Lesbianism Before Sexuality

Scholarship on Roman women who loved women (WLW) often focuses on the figure of the tribad, usually defined as a masculinized woman who desires to penetrate. Judith Hallett (1997) groups all woman-woman sex under this umbrella, arguing that the Romans consistently characterize women who have sex with women as literally phallic. However, Sandra Boehringer (2007) makes two important modifications to this model: women who have sex with women are not always, if ever, imagined as literally phallic, and not all such women can be considered tribads.

Sandra Boehringer has identified the story of Kallisto and Artemis as an early Greek mythical acknowledgement of female homoeroticism, and the unique female counterpart to the multiple myths that represent male pederasty (Boehringer 2007: 71–88). Sappho, however, does not mention Kallisto in her surviving fragments; she may sing of Artemis’ virginity in a hymnic fragment, but its Sapphic authorship has always been uncertain and continues to be contested (Boychenko 2017).

As is now reasonably well-known, several medical works of the Roman imperial period contain chapters ‘on the excessively large clitoris and clitoridectomy’, texts which, since they join this female anatomical surfeit with masculinized sexual desires, have been discussed in recent scholarship about ‘lesbianism before sexuality’, as the title of this panel so aptly phrases it (see esp. Brooten 1996; also Boehringer 2007).

The epigrams of Julia Balbilla on the Memnon Colossus have received little scholarly attention since the 1990s, but are a thought-provoking case study for discussions of “lesbianism before sexuality.” In November of 130 CE, Balbilla accompanied Hadrian and his wife Sabina to Egyptian Thebes where she composed four epigrams, predominantly in Aeolic dialect, recording the group’s encounter with the colossus. Balbilla’s erotic descriptions of Sabina and her use of Sapphic language led M.L.

In my paper, I put Sappho in dialogue with the feminist thought of Wittig and probe the dialectic between the past and present. I am particularly interested in Sappho fragments 16 and 31, in which she embodies the female voice of desire. In fragment 16, for example, Sappho sets up an opposition between the plurality and the singular “I” that speaks in this text to redefine what is the most beautiful. For her, beauty resides not in war, but in love: