Eleonora Colli (Oxford University)
In her 2014 essay “Like”, Stephanie Burt made a case for the figure of the simile as a ‘queer poetic tool’ to Burt, the ‘like’ of the simile expresses an instability in language that can be utilised to address an instability in gender and identity as well. The role of the simile in destabilising meaning (e.g., Buxton, 2004; Von Glinsky, 2012; Oswald, 2020) and even its capacity to invert set gender conventions (e.g., Foley, 1978) have both been explored within Classics. However, it is only more recently that scholars have explored its potentialities for describing non-conforming sexualities and identities beyond the binary (e.g., Corbeill, 2015). In this paper, I aim to start from Burt’s ideation of ‘the queer simile’ in order to assess how this figure of speech can be employed to explore gender and sexuality beyond the binary, noting its potential in Homeric epic in particular.
My study will be divided into two sections. Firstly, I aim to analyse cases of reverse similes — that is, similes within which the comparison provides ‘a change of perspective or reversal of social roles’ (Foley, 1978) in their use of masculine and feminine tropes — both in the Iliad and the Odyssey. This analysis will focus particularly on reverse similes related to motherhood, exploring how they are employed to subvert gender roles and their expectation within the ideological framework of epic, subverting the use of motherhood as a ‘biologising’ tool within texts, like epic, meant to create a collective imaginary for a specific cultural group (Barnard, 2012).
Yet reverse similes and the alternative possibilities of gender expression they provide still remain limited by the gender binary. In the second part of my argument, I thus aim to analyse similes that interact with identities outside of the human realm, and which indeed move comparisons and definitions of femininity and masculinity outside of the social. To do so, I will analyse similes that create a comparison between human desire and both the animal and the natural world. These comparisons, in fact, open up a ‘libidinal and ecstatic state which transcends humanhood and bodies’ (Tannahill 2020), tapping into a new realm of identities that are exempt from the human social enforcing of sexual and gender roles (e.g., Payne, 2010; Barad, 2011; See, 2020). Taking from Halberstam’s understanding of wildness as a category that lends itself to queerness and identities beyond the binary (Halberstam, 2020), I will then take animal similes as opening up a poetic realm free of binary divisions, and which instead lends itself to more liberating associations and descriptions, creating new possibilities for expressions of gender and sexuality.
With this paper, I thus aim to explore the rhetorical figure of the simile, particularly within Homeric epic, as developing new avenues of expression for the queer experience beyond the binary. By looking first at how reverse similes destabilise the gender binary, and then moving to similes which interact with a set of references outside of social constructions and expectations, I will analyse the potentialities of this figure of speech in its application to queer studies, joining a rising tradition of scholars working on gender diversity in the classical world (Surtees and Dyer, 2020)