Un-Roman Sex

Gender, Sexuality, and Lovemaking in the Roman Provinces and Frontiers

Tatiana Ivleva, Rob Collins, Tatiana Ivleva, Rob Collins

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138284029
• eBook ISBN: 9781351980432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Un-Roman Sex explores how gender and sex were perceived and represented outside the Mediterranean core of the Roman Empire.

The volume critically explores the gender constructs and sexual behaviours in the provinces and frontiers in light of recent studies of Roman erotic experience and flux gender identities. At its core, it challenges the unproblematised extension of the traditional Romano-Hellenistic model to the provinces and frontiers. Did sexual relations and gender identities undergo processes of "provincialisation" or "barbarisation" similar to other well-known aspects of cultural negotiation and syncretism in provincial and border regions, for example in art and religion? The 11 chapters that make up the volume explore these issues from a variety of angles, providing a balanced and rounded view through use of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence. Accordingly, the contributions represent new and emerging ideas on the subject of sex, gender, and sexuality in the Roman provinces.

As such, Un-Roman Sex will be of interest to higher-level undergraduates and graduates/academics studying the Roman empire, gender, and sexuality in the ancient world and at the Roman frontiers.

1 Venus’ mirror

Reflections of gender and sexuality in the Roman Empire

Tatiana Ivleva and Rob Collins

Introduction: gender and sex on display

Un-Roman Sex is intended to contest the current state of scholarship on Roman gender and sexuality, as well as to promote an agenda that increases the visibility and impact of evidence from the Roman provinces and frontiers by utilising material culture beyond its current role of illustrating textual analyses.

The first goal of the volume is to introduce gender and sexuality as appropriate variables of historical and archaeological analysis of the Roman provinces and frontiers through a number of case studies that map the complexity of gender and sexual identities within the Roman Empire. Long-standing interest in these subjects by Classicists (see below) has largely bypassed Roman archaeologists of the provinces and frontiers. Whenever references are made within Classical scholarship to the data outside the Mediterranean basin, they are either incomplete, superficial, or even misguided. For example, Skinner (2014: 269) observes that in Roman culture “sex was […] unashamedly on display”, but primarily refers to Mediterranean evidence. Thus, Un-Roman Sex is a response to John Clarke’s (2003) Roman Sex: 100 B.C. to A.D. 250, where he explores the range of sexual representations and texts alluding to the sexual activities, using the examples limited to the Mediterranean region. Sexual imagery also pervaded the provinces, as evidenced by the numerous archaeological discoveries of objects bearing depictions of phalluses or sexual scenes. Provincials, too, were surrounded by sex and sexual imagery, but there is no comprehensive informed volume that tackles this issue. There is a remarkable silence on the topic, and it is time to make some noise.

The second goal of the volume is to chart the perceptions of sexualities in provincial and peripheral settings through application of wide-ranging methodologies, some of which are imported or imposed models and paradigms established through the Classics, others are introduced for the first time. In this regard, Un-Roman Sex is a starting point for archaeologists of the Roman imperial period, especially those working outside of the Mediterranean basin, to engage with Roman sexuality via the material culture of the era. While not denying the significant contributions made through Classical scholarship, the volume acknowledges that the strengths, benefits, and limitations of archaeological evidence are different from those of texts and “fine” art. Given the sheer quantity of archaeological material from the Roman imperial period, found inside and outside the Roman Empire, there are thousands of objects that have great potential to contribute to our understanding of sexuality in this period. Furthermore, paradigms and models built on texts or fine art will always be biased toward the elite, those Mediterranean-based classes of the 1st centuries B.C. and A.D. that are not broadly representative of the population of the wider empire across space or time, though there are some notable exceptions (Kamen and Levin-Richardson 2015a, 2015b). Therefore, any desire to formulate any model(s) of Roman sexuality that has a basis in evidence outside of 1st-century A.D. Italy must engage with archaeological data.

The third goal of the volume is to explore how genders and sexualities in the provinces and frontiers may or may not have differed from that of the Mediterranean basin. The Roman Empire consisted of more lands and peoples than those of the Italian peninsula, and each new conquest brought new societies into the imperial fold. Roman culture, due in large part to the gross dominance of imperial politics and economics, was often advantaged in new territories incorporated into the empire, a process generally encapsulated by the term “Romanisation”. Romanisation, however, was not unilateral or universal; reception of various aspects of Roman culture was discrepant for individuals in provincial and barbarian societies (Webster 2001; Mattingly 2004, 2006, 2011; Revell 2009, 2015, 2016; Eckardt 2014). If we are to understand the constructions of gender and sex identities outside Roman Italy, the limitations of Latin authors proselytising an elite androcentric view on sexuality must be acknowledged, especially when sex identity may be deeply enshrined in cultural context and upbringing, which meant “non-elite” and “non-Mediterranean” for a vast proportion of the population of the Roman Empire. How were Roman norms and expectations of sexuality met in these societies, and how did local custom contest, mitigate, or give way to the metropolitan-Mediterranean elite culture of the ruling classes of the early Roman Empire?

