Erin Lam (University of California, Berkeley)
Breaking Bodies: Materiality and Vulnerability in Heroides 12
Medea is a controversial figure that has captured the imagination of many artists, writers, and scholars due to her transgressions of gender and social norms. Ovid has revisited the figure of Medea in several works including the Heroides (the Metamorphoses, the lost tragedy Medea), but the Heroides has enjoyed little critical attention due to its suspect textual authenticity, which is entangled with poor judgments of its literary quality. Peter Knox (Knox 1986, 1995) has been one of the most vocal recent opposers of the Heroides’ authenticity, building on a long tradition of philological doubt reaching back to Lachmann, Wilamowitz, and Housman (Courtney 1965). Although in recent years there has been more support for the authenticity of the Heroides (e.g. Hinds 1993, Casali 1997), this debate has consumed critical attention at the expense of literary analysis of the text. However, these two areas of analysis, the philological and the literary, cannot be separated: debates on the authenticity of Heroides 12 stem in part from the fact that Medea’s myth is one of fragmentation, most literally in the form of dismemberment, which she mobilizes against family and foe alike (Hinds 1993: 46), as well as from misogynistic judgments that the Heroides as a whole and this poem in particular are derivative (Knox 1986: 211), illogical (Knox 1986: 212), repetitive (Knox 1986: 220), and overly emotional (Knox 1986: 210).
This paper will argue that Ovid's Heroides 12 in fact presents a compellingly complex portrait of Medea, which recasts her transgressions as containing liberatory potential. Though Medea has been characterized as excessively masculine, this paper will demonstrate that it is in fact her embrace of the materiality and vulnerability of the female body, as depicted in Heroides 12, that allow her both to mobilize the negative female stereotype of vulnerability as a strength and to imagine alternative embodiments and futures that are deemed illogical according to conventional norms. To do so, this paper presents a queer feminist reframing of Deleuze’s “body without organs” through feminist work on vulnerability (Dahl 2017, Butler 2004), trans formulations of the body (Hayward 2008), and Black materialist understandings of the body (Keeling 2019), interpreting the Heroidean Medea through these various conceptions of what it means to be female and to have a body that is subject to violence. Medea in Heroides 12 mobilizes the violence of dismemberment in order to imagine the possibility of a dehierarchized relationship between her and Jason that can only be achieved by the dehierarchization of their material bodies (i.e. their transformation into bodies without organs). It is this orientation toward materiality that enables Medea to operate outside of conventional logics and norms, and thus provide a liberatory potential for reimagining relationships and communities as a non-hierarchical network of relations.