edgarallanhoetry - Tumblr blog

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the smallest artist i listen to? probably the bird outside my window

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you just know robin wood is never talking to any of the scooby people again after sunnydale lmao. well it's been real. thanks for availing of my mom's stuff while spitting on her memory. bye 👋

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All this about not getting to see John Lennon on twitter but I think the real tragedy is that Freddie Mercury never had an instagram

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IMPROVED AESTHETIC: SUNNY ACADEMIA. Well-funded, well-maintained public higher ed. Up-to-date, energy-efficient facilities, thoughtful in design, which make extensive use of daylight, circulate air astonishingly well and are for-real 100-percent accessible. A full spectrum of degrees across all fields of study, plus professional programs, FREE. Minimal intrigue and next to no angst on relaxed campuses awash in friendly communal green space. On-site daycare and afterschool at no cost for children of students, faculty and staff. Thriving unions. Administrators whose heads aren't up their asses.

BE ADVISED: MOODBOARDS AND RELATED SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT MUST BE BROUGHT INTO COMPLIANCE NO LATER THAN 7/31/24.

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The thing is that getting Palestine free is both very difficult but not as difficult as getting South Africa free. South Africa had more resources than Israel does, it could hold out so much longer and still the apartheid was ended by people working tirelessly and boycotting and pushing for divestment and sanctions. These methods will work for freeing Palestine too.

I know it doesn't feel like there have been many successes, but all the politicians are feeling the pressure. Pressure that we are able to sustain and even increase as we come up with new initiatives and convince new people to join.

One of the reasons they're resisting our pressure so strongly is because they know that when we see gains we will push harder, we will continue to push until the stones falling becomes a rock fall and Palestine's freedom is secured. They know if we get a taste of the power we can wield we'll turn that onto freeing Congo too. They know we're unhappy and have been for a long time and their very secure system starts to look a lot less secure when we start mobilising to change things.

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one of the most infuriating things about becoming an adult is when you realize that it actually is 10x easier to solve problems by making a phone call vs literally any other communication method

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the other night i had a dream that i was watching an episode of bobs burgers. it ended with bob singing come on eileen really loudly and linda turning into a car and driving away. the A plot was about tina being an intern at the “new jersey heritage center” which is probably not a real thing, and the B plot involved linda trying to write a book after she met a woman who was going around with a mailing list for preorders of her nonfiction book about animal shelters. also there was a man played by alan from russian doll who ate 50 lunches in a row because none of them were “perfect.” which is all to say I wrote as much of it as I could remember down immediately upon waking up:

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queer classics: a speculative reading list

well i said i would so: my rec list for queer classics scholarship! this comes from my own experience with the subfield of queer classics during my time as a graduate student and my current life as an independent researcher.

i'll put it under a cut because it's long and because (gasp!) i capitalized more formally while i was writing it. if you find this resource useful and want to support an underemployed colleague, my ko-fi is here.

This list mixes multiple different kinds of scholarly resources, including academic books and articles, public-facing scholarship, blog posts, and conference recordings. It does not include primary source material (i.e., ancient texts themselves) – in part, because I think far more ancient texts are open to queer readings than those that make up the existing ‘canon,’ and in part because this reading list is more focused on methodology than it is on any one ancient source.

I’ve marked which texts are available for free online (*) and which are available with a JSTOR account or Academia.edu account (**). Most academic books or articles should be variously available in academic library systems. I have PDFs of the majority, so if you’re having trouble finding something, feel free to reach out! 

Foundations of Gender and Sexuality Studies in Classics

These are some foundational works for thinking about gender and sexuality in the Greek and Roman worlds, which I would categorize under a methodological approach akin to LGBTQ+ studies. The primary distinction for me is that these works provide crucial information about systems of sexuality and relevant sources, but are often a) older and b) don’t use queer theory (or use it in a very limited way). This is by no means exhaustive, but it’s just a short selection of things that get cited often in queer Classics.

Sandra Boehringer, Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (2021; originally published as L’Homosexualité dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine, 2007)

Kenneth J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (1978)

Judith P. Hallett and Marylin B. Skinner (ed.), Roman Sexualities (1997) **

David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (1990)

David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin (eds), Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (1990) **

Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (2010; 2nd edition)

John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (1990)

Queering Classics

As I mentioned above, these are selected primarily because I think they’re extremely valuable examples of queer Classics methodology. The ground that they cover in terms of sources, authors, time periods, etc. is not meant to be universal. My aim is moreso to show what queer Classics can be and what it can do; the methods can be applied to any source you want! 

Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (2017) ** 

Marcus Bell and Eleanora Colli, “Queer Theory and Classics” (2022) * 

Shane Butler, “Homer’s Deep” in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (2016) and “The youth of antiquity: reception, homosexuality, alterity” in Classical Receptions Journal (2019) **

Cyberantiquities, “Sappho’s Yuri of Absence” (2023) *

Kay Gabriel, “Specters of Dying Empire: The Case of Carson’s Bacchae” in Tripwire: a journal of poetics *

Erik Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (2000) **

Ella Haselswerdt, “Sappho’s Body as Archive: Towards a Deep Lez Philology” in Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics (ed. Mathura Umachandran and Marcella Ward; 2023)

Ella Haselswedt, Sara H. Lindheim, and Kirk Ormand (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory (2023)

Tom Hendrickson, “Gender Diversity in Greek and Latin Grammar: Ten Ancient Discussions” *

Maxine Lewis, “Queering Catullus in the Classroom: The Ethics of Teaching Poem 63” in From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom (ed. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy; 2014) **

Tom Sapsford, Performing the Kinaidos: Unmanly Men in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures (2022)

Sebastian Matzner, “Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past” in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (ed. Shane Butler; 2016)

Ky Merkley, “Writing trans histories with an ethics of care, while reading imperial Roman literature” in Gender & History (2023) *

Melissa Mueller, Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading (2023)

Kelly Nguyen, “Queering Telemachus: Ocean Vuong, Postmemories and the Vietnam War” in International Journal of the Classical Tradition (2021) **

Walter D. Penrose, Jr., Postcolonial Amazons: Female Masculinity in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit Literature (2016)

Queer and the Classical - Their website hosts video recordings from two conferences (2021 and 2022) and two seminar series (2020 and 2021) that brought together queer researchers and artists in the field, in order to bring about new and radical ways to imagine, think, and feel future engagements with the queer and the classical. Strongly recommended that you take a look at their wide selection of video recordings! *

Vanessa Stovall, “‘Quid Si Comantur?’: Pic(k/t)ing out Entangled Epistemologies of Ex(cess) in (Em)bodied Techne” (2021) *

Allison Surtees and Jennifer Dyer (ed.), Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World (2020) **

Trans in Classics - Trans in Classics is a working group of the Society for Classical Studies that seeks to provide a community and source of advocacy for trans folx within Classics and to promote and produce scholarship that discusses trans-identities, issues, and readings. Currently their site hosts announcements on relevant events and publications. *

J. L. Watson, “Reframing Iphis and Caeneus: Trans Narratives and Socio-Linguistic Gendering in Ovid’s Metamorphoses” in Helios (2021)

Queer Theory Recommendations

These are some authors in the field of queer theory whose work nominally has nothing to do with Classics. I would argue that an important part of queer Classics methodology is exposing oneself to queer scholarship outside of Classics. Here are some great starting points! 

Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006) **

Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism (2022) **

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993) - Really, the secret with Butler is that basically whatever you read of theirs first is going to be immensely confusing BUT the more you read, the more you understand what they’re doing. Their work is very referential (both to itself and to its theoretical predecessors), so it takes time and investment to work through. If a whole book seems to daunting, a good starting point might be an early essay like "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" (1990) * or one of their interviews (like this one with Artforum) *, where they tend to be more straightforward. 

Paisley Currah, Sex is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (2022)

Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003) **

Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999)

Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) **

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024)

Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005) and The Queer Art of Failure (2011) **

Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019) 

Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007) **

José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (2005) and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) **

Paul Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto (2000) **

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1993)

Monique Wittig, “One is Not Born a Woman” (1981) *

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Evan Rachel Wood and Gina Rodriguez in Kajillionaire (2020)

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this 🤝 vievee francis saying the poem won’t be ruined if you let us in

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TWILIGHT (2008) | THE BEAR (2022-)

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Sex Education | 1.05

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Wordle is running out of words. Only 2,000 five letter words remain. When that supply is exhausted the Creation shall begin. One day the word will be ZHURM, and all shall get it, and all shall understand it to mean "an ache from suddenly remembering a long-ago friend, who meant something to you once, but whose face you can no longer conjure". The next day the word shall be JOROL, and all will get it, and all will know it means "the melancholy confusion of passing by somewhere where you once could have died". The next day it will be GREFT, and all will understand it to be a small brown bird with white streaks found only in South America, and suddenly, it will appear, in the underbrush of the Amazon, in the streets of São Paulo, and all will know that it once was not there, but now, will always be