This volume, therefore, examines the subject of human sexuality and gender variability at the edge of the Roman world, presenting a divergence or alternative to the dominant Romano-Hellenistic model of sex and erotic experience. By developing approaches to the study of ancient gender and sexuality in the provincial setting, it provides whenever possible a view that is grounded in a perspective of the cultures comprising the Roman Empire. Additionally, Un-Roman Sex is an important-yet-neglected topic in elucidating the processes contributing to the political and cultural incorporation of the provinces in the Roman Empire. The juxtaposition of multiple cultural views on sex impacts on the formation of social relations and gender dynamics. Our desire is also to introduce a new set of evidence comprising epigraphic and material culture sources and with their help point to future directions of research that will ultimately lead to enhancing our view of provincial sexuality and gender dynamics. Before introducing our contributors, however, it is necessary to provide a broad-brush review of the topics’ development in both Classical and Roman provincial scholarship. For decades, Classical studies conducted intensive discussions and dissections of sexuality and gender, but these subjects have barely surfaced as methodological or theoretical concerns in Roman archaeology. The following section aims to explore the reasons why.

“We may have lost the battle, but not the war”: sexuality and identity wars in classical and Roman provincial scholarship

Starting in the 1970s, the Classics has experienced the “sexuality wars”, and in the closing decades of the 20th century and early decades of this century, Roman archaeology has experienced its own revolution fighting through “Romanisation and identity wars”.

Classicists’ interest in the topic can be dated to 1978 when Kenneth Dover’s volume, Greek Homosexuality, was published, providing the first step in a new direction of scholarship of ancient sexual activities and desires. Directly building upon Dover’s work, Foucault’s original French-language text and its immediate English translation of History of Sexuality provided a new paradigm for the topic in two volumes (1985[1984], 1986[1984]), resetting the foundation of ancient sexuality in the 1980s. The volumes clearly stated that sexuality as a category is very much a product of modernity invented over the course of the 19th century. Significantly, this meant that the concept itself, and other categories deriving from it, such as the binary division of homosexuality and heterosexuality, were not applicable to Greek and Roman cultures, as those societies thought with their own categories (Holmes 2012: 80). It is the teasing out of these categories that gave rise to the study of gender and sexuality among Classicists. Yet, the emergence of strong, even vehement disagreements has been referred to as the “sexuality wars” with debates circling around historicising Greek and Roman sexual taxonomies. At the heart of the debate is whether these ancient taxonomies are limited to specific historical formations, or if they have any utility for understanding modern categories of sexuality, providing analogies for non-conformative (marginalised, non-heterosexual) individuals (Skinner 1997; Flemming 2010: 799; Holmes 2012: 82, 93, 109; Chapter 11). Having reached the second decade of the 21st century, “the ancient sexuality wars are […] over” for Classical scholarship (Ormand and Blondell 2015: 3), with a consensus on “making resonant, effective connections between the past and the present” with contextualised historical analysis (Holmes 2012: 110; Masterson et al. 2015a: 7). This holistic approach to exploring both emic and etic categories of past and present sex and gender systems allows us to transcend the rhetoric inherited from modern binary divisions, making the scholarship value-free, inclusive, and impartial (Ormand and Blondell 2015: 15).

In contrast, for Roman provincial and frontier scholarship, the wars were fought over the Romanisation and identity paradigms. The prominence of both themes, which were developed in parallel to each other, can be connected with the growing dissatisfaction of the unilateral imperialism of the traditional Romanisation paradigm that dominated Roman archaeology through the course of the 20th century. In this paradigm the inhabitants of various provinces were seen as adhering and emulating (elite and civilised) Roman cultural norms and practices, to the best of their abilities. Emerging in the post-colonial thought of the later 1990s, the debate on the redefinition or abandonment of the term “Romanisation” has been sustained into recent years (on the debate see Webster 2001; Mattingly 2004, 2011; Hingley 2005; Schörner 2005; Gardner 2013), but a theoretical and conceptual vacuum was created within which “identity” took centre-stage. This concept provided enough space for the development of different perspectives on the interaction between Roman and indigenous societies, “liberating Roman archaeology from the Roman-native dichotomy, encouraging research into regional, sub-ethnic, gender, and class identities” (Pitts 2007: 693). Yet, the growing interest in this research theme rather quickly backfired as identity started to be regarded as a substitute and synonym for the “R-word”, which led to it being studied for its own sake with research mainly focusing on cataloguing various types of identities and the way they can be determined from the archaeological record (on the debate see, among others, Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Insoll 2007; Pitts 2007; Revell 2009; Versluys 2014). The term became overused in Roman archaeology, and a quest to move beyond it is well underway, with the term “globalisation” now acquiring a prominent spot in Roman provincial studies but not in Roman frontier ones (Hingley 2005; Mattingly 2011; Gardner 2013; Naerebout 2014; Pitts and Versluys 2015; but see Eckardt 2014). This paradigm provides an all-inclusive, non-binary understanding for any sort of developments occurring in the provincial milieu, ranging from direct inter-provincial relationships to more complex networks concurrently working at multiple scales such as intra-provincial, inter-provincial, core-periphery, and diffused centralities.

