Presenters:

Debby Sneed, California State University, Long Beach, Alicia Matz, Boston University, Sydney Hertz, Barnard College
”Introduction”

1. Hannah Biddle, University of Oxford
   ”Genderfluidity, Prophecy and Blindness – A Study of Tiresias”

2. Justin Lorenzo Biggi, University of St. Andrews
   ”Two Disabled Women in Epidauros: Agency, Anatomical Votives and Embodied Texts”

3. Carissa Chappell, University of California, Santa Barbara
   ”Body-Texts and the Bow: Genderqueer, Gendercrip Kinship in Sophocles’ Philoctetes”

4. Jesse Obert, University of California, Berkeley
   ”Intersex Hoplites? The Normates of Warriorhood in Archaic and Classical Crete”

5. Alexandra O’Neill, Trinity College, Dublin
   ”Recuperating Catullus’ Attis”

6. Cecily Bateman, University of Cambridge
   ”Disability, Gender and Slavery in Roman Legal Writing”

Description:

The Women’s Classical Caucus invites abstracts for the 2024 WCC panel on “Gender, Queerness, and Disability in the Ancient World.” Aristotle believed that “the female is like a deformed male” (Generation of Animals 2.737), and responding to that, papers in this panel will examine the intersections of gender, sexuality, and disability in the ancient world, broadly defined.

The composition of dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities depends on a variety of cultural narratives that can be complicated, unsettled, and re-written by disability (McRuer 2006). What is more, major feminist issues—from reproductive technologies and the particularities of oppression to the place of bodily difference and the ethics of care—are intricately entangled with disability (Garland-Thomson 2002). This panel will consider the ways that disability, as both a lived reality and a “pervasive cultural system that stigmatizes certain kinds of bodily variations,” can enrich our analyses of gender and sexuality in antiquity (Garland-Thomson 2002, p. 5), as well as how gender and sexuality complicate our understandings of disability.

This is a fruitful area of examination that has thus far been underexplored in the field of ancient studies. And yet, feminism seems to be a perfect companion to critical disability studies, as “the notion of the personal as political has been a cornerstone of the feminist and disability rights movements, and feminist disability studies scholars embrace praxis by taking the complex, lived experience of disability as a starting point for theoretical inquiry…there is also a commitment to addressing epistemic privilege and problematizing certain conceptions of authority and objectivity in the production of knowledge” (Carson 2021, p. 519). Further examination of this, in combination with queerness, reveals parallel processes in which the normative body is formed, as “the system of compulsory able-bodiedness, which in a sense produces disability, is thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness” (McRuer 2006, p. 2).

We believe, like Hirsch (1995, p. 3) that “the introduction of a disabled/nondisabled dimension into historical studies brings to light new issues not revealed by familiar categories such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, age, occupation, or rural versus urban settings.” We encourage presenters to engage deeply with feminist disability studies and crip theory, as well as with theories developed within the long history of scholarship on women, gender, and sexuality in the ancient world to consider the ways that intersectional studies reveal new means of (de)stabilizing normative concepts of the body and identity. With this panel, we will examine questions surrounding bodily autonomy and its intersectionality. Is the female gender a category of disability in antiquity? What can an analysis of the treatment of disabled, queer, and feminine bodies in antiquity contribute to modern disability and gender studies? Our goal is to extend current ideas about diversity, intersectionality, and identity and rewrite the history of the body and embodied experience in antiquity.

We invite submissions on topics such as (but not limited to):

● Analyses of the lives of disabled women in the ancient world through studies of art, literature, graffiti, legal texts, inscriptions, mortuary contexts, etc.

● Comparative analyses of male versus non-male depictions of disabled bodies in ancient societies

● The queering of disabled or non-male members of ancient societies

● The performance of disability and gender, both on stage and in daily life

● The gendering of either the ‘cared for’ or ‘caretaker’ in the ancient world

● Depictions of ancient disabled bodies in classical receptions

● Comparative approaches to the study of gender, sexuality, and disability

Works Cited:

Carson, Licia. 2021. “Feminism and Disability Theory.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy. 517-530.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2002. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal 14.3, pp. 1-32.

Hirsch, Karen. 1995. “Culture and Disability: The Role of Oral History.” The Oral History Review 22: 1-27.

McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability.