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Why do we use Our Words to Study Antiquity? · Lambda: the LGBT in Antiquity Podcast

• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Lambda, the LGBT and Antiquity Podcast, your home for all things LGBT in the ancient world.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Dominica Raven, and today we're going to ask why is it important for us to use our own words when we study the past?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's become something of a point of contention among some corners of classical scholarship that words like homosexual or demisexual or transsexual simply did not exist in antiquity, so why should we use them to describe something today?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, this problem is not unique to the study of queer history.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Classicists use all sorts of words to describe situations, individuals, things, and ideas that don't have a common counterpart in antiquity.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: We use words which represent a frame of reference which allows us to make some sense of what we observe.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Neither the Greeks nor the Romans had socially imagined theoretical constructs like functionalism or structuralism or facult to help them describe what they were saying.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Technically speaking, they didn't have an idea of capitalism, Marxism, or even feudalism, or really any economic system which dominates so much of our current discourse today.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: This has led some scholars to question whether there was even capitalism in antiquity at all.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of these ideas finds their root in the Enlightenment, not even the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, but are true products of modernity.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Anytime we use one of these models to describe anything at all in antiquity, to describe mythology, or even describe the economic conditions that did exist, we are ascribing a modern world system to the past and imposing an order on it in our phrases, terms, constructs, and theoretical models that make sense to us and help describe what's going on, but don't actually have counterparts in antiquity.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody really has much trouble accepting that the pictoral turn or the sensory turn were not meaningful fields of inquiry, even until the last few decades.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is when we try to do the same with queer models, now we have a problem.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not even the only double standard at work here.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: While the word homosexual is not really a Greek or Latin word, that does not stop Christian, Jewish, and indeed homophobic classicists from using these words derogatorily against us and pretending like they're describing the past.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that a translation of Scripture, which translates from the Greek, containing the word homosexual, but only in the context of it being a monstrous sin, an abomination, a Leviticus thing, that's acceptable.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, these translated volumes form the bedrock of most Christian attacks on queer people today.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: However, the word homosexual simply is not in the Bible.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: As our classicists remind us, the word was not used in antiquity, it's not in the Bible, it didn't exist in Greek or Latin or Hebrew, and modern uses of phrases like sodomite are definitely not present in the original source languages.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: So it's totally fine to use a literal Greek or Roman document to attack homosexuality and general queerness, but the minute you start using queerness to describe somebody that looks or acts like you, well, suddenly something unreasonable has occurred.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: While this trajectory has lessened over the last few decades, given the state of the world today, there are a lot of people emboldened to continue making these truly absurd claims and double standards when they're used to attack queer people.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it's totally fine because queer people are evil and unreasonable.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're going to try to discuss today, why it's actually important for us to continue using our own terms to describe our experience in antiquity.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, we are able to discuss a much wider range of gender and sexuality.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: When we look at the history of the way classicists and historians have addressed homosexuality and gender in the ancient records, we really do see these parallel trends in archaeology and classical studies.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: In some eras, people are edited out entirely.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: They would literally look at a document which has references to homosexual acts, take out their magic markers, and cross it out completely.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: In some other eras, people would edit it in such a way to make it reflective of heteronormative values.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Translations and discussions could actually twist the vernacular of ancient Greek and Roman authors to say, I am in love in a totally heteronormative way.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Some authors would even leave the Latin stand as it was so that only more advanced students who were capable of reading it in its original source could interpret it and see the profanity that lied within.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: There definitely were things like profanities, insults, and off-color humor that were written in the ancient world that people didn't believe were appropriate for civilized society in the era they were working.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: However, editing out homosexuality persisted far longer than the off-color jokes and insults.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: People were comfortable editing homosexual out of the past until the mid-20th century.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Beyond this imperious violence directed at many minorities that was practiced against our forebearers, there is a very narrow, restrictive description of the queer experience.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: In the 19th century, German psychologists starting using the word homosexuality to describe basically anyone who is not entirely straight.