In short, the Classicists’ sexuality wars have rarely surfaced within Roman provincial disciplines. Yet, while it seems that provincial archaeologists have not participated in this sexuality and gender discourse, they have not remained completely silent on the subject.

The last three decades of scholarship fought hard for the inclusion of gender matters into mainstream Roman provincial discourse. These developments can be attributed to the pioneering and groundbreaking work of female scholars Eleanor Scott, Lindsay Allason-Jones, and Carol van Driel-Murray for gender, and Catherine Johns for sexual imagery. The appearance of the gender question in Roman provincial scholarship is tied up with the arrival of a new conference platform in the 1990s: the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC), initiated by Eleanor Scott. This was the place where controversial topics and ideas could be raised, promoted, and openly discussed without the danger that the researchers would be stigmatised or ridiculed (Scott 1993; Revell 2010; van Driel-Murray and Allason-Jones, personal communication). The work of these female scholars has generated a wide-ranging literature on topics such as the presence of women and children in Roman military camps and soldiers’ marriage and/or cohabitation rights and practices (Allason-Jones 1995, 1999, 2004, 2005; van Driel-Murray 1995, 1997, 1998; James 2006). At first glance, it seems that these developments in Roman provincial archaeology chronologically coincided with a rise in publications on gender and sexuality in Classics, but also with the growth of post-processual thought in Roman archaeology in general (Revell 2010: 2). However, these developments were not direct outcomes of these processes. According to Carol van Driel-Murray and Lindsay Allason-Jones (personal communication), they were never consciously seeking to engage with gender studies or post-processual theoretical archaeology. They were driven down the path of looking for women in the archaeological record for a number of simple reasons. First, there was the emerging professionalisation of artefact studies and specialists beyond the utilitarian application of small finds for dating archaeological contexts (Lindsay Allason-Jones, personal communication). Second, numerous assemblages of female-associated finds on Roman-period sites led them to realise that women needed to be put back into the picture—and exploration of exactly what women were doing on a particular site logically followed identification of their presence (Carol van Driel-Murray and Lindsay Allason-Jones, personal communication). Third, the androcentric biases and presumptions in reading the small finds also contributed to the urgency to tackle the issue of the gendered meaning behind specific artefacts or assemblages, making Lindsay Allason-Jones enquire as to what constitutes a typical military assemblage (Allason-Jones 1995, 1999). In short, scholars of the traditional frontier narrative required that the presence of women and children had to be proven rather than assumed, and now most scholars at least acknowledge their presence within the confines of military communities even if there are still debates about where women and children resided (Hodgson 2014; Le Bohec 2017).

Yet, those studies that placed women firmly within the annals of frontier and provincial histories have primarily focused on the methods of identifying women in the archaeological record (Allison 2006, 2007, 2009, 2013; Tomas 2011) and the investigation of women’s roles in various provincial societies, especially in the Roman military (Stoll 2006; Brandl 2008; van Driel-Murray 2008; Greene 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2017; Foubert 2013; Hemelrijk and Woolf 2013; Tomas 2015; Klein 2017; van Enckevort 2017; Vanhoutte and Verbrugge 2017; Juntunen 2018; Ivleva Forthcoming). Though informative and important, these studies have only constituted the data and phenomena to be documented and discussed, inhibited by the persistent and constant barrier that the presence of women had to be proven. This has constrained opportunities to engage with wider theoretical frameworks on gender and broaden the perspectives for exploring various gender categories, sexuality, and embodiment distinct to the provinces (Revell 2010). The current problems for the study of gender in Roman provincial circles can be summarised as an “add women and stir” approach (borrowing from Knapp 1998: 368).

Sex and sexuality are also found in mainstream Roman scholarship of imperial expansion, but explored through the themes of colonialism, subjugation, and power. Whittaker (2004: 115–43) and Mattingly (2011: 94–121) highlight how the terminology and imagery of sex is employed to speak about imperialism and domination, such that sexuality and sexual exploitation are formative for the construction of power relations and the subjugation of the native population. Indeed, for the Romans, sex was yet another weapon in the armoury of imperial conquest and expansion. Roman authors wrote about sexual violence in the provinces and the rape of the captives to underscore the power of Roman soldiers, and thus the imperial armies (Phang 2001:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1. Venus’ mirror: reflections of gender and sexuality in the Roman Empire
• PART I: Seeing (beyond) sex
• PART II: Representations and performance of the feminine (or is it?)
• PART III: The stuff of “man”
• Index