#queering classics

[kallistoriae]

— Sebastian Matzner, “Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past” in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (ed. Shane Butler; 2016)

[id: Academic writing on literary themes can be seen as metaleptic insofar as it dissolves boundaries between (previously) separate narratives and chronotopes and collapses them ad hoc into a shared time/space (in the discussion of the theme). Such academic writing, then, might be said to be creating and operating in a decidedly queer chronotope. As queer as the chronotope of literature itself, subsuming both the act of reading (reception theory: every text is read vis-à-vis all other texts) and the act of writing (intertextuality: all texts are a mosaic of quotations).]

[kallistoriae]

Queerness qua anti-normativity is not in itself always “good”. To queer something then is not to make a moral or value judgment: saying something is queer qua disruption is not an assessment that being queer or queering is in and of itself positive. Normative systems are spongy and can contain a lot of inconsistency, absurdity, and perversion within them (Berlant, 2016). In fact, some differences from the norm, or what is perceived as the norm with regards to the study of gender and sexuality in our field, still subscribe to the ‘government of the Classical’ (Umachandran, 2021). That is why some understand queer or trans to be part of the unmaking of the world, the unworlding of our present situation (Halberstam, 2020; Bey, 2022). And so ‘queer’ thus becomes a capacious term. It is as much a practice of revolution as it is a shared conversation in holding together incompatible truths. It can hold both of these energies simultaneously: the generation of alternative politics, spaces, erotics and also the unmaking, the unbecoming, and unknowing of the established order.

— “Queer Theory and Classics,” Marcus Bell & Eleonora Colli

[kallistoriae]

There is often a burden of proof placed on queer readings of ancient materials, ideas, and performances. It is as if this way of reading, analysing, and producing knowledge about the often ineffable, efflorescent ancient past — this practice of bringing together fragments, bones, and dust — is less valid than those used by our straight colleagues. But why is that? Perhaps it is because queer studies and queer genealogies can be a practice of listening to what is not there, what is absence, what is left off the record, just as much as they are tools for understanding why what is there is there.

— “Queer Theory and Classics,” Marcus Bell & Eleonora Colli

[kallistoriae]

…a critical methodology [that] can be best described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision. I see the past and the potentiality imbued within an object, the ways it might represent a mode of being and feeling that was then not quite there but nonetheless an opening. Queerness as utopian formation is a formation based on an economy of desire and desiring. […] The queer utopian project addressed here turns to the fringe of political and cultural production to offset the tyranny of the homonormative. It is drawn to tastes, ideologies, and aesthetics that can only seem odd, strange or indeed queer next to the muted striving of the practical and normalcy-desiring homosexual. Queer futurity does not underplay desire. In fact it is all about desire, desire for both larger semiabstractions such as a better world or freedom but also more immediately, better relations within the social that include better sex and more pleasure. One can imagine utopia through what I call queer utopian memory. Memory is most certainly constructed and, more important, always political.

— José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, quoted in “Queer Theory and Classics,” Marcus Bell & Eleonora Colli

[kallistoriae]

when people say a historical/literary figure is queer, and especially when there is discourse around that, i don’t think they make it clear enough whether they are approaching the topic according to modern standards of queerness (eg. an ancient greek erastes attracted to a younger eromenos is queer), or according to the figure’s contemporary standards of queerness (eg. a roman man who eats his wife out regularly is queer), or according to both, only calling queer people who are transgressive according to both ancient and modern standards of sexuality (eg. an ancient greek adult man attracted to other adult men is queer). and there is room for consideration for all of these (though personally i don’t use queer in a serious/genuine way to refer to the first option — i’d rather use less politicized words for that) but it’s good to keep the other perspectives in mind

[kallistoriae]

i often find myself falling back on the less-meaningful (to me!) term "gender non-conforming" when describing figures that i truly want to call "transgender", simply because i know my specific meaning will not be understood properly otherwise. but i think of leslie feinberg’s use of transgender(ed) and transsexual for beings and experiences that can coincide but do not always, how ze includes drag queens/kings and "cis" butches and similar people in hir discussions of transgender(ed) life, how much more sense it makes sometimes than modern online discourse over what transness is or is not.

is iphis from ovid’s metamorphoses trans? he/she/they is transsexual and transgendered, but i don’t know if it makes him/her/them a trans man, that depends on the reading. yet if i say trans now most people will interpret it (and have done so when i was trying to talk about it) as me saying this figure was born and raised wanting to be turned into a man, resenting their biological (but, funnily enough, not assigned) sex. and that’s reductive of transness in general, of ancient literature and its possible readings, and of modern trans identities

[amanda-glassen]

LOVE LETTERS IN THE SAND, 1959*

‘Because of you, I feel so connected to the world around me. Every song I hear on the radio in your car or on a 45 in my room makes me think of you, Ellie.’

‘What about the sad songs?’

‘Even those. I’m building an arsenal of music in case you break my heart someday.’

‘Honest to goodness, Judith, what am I going to do with you?’

‘You can kiss me again for reassurance.’

When her father accepts a teaching job in California, seventeen-year-old Judith Moretti (Elizabeth Ashley) is forced to leave Brooklyn for sunny Santa Monica the summer before her senior year. She tries to rebel but her liberal-minded, artistic father who wants her to have fun and explore her interests leaves her little to rebel against. Instead, the young, aspiring beatnik spends most of the summer in her room journaling and reading her favorite beat poets until a chance encounter with bubbly surfer girl, Eleanor “Ellie” Wilson (Sandra Dee) at Palisades Park brings color into her world and her wardrobe.

*If Classic Hollywood Had Allowed Non-Hetero Stories 

Special thanks to @queer-eyes-full-hearts-cant-lose for coming up with so many wonderful classic Hollywood storylines and @ghostwritingcabenson for encouraging me.