This “handbook” is a reference work. However, it is not easy to hold the Routledge volume under review in one hand or tuck it away in a pocket, in order to use it as a vade mecum. This imposing work of scholarship is a comprehensive assemblage, at the intersection of the two fields mentioned in its title, namely classics and queer theory, brought into a dynamic tension. This collection of studies, with its highly variegated style and content, is spread over more than 500 pages and 32 chapters, which can be read not in the order of the book, but according to one’s main thematic or critical interests: this collection is queer in its very form, a rhizomatic entanglement, rather than a linear thematic and temporal ordering of chapters. Most of the essays here could be part of another thematic ensemble than the one to which they have been attached to: 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. By presenting a succinct but efficient synthesis of the relationship between classics and queerness, and by evoking as an exemplary moment the publication of Mario Telò and Sarah Olsen on Euripides,[1] the general introduction of the volume emphasizes the fluid and productive plurality, unruliness, and heterogeneity of queer theories and practices, well beyond questions of gender and sexuality, and the current effervescence of classical studies referring to them.
The first chapter (Ormand) by itself occupies an introductory section entitled Classics and Queer Theory: Beginnings. The sinuous and invigorating history of the relationship between historicism and queer theory is evoked, followed by the (intersectional) queerization of the classics, both in progress (especially via queer unhistoricism as a critical experience) and to come, in connection with the now fundamental and inspiring works of Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith/Jack Halberstam, Donna Harraway, José Esteban Muñoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Monique Wittig, and others, all often mentioned in the general introduction and in the “further reading” sections of individual chapters. The classicists gathered in this choral work have not simply borrowed their tools and concepts from queer studies: the application of a queer approach to a field for which it was not first developed shows well how the study of antiquity can reinforce reflexive approaches to the contemporary, and in turn enrich queer studies themselves, as Foucault did in another way, above all in his Histoire de la Sexualité, and then, through multiple intensifications and detours, James Davidson, David Halperin, Nancy Rabinowitz, Amy Richlin, John J. Winkler and others, such as Sandra Boehringer or Kirk Ormand, one of the editors of this volume. But an important aim is also to turn queer classical studies into a utopian territory, until the “right to read antiquity through queer reception” also takes its rightful place. The work of another of the volume editors, Ella Haselswerdt, who proposed to re-queer Sappho, is also a good example of these new stakes.
The book is then organized into five parts, each with six or seven chapters. The first part (Queer Subjectivities) combines Greek and Latin objects of study with historical, cultural, aesthetic, epistemological, and political reflections. The (de)construction of subjectivities in a queer mode, and the philological and contemporary interest of this activity of resistance to the notion of identity, is at the heart of this series of studies on ancient figures who do not conform to the norms of their time. We thus encounter the savagery of Achilles and the disruptivity of desire in the general economy of the Iliad (Mueller); a post-humanist perspective on Cicero and Seneca aimed at better linking race (especially Blackness) and queerness (Rankine); the Roman imagery of Priapus, through a “(com)posthuman” conception of identities (Åshede); Bassa as a lesbian and Philaenis as a tribad (trans?) in Martial (Mann); Orestes doubting his identity, staged, especially in the face of Apollo, in Aeschylus’ Choephores and Eumenides (Chesi); pleasure according to Catullus, in a both Freudian and Foucauldian perspective (Miller); and Philoctetes in Sophocles and his both Greek and Halberstamian art of failure (Spiegel).
The second part (Queer Times and Places), the title of which refers to another work by J. Halberstam (In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, 2005) focuses on the relationship between queerness and futurity, in an anachronistic or digressive resistance to normative, chronological, linear and straight temporalities, and in reference to J. E. Muñoz, on utopia, and L. Edelman, on the present. For space as a relational process rather than a given, the main reference is S. Ahmed, on a queer phenomenology of orientation. A queer approach is thus implemented in various case studies echoing the singularly queer musicality of Sappho, Euripides’ Bacchae (especially passages in Ionic meter) and Catullus (Sapsford); the notions of trace, ghost, ephemerality and the otherwise in performances by contemporary artists Johanna Hedva and Trajal Harrell, who queer the present and the future, by using spectral references from antiquity (Bell); Tibullus’non-conforming temporality, both repetitive and annular, in his relationship to Nemesis, in Book II of his poems (Lindheim); the disturbance of family and reproductive norms by Terence in the Self-Tormentor and his practice of pedagogy (Youd); Narcissus in the space of the Roman home and images of small erections, in Pompeii, that dodge the penetrator-penetrated binary, in untimely connection with the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Fredrick); and classical Athens as a comic state and a trans polis, in Aristophanes’ Birds and Ecclesiazusae, where various practices of parrhēsia queer gender relations (Ruffel).
