Queer Representations and Receptions of Amazons

"My country is all women. To us, it’s not ‘gay’ marriage, it’s just marriage.”

The endurance of the Amazonian archetype in mass media fiction products -tv series, movies, video games, comics, etc.- has been steady for the last eighty years, since William Moulton Marston brought to light the mother of the modern Amazons: Wonder Woman. Nevertheless, the manifestations of these mythological warriors have been changing over the last decades. This proposal seeks to analyze the shape-shifting nature of this archetype in characters of mainstream television, with a special focus on recent queer implications.

Gender bias and a constricted “feminine” ideal prevented the Greeks from recognizing Amazons as women. The Amazons were “accounted as men for their high courage, rather than as women for their sex; so much more did they seem to excel men in their spirit than to be at a disadvantage in their form” (Lysias). For that reason, the Amazons in Donna Dodson’s wood sculptures transform historic misunderstandings about these ancient warriors.

In 1853, Rosa Bonheur first exhibited what would become her most widely celebrated work: The Horse Fair (final version, 1855), a monumental, horizontally oriented painting representing an energetic scene from the regular horse markets held on Paris’ Boulevard de l’Hôpital.  Although the work’s modern setting and animal-focused subject matter do not obviously characterize it as an instance of classical reception, the artist described the painting as her own Parthenon frieze.

This paper takes up the organizers’ aim of “investigat[ing] the reception of the Amazon myths in various queer contexts, broadly defined.” In it, I’ll be looking at both lesbian and queer contexts in Christa Wolf’s mixed-form text: Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (1984). In both narrative and essays, she looks back to Greek literature and the Trojan War.

As the term is frequently used in Classics, “the family” consists of those related by legal ownership, by blood, or by marriage, the latter representing the privileged form by which “legal kinship” is conferred. Marriage was surely inescapable for many in the ancient world, especially women. But in the realm of literature, repository for collective fantasy, alternatives to “the family” - indeed, alternative families - can be imagined. I suggest that the homosocial intimacies within huntress/Amazon bands in Latin literature constitute forms of queer kinship (see Freeman 2007).