The second post in the Realigning Reception blog series is written jointly by Marcus Bell and Eleonora Colli. Marcus Bell is a DPhil student in Classics at the University of Oxford, where they moved after completing their MA in Classical Reception and BA in Classical Studies at King’s College London. Their thesis is on choreographing tragedy at the turn of the twenty first century—combining critical classical reception, dance studies, and queer theory. Marcus is also co-founder and co-convenor of the ‘Queer and the Classical’ research project and an Associate Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmith’s University.
Eleonora Colli is a DPhil student in Classics at the University of Oxford, where she also completed her MSt after gaining her BA in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Her thesis project focuses on the queer potential of the figure of the simile, both in classical epic and contemporary queer writing. She is also co-founder and co-convenor of the ‘Queer and the Classical’ research project. You can get in touch via Eleonora’s graduate profile.
Queer Theory and Classics
In his article “Queer Unhistoricism”, Sebastian Matzner notes: ‘studies in queer history are often marked by a desire for and a rhetoric of recuperation, which characterize not only scholarly work in this field (given the social, political and cultural investments of individuals and communities at stake here) but also much of the studied material itself’ (Matzner, 2016). Matzner’s statement is particularly poignant when thinking about how the study of queerness in Classics functions, and at the same time recognises that this function stems from the particular and personal desires of queer individuals and communities at work. By re-centring queer folks in discussion as we cruise between the present and ancient world we acknowledge that queer people – their friction with norms across time and space, their bodies, hopes, desires, losses – help us rethink the fraught genealogies and narratives that populate academia.
There is often a burden of proof placed on queer readings of ancient materials, ideas, and performances. It is as if this way of reading, analysing, and producing knowledge about the often ineffable, efflorescent ancient past – this practice of bringing together fragments, bones, and dust – is less valid than those used by our straight colleagues. But why is that? Perhaps it is because queer studies and queer genealogies can be a practice of listening to what is not there, what is absence, what is left off the record, just as much as they are tools for understanding why what is there is there. A theoretical component that has been particularly emphasized within Classics and classical reception studies is the need to justify an interest in queerness in the ancient world philologically and historically. Often, this leads to creating false narratives where ancient Greece and Rome are seen as the birthplace of queerness, as the origins of multiple discourses on gender and sexuality. This is one genealogy of Queerness and the Classical – an essentialising mode – and it has been very persuasive. But it is not the only option, as Kadji Amin writes: genealogy, in fact, ‘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).
Following this, this entry aims to make a sketch of how Classics and queer theory and/or queer studies have been in conversation, how these conversations have often been portrayed and narrativized, and how we might work around and to the side of those tall tales. To do so, we will first showcase how the intersection of Classics and queer theory has most commonly been portrayed, and then move to sketch out our own understanding of queerness, before proposing how ideas of queer time might disrupt canonised ideas of classical reception, queer theory, and Classics.
Classics’ Imagined Genealogy of Sexuality
Queer theory’s constructed genealogy within Classics often starts with Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978), a common text on many curricula reading lists, and often used as a cornerstone for thinking about the relations between the ancient Mediterranean and deviant sexualities. Influenced by Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (1978), Foucault’s text is attractive to a Classics reader for the ways in which it positions ancient Greece within a genealogy of modern sexuality. The work usefully argues that ‘homosexuality’ is not a stable category, but is instead part of medical, legal, and social power structures that developed at the turn of the 19th century. Foucault’s intervention created an important node between Gay and Lesbian studies (as it was then termed) and Classics, and his work has since influenced a number of other projects on the subject in very exciting ways. His drive to understand how power structures influence discourses and practices around sex and desire was revolutionary, yet his canonization as a historian of sexuality in the curriculum, along with others, is illustrative of the ways in which the study of queerness is often subject to attempts at stabilisation.
