Philip Purchase: Philip Purchase is a graduate student in the Classics Department at the University of Southern California and is particularly interested in questions of self-definition and gender in Latin love poetry.
David Halperin's collection of essays One Hundred Years of Homosexuality grew out of the intellectual climate of the 1970s. Two works in particular revolutionized understanding of ancient sexuality, a subject which had progressed little since A.E. Housman published an investigation of Roman terms for sexual acts in 1931—a subject, as Halperin points out, too risqué for English publishers even though the article itself was written in Latin. In 1978, the first volume of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality was published in English, introducing Anglo-American academics to a compelling way of treating sexuality as a social construct. As Halperin describes it, “Foucault detached ‘sexuality' from the physical and biological sciences . . . and treated it, instead, as ‘the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations by a certain deployment' of ‘a complex political terminology'.” In the same year, and quite independently, the English classicist Sir Kenneth Dover published Greek Homosexuality, an unflinching survey of sexual practice which helped to clarify the codes under which homosexuality was sanctioned (or not) in Classical Greece. Halperin's work can be seen as a felicitous union of the two approaches, combining rigorous and judicious application of the classical sources (an area where Foucault has often been criticized) with a coherent and passionately held theoretical position.
One of the strengths of this book is the explicit investigation of the author's theoretical standpoint. For instance, the second chapter is writtin in the form of an exchange between the author and Richard Schneider. Entitled ”'Homosexuality': A Cultural Construct,” the conversation probes Halperin's reasons for adhering to a social-constructionist position while considering the possible impact upon such a position of genetic discoveries and the kinds of way in which all of us are involved in the seemingly “natural” systems of sexuality we grow up in. As Halperin cogently states: “That, after all, is what it means to be acculturated into a sexual system: the conventions of the system acquire the self-confirming inner truth of ‘nature'.”
The chapter prior to this conversation, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality,” employs the theoretical allegiances of the author and demonstrates how several key classical texts conform to constructionist readings, not least the famous speech of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, where we seem to be given a definition of homosexual and heterosexual behavior. This is the way John Boswell, author of the influential work Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, reads the passage where Aristophanes posits a race of people, split in half from their original combined selves, constantly in search of their severed half. Halperin demonstrates how this passage in fact studiously avoids the recognition of homosexual and heterosexual categorization and goes on to show in the work of Artemidorus, an interpreter of dreams, how wrong-headed it is to jump to conclusions about “sexuality” from modern standpoints: if a man dreams about sleeping with his mother nowadays, one can safely assume that some kind of Freudian reading is likely to come to mind. In Greece, the dream would probably be interpreted as signifying good luck for the dreamer, who occupies a penetrating, masterful role.
The first section of the book concludes with “Two Views of Greek Love: Harold Patzer and Michel Foucault.” Here, Halperin shows in a discussion of paederasty how scholars often must take into account the differences between contemporary concerns and those of the past. Accordingly, the stance of the disinterested scholar is often an illusion: “Foucault's study of the construction of sexual experience in ancient Greece is designed to be what he calls a ‘history of the present', a genealogical inquiry into the provenance of present day ‘sexuality'.” As such, Halperin draws parallels between Foucault's project and Nietzsche's Geneology of Morals, in contrast to approaches which seek a “clinical distance” between interpreter and interpreted (for example in the use of ethnographic data with the purpose of overcoming the interpreter's ‘ethnocentrism'.) The second section is made up of more specific readings of the Classical past. “The Democratic Body: Prostitution and Citizenship in Athens” is a fascinating examination of the relationship between the inviolability of the male citizen's body (seen as an essential guarantor of democracy, which provides equality of treatment, if not of wealth and status), the possibility of sexual relations between men and adolescents within this discourse of impenetrability, and the public provision of male and female prostitutes.
The most impressive article in the work is “Why is Diotima a Woman?,” an examination of the Symposium centering on Plato's use of the figure of Diotima. After the guests at the Symposium have given their views on love, Socrates introduces his view of erotics, which he attributes to Diotima, “who was learned in that subject and in many other things… and it was she, as well, who taught me erotics.” Halperin asks the question, “why did Plato select a woman to initiate Socrates into the mysteries of a male, homo-erotic desire?” The article is a complex set of answers which notes how Plato's unorthodox reciprocal erotics is essentially feminine, replacing a vision of desire which stresses acquisition of the love-object with one which sees erotics as a collaborative process. What is more, Diotima's vision of love is characterized by the recurring image of male pregnancy: “Diotima's systematic conflation of sexual and reproductive functions indicates that Plato has shifted, intellectually and mythopoetically, to a realm of desire conventionally marked as female.”
It becomes clear, however, that the “femininity” ascribed to Diotima is illusory, a conflation of the reproductive and the sexual which is, in fact, male to begin with: in women, orgasm and reproduction are quite independent. Halperin discerns in this a characteristic move of male culture. Indeed, he quotes Barry D. Adam who sees in Greek paedersty “the social reproduction of the male which functions as a second stage of parenting that succeeds the mother-child relationship.” So Plato gives us a “femininity” radically lacking in the female. Halperin's article self-consciously examines the way men talk about women and employ male-centered notions of femininity, alerting us once again to how subtle the techniques are for appropriating the identity of the other.
The essay “Heroes and their Pals” looks at the space of friendship in culture through three parallel ancient constructions of its symbolic space: the relationships of the heroes Enkidu and Gilgamesh, Achilles and Patroclus, and the biblical story of Jonathan and David. Halperin's reading is particularly compelling because it demonstrates how the discourse of friendship first borrows terms from elsewhere, particularly marriage and kin-relations. Then, we find that it “invoke(s) kinship and conjugality . . . only to displace them, to reduce them to mere images of friendship.” This reading of the way discourse reverses, doubling back on itself, is characteristic of the author's keen eye. In every essay in this book, Halperin shows consistent brilliance both in his grasp of the ancient world, and in his understanding of the importance of that world to our own. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality stands as a test against which all subsequent writing on ancient erotics has been measured, and will continue to be measured for some time to come.
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