Cecily Bateman, University of Cambridge
This paper examines the relationship between gender, disability and slavery through analysis of Roman legal writing, focusing on Justinian’s Digest 21, writings recorded in Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights and papyri evidence from across the Roman empire. Roman slavery, as an institution unfamiliar and horrific to modern eyes, provides a particularly useful angle into the construction of gender and disability, as it lays bare the cultural and historical contingency of both categories. The principles of crip theory emphasise that all analysis of disability should aim to produce knowledge in support of justice for disabled people (Minich 2016). Therefore, this paper in analysing the power of law to construct marginalised and stigmatised bodies, aims to invite reflection on how the law inflicts violence on disabled people today (Ryan 2019, Clifford 2020).
Ancient world scholars have increasingly engaged with modern disability/crip theory, (Sneed 2021, Ward and Silverblank 2020, Adams ed. 2021) and I first use modern disability theory (Davis 1995, Garland-Thomson 2005, Oliver 2012, Kafai 2022) to create a framework to approach disability within the context of slavery. I argue that Roman law allowed for a continuum of disability depending on context; disability for enslaved peoples was constituted in their ability to function within the unique social role of Roman slavery, in which serviceability was not judged in relation to the enslaved person’s ability to do specific labour, but to fulfil the social role of an unfree, inferior party (Bradley 1994). Mental and physical impairments did not necessarily prohibit this and were thus not always disabilities, and differing redhibition rates depending on the impact of an impairment on serviceability demonstrate the continuum of disability, rather than a simplistic disability-ability binary (Dig.21.1.12.1). Consequently, the relationship between impairment and disability differed between enslaved and free people, and through manumission, an impaired enslaved person could become disabled without any physical change.
My case studies apply this theoretical approach to the feminist issues of reproduction and gender construction in (in)fertility and castration; fertility combines both “conceptual slipperiness and practical importance” (Flemming 2013) so is a preeminent site for examining the nuanced construction of gender, disability and the intersection of both. The meaning of infertility differed for free and enslaved people; for the latter infertility was not always disabling, but conversely fertility could also ‘cancel out’ all other impairments and result in a pregnant enslaved person being judged abled regardless of other impairments (Dig.21.1.14.1). I will explore the social factors, such as lack of family legitimacy and potential for sex work that enabled this range of positions. Castration also occupied a problematic position; enslaved eunuchs had often been castrated to prolong their transient beauty and sexual desirability (Tougher 2013) at the cost of physical capacity for other labour, which presented the possibility that as eunuchs aged and their desirability disappeared, necessitating their reassignment to other work, their impairment would become a disability. Furthermore, I will discuss how juridical disagreements over infertility, castration and the redhibition rates applicable to both demonstrate the contested nature of these categories.