Foucault’s methodology sets up a particular lens for reading the queer connections between ancient Greece and modern Europe. Greece is both estranged from the present but its ruins, myths, philosophers, and artifacts also lend permission for the practice and theorisation of non-normative sexualities: such as those identified as urnings, homosexuals, pederasts, deviants at the turn of the century. The Foucauldian model and its canonisation within the academy creates not a specific history of sexuality but the history of the negotiation of identity, desire, and sexuality. This produces queer bodies and affects as objects of study within a genealogy which leads from Greece through to a universalised modern, western, white liberal identity. As Mathura Umachandran notes, ‘there is no elective affinity that means queerness must find a happy home in the disciplinary rubrics of Classics no matter how many gay Victorian public school scholars or further Winklemanian descriptions of sculpture we have in our back pocket to produce with a flourish as proof that “no, the ancient world really truly was super gay”’ (Umachandran, 2021). To pick up and analyse queerness and/or queer bodies only as theoriesor merely lenses to peer through, and not tools to dismantle the many systems that harm queer folks, or indeed lived and embodied experiences that rebel against such systems, is the biggest disservice we can do to the intersections between Classics and queerness.
As we navigate the most commonly discussed connections between queer studies, the Classics, and classical reception, we therefore must pay attention to how approaches within Classics to the study of gender and sexuality is often objectifying, falsely universalising, and focused on looking for an historical explanation of desire as a relic of the past that could be used to explain all of human sexuality. Additionally, Classics often turns to scholars who have been influential in queer studies (such as Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick) in order to justify the ‘givenness of the claim’ that Classics is a good or suitable partner for queerness conceptually, or even more worrying, that queer studies was always already Classics all along (see Umachandran, 2021). Yet desire and queerness have always escaped definitions and historical explanations. What does it mean, then, to study and engage with queer classics, as opposed to trying to find the origins of homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome? What does it mean (and is it possible) to engage with queer classics in a way that allows for radical and powerful sites of identification for queer people, not dictated by institutional curricula but by critical assessments that can build new, ethical, and queer ways of knowing, thinking, and feeling?
Queerness’ Refusal of Definition
Perhaps to address this question we should first look at various interpretations of queerness, and how queerness does not just relate to gender and sexuality, but also implies an ethical and political positioning. José Esteban Muñoz writes that queer is an ideality, a set of feelings, gestures, practices, and worldings which, in certain political configurations, reach for a utopian horizon (Muñoz, 2009). As the late bell hooks once put it: ‘queer not as being about who you are having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live’ (hooks, 2014). This feature, the anti-normativity of queer as a mode of enquiry, moves away from essentialising narratives which draw a line from queers today back to queers in the past via identity, and instead shows that there have always been folk who are at odds with the dominant normative scripts even if that means something very different in ancient Greece from what it means in various contemporary cultural contexts.
And yet, queerness qua anti-normativity is not in itself always “good”. To queer something then is not to make a moral or value judgment: saying something is queer qua disruption is not an assessment that being queer or queering is in and of itself positive. Normative systems are spongy and can contain a lot of inconsistency, absurdity, and perversion within them (Berlant, 2016). In fact, some differences from the norm, or what is perceived as the norm with regards to the study of gender and sexuality in our field, still subscribe to the ‘government of the Classical’ (Umachandran, 2021). That is why some understand queer or trans to be part of the unmaking of the world, the unworlding of our present situation (Halberstam, 2020; Bey, 2022). And so ‘queer’ thus becomes a capacious term. It is as much a practice of revolution as it is a shared conversation in holding together incompatible truths. It can hold both of these energies simultaneously: the generation of alternative politics, spaces, erotics and also the unmaking, the unbecoming, and unknowing of the established order.
We therefore use queer and queerness not just because of its use as a tool of/for disruption but as a means of inventing and creating a fairer, more equitable, more liveable world. Turning to theorists like hooks and Muñoz is helpful to see how they positioned justice and liberation as vectors within queerness: their writings help us visualise how to enact alternative futures in the present. They give us the language to understand what we might have been doing all along, and to listen more closely to what we might have been ignoring, or trained to ignore.