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Eugenics crusaders took these ideas and used them to justify mutilation, execution, and forced sterilization.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Many of the same men who would advocate the destruction of this homosexual menace would also commodify it, get research papers out of it, and use their station to abuse people in the past, as well as the present.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Nowhere is this more evident than in the works of that same eugenics crusader who might have had to say that all the gays must be eugenicized, then devoted an entire book to studying eunuchs and the myth of Attis, commodifying them in antiquity.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's Sir Fraser, the author of the Golden Bough, whose work remains widely cited to the present day, and reflects very clearly the double standard directed against studying queer people in antiquity.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's important to bear in mind that when we read through such documents today, any man who shared even the barest amount of interest in another man was a homosexual.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that a person might be interested in the same sex, and also the opposite sex, was completely outside the pathology that was homosexuality at the time.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: When you do get references to female homoeroticism, and they are very few and far between, they always follow the same pattern.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: The concept that people might experience different types of desires or explore different combinations of desires was completely outside of their frame of reference.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Beyond this, acts of gender nonconformity were often linked with homosexuality.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: The act of being gay was part of an act of gender nonconformity, so any act of gender nonconformity implied an act of homosexuality.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: So during this period, outsiders pathologized gender and sexuality and homogenized all queer people who really just had one of two groups.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Later, towards the turn of the century, as the idea of transgender really starts to take shape, many of the first modern gender reassignments occurred, but we're still talking about a medical pathology, a mental disorder that shapes physical activities.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to be sure, a mental disorder is technically better than a monstrous satanic act of sodomy, but not by much, and we basically only get outsiders discussing gender and sexuality that they do not take part in in this era.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, contrast this with the study of queer people today.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Today we use our own words to describe our desires, interests, combinations, sexualities, and genders.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: There is a reason that many of the words we use today aren't that old, because we weren't able to describe our own sexualities until very recently.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now that we're able to describe our own desires and our own gendered expressions, our ways of understanding sexuality and gender have proliferated.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Add to this that back in those days, a psychologist's clinical note might be compared with another psychologist's note.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Today we can interact with other queer people around the world with MySpace, Tumblr, DeviantArt, all manner of online support groups, gaming communities, help communities, dating apps, all sorts of opportunities to engage that didn't exist.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're also able to communicate with one another, and when we do, we realize that our desires are not necessarily unique to us.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: There are other people in this world who experience their sexuality and gender in ways not dissimilar from our own.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: This proliferation of identities has truly revolutionized the way we discuss gender and sexuality today and in the past, where we once might have heard of a person's desires in their gendered expressions and assumed they were talking about a gay man, today we can explore a wide variety of options for what is actually going on.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: We can explore the possibilities rather than being bound to what an outsider thinks or has assumed based upon a caricature of gender and sexuality.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: People can discuss what's happening from many angles.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Let's explore the character of Achilles, the greatest and most powerful hero since Heracles.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: In Homer, Achilles is often shown with their beloved companion Patroclus.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: When Achilles is insulted by Agamemnon, both of them stay back at the camps.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Then Patroclus can take it no longer, having watched so many Greeks die and be slaughtered on the plain.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: He puts on Achilles' armor and charges the Trojan ranks.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: In the immediate confusion, most of the Trojans thought it was Achilles, and the Greeks were able to regain the upper hand.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, Patroclus and Hector duel, and Hector, the greatest hero of all the Trojans, kills Patroclus.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: This sets Achilles into incredible grief.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Within Achilles there is this image that goes far beyond a standard hero mourning a comrade and lamenting at their death.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: In Achilles we get something that seems to resemble a much deeper connection than a standard heteronormative brother at arms.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Many ancient authors after Homer took this as clear proof that Achilles and Patroclus were in fact lovers.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't technically knowable within the confines of the works of Homer.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: We can interpret it either way, and it makes logical sense.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: But later Greek and Roman authors made it absolutely clear that Homer intended for them to be lovers and battlefield companions.