The third part (Queer Kinships) twists what have become traditional models of ancient family and society, with useful references to Tyler Bradway, Elizabeth Freeman, and Kadji Amin. To experience a queer perspective on classical antiquity and classics means to denaturalize hetero-productive and patriarchal kinship relations, by focusing on chosen families and defining genealogies which are not based on the model of inheritance. The kinships studied here are multiple: the figure of Hippocrates as a (metaphorical and authoritarian) “father”, in the history and historiography of ancient medicine, through the prism of queer unhistoricism (D’Angelo); pederastic parenthood in Petronius’ Satyricon, based on economic and social power, combining care and coercion in same-sex dynamics (Piros); the contemporary reception of Hellenistic astrology (“language of the stars”), as a kind of queer empowerment, through the versatile figure of Mercury (Silverblank); the necessary queerization of the “classical tradition”, through the application of alternative models of kinship, neither merely genealogical, nor teleological, nor biologizing, for instance a chosen type of crip ancestorship (Ward); queer parentalities, already active in ancient literature, for example in Lucian, Petronius, and Apuleius (Oliver); and the queer phenomenon of spontaneous generation, typical of the Golden Age and of various animals and plants, in Virgil’s Georgics (Devecka).
The fourth part (Queer Receptions) gives voice at once to classicists and artists, by extending the previous part on kinships, and focuses on the interplay between ancient and modern sexualities and sexual identities: contemporary queerness is then an outcome, made of desire and turmoil, rather than a stable identity. Here we encounter the poem Sapphở by Vi Khi Nao, an active reader of Sappho and of the poetess Hồ Xuân Hương, from the perspective of queer diaspora theory, and affiliation rather than filiation (Nguyen); Monique Wittig in creative and sensitive dialogue, in Les Guérillères, also with Sappho (Han); the fetishist legitimization of the athletic male body, mostly white, in gay (queer?) photography of the mid-20th century (Blanshard); classical references (Trojan War and Philoctetes) in reflections on the origins of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, A. E. Dreuilhe’s Mortal Embrace and Mark Merli’s An Arrow’s Flight (Capettini); Plato’s Socrates, in E. Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, in dialogue with the cultural history of late 19th century and 1980s (Orrels); and the use of artificial contrasts of light and dark in queer rave parties and club performances, as a possible model for a queer study of classical reception (Colli).
Finally, the fifth part (Ancient Pasts/Queer Futures) draws from Muñoz’s idea that the future is/should be queer: this collection of chapters seems to elaborate afresh what the general introduction asserted with force and precision, as well as most of the chapters engaged in methodological, epistemological, and critical reflection. This part also invites us to explore new territories in which the “future of the classics” could flourish: a philology that has in fact always been queer, i.e. an art of diversified adaptation to the instability of the discursive devices to study, exemplified by Angelo Poliziano’s Miscellanea (15th c.), on the cinaedus and the love of Achilles and Patroclus (Butler); a historiography of Heliogabalus as a cinaedus again, both silenced and famous for his death (Herz); interspecies desire and queer and trans* savagery in Oppian’s Halieutica, especially in Book IV, between an olive tree and an octopus (Telò); publications of Sappho’s fragments in artists’ books, in the style of “queer abstraction” or anti-essentialist punk (Haselswerdt); the ecologist dystopia entitled The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, by Cherríe Moraga, hybridizing ancient Greek and Mexican references through a powerfully nonconforming Medea (Worman); and Afrofuturist speculations (notably N. K. Jemisin), as spaces where classical reception studies can radically queer themselves by opening up to new futures, along the lines of U. Le Guin’s metaphor of the “carrier bag” (Umachandran).
The volume is so rich that it is not possible to discuss each chapter as it would deserve. In a queer, untimely, and very subjective way, I would mention some contributions that struck me in particular, and will certainly be powerful clutches for new researches: Mueller, Spiegel, Sapsford, Bell, Fredrick, d’Angelo, Nguyen, Orrels, Colli, Butler, Umachandran. But, indeed, this list is ephemeral and fragile, and all essays in this volume benefit from being read together.
