5-Week SASA Reading Group: Queer Lives and Loves in Ancient History

 "Queer Lives and Loves in Ancient History" will use Queer Theory to explore and uncover evidence of LGBT+ lives in the Ancient World. The reading group will employ a variety of ancient Greek, Latin, and Near Eastern literature, recognizing the diversity of the Ancient World beyond the Mediterranean, and hypothesizing about the lived experiences beyond the Western norms of fixed sexual and gendered binary identities that have emerged only within the last few hundred years. The reading groups will each assume no specialist knowledge of the period, and so will begin with a contextualisation of the time and place in which these texts were created. We will also discuss the potential challenges of applying modern theory to ancient texts, and how using the ‘Resisting Reader’ approach can provide insightful challenges to historic interpretations of classical texts. In a time when we see transphobic and homophobic legislation and hate speech on…