Conclusion
Both the area of queer classics and notions of queerness come with fraught histories: just like the study of gender and sexuality in Classics risks falling into an essentialising genealogy, so the term queer often risks being reduced to a singular, monolithic definition. In reality both queerness and its study, in whichever subject it appears, demands the intersections of different experiences and multiple identities: because of this, counternarratives to singular and linear time are multiple and varied, often interdisciplinary, often future-oriented. We have here hinted at only a few theories on queer time, how it can disturb the normative, and how that can apply to our own field. Our personal attachment to this theorist leads us to conclude with a quote from Muñoz, showing a mode of utopian queer time that we believe inspires us in both our writing and other projects. Muñoz describes his approach as:
‘…a critical methodology [that] can be best described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision. I see the past and the potentiality imbued within an object, the ways it might represent a mode of being and feeling that was then not quite there but nonetheless an opening. Queerness as utopian formation is a formation based on an economy of desire and desiring. […] The queer utopian project addressed here turns to the fringe of political and cultural production to offset the tyranny of the homonormative. It is drawn to tastes, ideologies, and aesthetics that can only seem odd, strange or indeed queer next to the muted striving of the practical and normalcy-desiring homosexual. Queer futurity does not underplay desire. In fact it is all about desire, desire for both larger semiabstractions such as a better world or freedom but also more immediately, better relations within the social that include better sex and more pleasure. One can imagine utopia through what I call queer utopian memory. Memory is most certainly constructed and, more important, always political.’
Starting from Muñoz and his utopian thinking, his attention to desire, the personal, the better futures, we thus wish to understand queer theory as a way to disturb and re-think classical studies in combination and solidarity with several other communities inside and out of the academy, including drag artists, sex workers, DIY performance makers, activists, people and others like us deemed not-fully-human within and under the violent extractive structures of the racist-capitalist present. At the same time, we want to think and work for various fields of critical theory (such as trans studies, disability studies, feminist studies, and decolonial and anti-racist approaches), look forward to speculative orientations, plumb for the futures that could be, and propel ourselves towards the otherwise (Hartman, 2019; Muñoz, 2020). As Mathura Umachandran puts it, citing adrienne maree brown: ‘“We’re responsible for imagining beyond our oppressors rather than continuously turning on each other for being oppressed”. It has been too long that we have allowed queerness to traffic in hierarchies rather than build worlds for queer people to live in’ (Umachandran, 2021). Thinking of queer time within Classics, then, may allow us to keep the field critical yet supportive, to avoid false genealogies, to get away from constructed narratives, build better futures. Our bringing together of queer and the classical to change structures of knowledge production, may allow us, as queer classicists, to build together a field that unapologetically makes use of queer theory not to just to look at the ancient world through a new lens but that offers a new critical study of the ancient world and contributes to queer activism, queer ways of knowing, and most of all, queer people.
WORKS CITED
Amin, Kadji. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. Theory Q. Durham, 2017.
______. “Genealogies of Queer Theory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies, 17-29. 2020.
Berlant, Laurent. “Interview, IPAK Center”. November 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih4rkMSjmjs>.
Bey, Marquis. Black Trans Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
Halberstam, Jack. Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press: Durham, 2011.
______. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, Perverse Modernities, 2020.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments : Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. London, Serpent’s Tail, 2019.
hooks, bell. “Are You Still a Slave?”. 2014. <https://livestream.com/thenewschool/slave/videos/50178872>.
Matzner, Sebastian. “Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past”. In Butler, Shane, ed. Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception. Bloomsbury, 2016.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York, London: New York University Press, Sexual Cultures. 2009.
______ and Tavia Amolo Ochieng’ Nyongó, and Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson. The Sense of Brown : Ethnicity, Affect and Performance. Perverse Modernities. Durham, 2020.
Umachandran, Mathura. “Carrier Bag Theory of Queer Feeling, or, Coming to Critique”. February 2021. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0an5rNDKEeM&t=10s>.
FURTHER READING
Brim, Matt. Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University, Durham: Duke University Press. 2020.
Goldberg, Jonathan, and Menon, Madhavi. “Queering History”. PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120.5: 1608-617. 2005.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013.
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press. 2007..
Nguyen, Kelly. “Queering Telemachus: Ocean Vuong, Postmemories and the Vietnam War.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 28:4, 2021.
Pereira, Pedro Paulo Gomes. “Reflecting on Decolonial Queer”. GLQ 25.3: 403-29. 2019.
The image at the top of this post is from Unsplash.