Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-nlwjb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-06T14:09:48.985Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Athenian Male Gayze: Desire and Spectatorship in Ancient Greek Tragedy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2025

WILL SHÜLER
Get access

Abstract

This article argues that an understanding of male same-sex practices in ancient Greece point towards a queer desirous spectatorship – a male ‘gayze’. Ancient tragic scholarship has often omitted discussion of male same-sex practices, despite using marriage and heterosexual social norms to elucidate meaning in text and performance. This article seeks to redress the exclusion of queer histories and perspectives from understanding tragedy in its social context. The article outlines evidence of male same-sex practices, including pederasty; relates ancient understandings of desire to the gaze; and evidences how and where young men, like those who danced in the tragic chorus, were courted and coveted. The article concludes with a case study of the chorus of young huntsmen from Euripides’ Hippolytus, read through the lens of a desirous gayze.

Information

Type
Article
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , March 2025 , pp. 57 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Federation for Theatre Research

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

NOTES

1 Dover, Kenneth, Greek Homosexuality (London: Bloomsbury, 1978, 2016), p. 1.Google Scholar Cf. Robson, James, Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Halperin, David M., ‘How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 6, 1 (2000), pp. 87–123, here p. 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Traub, Valerie, ‘The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies’, PMLA, 128, 1 (2013) pp. 21–39Google Scholar. Cf. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Hurley, Robert (London: Penguin, 1978)Google Scholar.

4 Menon, Madhavi, ‘Historicism and Unhistoricism in Queer Studies’, PMLA, 128, 3, (2013) pp. 781–6, here p. 786Google Scholar.

5 Haselswerdt, Ella, Lindheim, Sara H. and Ormand, Kirk, ‘General Introduction’, in Haselswerdt, , Lindheim, and Ormand, , eds., The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory (Edinburgh: Routledge, 2024), pp. 1–9Google Scholar, here p. 4.

6 Freeman, Elizabeth, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 95Google Scholar.

7 Jill Dolan, introduction to the second edition of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Lansing: University of Michigan Press, 2012), pp. xiv–xliv.

8 ‘Twink (Gay Slang)’, Wikipedia, at www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twink_(gay_slang) (accessed 20 July 2023). While not in all print copies of the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘twink' is an entry at OED.com with a definition which is somewhat pejorative and does not relate to age: ‘a gay man, esp. one considered to be affected, flamboyant, or feminine in appearance or manner'. Furthermore, the definition does not capture the desirous aspects of twink that the examples cited in the OED evidence, e.g. ‘“Where are the twinks, anyway? Who needs to waste a night staring at these tired old Gucci queens.” A. Maupin, Tales of City 194, 1978’, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/twink_n3?tab=meaning_and_use#12653771 (accessed 31 January 2025).

9 James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love (New York: Random House, 2007), pp. 90–3. Cf. Robson, Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens, p. 40.

10 Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love, p. 90.

11 Amin, Kadji, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 15Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., p. 15.

13 Halberstam, Jack, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), pp. 174–9Google Scholar.

14 Davidson, Greeks and Greek Love, p. 524; Dover, Greek Homosexuality, p. 6.

15 Davidson, Greeks and Greek Love, p. 545.

16 Robson, Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens, p. 46.

17 Plato, Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; first published 1994), 178c.

18 Dover, Greek Homosexuality, p. 23.

19 Robson, Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens, p. xvi.

20 Ibid., p. 64.

21 Plato, Symposium, 178a.

22 Ibid., 178d–e; cf. Xenophon, Symposium, trans. Carleton L. Brownson (London: William Heinemann, 1947); and Plutarch, Lycurus, in Plutarch, Greek Lives, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 3–41.

23 Plato, Symposium, 181c.

24 Ibid., 184a.

25 Robson, Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens, p. 66.

26 See, for example, Plutarch's Life of Solon, in Plutarch, Greek Lives, pp. 42–77, here p. 46; Cf. Robson, Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens, pp. 63–5.

27 Davidson, Greeks and Greek Love, p. 530.

28 Jennifer Larson, Greek and Roman Sexualities: A Sourcebook (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 8.

29 Andrew Lear and Eva Cantarella, Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty: Boys Were Their Gods (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 106.

