus, and the fututrix.
It appears, then, that bringing such diametrically opposed ancient and contemporary protocols
into conjunction gives us a sharper understanding of what “normative” sexual standards
regulate overall.
As if questioning those controlling protocols were not enough, some specialists in
ancient sexuality, such as Holt Parker whom I mentioned above, are now reconsidering the
subfield’s defining tenets, the dichotomy of nature and culture and the relegation of the
somatic aspects of sex to the exclusive purview of hard science. In the 1980s, when biology as
an explanation for human sexual behavior was synonymous with evolutionary theory and
popularized as “sociobiology,” historians reacted by aligning themselves with an
anthropological hermeneutics that privileged culture as the main, if not the sole, shaping
element. Acknowledging the impact of nature on sexual conduct opened the door, they feared,
to a genetically programmed determinism. During the last two decades, however, biologists
and anthropologists have developed collaborative models in which nature and culture act in
tandem: under this expanded Darwinian scheme culture exerts an influence upon genetic
selection, just as genetic selection influences culture. In a pathbreaking new article (2013),
consequently, the social historian Kyle Harper has proposed re-integrating nature into the
history of sexuality as a causative factor. The existing disciplinary paradigm, he argues,
precludes the basic question of how culture and nature may interact over time. Greek and
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15. Roman mating systems, which imposed monogamous marriage yet permitted affluent males
effective polygynous mating through chattel slavery, are one understudied topic that requires
analysis on multiple fronts using biological as well as anthropological and historical tools.
One last trajectory, which takes us from the heady world of theory to the pragmatics of
classroom instruction, asks about the impact of sharing our knowledge with those for whom we
are chiefly responsible, our students. It is axiomatic, we all know, that putting “sex” in a course
title increases enrollments. That may still be true, but in the past decade Classics teachers have
repeatedly grappled with the risks of using ancient materials that deal with potentially
explosive topics, most notably sexual violence. Students with firsthand experience of assault
need to feel that the classroom is a safe place where they will not be traumatized further; as
instructors, it is our responsibility to guarantee those conditions to the best of our ability.
Panels, round tables, articles, and books are now devoted to framing discussions of mythic and
literary rape in ways that will decrease emotional tension, minimize confrontation, and enable
learners to perceive alignments between the narrative itself and wider cultural assumptions
about sex, gender, and power. Sophisticated strategies for approaching particular texts and
genres have been developed: methods for engaging with rape as a plot device in Greek and
Roman comedy and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses now receive considerable attention, and two
separate chapters of Barbara Gold’s edited collection A Companion to Roman Love Elegy (2012)
address the issue of handling the “rape scripts” of Tibullus, Propertius and (especially) Ovid. I
have already mentioned the new collection From Abortion to Pederasty, edited by Nancy S.
Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy (2014), which branches out from sexual violence to cover other
subjects—death, disability, infanticide, slavery, abortion, pederasty, and domestic abuse—
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16. where a perceived difference between ancient and modern ethical standards can make
students uncomfortable or angry. Chapter authors emphasize the importance of encouraging
thoughtful communication among classmates and fostering critical judgment, always keeping in
mind the complexity of the moral and social issues. Because the discourses of Greek and Roman
culture are so permeated with the language of aggression and sexuality, these learner-centered
techniques, suitably adapted, may prove useful for Classics teachers in many contexts, even
teaching mythology in primary schools.
Let me summarize, in conclusion, some general directions in which work on ancient
gender and sexuality seems headed. First, we can observe a burgeoning trend toward
integration. The subfield continues to incorporate new findings from many subject areas in the
humanities and social sciences—archaeology, art history, economics, literature, sociology--and,
as we have just noted, may even be primed for a rapprochement with evolutionary theory. At
the same time, as Brooke Holmes’ volume illustrates, its own discoveries are now being taken
into account in broader cross-disciplinary contexts, especially those related to women and
gender studies. Re-examination, as a second major trend, has been the focus of the greater
part of my talk tonight: we see numerous assumptions that have become canonical currently
under scrutiny, while basic disciplinary premises are being reformulated. A generation of
younger investigators is asking whether ideas hastily accepted in the first flush of the
movement are holding up as well as might have been expected. Finally, there is a growing
crusade aimed at creating positive atmospheres for dissemination: increasing self-awareness of
their task as educators is bringing feminist scholars together to ask how students are reacting to
these often grim materials and applying lessons learned from them for personal benefit. I am
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17. sure that these and other searching questions will be investigated in tomorrow’s workshop
sessions, and I eagerly await to hear the answers you will propose. Thank you.
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18. Bibliography
Budin, S. L. 2015. “Fertility and Gender in the Ancient Near East.” In Masterson,
Rabinowitz and Robson, eds. 30–49.
Cassio, A. C. 2012. “Teaching Rape in Roman Love Elegy, Part II.” In Gold, ed., 549557.
Davidson, J. 2007. The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in
Ancient Greece. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Dover, K. J. 1978. Greek Homosexuality. London: Duckworth.
duBois, P. 1995. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. 1980. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans R. Hurley. New
York: Vintage Books. [Orig. pub. as La volenté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976.]
–––. 1986. The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Trans. R. Hurley. New
York: Vintage Books. [Orig. pub. as L’Usage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.]
–––. 1988. The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self. Trans. R. Hurley. New
York: Vintage Books. [Orig. pub. as Le Souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.]
Foxhall, L. 2013. Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gold, B. K., ed. 2012. A Companion to Roman Love Elegy. Malden, MA and Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Halperin, D. M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek
Love. New York: Routledge.
–––. Forthcoming. “Epilogue: Not Fade Away.” In Ormand and Blondell, eds.
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19. –––, Winkler, J. J., and Zeitlin, F. I., eds. 1990. Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic
Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harper, K. 2013. “Culture, Nature, and History: The Case of Ancient Sexuality.”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 55.4: 986–1016.
Holmes, B. 2012. Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hubbard, T. K., ed. 2014. A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities. Malden, MA and
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Kamen, D., and Levin-Richardson, S. 2015. “Revisiting Roman Sexuality: Agency and the
Conceptualization of Penetrated Males.” In Masterson, Rabinowitz and Robson, eds. 449–460.
–––. Forthcoming. “Lusty Ladies in the Roman Imaginary.” In Ormand and Blondell, eds.
Konstan, D., and Nussbaum, M., eds. 1990. Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society.
Special issue of differences 2.1
Lewis, M. 2014. “Queering Catullus in the Classroom: The Ethics of Teaching Poem 63.”
In Rabinowitz and McHardy, eds. 248–266.
Liveley, G. 2012. “Teaching Rape in Roman Love Elegy, Part I.” In Gold, ed., 541–548.
Masterson, M., Rabinowitz, N. S., and Robson, J., eds. 2015. Sex in Antiquity: Exploring
Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World. Abingdon, Oxon., UK and New York: Routledge.
Montserrat, D. 1999. “Experiencing Gender in the Roman World.” In J. Huskinson, ed.,
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