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: So here we have a representation of two homosexual men, or at least that's what these other scholars would have interpreted.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not that simple.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Achilles represents a much larger combination of gender and sexuality than immediately meets the eye.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: But Achilles had other relationships throughout their life.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Prior to the Trojan War, Achilles was living in the house of Lycomedes on Sciros, where they had a long-term relationship with Diadamia, and the two of them had a child named Neoptolemus.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: This child grew up and joined the Trojan War after Achilles had been killed.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: When we look at this relationship between Achilles and Diadamia, it's clear that Achilles has a deep romantic affection for this woman.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we can see from these two examples that Achilles definitely does have powerful relationships for men and for women too.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: So are we meant to interpret Achilles as some kind of bisexual?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, it's not even remotely that simple.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Achillead tells the story of Odysseus and Diomedes going to the island of Skyros to recruit Achilles to fight the Trojan War.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: There was this prophecy that if Achilles should fight, they would not survive the Trojan War but would achieve fame and glory which would be remembered for all time.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because of this, Achilles' mother Thetis had hidden her glorious child away on this island, where they live as a maiden.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is not just a disguise either, but it represents years of time where Achilles plays all the roles a young woman would be expected to play in ancient society.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Achilles eventually falls in love with Diadamia, and they have a child together.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now if you step back and look at this, you see a person who sometimes presents as a male, and sometimes as a female, and pursues men sometimes, and other times pursues women, and they all have appropriate places within the story of Achilles.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: So once again, neither Achilles' sexuality nor gender is as straightforward as it initially seems.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: That actually brings us to number two.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Describing the wider range of gendered and sexual experiences allows us to have more nuance in the interpretive possibilities that they represent.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because we're able to describe gender and sexuality in our own terms, we're able to see possibilities within the full range of human gender and sexual diversity.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because of this, we open up all sorts of possibilities.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just that we have a much longer acronym that we can use to describe gender and sexuality, it's that each letter in the acronym represents an interpretive possibility we can use to help interpret the past.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: At the beginning, I threw out ideas like structuralism and Marxism and capitalism, and these words certainly have a common meaning, but in the social sciences and natural sciences too, they actually mean something a lot different.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: They represent interpretive frameworks we can use to better understand the past.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: If we approach, for example, a world system through a purely capitalist lens, we would get one specific image of what Greece or Rome was like, which is markedly different than if we focused on a Marxist form.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: And both of these systems reflect large-scale dynamics of economics and politics and aren't necessarily interested in the day-to-day lives of individual people.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we might use anthropology or sociology to better understand the mythology and how people approach the ritual environments that they move through throughout their lives.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of these represents a theoretical framework that can be used to answer research questions and to explore what has survived from the past.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Theory allows us to work with what has come down to us from antiquity in different ways.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's what queer studies actually allows us to do.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of our many possibilities of sexualities and gender represents a slightly different interpretive framework and a slightly different set of ideas that reflect a range of gender and sexuality.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: So much like using different theoretical approaches, this actually allows us greater interpretive flexibility.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because we're able to use our own words to describe things, we're able to explore more of what has come down to us.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: On this show, we've discussed Dionysus a few times before.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus represents one queer enigma after another, one that in ancient or modern times truly defies explanation.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: We devoted an episode to detailing how Dionysus' sexuality and gender are beyond any description of queerness.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: For a quick review, Bacchus is capable of showing five different gendered representations, and never actually feels the need to land for any length of time on any one of them.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: When Dionysus appears as the bearded older Bacchus or the Roman father Liber, we have an image of a masculine figure.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now it may be a fairly young prince, but this is a discrete masculinity.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus can also be shown as a young effeminate male figure, too.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is particularly common in a lot of artistic representation on pottery during the classical period.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Nonos of Panopoulos Dionysiaca includes a lot of representations of the young prince, Dionysus.