It’s safe to say that people come to Eidolon for content about gender and sexuality in antiquity. You can find some of these articles, plus exclusive additional material, in our course packets. Here, you’ll find pieces on everything from ancient midwifery to the modern #MeToo movement.
Et in Arcadia Ego
What #MeToo Means in Classics
by “Hortensia”
“#MeToo, or to re-purpose a famous Latin phrase, #EtInArcadiaEgo. I am a female classicist, and male classicists sexually harass me.”
The Body in Question
Looking At Non-Binary Gender in the Greek and Roman World
By Grace Gillies
“ Men who harassed me while I looked feminine wanted my attention. Men who harassed me for being too masculine considered my very existence disruptive.”
Medea’s Postpartum Obsession
By Donna Zuckerberg
“ I realized just how nonsensical the psychology of Euripides’ Medea is. Not because she kills her children, but because she fixates so heavily on their murder as a symbolic reversal of their birth. Birth is the easiest hard part of motherhood.”
Midwifery, Then and Now
By Tara Mulder
“I am often struck by how similar ancient midwifery seems to modern homebirth midwifery. How similar to stories I have heard from my mother and scenarios I myself have witnessed.”
Blame It on the Blush
On the Sexual Objectification of Female Professors
By Jessica Blum
So there it was. My face was the problem. Maybe my body. Unclear. My enthusiasm, my passion for the material, my voice, had gone unheard. My Ph.D., six long years of work and discovery and enjoyment and struggle, counted for nothing as soon as I blushed. Reduced to an object, I am a distraction from my own class.
A Mother’s Odyssey
The Journey to Integrating the Roles of Scholar and Mother
By Jennifer Stager
“Over the years my children have formed relationships with my colleagues, moved five or six times, learned different languages, read myths and visited innumerable museums, but my first instinct was to keep the walls up.”
Iphis’ Hair, Io’s Reflection, and the Gender Dysphoria of the Metamorphoses
By Sasha Barish
“I didn’t know why these stories existed — these imagined accounts of what I wished would happen to me — but they certainly existed, and so I felt that ancient Rome had people like me, and I grasped onto this as a source of pride in my identity. I was a trans guy, just like Caeneus and Iphis, and I could be just as male as them.”
Life as an Iphis
Ancient and Modern Perspectives on Your Hopeless Gay Crush
By Lisa Franklin
“I first read this myth from the Metamorphoses in my senior year of high school Latin. And had you asked me then what it means to be queer, without a doubt I would have said that it means being alone.”
Queer Classics
Survey of LGBTQ+ Classicists Reveals Community and Continuity
by Hannah Clarke
“A sizable part of why I took on a Classics major was to meet other queer people. (A tactic, for the record, that worked.)”
Made Miracle
Tiresias Beyond the Gender Binary
By Charles-Elizabeth Boyles
“Gender, after all, does depend. It depends on perception, on assumption, on personal experience. And sometimes, of course, it depends on the will of the gods.”
Achilles’ Rage and #MineToo
Reading the Iliad as a Victim of Sexual Assault
by Maia Lee-Chin
“But it is that same Patroclus that made Achilles and I lose our humanity in the first place. Is this what humanity is? An endless cycle, an infinite battle between rage and forgiveness?”
Rape or Romance?
Bad Feminism in Mythical Retellings
by Aimee Hinds
“ True feminist retellings recognize and don’t repress their characters’ liminality.”
Maiden, Interrupted
The Truth About Title IX
by Anonymous
“I had fallen in love with the Professor and Greece at the same time.”
