From Abortion to Pederasty

FROM ABORTION TO PEDERASTY FROM ABORTION TO PEDERASTY Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom EDITED BY Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz AND Fiona McHardy THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1261-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9365-2 (cd-rom) Cover design by Juliet Williams Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Mate- rials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Editors’ Preface ix INTRODUCTION • Difficult and Sensitive Discussions NANCY SORKIN RABINOWITZ 1 ChapTER 1 • Near Death Experiences: Greek Art and Archaeology beyond the Grave TYLER JO SMITH AND CARRIE L. SULOSKY WEAVER 13 ChapTER 2 • Raising Lazarus: Death in the Classics Classroom MARGARET E. BUTLER 39 ChapTER 3 • Teaching about Disability in Today’s Classics Classroom LISA TRENTIN 53 ChapTER 4 • Teaching Ancient Medicine: The Issues of Abortion PATTY BAKER, HELEN KING, AND LAURENCE TOTELIN 71 ChapTER 5 • The “Whole-University Approach” to the Pedagogy of Domestic Violence SUSAN DEACY AND FIONA MCHARDY 92 ChapTER 6 • Teaching Uncomfortable Subjects: When Religious Beliefs Get in the Way POLYXENI STROLONGA 107 vi • CONTENTS ChapTER 7 • Too Sexy for South Africa?: Teaching Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in the Land of the Rainbow Nation SUZAnnE SHARLAND 119 ChapTER 8 • Pedagogy and Pornography in the Classics Classroom GENEVIEVE LIVELEY 139 ChapTER 9 • Challenges in Teaching Sexual Violence and Rape: A Male Perspective SAnjAYA THAKUR 152 ChapTER 10 • Talking Rape in the Classics Classroom: Further Thoughts SHARON L. JAMES 171 ChapTER 11 • Teaching the Uncomfortable Subject of Slavery PAGE DUBOIS 187 ChapTER 12 • T eaching Ancient Comedy: Joking About Race, Ethnicity, and Slavery BARBARA GOLD 199 ChapTER 13 • Difficult Dialogues about a Difficult Dialogue: Plato’s Symposium and Its Gay Tradition NIKOLAI ENDRES 212 ChapTER 14 • A World Away from Ours: Homoeroticism in the Classics Classroom WALTER DUVALL PENROSE, JR. 227 ChapTER 15 • Queering Catullus in the Classroom: The Ethics of Teaching Poem 63 MAXINE LEWIS 248 Bibliography 267 Contributors 295 Index 298 ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE 1.1 Drawing of burial from the heroön at Lefkandi. 10th c. bce 14 FIGURE 1.2 Athenian red-figure loutrophoros. c. 430 bce 23 FIGURE 1.3 South Italian funerary relief. c. 325–300 bce 25 FIGURE 1.4 Detail of Klazomenian sarcophagus. Late 6th c. bce 29 FIGURE 1.5 Reconstructed grave from Rhitsona (no. 145), Boeotia. First half of 6th c. bce 35 FIGURE 4.1 Egyptian image depicting circumcision 81 FIGURE 4.2 Roman vaginal specula 82 FIGURE 4.3 Roman fetal hook with reconstructed drawing 83 FIGURE 4.4 Equipment used for a gynecological examination. Modern speculum on the right. 84 vii Editors’ PrefacE S THE Introduction makes clear, this volume grows out of a series A of conversations on pedagogy in the Classics. We want to thank all of those who participated in electronic and face-to-face conversations between the panel on pedagogy at the University of Michigan Feminism and Classics Conference in 2008 and the present publication. Their interest in questions of how to teach difficult topics was an inspiration. ix INTRODUCTION Difficult and Sensitive Discussions1 NANCY SORKIN RABINOWITZ HIS VOLUME had its beginnings at the fifth Feminism and Classics T conference, held at the University of Michigan in spring of 2008. At that time, Sharon James organized a panel on the topic of pedagogy with some of her graduate students. Her paper, which was published in Cloelia (2008), focused on teaching texts that depict rape, and she described an incident that had taken place years earlier when she was teaching a large, lecture-style mythology course. She realized that deep problems can emerge in the process of addressing such texts, especially if, as in her case, both the rape survivor and the assailant are in the room (on teaching Ovid, see Kahn 2004). In the discussion that followed her paper, participants took up the question of what we as a group of feminist scholars might do about the problem of rape. Some were so moved by the topic that we organized a round table discussion entitled “Teaching Rape Texts in Classical Litera- ture: Activism, Pedagogy, and the American University” at the next annual meeting of the American Philological Association (APA). The open format of that event allowed us to identify others interested in the problem and to keep the issue of teaching rape on the agenda of the Women’s Classical Caucus. Internationally, we took the conversation to the British Classical Association with a roundtable discussion in Glasgow in 2009. 1. I would like to thank Eugene O’Connor for his vision and encouragement, the anonymous reviewers for their help and suggestions, and Fiona McHardy and Corinne Bancroft for their careful reading and commentary. 