sontagspdf - Tumblr blog

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shirt that says I Got My Top Surgery at the 4077th MASH

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‘cupid’ xy magazine june 2001

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A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Dispossessed

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Palestinian activists get their message across on Londons iconic Tower Bridge landmark- one of the cities most historic buildings. We need a ceasefire now.

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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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humans and their pets

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Also using the sontag quote about double passports it really is my day huh

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writing a paper about neoliberal policy in mental health care and its disastrous effect and i just wanna thank naomi klein for the hardest quote ever "I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy.”

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Weiner dog wearing armor at the Michigan Renaissance Festival (2002)

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Ummmm sometimes you dread the weight of your life and other times it is an early morning in april and there are 5 species of birds singing and also the sun is shining through the baby leaves. Btw

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Willem de Kooning

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Skin of Skunk Anansie in The Righteous Babes: Feminism and Rock Music in the 1990’s (1998, dir. Pratibha Parmar)

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national holiday