TransAntiquity by Campanile, Domitilla; Carlà-Uhink, Filippo; Facella, Margherita;

Short description:

Explores transgender practices, in particular cross-dressing, and their literary and figurative representations in antiquity. It offers a comprehensive study of cross-dressing, both of the social practice and its conceptualization, and of its interaction with normative prescriptions on gender and sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Long description:

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.

"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

Table of Contents:

Preface, Part 1: Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient Social and Political Space 1. ‘Between the Human and the Divine’: Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Graeco-Roman World 2. Cross-Dressing in Rome between Norm and Practice 3. The Patrician, the General and the Emperor in Women’s Clothes. Examples of Cross-Dressing in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome 4. Literary Discourse of the Roman Empire Part 2: Ancient Transgender Dynamics and the Sacred Sphere 5. Cross-Dressing and the Sexual Symbolism of the Divine Sphere in Pharaonic Egypt 6. Aspects of Transvestism in Greek Myths and Rituals  7. Beyond Ritual: Cross-Dressing between Greece and the Orient 8. Cross-Dressing as Discourse and Symbol in Late Antique Religion and Literature Part 3: Transgender as Subversive Literary Discourse 9. "O Saffron Robe, to what Pass have you brought me!" Cross-Dressing and Theatrical Illusion in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae 10. Declaiming and (Cross-)Dressing: Remixing Roman Declamation and its Metaphorology 11. Imperatrix and bellatrix: Cicero’s Clodia and Vergil’s Camilla Part 4: Transgender Myth 12. The Hero’s White Hands. The Early History of the Myth of Achilles on Scyros13. Hercules cinaedus? The Effeminate Hero in Christian Polemic