Send me a “ 🔥 “ for an unpopular opinion.
listen…classics academia is saturated in some racist sexist fucking nonsense. and tbh this goes for a lot of academia but i’m gonna go off about this for a sec. i majored in humanities w/minors in myth studies, film studies, and anthropology. all my departments had some Nonsense™ going on. but i get so heated about fuckups in myth studies because myths are by definition not lies, but rather hidden truths. and if you teach these stories that are in some way shape or form at the heart of all storytelling in every culture in a way that fails to transcend or at least account for hegemonic bullshit…you’re failing a lot of students. and i’ve seen so many educators completely fail to critically examine what at face value could be very damaging character tropes. like taking the myth of medusa and failing to account for a) greek appropriation of lybian & other cultures b) male castration horror, and above all c) something other than the traditional cismale perspective of all these characters. ??????
and Nonsense™ carries over into Life. you’re sending students home with these stories that rail against who they are as people and then you try to erase all variant interpretations??? literally, i had a professor once sit me down for TWO fucking HOURS after i posted an article by henry louis gates explaining why andromeda was black & try to tell me why that was Wrong. and he bent and twisted every bit of “historicity” he possibly could to defend his anti-blackness because he was that shit-scared of reclamation. and all he did was expose his demonstrative failure to comprehend the way myth moves; how the very guests at the marriage of perseus to andromeda is the greatest evidence for gates’ case, because it represents the tried & true trope of the civilization hero marrying the earth goddess type at a time when greece was trading with & claiming rights to lands in the middle east & africa. like ???? sit down.
but you know what ??? even without all that narrative evidence, how fucking threatened do you have to be by the notion of a black woman epitomizing beauty that you take such pains to try and convince someone otherwise? maybe because hmmm, andromeda’s partially the ur example for the damsel in distress trope, and her blackness would threaten this idea that only white women are worthy of rescue?? HMMMM.
btw the SAME PROF tried to wage a proxy war with my mentor ( another classics/myth prof from the dept who’s honestly like my professor!dad ) through me, because white men in academia are immature.
