Penetration and Its Discontents: Greco-Roman Sexuality, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, and Theorizing Eros without the Wound

Abstract

These assumptions have proceeded largely from K.J. Dover's Greek Homosexuality, and the similar but theoretically much more sophisticated thesis in Foucault's work on the history of sexuality, in which Foucault argues that the notion of an identity based on "sexual orientation," so to speak, was an invention of the modern (and specifically bourgeois) culture-"homosexuality" particularly being coined in the 19 th century. 3 Sexuality for Foucault was a politically flexible category for selfunderstanding-a "technology" of culture, as it were, that has a history. 4 Thus studies of sexuality in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds have focused largely on questions of power and dominance at both individual and collective levels. David Halperin's work on 2 On the history of this consensus, as well as an important critique of its epistemology and historiographical motors, see James Davidson, "Dover, Foucault and Greek Homosexuality: Penetration and the Truth of Sex," Past and Present 170 (2001), 3-51. Davidson specifically states, however, that is aim is "not to provide a comprehensive alternative theory of Greek sexuality, so much as to examine the will to truth which insists on taking as its object of knowledge the undisclosed details of the sexual acts of a distant culture," 7.

Roman provincial sexualities: Constructing the body, sexuality, and gender through erotic lamp art

“…As such, active/passive sexual roles structured the production of selfhood, gender asymmetry, and larger socio-political dynamics. Foucault’s model has been contested on the grounds of being phallocentric, over-deterministic, and reductive because it focuses on frames of legibility (Davidson, 2007; Kotrosits, 2018). Recent scholarship also stresses that while the Romans were preoccupied with the issue of who penetrated whom, they also saw agency as an important aspect of the sexual act (Kamen and Levin-Richardson, 2015, 2014; Levin-Richardson, 2013).…”