Maia Kotrosits (Denison University)
In Jane Gallop’s Sexuality, Disability, Aging, she proposes thinking about gender, sexuality, and identity at large as “longitudinal.” In so doing, she invites us to consider the ways bodies cut across categories through time – and, I would add, space. This paper explores late antique travel narratives (Greek novels, some ancient medical texts and pilgrimage stories) in which a figure seeks or undergoes bodily and/or other deep personal change (see for instance Sylvia Montiglio, Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture) through some recent work in Trans, Queer, and Disability Studies, and does so with attention to colonial geographies. In these ancient stories, these bodily changes -- or potential bodily changes -- might be characterized in the text as fake, as in the identity mix-ups of the novels in which the protagonists arrive home (ideally) returned to their true selves. Or it might be characterized as real, as in Thessalos’ On the Virtues of Herbs, in which he arrives at his exotic destination (Egypt) receiving the knowledge he had long sought through an encounter with the god Asklepios, and saving him from suicide. In either case, travel to far-off lands implies both the threat and the promise that one will not remain the same. Focusing specifically on gender and ethnicity in Heliodorus’ late novel Aethiopika and its central figure, Chariclea, who appears Greek but is “actually” Ethiopian, the paper places this theme alongside Aren Aizura’s work (Mobile Subjects: Transnational Imaginations of Gender Reassignment) on modern metaphors of gender transition as a “journey” in which one arrives at their true identity, noting that those undergoing transition often actually travel internationally for gender reassignment or confirmation surgery. Following Aizura, I ask how these stories of journey and arrival try to spatially contain changes that are ongoing, uncertain, and necessarily ambiguous – or already “here.” Without questioning the significance of the lived experience of “at home-ness” that can accompany bodily healing, return, or self-alignment, I ask how ancient travel narratives and the way they depict changes in gender, ethnicity, and other forms of status are inflected with colonial power relations that “straighten” or stabilize such changes by locating them “elsewhere,” and as permanent truths that erase complexity and can never be undone. As such, they not only enact and retrace colonial mappings, but also tend to quell an uncertainty much closer to home. Indeed, they might stabilize what is a larger unsureness, or even erase a precious ongoingness, at the heart of homeland and self.