Un/Doing Queerness in the European South: (De)Colonise Antiquity/Archaeopolitics/Homosexuality
Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing
Speakers:
Dimitris Plantzos (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
John Champagne (Pennsylvania State University)
Dimitris Plantzos (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), ‘We Have Never Been Queer: Ancient Sexualities and Present Archaeosocialities as a Way (Not) to Define the Modern Greek Self’
Modern Greeks have time and again styled themselves as the legitimate offspring of the glory that was Hellas, complete with good old ‘Greek’ DNA going all the way back to Homeric times, whenever these may have been. Whereas many present-day Greeks, however, would gladly promote a close cultural, even biological, relation with the likes of the (mythical) Achilles, they might feel less inclined to include Patroclus in the mix – and certainly not over-think what these two may have been doing together.
A certain archaeolatric ethos has been permeating Greek society, and public discourses about the past, since at least the establishment of the Greek state in the 1830s; in recent years, however, and following the repeated social, economic, and political challenges Greek society has been facing, such archaeolatric notions have been turned into something of an archaeopolitical regime: that is, a realm where antiquity becomes an instrument for politics and a yardstick for public control, manipulation, and sorting. These projections of the past invariably focus on appropriately patriarchal readings of ancient Greek society, engendered and embodied in ways modern ethno-nationalist, exceptionalist, and racist ideologies would approve of. These readings are inevitably hostile to queer readings of the past, even if these seem to make actual historical sense.
This paper discusses how Greek society is being conditioned to accept an archaeopolitical template for itself through an academically outmoded, through culturally still appealing model for ancient Greece and its classicality.
John Champagne (Pennsylvania State University), ‘The Italian Vice, Rethinking the Role of Italy in the Invention of Modern Male Homosexuality’
In late 19th and early 20th century Europe, discursive accounts of male homosexuality, whether produced by sexologists, self-identified ‘Uranians,’ novelists, jurists, journalists, German masculinists like Adolf Brand, or homosexual rights activists like JA Symonds, invariable referenced ancient Greece and Rome. These efforts were undergirded by a broader ‘Hellenic’ revival that cut across such disparate cultural regimes as Winkelmann’s aesthetics, Great Britain’s Oxford Movement, and French and Russian Symbolist theory and practice.
Unfortunately, the ubiquity of this neo-Hellenism has played an overdetermining role in accounts of the history of modern male homosexuality, fostering what George Chauncey has identified as two false dogmas: that homosexuality was the invention of German sexology; that modern homosexual culture was the product of wealthy bourgeois privileged white men. Both of these dogmas effectively erase the participation of working-class men in modern homosexual culture, evidence of which can be found, albeit not in the archive queer theory has typically referenced. This erasure has been aided by the wide range of texts produced by the numerous bourgeois white male artists—writers, painters, and photographers – who traveled to Italy in search of both the remnants of antiquity and male same-sex love. Both these ‘primary’ texts and subsequent analyses of them by modern critics such as Robert Aldrich have however inadvertently produced a history of modern homosexuality that treats Italy as its object but not its subject. That is, many accounts of modern male homosexuality imply that it was brought to Italy by privileged European gentlemen who availed themselves of sex with Italian young men and boys whose own longstanding patterns of queer life were treated as residual or primitive – a status confirmed by the racial identity of Italians as non-white and even ‘Oriental.’
Recent work in Marxist queer theory, however, has suggested an alternative way of understanding the history of modern male homosexuality – one attentive to capitalism’s long durée in the Mediterranean region. This work seeks to restore to the history of modern male homosexuality its working-class origins and recenters that history on Italy. After briefly discussing how and why Chauncey’s two dogmas came to dominate queer theory’s account of modern male homosexuality, this talk will first propose how a modern history of male homosexuality might be centered on the Mediterranean and second, the value of engaging in such a project today, given queer theory’s continuing reluctance to take up issues of class.
Date of event: 7 May 2024