https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/367 Publications de Auteurs Brooke Holmes fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/851 “The Poetics of Anthropogony: Men, Women, and Children in Lucretius, Book Five” analyzes how Lucretius handles a significant problem in Epicurean accounts of the origins of humans and human culture – namely, how a species that, unlike any other, enters the world “in need of every kind of vital support” (indigus omni uitali auxilio) as Lucretius himself famously writes in an argument against a providential ordering of the cosmos, ever managed to survive. The young nurturing earth plays a crucial role in the early survival of the species, but the earth’s aging necessitates another solution. I argue that this takes the form of the early societies that Lucretius describes in a well-known but puzzling excursus at 5.1011-1027. With the rise of human society, fathers come to take on the role of the young earth in protecting children as well as women, while at the same time taking care to protect themselves through a male community. The passage thus responds not only to Epicurean ideas about justice and friendship but also obliquely addresses, through what I term “poetic logic”, questions of infancy, vulnerability, and care that are generated by the first phases of the origin narrative. mar., 14 juin 2022 11:35:03 +0200 lun., 16 oct. 2023 13:42:51 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/851 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/356 Once upon a time, the body had no sex. This is the story that has long been told about the history of the sexed body in “the West” under the influence of Thomas Laqueur’s book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, published in 1990. It has continued to be told across disciplines, despite incisive critiques of Laqueur’s use of evidence and historical analysis, most recently in Helen King’s The One-Sex Body on Trial (2013). We need to let go of this story once and for all. This article again marshals the historical evidence against Laqueur’s story alongside a critique of that story’s historiographical tropes, a critique indebted to two decades of work in queer theory and the history of sexuality on logics of alterity and affinity in narratives about the premodern past. Laqueur’s account, it is argued, relies on the mutually reinforcing support of two binaries: sex vs. gender and modern vs. premodern. By interrogating each of these binaries, the article proposes new directions in the history of the sexed body within the many traditions of knowledge and practice in dialogue with learned Greek medical texts. It is first shown that, freed from a later twentieth-century opposition of sex and gender, the evidence from the ancient Greek medical and philosophical tradition yields views of the sexed body that often bring together a commitment to sexual difference as physically embodied with a commitment to therapeutic and normative techniques of gender designed to correct for the waywardness of matter. These views, moreover, are many and diverse. The second half of the essay aims to disrupt the monolithic categories of “premodern” and “modern” by emphasizing the diasporic and non-linear nature of the reception of Greek medical texts and the complications of what Ahmed Ragab evocatively calls the “sexscape” that they produce; the importance of situating accounts of “the Greeks” within the dynamics of various historical moments, especially in the early modern period, so pivotal for Laqueur’s story; and the persistent influence of a Foucault-influenced narrative of the premodern past’s radical alterity on the history of the sexed body. The article argues for reading the complexity of the premodern past together with the complexity of our relation to that past. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:39:40 +0200 mar., 17 oct. 2023 13:31:53 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/356