1 2 • INTRODUCTION As a result of the email correspondence, in the fall of 2009 members of the Women’s Classical Caucus began the process of expanding the dialogue to include other topics that seemed to be as important and as difficult to discuss. Thus arose a panel entitled “How to Manage Difficult Conversa- tions in Classics Classrooms” at the Classics Association of the Atlantic States. Finally, the proximate cause and kernel of this current volume was an APA panel in 2011 called “Teaching Difficult Subjects in the Classics Classroom.” In this collection of essays, we address potentially politically divisive topics such as race, sexual orientation, and abortion, as well as those topics that might arouse emotional as well as political anxiety, such as rape, sex, and death. We recognize that these categories overlap and intersect; for instance, rape and sexuality are closely related to current political debates. The conversations we have been having within Classics should be placed in the context of two larger discourses both nationally and internationally. First, scholars have noticed the “crisis in the Humanities” for at least fifty years—J. H. Plumb edited a book with that title in 1964—and perhaps even as long ago as Aristophanes’ attacks on Socrates. In the 1990s the conservatives in the academy mocked the “politically correct” left wing for its insistence on changing the curriculum; William Cain analyzes Gerald Graff’s argument that theories that denied “‘that poetry asserts anything or makes propositional truth claims’ had worsened the plight of humanists, who had defined themselves in a manner that separated them from ‘the everyday demands of objectivity and public reality.’ . If humanists shunned making claims for the knowledge that the arts offer, . then they could hardly complain, Graff stated, when their activities were regarded as ornamental and, at bottom, trivial” (Cain 1994: xxiii, citing Graff 1970: xiv).2 There has been a shift in nomenclature, the term “culture wars” and talk of political correctness have ebbed, but much remains the same (Cart- ledge 1998: 17). Indeed, the attacks have intensified with the corporatization of the academy, by which I mean the involvement of corporations in every aspect of the schools, including: the big-business of testing, the privatization of education, the dominance in universities of attitudes borrowed from business board rooms. In this context, the Humanities and the liberal arts seem useless; the fundamentally anti-intellectual arguments from the corporatization of the academy (Clegg and David 2008; Tuchman 2009; Schrecker 2010: esp. chapters 6, 7) are accompanied by demands for direct lines from education to employment, assessment to demonstrate the value of the lib- 2. See Gubar and Kamholtz (1993) for a summary of the impact of those wars, though more on English departments than on Classics. RABINOWITz, “DIFFICULT AND SENSITIVE DISCUSSIONS” • 3 eral arts (with talk in the faculty of the need to show “value added”). The cuts in Humanities departments’ staff and funding are clear evidence of the effects of this situation.3 In an article about English literary study, Mark Eaton has this to say: “Ironically, the justification for reading literature is articulated more and more frequently in terms of a set of skills rather than a body of knowledge. English departments are now heavily invested in teaching writing, and many students encounter literary texts only in writing courses” (Eaton 2001: 313). In January of 2012, President Barack Obama unveiled his new education thinking; his plan “calls for linking federal aid not only to net price increases but to whether colleges provide ‘good value’ to students—a ‘quality education and training that prepares graduates to obtain employment and repay their loans’” (Nelson 2012). This demand is very chilling—especially given the problems in the global economy. Second, the liberation movements of the 60s, with their accompanying attention to racial diversity in the student body, also led to the demand for more relevant courses. As a result, the curriculum has been a site of cultural and political contestation.4 The Classics in particular have been attacked from the left, as being not only a mausoleum of dead white male authors but also for the discipline’s role as the gate keeper to the halls of power— keeping women and people of color out (though this has been less and less true since 1950; see Cartledge 1998; Hardwick and Stray 2008: 1–11; Stray 1998; duBois 2010a). The function of Classics, as defined and critiqued by Seth Schein, “to legitimate a social order and a set of institutions, beliefs, and values that are commonly associated with western civilization and ‘our’ western cultural heritage” (Schein 2008: 75), and its role as a status marker, have exacerbated our problems (Stray 1998: 40).

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