Sappho’s Fraying Text[ile]s: Philology and Queer Handicraft — a Talk by Ella Haselswerdt
While the figure of the archaic poet Sappho and what little remains to us of her poetry have played an outsized role in the history of sexuality, details of her biography and the social significance of her desire for women are, in the end, impossible to recover. What, then, are the non-positivist avenues available for contemporary queer identification with Sappho? Modern fiber artists and practitioners have long used their craft and craftiness to play with and subvert normative gendered expectations, both aesthetically and politically. This talk brings the philological reception history of Sappho’s fragmentary poems about textiles and weaving together with contemporary queer and feminist handicraft to ask: What insights, material and metaphorical, into Sappho’s sensory lyric world does such a comparison provide? And what sort of light does it cast on questions of memory, marginality, labor, text and paratext, and high art and low?
Ella Haselswerdt is Assistant Professor of Classics at UCLA, with special interests in Greek tragedy and queer studies. She has authored articles on mythic landscapes and soundscapes in Greek tragedy, queer philological approaches to Euripides and Sappho, and co-edited the Routledge Handbook to Classics and Queer Theory. She is currently working on a monograph about tragic chorality as a unique mode of thinking and signification.
This talk is being held in the context of BISR’s Language Learning and Critique program, an innovative approach to classical languages and their ever-changing scenes of reception. RSVPs will receive a link to the Zoom meeting room where the talk will be held.
This talk is now available for viewing on BISR’s Vimeo page; click here to watch.
$0.00
In Stock