redolentque thymo fragrantia mella

24 ; themed party enjoyer & grasshopper fan sometimes i write fanficton. header is a unicorn tapestry. terfs die badly. you will be blocked.

[figbian]

title: mud almost to your mouth pairing: dorothea/ingrid word count: 8,892 of 19,140 chapter: 2/4 summary:

Ingrid shrugs and brings half of the cookie to her mouth. “It sounds trite, but people are complicated.” “It’s not trite,” says Dorothea. Her expression is very odd. There’s something still about it. “I’ve always wondered how you lost someone like Glenn and then decided to become a knight knowing you could lose someone else.” Ingrid feels her face heat. She kicks at the snacks she’d gathered for Felix, checking to see if they’re still under her seat. “I worry, obviously.” She bites in the inside of her cheek. There’s always the thought—the unkind, unfair thought: would he do the same thing for Ingrid? She isn’t sure. “I don’t know. I am what I am because of the good parts, I suppose. The parts of him that I—loved.” The word love feels stale when she says it. A bit like a stone shifted in the dirt. Something unnatural, intentional.

[adamnagaitis]

can everyone reblog with the interest of theirs that was the most intense or continued for the longest because i’m so curious

[storm-of-feathers]

yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.

[storm-of-feathers]

I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.

[netcromancy]

[mymotorcyclediaries]

Love women who love the brine of life...Pickles, Olives, pickled jalapeños, sun-dried tomatoes, pickled ginger, pepperoncini, kimchi, pickled red onions

[herbaklava]

SEX MONEY DRUGS CHAINS ON MY CHEST THAT VINTAGE CELINE DIAMOND GRILLS CHAMPAGNE BOTTLES SWAGGER I BLEED I WANT SEX MONEY BITCHES AND THE STICKIEST WEEEED

[elexecution]

there are too many things happening this summer that i'm thinking we are going to need an extra 6-12 months of june and possibly another 3-4 months of july. probably no extra august as the problem should hopefully sort itself out by then. we are also looking into extending the day night cycle to 55 hours and extending the human lifespan to 10000 years.

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

i just apolitically killed the king like i have no agenda or whatever im just the jester here but i stabbed him anyway LOL all the courtiers and advisors are trying really hard to figure out who did it LOL all of them wanted him dead but they dont know whose scheme it was so nobody can promulgate a coherent political maneuver based on the circumstances LOL just playing my lute #MyLute

[fluentisonus]

various groups of people from this manuscript

[postarcadian]

have you seen the roman twink post by the hopepunk author yet? thought you might find it funny/piss you off (tum blr.com/ariaste/81550 59103415 33696/has-anyon e-asked-you-what-the-twi nk-genders-are)

hadn't seen it, just went and read it along with the author's other thread on the meaning(s) of vir. overall, setting the tone aside (not a gripe exactly, I'm just not the target audience), it's not a bad treatment of the subject and I like that they highlight e.g. the elements of a kind of symbolic gender transition in manumission. there's a few things I'd take issue with -- mostly around the figure of the cinaedus, since the OP says "it's one of the closest things the Romans had to a self-chosen identity" but I tend to agree with Hallett and Lateiner's piece "Connotation and ‘Com-motion’: Putting the Kinesis into the Roman Cinaedus" in the 2023 volume Searching for the Cinaedus in Ancient Rome that ultimately cinaedus is never a neutral term in extant Latin -- it's always more or less a slur -- and that the evidence simply is not there for widespread reclamation of it in the sense of e.g. the reclamation of "fag" in a modern context. this is absolutely not to suggest that there was not a queer subculture with characteristics along the lines of those attributed to cinaedi! but it's crucial to keep in mind that we're always reading cinaedi through somebody else's eyes.

I also think that the claim that the Romans didn't have a gender/sex binary is a bit too facile -- I think what the author is trying to do is to point out that gender identity in the Roman context is extraordinarily complex, and that e.g. vir vs. puer can be usefully framed as different gender categories (which I agree with!). but I think it massively downplays Roman misogyny to suggest that the Romans don't have some kind of active concept of a gender/sex binary; I think the way I would frame it is that gender for AMAB persons in the Roman context is complex but that being AMAB but not a vir meaningfully puts one closer to being a woman, which is both legally and philosophically defined by the Romans as a lesser kind of personhood. if anything I think this all falls out of the Roman subject/object binary where subjectivity in (mainstream) Roman thought is almost invariably associated with the figure of the elite male dominus, to whom everything else -- women; enslaved persons; animals; the natural world -- is a kind of object. (side note on this last part: one reason that e.g. Lucan's Pharsalia is subversive is that it really sits with the notion that civil war turns viri into objects; everyone goes into the war planning to prove themselves as the ultimate subject and everyone comes out a literal object. the gruesome violence enacted upon the vir's body is the point, given that the vir's body is otherwise defined by inviolability.)