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus can also manifest a masculine femininity as well, most visibly seen at the time when Dionysus was described as a tomboyish imp and lived for this as much of their youth.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's often difficult to differentiate the womanish man and the mannish woman when they appear in art.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yet there are representations where Dionysus does take the form of a feminine woman, such as the Latin figure Libera or the native Italian deity of the fruit cheese, called Pomona.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Throughout it all, Dionysus is thought of as an androgynous being, a melting of these four possibilities into all sorts of combinations, which would be difficult to contextualize, so the Greeks labeled them androgynous, which we might as well use genderqueer.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's actually another element which we didn't get to in that episode.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus is a deity, and there are always multiple representations and multiple stories where Dionysus is meant to be interpreted as some kind of intersex.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: One tradition has Dionysus being born, placed upon Zeus's throne, then immediately attacked by Titans, who destroy the infant by ripping them apart.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Then the heart of the baby is rescued by Athena, and here's where most versions of the story have Zeus eating the heart and then resiring Dionysus through the human woman Semele.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: However, there's another version where Rea Chibalae rediscovers all the dismembered components, connecting Dionysus back together, reattaching them into their deity form, and replacing the heart which reanimates Dionysus.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: However, there is one part Rhea could not find, the sexual organs.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: This reanimated Dionysus, who's often called Zabasios, or the Phrygian Dionysus, no longer has any sexual organs to speak of.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Another story sees Dionysus going to the underworld to retrieve their mother Semele, and as payment, Dionysus must surrender their sexual organs.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you see in these two stories, Dionysus is presented as somebody without the key defining sexual characteristics.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now suddenly all of those five gendered combinations appear slightly differently than they did before.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, as for their sexuality, we discuss Dionysus as a demisexual because though there are ubiquitous images and narrative descriptions of Dionysus being surrounded by heightened hypersexuality, Dionysus is rarely shown to partake in any kind.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus takes a long time to make connections, but once they do, these are powerful connections that last forever.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus has known sexual relations with Ampelos, a satyr who is eventually transformed into the grapevine.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Ampelos' own gender is less straightforward as they were called the bride of Bacchus, but that's too much to get into here.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Dionysus formed powerful connections with Opheltes during the Bacchic War in Asia.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: When Opheltes was killed, Dionysus built the largest funeral pyre and the largest funeral mound ever built in the history of the world to remember their love by.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Bacchus fell in love with Ariadne, who was a female, but not a traditionally feminine type of female.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, she was a woman who followed her own desires, made her own plans, wed according to what she was looking for in life, and not the will of her father.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: So with just a few examples, we really do see how Dionysus' sexuality is much less straightforward than it initially seems.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: As you can see, conventional understanding of Dionysus representing a gay man is not necessarily the most accurate way to think about this figure.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: We can engage with Dionysus through demisexuality, umbrella queerness, through bisexuality, pansexuality, and we can engage with Dionysus' gender through gender nonconformity, intersex, or even transgender lens.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, if we were to interpret Dionysus as transgender, which direction would be most accurate?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: Should we see Dionysus as an AMAB figure who habitually diverges into femininity?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: Or should we see a figure who was raised like a girl, lived like a girl during their youth, and when they became an adult, matured into a A more masculine looking figure.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: You see, either MTF or FTM are both valid ways of approaching Dionysus.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Above all, this is one of the key reasons it is important to think about the whole range of queerness represented in our own words instead of just a couple of possibilities prescribed for us by outsiders.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: When we use these interpretive frameworks correctly, we can come away with more than one interpretive possibility.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if we're doing things right, different interpretive possibilities will be valid at the same time.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: 3.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: It is important to use our own words to describe the ancient world because the ancient world is one space where queerness is visible.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: When we look at antiquity, we genuinely do get all sorts of images of love and affection.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: We get images of sapphic love, which we described last week, images of people living outside conventional gender norms.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: We get all sorts of combinations of sexualities.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's definitely not to say ancient society was open and accepting for such people.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, one of these days we're going to have to talk about the Sonatus Consultium concerning Bacchanalia, which was an episode where the Roman Senate and people induced incredible violence and slaughter on queer peoples who would not conform.