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 gender and self-definition in Latin love poetry.
BEFORE SEXUALITY stands as a landmark in the field of ancient sexuality, collecting papers from many of the key writers who have engaged the explosion of discourse on the subject following Michel Foucault's HISTORY OF SEXUALITY. Foucault is an essential presence in the book: while he is often criticized by classicists for his lack of historical specificity in examining the ancient world, the editors note that “most of the contributors to this volume would acknowledge (him) as one of the most brilliant recent investigators of our subject, even when we have differing assessments of his views.”(p.5) The very title of the volume is clearly indebted to him, positing sexuality itself as a construct of the modern world: the editors note how the importation of a centralized, centralizing notion of sexuality into the ancient world obscures the autonomy of diverse “practices and notions”(p.5) which employed sexual meanings. They therefore envisage a volume with the fundamental belief that “the multiple and competing significances of sex (are) intelligible only in relation to the warp and woof of the whole social fabric.”(p.3) The chapters they include examine many aspects of erotic experience, reflected in material artifacts, medical writings, literary texts and philosophy. All are united by a recognition of the need to employ a rigorous methodology which throws light on both the separate constructions of sexual experience in Greece and the assumptions about sexuality and its role in the construction of the self in our own culture.
For readers interested in Greek homoeroticism, David M. Halperin's ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF HOMOSEXUALITY (New York, 1990) is an essential companion to the volume under review: it shares one paper, “Why is Diotima a Woman?”, but also elucidates the social-constructionist view of homosexuality and compellingly advocates the cultural specificity of the homosexual. Halperin's theoretical clarity here elucidates the kinds of approaches taken by writers in BEFORE SEXUALITY. Another convincing statement of the role of the classicist in the field of sexuality is found in John J. Winklker's chapter in the work under review here, “Laying Down The Law: The Oversight of Mens' Sexual Behavior in Classical Athens.” Winkler stresses the restrictive focus on “great books” which has characterized classical scholarship: he tries to go beyond the prescriptions of the cultural elite- “But our current intellectual interest is not to pay allegiance to the values of that hegemonic group (and thus indirectly to support its equivalents in our own society.)”(p.174) Any attempt to talk about the sexual practices of the Greeks will have to deal with the fact that their representations of their social world employ privileged terms to “mark off a restricted area of importance . . . and to speak of it in absolute terms as if it were the whole.”(p.174)
This review will focus on the three chapters by Francois Lissarrague, David M. Halperin and Maud W. Gleason in an attempt to convey the range of source material employed throughout the volume. As the editors state in their introduction, this volume merely scratches the surface of Greek sexuality, leaving subjects such as prostitution and marriage to other researchers. The subjects that are covered, however, are indicative of the value of looking beyond the standard texts of the hegemony described by Winkler above. So Francois Lissarrague, in “The Sexual Life of the Satyrs,” uses the evidence of vase paintings to investigate the kinds of maleness at play among the seemingly hyper-masculine satyrs. His chapter acts as a commentary on twenty-nine reproductions of vase-paintings of satyrs, the ithyphallic half-animal, half-human creatures emblematic of sexual excess. As Lissarrague methodically examines the aspects of the satyrs' posture and sexual behavior, it becomes clear that several assumptions one is likely to make are false.
So “large genitals are not the attribute of the superman, and it is not Herakles whom we find provided with a huge phallos, but rather Geras- decrepit old age- or the Pygmies- monstrous creatures, barbarous and misshapen.”( p.56) This emphasis on bestial sexual appetite sets the satyr apart from the positive constructions of male human desire: we may note how scenes showing satyrs coupling with deer or donkeys employ the motif of the amphora, placing their activity in the realm of the Symposium, subverting the close link between Eros and wine.
Lissarrague gives a fine reading of a rare representation of satyrs engaged in homosexual behavior, behavior which is bizarre in itself as there is no age-differential between the partners, essential to socially endorsed male-male love in Classical Greece. Beyond this and the gymnastic repertoire of sexual positions, we note that the satyrs show sexual interest in two sphinxes bordering the cup, a remarkable union between a decorative motif and the subject-matter of the painting: “The satyr appears here as sexually inexhaustible, ready to unite with any living being without discrimination, and liable to be caught in the trap of mimesis, confusing an ornamental figure with a flesh-and-blood creature.”(p.65) So the satyr tells us not about the sexual life of the Athenians, but about how they played with its conventional parameters through the figure of the pan-sexual satyr who “distorts ‘normal' situations and out of them invents new ones.”(ibid.)
David M. Halperin, in “Why is Diotima a Woman?”, examines Plato's “Symposium”, surely one of the most canonical of all Greek texts, in order to explore his use of the figure of Diotima. After the guests at the Symposium have given their views on love (which is discussed in terms of paederasty), Socrates introduces his view of erotics, which he attributes to Diotoma, “who was learned in that subject and in many other things . . .and it was she, as well, who taught me erotics.”(p.257) Halperin asks the question “Why did Plato select a woman to initiate Sokrates into the mysteries of a male, homo-erotic desire?”(p.259) Halperin's 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 mythopetically, to a realm of desire conventionally marked as female.”(p.281)
It becomes clear, however, that the “femininity” ascribed to Diotima is illusory, a conflation of the reproductive and 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 paederasty “the social reproduction of the male which functions as a second stage of parenting that succeeds the mother-child relationship.”(p.287) So Plato gives us a “femininity” radically lacking in the authentic 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 are the techniques for appropriating the identity of the other.
Finally, Maud W. Gleason approaches sexual deviance through evidence of ancient physiognomy in “The Semiotics of Gender: Physiognomy and Self-Fashioning in the Second Century C.E.” This discussion centers on the elusive figure of the kinaidos, the effeminate anti-type to the adult citizen male. The physiognomist, meanwhile, set himself up as one able to read the signs of sexual deviance: as Gleason notes, “The fact that physiognomy was prepared to offer itself as a tool for decoding the signs of gender deviance makes it a fruitful source of information about the sex/gender system that permeated ancient society but rarely articulates itself in canonical texts.”(p.390) That the kinaidos can disguise his femininity should be seen as part of a system in which “masculine and feminine types do not necessarily correspond to the anatomical sex of the person in question.”(ibid.) Being masculine is not the same as being male: indeed, some physicians believe that a mixture of both masculine and feminine traits is beneficial, but this is scarcely a universal view. Of particular interest is Gleason's reading of astrology, in which the conditions pertaining to the birth of the kinaidos are discussed. While so-called public kinaidoi (such as prostitutes) are easily identifiable, hidden kinaidoi also exist: “it is precisely this sense of the omnipresence of potential deviants which kindled the vigilance of physiognomists, amateur and professional.”(p.399)
Gleason gives us a very useful reading of the relationship between the kinaidos and the modern homosexual, noting that, while Foucault's distinction between ancient views of sodomy in terms of forbidden acts and modern views of the homosexual as a distinct personage is well-taken, much of what he says about the nineteenth-century homosexual could be applied to the kinaidos. The distinction lies in the fact that the homosexual is defined by the gender of his sexual partners, the kinaidos by his own gender deviance. The relationship between modern conceptions of homosexuality and practices of the ancient world is a thorny one: articles such as Gleason's, which expands our knowledge of ancient reactions, and Halperin's, which opens new approaches to canonical texts, clarify and complicate, in equal measure, our reading of what same-sex love signified in Ancient Greece.
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