About the Book
New directions in queer theory continue to trouble the boundaries of both queerness and the classical, leading to an explosion of new work in the vast—and increasingly uncharted—intersection between these disciplines, which this interdisciplinary volume seeks to explore.
This handbook convenes an international group of experts who work on the classical world and queer theory. The discipline of Classics has been involved with, and implicated in, queer theory from the start. By placing front and center the rejection of heteronormativity, queer theory has provided Classics with a powerful tool for analyzing non-normative sexual and gender relations in the ancient West, while Classics offers queer theory ancient material (such as literature, visual arts, and social practices) that challenges a wide range of modern normative categories. The collection demonstrates the vitality of this particular moment in queer classical studies, featuring an expansive array of methodologies applied to the interdisciplinary field of Classics. Embracing the indeterminacy that lies at the core of queer studies, the essays in this volume are organized not by chronology or genre, but rather by overlapping categories under the following rubrics: queer subjectivities, queer times and places, queer kinships, queer receptions, and ancient pasts/queer futures.
The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory offers an invaluable collection for anyone working on queer theory, especially as it applies to premodern periods; it will also be of interest to scholars engaging with the history of sexuality, both in the ancient world and more broadly.
Table of Contents:
General Introduction - Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim, and Kirk Ormand; Classics and Queer Theory: Beginnings; 1. How Did We Get Here? - Kirk Ormand; Queer Subjectivities; 2. 'Wild' Achilles and the Epistemology of the Ferox in Homer’s Iliad - Melissa Mueller; 3. Black[ened] Queer Classical: Cicero’s pro Archia poeta and Seneca’s Natural Questions (and Epistulae Morales 114) in Posthuman Perspective - Patrice Rankine; 4. Priapus Unlimited: Queer(ing) Identity, Agency, and Bodies without Boundaries in Roman Art - Linnea Åshede; 5. Tribad Philaenis and Lesbian Bassa: Queer Subjectivities in Martial - Kristin Mann; 6. Queering Divine Authority and Logical Consistency in Aeschylus’ Oresteia - Giulia Maria Chesi; 7. Catullus Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Between Freud and Foucault - Paul Allen Miller; 8. A Murky Unlearning: Sophocles and the Greek Art of Failure - Francesca Spiegel; Queer Times and Places; 9. Queer Musicality in Classical Texts - Tom Sapsford; 10. Encountering Absence: Queer Traces, Ghosts, and Performance Otherwise - Marcus Bell; 11. Queerly Beloved: Nemesis, Credula Spes, and Queer Temporalities in Tibullus Book 2 - Sara H. Lindheim; 12. Time and Punishment, or Terence’s Queer Pedagogy - David Youd; 13. Narcissus and the Happy Inch: Queering Social Reproduction in the Roman House - David Fredrick; 14. 'How Could a City Become Straight?:' Aristophanes and the Trans Foundations of the Comic State - Isabel Ruffell; Queer Kinships; 15. Hippocrates the 'Father'? Disturbing Attachment Genealogies in the History of Ancient Medicine - Nicolette D’Angelo; 16. Tamquam Favus: Queer Kinship and Monetary Value in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis - Elliott Piros; 17. Nonbinary Mercury and the Queer Arts of Astrology - Hannah Silverblank; 18. Queering Kinship against Genealogy: Crip Ancestorship, Chosen Families, Alternative Intimacies and Other Ways of Refusing the Classical Tradition - Marchella Ward; 19. Queer Kinship in Ancient Literature - Jay Oliver; 20. The Greatest Generation: Golden Age, Spontaneous Generation, and Queer Kinship in Vergil’s Georgics - Martin Devecka; Queer Receptions; 21. Queering Feminine Movement: Sappho, Hồ Xuân Hýõng and Vi Khi Nao - Kelly Nguyen; 22. Les Guérillères: Sappho and the Lesbian Body - Irene Han; 23. The Rise and Fall of the Queer Male Body in Mid-Century Muscle Photography - Alastair J.L. Blanshard; 24; Destiny’s Queer Scribblings: Greek Myth and Etiologies of HIV/AIDS - Emilio Capettini; 25. Socrates and Sedgwick: Ancient Greece in Epistemology of the Closet - Daniel Orrells; 26. Shedding Light, Casting Shadows: Queerness, Club Performances, and the Faux-Natural Narratives of Classical Reception - Eleonora Colli; Ancient Pasts/Queer Futures 27. Queer Philology - Shane Butler; 28. How to Do the History of Elagabalus - Zach Herz; 29. Queer Interspeciesism, or Oppian’s Wild Love - Mario Telò; 30. Sappho’s Body, Queer Abstraction, and Lesbian Futurity - Ella Haselswerdt; 31. Medea’s Ghosts: Cherríe Moraga and Queer Ecologies - Nancy Worman; 32. Speculation on classical reception: Queer Desire and N.K. Jemisin’s 'The Effluence Engine' - Mathura Umachandran.
About the Author :
Ella Haselswerdt is an Assistant Professor of Classics at UCLA. She has broad interests in poetics, aesthetics, and reception, and has published on the dreamscapes of the ancient body, the soundscapes of Oedipus at Colonus, the mythic geography of Philoctetes, and philology as a site of queer liberation. She has two current major projects: the first explores the conceptual, expressive capacities of the tragic chorus via trauma theory, queer theory, and posthumanism; the second is a multifaceted approach to Sappho and contemporary lesbian identity, under the rubric "Deep Lez Philology."
Sara H. Lindheim is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides (2003) and Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire (2021). She has also co-edited with Helen Morales New Essays on Homer: Language, Violence, and Agency (2015), although her work generally focuses on gender and subjectivity in Latin poetry of the late Republic and the Augustan Age.
Kirk Ormand is the Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics at Oberlin College. He is the author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (1999), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece (2014), and Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (2nd ed., 2018); he has co-edited with Ruby Blondell Ancient Sex: New Essays (2015) and has published essays on various ancient authors, Michel Foucault, and Clint Eastwood.
Review :
"Each chapter, in a remarkable polyphony, rich in diverse echoes and dynamic tensions, poses its own questions on notions such as subjectivity, spatiality and temporality, genealogy, and on the queer relationship of classical studies to their past, their present, and above all their future... This work will be of interest to classicists who are curious about what their field of research is becoming and can or should become, but specialists of queer studies would also be inspired by it." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review
