Disability, Gender and Slavery in Roman Legal Writing
By 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.
Recuperating Catullus’ Attis
By Alexandra O’Neill, Trinity College, Dublin
The figure of Attis in Catullus’ poem 63, for many modern readers, presents a problem to be solved.
The poem is declared ‘complex and difficult’ (Harrison 2004: 532), it ‘shocks and
Intersex Hoplites? The Normates of Warriorhood in Archaic and Classical Crete
By Jesse Obert, University of California, Berkeley
Debra Martin wrote that “masculinity is more a verb than a noun” (Martin 2021, 171). It was something performed, like an athletic competition or an oral poem, so it fundamentally depended on cultural context. Traditionally, scholars have closely associated violence and warfare with masculinity (see Van Nortwick 2008). However, detailed studies of violence and further engagement with disability studies complicate these uncritiqued equivalencies between masculinity and violence.
Body-Texts and the Bow: Genderqueer, Gendercrip Kinship in Sophocles’ Philoctetes
By 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.
Two Disabled Women in Epidauros: Agency, Anatomical Votives and Embodied Texts
By Justin Lorenzo Biggi, University of St. Andrews
This paper explores the relationship between anatomical votives and the “miracle” inscriptions in the Asklepeion of Epidauros (the so-called iamata), in particular as this pertained to the role and agency of women within their own healing process and their unique and individual experiences of illness and disability.
Genderfluidity, Prophecy and Blindness – A Study of Tiresias
By Hannah Biddle, University of Oxford
Prophets in the Classical World were one of the few public and socially accepted figures that were not inextricably linked with the male gender. A µάντις could be male, female or even exist outside the gender binary, and this observation opens an avenue to explore the dynamics of gender and vatic authority.