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: A man might be thrown into exile, his name might be stricken from the record if people found out there was evidence for sexual duplicity.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the desires of women were truly irrelevant, and it did not matter whether a woman was interested in a man or a woman or even cared about the person she was married to.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: As we saw with Sappho, any woman's relationship could be overturned on the day the Patrafamilius made a business deal with another Patrafamilius, and the woman went off to marry in according to this business arrangement.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's not necessarily a world that's pleasant or sexually liberated for anybody, but people whose genders and sexualities did not match perfectly with heteronormative ideals were given particularly rough treatment.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Despite all of this, queer people are visible in antiquity.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: There are myths that display it, tales of heroes that feature it, and individuals living out their queerness.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: I would argue that at no point prior to the 21st century has there been such room for an exploration of sexuality and gender as there was in the ancient world, and it is within that exploration that we can see many of the same things that we today experience.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Queer historians sometimes arrive at points of discontent where a historical figure can be seen as both a butch lesbian by one group and a non-binary figure by another.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: What follows is often a tense discord where both parties accuse the other of minimizing their own identities.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: We rarely know how an individual might have understood their own gender or sexuality.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's a rare moment for someone in the past to vocalize, I feel like my gender is different than what I was raised as.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: People can explore their sexualities in many different ways, but not be able to contextualize what they're going through in every historic period.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: It is a rare moment in the annals of world history where we can actually see many of the gender identities that we actually experience today.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: For most people in most time periods, it's simply not something they could have contextualized, let alone vocalized.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, when we do use our own words to describe instances in the past where different identities, different sexualities, different gendered expressions are visible, we actually gain the ability to better interpret antiquity.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: By having this space where we're visible, we're able to understand different ways of interpreting our own genders and sexualities.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: In one episode we discussed Artemis as a lesbian figure.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: We drew on narratives from early in Artemis' history which represented their affection for other women and the implications behind some of the stories that have survived.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: In another episode we discussed Artemis as a non-binary figure who presents in the general direction of femininity, but definitely does not encapsulate feminine expectations.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than letting the overbearing factional dynamic of the turf versus trans non-binary, we were able to explore both as valid and use both as interpretive frameworks to understand Artemis and their role in Greek and Roman religion.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: Both are valid because we have such a vivid depiction of Artemis from such a wide variety of sources that survive to this day.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because of this visibility, we are able to allow some of the factional tensions to dissipate, some of the urgent need to defend my role, my gender, my sexuality, and disassociate a little bit into antiquity.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's important, of course, to see yourself, but that only gets us so far.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: The visibility allows a host of people to see themselves.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: It allows a lot of voices to speak about gender and sexuality in the ancient world and have them all be valid.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: So in conclusion, it's important for us to be able to use our own words to describe different types of gender and sexual experiences in antiquity.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because antiquity is a space where we're visible, we're able to use multiple valid interpretations to expand the possibilities, thereby describing a much wider range of gender and sexuality than we could before.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because antiquity is a space where we're visible, we're able to use multiple valid interpretations to expand the interpretive possibilities, thereby describing a much wider range of gender and sexuality in antiquity using our own terms.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: I hope everybody's LGBT History Month is going well.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you in the next episode.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: Notes and comments.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: I am recording it from a hotel room, and the acoustics are not the greatest, and we're using the old mic, so I'm sure the audio quality is much reduced from our usual format.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to add one point of clarification.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: I am definitely not suggesting we reduce complex identities into simple interpretive frameworks, thereby removing the individual lived experiences they represent.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: Identities are complex and very personal truths.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: They come through personal reflection and meditation.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a profoundly powerful thing for an individual to understand themselves in this way.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: I am merely suggesting we consider queer identities as a way to consider the myriad of materials which have come down to us.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's all for this week, folks.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you in the next episode.