Looking Back: Queer Orpheus and His Modern Reception in Two Queer French Films
By Em Roalsvig, University of California, Santa Barbara
Orpheus has been a queer icon since even before Eurydice existed, and he lives on in modern queer love stories. There are only five references from antiquity that specifically reference Orpheus’ queer, namely pederastic, love: Phanocles, Ovid, Hyginus, Philargyrius and Virgil, the latter three which follow Ovid, who is believed to have followed Phanocles. Phanocles’ fragment, from his elegiac poem which survives in Stobaeus, is the first instance of the myth having an element of same-sex love and can be read as an example of a queer relationship.
"Costume is Flesh": Trans*ing Pentheus in Anne Carson’s Bakkhai
By Emily Waller Singeisen, University of Pennsylvania
“Costume is Flesh”:
Trans*ing Pentheus in Anne Carson’s Bakkhai
“Queering the Hero,” Society of Classical Studies 2024 Annual Meeting
“Look at Pentheus / twirling around in a dress, / so pleased with his little girl-guise / he’s almost in tears. / Are we to believe / this desire is new? / Why was he keeping / that dress in the back / of his closet anyhow? / Costume is flesh.”
Queer Cassandra: Re-Reading Euripides’ Trojan Women
By Emily Hudson, University of California, Santa Barbara
I propose to consider Euripides' Cassandra through the lens of queer possibilities offered by Jack Halberstam's Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire and The Queer Art of Failure. By reading Cassandra as “wild” and a “failure,” in Halberstam's terms, we free her from heteronormative expectations for subjectivity and can read her refusal of sexuality, her prophetic frenzy, and her speech that exceeds regular signification in new and productive ways. She knows and declares that her relationship with Agamemnon will result in death and not new life.
Queer Paradigms of Achilles and Patroclus
By Celsiana Warwick, University of Iowa
This paper argues that post-Homeric Greek writers employed references to Achilles and Patroclus as a way to subtly address the taboo topic of mutual eros between men. According to the normative model of Classical Greek sexuality, adult citizen men desired and sexually penetrated their social inferiors: boys, women, and slaves (Dover 1978). A reciprocal erotic relationship in which one party did not seek to dominate the other was, according to these norms, unthinkable (Konstan 1997).
Remember Patroklos
By Bruce M. King, The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
At Iliad 24.511–12, Akhilleus “weeps now for his own father, now again for Patroklos,” αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς κλαῖεν ἑὸν πατέρ’, ἄλλοτε δ’ αὖτε / Πάτροκλον. Commentators have generally ignored the second clause, focusing rather upon the reciprocal weeping of Akhilleus and Priam. The mutuality of fathers and sons and the making of fictive kinship, however fleeting, have been taken as strong signs of narrative closure.