International Colloquium - Queer Antiquity: History, Reception, Creation

The colloquium and a doctoral workshop are organised by Sandra Boehringer (Archaeology and Ancient History: Mediterranean-Europe - ArcHiMedE) and Todd Reeser (University of Pittsburgh, USA and 2021 USIAS Fellow), and are supported jointly by ArcHiMedE and USIAS.

From Aphrodite to biopower, the deployment of sexuality has taken numerous forms and has produced numerous identities located in time and space. Greece and Rome have often served as influential models to legitimize current practices and norms (such as the ideals of law, of democracy, and of philosophy), but they also allow us to deconstruct categories whose historicity we too often forget. As societies “before sexuality,” as David Halperin puts it, Greek and Roman societies make it possible to “trouble” gender and sexuality, to “twist” the seemingly stable, and to “queer” normativity (in the etymological as well as the contemporary sense of the word).

Two approaches (among others) will allow us to reconsider the past to rethink identitarian norms. First, we will examine ancient material objects and recurring cultural themes to construct new discourses of sexuality and to play with ancient images and perspectives. Second, we will consider anew our own approaches to Greek and Roman cultural practices, societies that  historiographers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries often constructed in their own image. By comparing past and present, we imagine discovering ancient categories that are much more fluid than are sometimes imagined and that have been sources of inspiration for art, politics, and literature.

How were ancient sexualities subject to appropriation, transformation, or revision in post-classical periods? How did the return to the Ancients during the European Renaissance transform Greek and Roman forms of expression of love and desire between people of the same sex? What role does ancient queerness play in the discursive and artistic expression of male and female “homosexuality” in the 19^th century? How were the cultural norms of the Ancients in erotic matters used, transformed, or reclaimed in LGBTQ+ political movements in the 20^th century? In short, how has the queer dimension of Antiquity been received over time? These are the questions and approaches that this international colloquium and doctoral workshop aims to consider.

• Programme
• Masterclass & Doctoral Workshop - invitation and registration (requests for registration to send back before 3 May 2024)