The formal quality of the publication is keeping with Routledge’s usual high standards. The bibliographies at the end of each chapter are unnecessarily repetitive and not the most practical, but this is a secondary issue. The past and current scholarship referred to is mostly anglophone, or even US-centered, which makes the collection less diverse, utopian, and … queer than often stated. But the diversity of the contributions, in their style as well as in their argumentative stances and strategies, creates however an impressive effect of poikilia, sometimes enargeia, sometimes not so much saphēneia, which is all in all also very queer.
A handbook of this kind cannot be exhaustive, but the collective impetus it provides will encourage the contributors of this volume and hopefully many other scholars to pursue such investigations. A few paths, among others, can be suggested, to be explored and queered further: queer as a (paradoxical) category; camp attitudes, in Antiquity and its modern and contemporary reactivations, as well as in classical studies; queer transmediality and multisensoriality; other various types of ancient and contemporary queer fictions and fabulations … 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: in these matters, real transdisciplinarity, because it is reciprocal, is necessary, in both philological, epistemological, and even political terms.
Authors and Titles
General Introduction – Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim, and Kirk Ormand
Classics and Queer Theory: Beginnings
- How Did We Get Here? – Kirk Ormand
Queer Subjectivities
- ‘Wild’ Achilles and the Epistemology of the Ferox in Homer’s Iliad – Melissa Mueller
- Black[ened] Queer Classical: Cicero’s pro Archia poeta and Seneca’s Natural Questions (and Epistulae Morales 114) in Posthuman Perspective – Patrice Rankine
- Priapus Unlimited: Queer(ing) Identity, Agency, and Bodies without Boundaries in Roman Art – Linnea Åshede
- Tribad Philaenis and Lesbian Bassa: Queer Subjectivities in Martial – Kristin Mann
- Queering Divine Authority and Logical Consistency in Aeschylus’ Oresteia – Giulia Maria Chesi
- Catullus Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Between Freud and Foucault – Paul Allen Miller
- A Murky Unlearning: Sophocles and the Greek Art of Failure – Francesca Spiegel
Queer Times and Places
- Queer Musicality in Classical Texts – Tom Sapsford
- Encountering Absence: Queer Traces, Ghosts, and Performance Otherwise – Marcus Bell
- Queerly Beloved: Nemesis, Credula Spes, and Queer Temporalities in Tibullus Book 2 – Sara H. Lindheim
- Time and Punishment, or Terence’s Queer Pedagogy – David Youd
- Narcissus and the Happy Inch: Queering Social Reproduction in the Roman House – David Fredrick
- ‘How Could a City Become Straight?:’ Aristophanes and the Trans Foundations of the Comic State – Isabel Ruffell
Queer Kinships
- Hippocrates the ‘Father’? Disturbing Attachment Genealogies in the History of Ancient Medicine – Nicolette D’Angelo
- Tamquam Favus: Queer Kinship and Monetary Value in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis– Elliott Piros
- Nonbinary Mercury and the Queer Arts of Astrology – Hannah Silverblank
- Queering Kinship against Genealogy: Crip Ancestorship, Chosen Families, Alternative Intimacies and Other Ways of Refusing the Classical Tradition – Marchella Ward
- Queer Kinship in Ancient Literature – Jay Oliver
- The Greatest Generation: Golden Age, Spontaneous Generation, and Queer Kinship in Vergil’s Georgics– Martin Devecka
Queer Receptions
- Queering Feminine Movement: Sappho, Hồ Xuân Hýõng and Vi Khi Nao – Kelly Nguyen
- Les Guérillères: Sappho and the Lesbian Body – Irene Han
- 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
- Socrates and Sedgwick: Ancient Greece in Epistemology of the Closet – Daniel Orrells
- Shedding Light, Casting Shadows: Queerness, Club Performances, and the Faux-Natural Narratives of Classical Reception – Eleonora Colli
Ancient Pasts/Queer Futures
- Queer Philology – Shane Butler
- How to Do the History of Elagabalus – Zachary Herz
- Queer Interspeciesism, or Oppian’s Wild Love – Mario Telò
- Sappho’s Body, Queer Abstraction, and Lesbian Futurity – Ella Haselswerdt
- Medea’s Ghosts: Cherríe Moraga and Queer Ecologies – Nancy Worman
- Speculation on classical reception: Queer Desire and N.K. Jemisin’s ‘The Effluence Engine’ – Mathura Umachandran
Notes
[1] Queer Euripides: Re-Readings in Greek Tragedy, London – New York, Bloomsbury, 2022.