1st Edition

TransAntiquity Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World

    276 Pages
    by Routledge

    276 Pages
    by Routledge

    TransAntiquity explores transgender practices, in particular cross-dressing, and their literary and figurative representations in antiquity. It offers a ground-breaking study of cross-dressing, both the social practice and its conceptualization, and its interaction with normative prescriptions on gender and sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean world. Special attention is paid to the reactions of the societies of the time, the impact transgender practices had on individuals’ symbolic and social capital, as well as the reactions of institutionalized power and the juridical systems. The variety of subjects and approaches demonstrates just how complex and widespread "transgender dynamics" were in antiquity.

    Domitilla Campanile, Filippo Carlà-Uhink, and Margherita Facella, Preface



    Part 1: Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient Social and Political Space







    1. Filippo Carlà-Uhink, ‘Between the Human and the Divine’: Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Graeco-Roman World


    2.  



    3. Andrea Raggi, Cross-Dressing in Rome between Norm and Practice


    4.  



    5. Domitilla Campanile, The Patrician, the General and the Emperor in Women’s Clothes. Examples of Cross-Dressing in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome


    6.  



    7. Martijn Icks, Cross-Dressers in Control. Transvestism, Power and the Balance between the Sexes in the Literary Discourse of the Roman Empire






    8. Part 2: Ancient Transgender Dynamics and the Sacred Sphere





    9. Valerio Simini, Cross-Dressing and the Sexual Symbolism of the Divine Sphere in Pharaonic Egypt


    10.  



    11. Fiorella La Guardia, Aspects of Transvestism in Greek Myths and Rituals


    12.  



    13. Margherita Facella, Beyond Ritual: Cross-Dressing between Greece and the Orient


    14.  



    15. Chiara O. Tommasi, Cross-Dressing as Discourse and Symbol in Late Antique Religion and Literature


    16.  



      Part 3: Transgender as Subversive Literary Discourse





    17. Enrico Medda, "O Saffron Robe, to what Pass have you brought me!" Cross-Dressing and Theatrical Illusion in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae


    18.  



    19. Christian Stoffel, Declaiming and (Cross-)Dressing: Remixing Roman Declamation and its Metaphorology






    20. Bobby Xinyue, Imperatrix and bellatrix: Cicero’s Clodia and Vergil’s Camilla


    21.  



      Part 4: Transgender Myth





    22. Fabio Guidetti, The Hero’s White Hands. The Early History of the Myth of Achilles on Scyros


    23.  



    24. Alexandra Eppinger, Hercules cinaedus? The Effeminate Hero in Chri

    Biography

    Domitilla Campanile (PhD 1992) is Associate Professor of Roman History at the University of Pisa, Italy.

    Filippo Carlà-Uhink is Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK. After studying in Turin and Udine, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and as Assistant Professor for Cultural History of Antiquity at the University of Mainz, Germany.

    Margherita Facella is Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Pisa, Italy. She was Visiting Associate Professor at Northwestern University, USA, and a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Münster, Germany.

    "TransAntiquity: Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World is a volume to be welcomed. The editors have assembled a wide-ranging set of essays--stretching from Pharaonic Egypt to late antiquity - that illuminate the roles played by transgender behavior and cross-dressing in ritual and religion, myth, gender, sexuality, law, politics, oratory, and literature. There are unexpected delights in this collection and many new conversations will take their start from it."

    - Mark Masterson, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

     

    "Reasoning of disguise practices in the modern world requires complicated definitions and subcategories and cautions (...) Certainly more complicated it is still talk of disguise for the ancient world (...) The fact is that the theme has been overlooked or ill-treated by world scholars Greek almost as the perturbing nature of the practice advised him to pluck away. To overcome this kind of block, it needed a wide-ranging rethink: it now offers the Transantiquity. Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World."

    - Carlo Franco, Alias - Il Manifesto, Domenica 21.05.2017