Fact: ancient sexuality is one of the sexiest fields in Classics. One reason is that the practices of antiquity seem to offer a glimpse into what the world would look like if centuries of Christian intolerance hadn’t taught the world homophobia. The Greeks, with their Sappho and their is-that-a-scroll-in-your-cloak-or-are-you-just-happy-to-see-me Socrates, not just accepted but in fact lauded same-sex relationships.
The second reason for burgeoning interest in ancient sexuality is simultaneously more and less sexy; a theory-lover’s dream. Scholars enjoy using popular perceptions about the ancient world to garner interest, then entirely subverting these understandings by drinking from the cup of Foucault or Butler. For example, one of their favorite bubbles to burst is the notion that there were homosexuals in ancient Greece. Since the very idea of homosexuality (or heterosexuality) as an identity didn’t exist before the nineteenth century, Greeks who liked male thighs weren’t gay or even bi and only on a spectrum in the way that we might say people who like cats or dogs or both are on a spectrum.
Ancient sexuality can be a fun, if highly fraught, topic to introduce people to, at least for intellectual sadists who like to watch people flex their brains as they are forced to come to grips with history that teaches us that our present truths are not universals. And this is the case whether we think that there were homosexual Greeks and Romans or not, or that early Christianity represented a rupture or a development from preceding “pagan” sexual mores.
My own engagement with this topic is as a teacher who works in a history department where I’m also required to teach world history. I mention this because my experience with the latter course — cover 10,000 years and all regions of the globe in one semester, with intro students? Sure, no problem — created some angst about how I was defining ancient sexuality. In world history, we study and compare “ancients” from East and South Asia, the Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa, alongside the more traditional Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, and Romans. Why was I not doing the same thing for my sexuality students?
The short answer was simple: because nobody else is (or has, apart from some engagement with modern anthropology). So what do you do if you are not a specialist in sexuality and you want to approach it in a way that scholars are not (yet) interested in pursuing? Well, you could co-chair a panel on global feminism at a warm-weather academic conference, but that takes years to organize. So in the meantime, I decided to make space in my course for material on ancient Chinese, “Indian,” Japanese, and Pre-Columbian American sexuality.
The reasons not to offer a class like this are legion. It’s more work and effort. I don’t know Chinese, Sanskrit, Japanese, or Navajo. I’m ignorant of the larger scholarly debates in each of these subfields. I’m a white dude. While these excuses are valid, I’d like to offer a few reasons for opening up how we define antiquity and for challenging the idea that the Greeks and the Romans hold unique historical value when it comes to pre-modern sexuality.
Not All Roads Lead to Rome, but They Are Still Roads
The reason why most folks in the West think only of a small Mediterranean cranny when they hear the word “antiquity” has to do with an even smaller group of European intellectuals who, over the last few centuries, decided to cast themselves as the only and rightful heirs to Greco-Roman culture, which for a time they acknowledged as having been indebted to earlier “Near Eastern” civilizations. (Don’t worry: when racism really got going they dropped this last part.)
In other words, history as we know it is myopic. Even when it comes to quintessential “Greeks” like Homer, how “we” think about our relationship to the past has largely been determined by a bunch of dead(?) white supremacists. It can be somewhat freeing to have the opportunity to extend our field of vision and, in doing so, widen how we define “our past.” Scholars are already pushing this envelope on topics like democracy, empire, ethnicity, and science and medicine.
Why not with sexuality? I’ve learned that there is tremendous potential for comparison and connection. Take sex and empire. We all know that the Roman emperors were rather active in the bedroom, and that this infuriated wistful “republican” senators so much that some of them wrote histories that made these emperors look crazy, or weak, or depraved. The result is a product of vengeful imagination that sought to link monarchy with disorder, especially when it came to talking about imperial wives and former slaves.
But contemporary Han rulers were no slouches either. Nero may have married his boyfriend, but emperor Ai seems to have tried to make his lover the next ruler. Several Han princes one-upped Caligula by sleeping with their sisters. And Tacitus’ Messalina finds a kindred spirit in the mother of the First Emperor, who was so enamored with her well-endowed boy-toy Lao Ai (Lustful Misdeed) that she faked his castration, and then plotted to have her children by him ascend the throne after her son (the emperor)’s death.
My point is not, of course, to re-sex our image of the ancient Chinese — though maybe this is worthwhile given current stereotypes — but to suggest that Roman and Chinese historians both used their works to link sex and power in criticizing empire for its potential to create moral chaos. In addition, we gain insight into both Roman and Chinese (elite male) mindsets when we note how Tacitus places a far greater emphasis on inverted gender roles (e.g., an emasculated emperor) than Sima Qian or Ban Gu when highlighting the imperial court’s sexual depravity.
The bigger point, though, is that the reasons that attract us to ancient discourse on sex in Rome or Greece hold true for cultures elsewhere. Reading Tacitus or Sima Qian helps us appreciate how sexual stereotypes grounded in traditional morality serve even today to control those in power and undermine the very validity of female and non-elite agency. Reading Tacitus and Sima Qian helps us see that the cultural distance between ancient societies is not as vast as we often assume, and sometimes closer than what separates us from either.
Untimely Histories
Brooke Holmes convincingly argues that studying ancient gender and sexuality has a keen ability to push us “outside our present selves and [to] imagine the future afresh.” This is especially true when we do not limit our gaze to the Greeks and Romans, who, for all of their different ways of conceptualizing and evaluating same-sex relations, still operated according to a binary gender system.
