Trans history from antiquity for today: reading gender in Imperial Roman literature

This project highlights how modern binary conceptions of gender have limited scholarly discussion of gender within the literature of the Roman Empire by erasing the trans potentiality of these texts’ fluid and multifaceted conception of gender. The lack of distinction between gender and the sexed body means that we cannot analyze gender in the Greco-Roman world from a modern binary cisgender framework. Instead, this project provides a trans history that takes clothing seriously as a potential technology for creating, policing, and changing bodies. Through analyzing such moments of re-embodiment, I reinterpret several famous passages of Imperial Roman literature—Megillos in Lucian’s fifth Dialogue of the Courtesans, Hercules swapping clothes with Omphale, and Statius’ account of Achilles living as a maiden on the isle of Scyros—in order to draw several principles about how gender is functioning within these texts. First, clothing, body language, and behavior serve as a means to chance one’s social identity. Second, Roman men seemed to instrumentalize the fluid nature of gender in order to use gender bending to prove a masculine identity despite a feminine moment of embodiment. Third, because gender identity was so flexible, a correct gender needed to be carefully taught to young adults. These three stories show just how flexible and in transition gender constantly was in the Greco-Roman world. Gender was not stable and bodies were constantly on the verge of transition; thus, the boundaries of gender constantly needed to be policed to control unstable bodies. It is in this instability, and the fears that such unstable identities provoked, that we can find rich material for future work in premodern trans history.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Classical Philology

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Merkley, Ky

Contributors dc:contributor

• Williams, Craig
• Beauchamp, Toby
• Bosak-Schroeder, Clara
• Walters, Brian

• Trans Studies
• Classical Studies
• Transgender
• Gender
• Megillos
• Lucian
• Hercules And Omphale
• Achilles
• Statius
• Re-embodiment

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Ky Merkley

Language dc:language

eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124673

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/124673