Carissa Chappell, University of California, Santa Barbara
Classicists’ analyses of the Philoctetes often stop where their understandings of disability do: on the surface of Philoctetes’ physical, visible body. Frameworks of queer, trans, and disability theory, however, reveal gaps inside and outside the body-text of Philoctetes. In one such gap, I argue we can see Herakles, Philoctetes, and Neoptolemos existing in a network of relationships which enables and encourages them to navigate chronic illness, gender, and embodiment. After analyzing the genderqueer, gendercrip kinship system of these three characters and focusing on their individual and collective relationships with chronic pain and transness, I conduct a queer-crip rereading of the play’s ending — we can read Philoctetes’ decision to leave with Neoptolemos and Odysseus as a nuanced, purposeful rejection of ancient and modern ideal narratives about society, bodies, and pain.
Following scholars such as McRuer, Freeman, Kafer, and Halberstam, I explore intersections of chronic pain, transness, and liminality in the stories of Herakles, Philoctetes, and Neoptolemos. I follow on Herakles’ bow and arrows — a physical manifestation of their queer-crip kinship — before, during, and after the events of the Philoctetes, especially in liminal spaces such as Lemnos and the sea. Herakles, who spent years as a woman in Omphale’s court, seeks death in exchange for his bow; he embraces queer failure. Philoctetes, living an unseen and thus nongendered life on the very gendered island of Lemnos, survives by relying on the bow as his mobility aid and refuses to seek the kleos which would “cure” him. Neoptolemos, called Pyrrhos for his father Achilles’ time as Pyrrha, struggles to navigate the genderfluid liminal space of ephebehood and learns to use the bow to survive his precarious position between obeying Odysseus and empathizing with Philoctetes. So long as they possess the bow, each of these three characters rejects and refutes the normative narratives of pain, loss, and return that Odysseus articulates.
By rereading the Philoctetes as a narrative of chronically ill and disabled queer people occupying and leaving the liminal spaces they were forced to occupy, Philoctetes’ baffling agreement to return with Odysseus becomes a clear act of queer-crip agency. More importantly, the Philoctetes also becomes a tool for understanding and supporting the queer and crip communities around us. The Philoctetes affirms what modern crip and queer people already know: that those with chronic pain can and do choose not to “heal” as a form of resistance to both ancient and modern ableism, either by departing from normative society or by remaining in a harmful system which abuses bodies and tortures minds. Often, crip and/or queer people who cannot or will not conform to societal ideas of healing, health, and pain are forced into liminal, isolated spaces; we form communities of mutual support and shelter against the violence of abled cisheteronormative society; we experience gender and disability twining together into a new, distinct identity; we experience pain in isolation, especially those with chronic and/or invisible disabilities — we are islanded on Lemnos with Philoctetes.