Not so for the ancient peoples of South Asia (or North America), who posited third and even fourth genders. This more complex way of thinking about gender was unsurprisingly enmeshed with perceptions of sexual behavior and even attraction. Take the Kama Sutra’s discussion of third-gender persons (the prudish Victorian translation erroneously uses the term “eunuch.”). It might blow your mind (sorry) to learn that their most common characteristic is providing oral sex. We also read that there are two kinds of third-gender people: those who dress like women, and those who dress like men but work as shampooers to flirt with and suck men. Yes, it’s really specific.
The Kama Sutra echoes other texts in the Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jainist traditions in casting aspersions on the gender-non-conformance of people who were more commonly called “non-males.” This stigmatizing language may make us suspect that matters aren’t so different from today or even from the ancient Greeks and Romans, who castigated sexual deviance through the figures of the kinaidos (the willing sexually passive male) and eventually the tribas (the sexually penetrating or hip-thrusting female).
But there is a key difference. Terms like kinaidos, tribas, “gay,” “lesbian,” or “trans” (have) never lost their pejorative connotation within the dominant (cis-)male discourse, largely because they are defined by their deviance from a normative binary gender and sexuality system. By conceptualizing a third gender to talk about deviance, ancient “Indians” created, perhaps unwittingly, the potential for the third gender to become normalized.
This normalization seems to have occurred within Jain monastic communities, which sought to police membership within their orders by developing a complex understanding of all three genders in terms of sexual proclivities. In the process they (for us) unexpectedly came to adopt a more inclusive policy of admittance toward third-gender aspirants. The Jains may not have been alone in this, since the hijra of modern India have been able to survive colonial British and subsequent attempts to criminalize them.
I’m not trying to suggest that we look to ancient Indian ideas of a third gender as a model — most of the authors writing about all three genders come across as assholes. But these texts do challenge us to consider what it can mean for gender and sexual identity when we move past a binary way of thinking about these concepts. In this case at least, they disrupt our assumptions even better than the Greeks and the Romans do, especially when we look at all three.
Challenging Whose Biases?
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from teaching ancient sexuality is that my assumptions about my students’ assumptions were pretty ignorant. I was oh-so confident on the first day of class that when I asked them who they thought counted as “the ancients,” they would fall into the Classic trap of naming the usual Greco-Roman suspects, and then I could expose their Western-centric biases in the name of reaching the aporia necessary to commence wising up.
But mostly they just said they weren’t sure, and would you please tell us, kind sir? (Okay, I added that last part, because sometimes I need the fantasy that my students respect me.) What this taught me is that, not only is the task of getting students to let go of problematic biases often easier than we expect — thanks perhaps in part to the fact that world history has largely replaced Western civ in secondary education — but also the continued preference for history of the “West” may be as much or more a product of what folks learn in higher education.
If this is at all true — cue a future Eidolon article? — then classicists who are troubled by nationalist, chauvinist, and racist appropriation of our discipline need to think hard about how the titles and content of our courses, as well as the lack of courses on other ancient societies at most universities, not only reinforce but possibly implant the notion that the only ancient history that matters is ours (in both senses).
That students aren’t naturally disposed toward the Greeks and Romans also came out in my class surveys. I asked them about the amount of coverage of the Classical world in relation to non-Mediterranean societies, and most wanted more of the latter. One student stated that, apart from my class, they had “been given almost no opportunities to study these areas of the world in a university setting.” Of course, some of this may be the result of the relief we all felt in moving away from the intense dicketry of ancient Roman sources whose words drip with gender and sexual violence.
This feedback from students in a state university whose entering class each year is about 40% first-generation suggests that there is a widespread public interest in a more widely construed ancient world. Given the current hiring practices of universities, it is unlikely that there will be anyone else able to meet this demand.
I don’t wish to focus solely on teaching. Ancient comparative sexuality makes for good (and puntastic) headlines and even better articles that give readers “refreshing” and “fascinating” (to again quote my student surveys) takes on a topic that is inherently interesting and even more so when looked at in an unfamiliar setting — certainly for those interested in writing for a more public audience, but also for those who want to show me how I should have written this piece.
Finally, for anyone who is sick of their [dissertation/current book project/ memoir on the horrors of academia] and ready to [reinvigorate themselves/spice up job cover letter/redefine the field], comparative sexuality is a minefield that will explode your career…um, in the good way, like to “explode onto the scene.”
The least risky way to do this is to start viewing scholars of ancient Chinese, Indian, etc. sexuality as our colleagues and potential collaborators. Their own work is almost always already aware of what scholars of Greco-Roman sexuality are up to. Is it anything besides our own complicity in a pro-Western version of the past that keeps us from thinking east of Lucian, south of Cleopatra, or west of the pillars of Herakles? Perhaps, but insistence on language competence, reverence for the canon, and a particular citation politics (#performativehistoriography) all have their roots in colonialist, androcentric elitism too.
I get it. Teaching a topic well, or saying something smartly new, is hard enough when just focusing on one society. And for those of you on the job market, don’t even bother with any of this until you’ve convinced the establishment that you’ll play nice with tradition. But if we are really to understand the past, or even just the “Classical” past, how are we to do so properly with blinders on?
Jeremy LaBuff is a Lecturer at Northern Arizona University. His least favorite thing besides canned mushrooms is autobiography.