[postarcadian]

returning to this because I've been thinking about it this afternoon and I think the question of "did the Romans have a gender/sex binary" is actually symptomatic of some issues that are near-constant when we frame debates about ancient sexuality in modern terms. let me first say that this is not intended as an attack on the author of the post mentioned; I do think that an average non-specialist Tumblr user could do a lot worse than this post for wrapping their mind around Roman gender (specifically the many gradations of gender for Roman AMAB persons) even if I have the quibbles I've mentioned above.

but as far as I can tell, the author's argument that "the Romans didn't have a gender/sex binary" is really an argument that gender in the Roman context is more complex than male/female, which is completely accurate. however, I think that "gender in ancient Rome was not as simple as the male/female binary" and "the Romans had no active concept of a gender/sex binary" are two entirely different claims, and while the first one is pretty self-evident from even a cursory look at the evidence, the latter misses the crucial fact that the entire Roman matrix of gender is based on misogyny, and that misogyny is very much rooted in a gender/sex binary.

for instance, the author points out that Latin has words for intersex people and says that "if a word exists, the concept exists. So already they're aware that sometimes bodies aren't easily categorized, so anyone who says 'but the romans definitely did have a sex/gender binary' is just self-evidently wrong from the get-go." but by this logic, you can just as easily say "modern English has words for intersex people, ergo modern Anglophone societies don't have a gender binary" which I think is blatantly wrong -- we do have a concept of a gender and sex binary, one that is enforced every day through violence. the ability to conceptualize identities that disrupt a binary is not the same thing as not maintaining an ideological commitment to that binary, and if anything, the existence of exceptions provides the justification for the powers that be to enforce the rule through violence.

a similar concept applies in the Roman context, with the crucial addition that as a violently imperialistic slaveholding society, all Roman gender and sexuality is enforced through violence (see this post, as well as this post from my other blog for my full thoughts on the subject). the existence of certain identity categories in Roman society that seem to map on to nonbinary, intersex, and/or trans identities, some of which are socially accepted in very specific contexts (e.g. the galli), does not mean that the society as a whole isn't committed to a fundamentally misogynistic construction of gender. to radically oversimplify certain things, in Roman society there are citizen males (viri) and all other gender categories seem to be defined by their (potential or actual) proximity to enslavement, womanhood, or both, which suggests that the free/enslaved binary and the male/female binary are very much both active in Roman thought and provide the ideological underpinning for the rhetorical and actual violence we see.

tldr: if it sounds like I'm a pessimist about most aspects of Roman society and especially non-normative gender and sexuality in Roman society it's because I am. this is not to suggest that people gendered outside the binary didn't live meaningful lives in Roman antiquity (they did!), but that we shouldn't mistake that fact for any kind of tolerance of difference at the hegemonic level any more than might be said of modern western societies whose deeply entrenched homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny we've all spent our whole lives living in.

[tyrian-red]

my erotic fanfiction is more historically accurate than yours. here it claims that shes moaning 'yes,' however classical latin didn't have a word that corresponds to Modern English 'yes,' i.e. an affirmative answer to an interrogative. You could have easily avoided this glaring implausibility by allowing her to moan plus, 'more'—as exemplified in my critically acclaimed fic with an unprecedented number of kudos (eleven). I recommend that you log out of AO3 and return only after acquiring satisfactory knowledge of the subject matter.

[catilinas]

[catilinas]

shadi bartsch, introduction to the aeneid

[havingapoemwithyou]

Dinosaur by Richard Siken

[icaseybaybee]

[antigonewannabe]

x

[monamoni]

Upside down fig tree in Bacoli, Italy. No one is quite sure how the tree ended up there or how it survived, but year after year it continues to grow downwards and bear figs.

[redlipstickresurrected]

Leonardo Devito (Italian, b. 1997, Florence, Italy, based Torino (Turin), Italy) - Camera d'Albergo, 2024, Paintings: Oil, Acrylic on Canvas