30 Robson, Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens, p. 44.

31 George Devereux, The Character of the Euripidean Hippolytos: An Ethno-psychoanalytical Study (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 67, 75.

32 Ibid., p. 75.

33 James Davidson, ‘Dover, Foucault, and Greek Homosexuality’, Past and Present, 170 (2001), pp. 3–51, here p. 9.

34 Rush Rehm, Greek Tragic Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992, 1994), pp. 138–9.

35 David Wilson, ‘Music’, in Justina Gregory, ed., A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 183–93, here p. 187.

36 Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘Playing the Other: Theatre, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama’, in John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 63–96, here p. 95.

37 Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Brooklyn: Zone, 1988; first published 1972), p. 212.

38 David Wiles, Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 81.

39 Ibid., p. 203.

40 Ibid., p. 20.

41 Ibid., pp. 73, 74, 118, 125.

42 David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 19.

43 Mario Teló, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020).

44 Sarah Olsen and Mario Teló, eds., Queer Euripides: Re-readings in Greek Tragedy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

45 Haselswerdt, Lindheim and Ormand, ‘General Introduction’, p. 4.

46 David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 2.

47 Ibid., p. 2.

48 Larson, Greek and Roman Sexualities, p. 3.

49 Ibid.

50 Cf. Hanna M. Roisman, Nothing Is as It Seems: The Tragedy of the Implicit in Euripides’ Hippolytus (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefiled, 1999), p. 28; Halperin, One Hundred Years, p. 131.

51 Barbara Goff, The Noose of Words: Readings of Desire, Violence and Language in Euripides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 20.

52 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Martin Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2.43.1

53 Dover, Greek Homosexuality, p. 56, added emphasis.

54 Xenophon, Symposium, IV.12–13.

55 Cf. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, p. 54.

56 Aeschines, Against Timarchus, trans. Charles Darwin Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 135.

57 Plato, Charmides, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; first published 2005), 153d–154d.

58 Cf. Robson, Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens, p. 48, for the gymnasium as a homoerotic site.

59 Plato, Charmides, 176c–d.

60 Cf. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, pp. 54–5.

61 Davidson, Greeks and Greek Love, p. 541.

62 Xenophon, Symposium, II.3.

63 Davidson, Greeks and Greek Love, p. 541.

64 madison moore, ‘DARK ROOM: Sleaze and the Queer Archive’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 31, 1–2 (2021), pp. 191–6, here pp. 195, 196.

65 David Wilson, The Athenian Institution of Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 55.

66 Euripides, Hippolytus, trans. Mark Griffith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), ll. 51–7.

67 Ibid., ll. 108–11.

68 Cf. W. S. Barrett, ‘Commentary’, in Euripides, Hippolytos (London: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 153–420, here p. 167.

69 Richard Hawley, ‘The Male Body as Spectacle in Attic Drama’, in Lin Foxhall and John Salmon, eds., Thinking Men: Masculinity and Its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 83–99, here p. 83.

70 Alastair Blanchard, ‘Fantasy and the Homosexual Orgy: Unearthing the Sexual Scripts of Ancient Athens’, in Mark Masterson and Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, eds., Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 99–114, here p. 99.

71 Xenophon, Symposium, II.15.

72 Cf. Will Shüler, ‘The Greek Tragic Chorus and Its Training for War: Movement, Music, and Harmony in Theatrical and Military Performance’, in Victor Emeljanow, ed., War and Theatrical Innovation (London: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 3–21, here pp. 10–12.

73 Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

74 Plutarch, Lycurgus, p. 15.

75 Robson, Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens, p. 132.

76 Jay Oliver, ‘Queer Kinship in Ancient Literature’, in Haselswerdt, Lindheim and Ormand, The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory, pp. 273–86, here p. 275.

77 Sue-Ellen Case, ‘Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts’, Theatre Journal, 37, 3 (1985), pp. 317–27.

78 Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

79 Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, VC: Duke University Press, 2006).

80 Halperin, One Hundred Years, p. 9; cf. Halperin, ‘How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality’, p. 264.