98 people here in the first virtual meeting of 'The Queer and the Classical' series! Going to do my best to livetweet it here...

Constanze Güthenke opens by mentioning the wide appeal of, and anticipation felt in classical and queer studies for, a series of this kind: in many ways "it's about time."

Building from the work of Critical Classics in Oxford ( @POCinClassics), co-conveners Marcus Bell & @elecollii hope to explore what kind of futures we can engender as queer studies and the classical world engage w/ each other: and, they wonder, are there ethical ways to do this?

Now our speaker for this week: Sebastian Matzner ( @ExLibrisMatzner) on "Queer theory and ancient literature: now what?" based on a reference article he wrote on queer theory and ancient literature. This is, he stresses, not a finished paper, but a springboard for open discussion.

Matzner opens with a quick live poll to see who is in the room: who are we doing this work for? who is out audience? who do we reach, or fail to reach? At this point we have 102 participants on the call.

The poll shows a pretty queer audience and a very classicist audience. For queer classicists in the room, an overwhelming majority says ancient literature and culture DID play a role into how they have grown into their queer self.

These responses spark questions: for example, how much does our own biography shape assumptions of what queer classics can do, or our perceptions of others in queer and/or classical spaces? In any case, it is clear that queerness & antiquity is an impt nexus to think about.

Matzner notes that his journey into queer Classics started with observing an "unsatisfactory separation" of ancient and modern queers. Framing affective relationships to the past as mere "misappropriations" or "misreadings" does not explain transhistorical queer communities.

Studying queerness across time led Matzner to queer unhistoricism (see Matzner's chapter on queer unhistoricism in the 2016 Deep Classics volume). Importantly, however, the topic of "queers across time" is not often studied in conjunction with "queers across cultures."

Matzner observed that the standard procedures of historical-critical work tend to stall in the face of queer frameworks: this work "pursues what's 'likely' or 'plausible' in a context, but queerness is by definition not 'likely'," and thus often flies under the academic radar.

Asked to do a reference entry on queer theory for an academic handbook, Matzner's immediate response was that this was "not queer at all": being told "how to do queer theory" runs counter to everything queer theory is about.

Matzner poses three questions to the group:
1) "My number 1 queer text in ancient literature is..."
The top answers seem to be Sappho's poetry, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Plato's Symposium. What is your number one text?

2) "What queer classics promises to me is..."
Top answers include "a better future," "freedom," "belonging," "creative texts," "bringing Classics into the modern world, helping to engage more people," "turning the world upside down so we can see it differently."

3) "What bothers me about queer classics is that..."
Top answers include "the unbearable whiteness of the entire field," "the pushback from straight/non-queer/traditional scholars against queer classics," "its inevitable trendiness," and "exclusivity."

Matzner discusses several problems w/ the rise of queer Classics, e.g., how Classics as a discipline is "late to the party" of queerness. Many implications of this lag: that queer Classics is a new phenomenon, that we must work thru a backlog of white theorists from the 90s, etc.

Ultimately, Classics' genealogical thinking about scholarship -- whose ideas matter, and why -- is a problem in queer studies as well. The idea that ~one must read their Butler and Foucault before being qualified to make interventions in the field~ is exclusive gatekeeping.

A q from Nancy Rabinowitz: "how to deal with how narrow and white the field remains? Are we trying to make the world better and happen to work on a particular body of literature to do so, or...?" She mentions ageism: the risks of being young & queer in Classics in particular.

A q from @lbarsk & Leo Kershaw about queerness' expansiveness as a category vis-a-vis the scholarly tendency to discourage "reading queerness in ancient sources": "How do you respond to those who say that applying modern understandings of queerness is anachronistic?
"

Matzner stresses the importance of co-articulations of queerness, embedded in lived experiences of particular people, instead of policing queerness within queer communities, especially along the lines of sex and gender systems alone. Wherever there are norms, there are queers.

Great discussion on queer theory as an oppositional tool, but how it nonetheless has much to gain from methods and approaches in critical race theory, e.g., Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation," to get closer to the actual phenomenology of queerness, classical or otherwise.

Leah Alpern points out that, in "straight" Classics, desire nonetheless plays a crucial role, citing Matzner's (2016) argument that all academic work deals with a sense of queer community-building across space and time. Are all scholarly engagements in the past queer then?

Matzner notes that there are places of gender ambiguity in the textual/historical record that have been not only lost, but deliberately erased or over-determined in acts of textual criticism & translation. Seemingly innocuous parts of the classical discipline involve queerness.

Alexandra Schultz ends with a question about the centrality of literature to queer classics. "What about queer archaeologies, art histories, anthropologies, etc.?" Material evidence is a sort of a "check" on what subjectivities are represented and remembered from antiquity.

A risk in queer Classics is creating a sub-canon or retreating, as is baked into classicism, into sub-disciplinary silos. A canon is perhaps the least queer thing there is.

That's it for this week! Tune in next week for Hannah Silverblank on queer assemblages in Anne Carson.