Call for Papers: Sexuality in Ancient Art

LCC Panel, 2016 SCS Meetings, San Francisco
Organizers: Bryan Burns (bburns@wellesley.edu) and Sarah Levin-Richardson (sarahlr@uw.edu)
Sponsored by the Lambda Classical Caucus

The 2016 meeting of the SCS/AIA coincides with the twentieth anniversary of Natalie Boymel Kampen’s influential edited volume Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy (Cambridge 1996). This landmark publication marked the impact of feminist perspectives on art history and classical studies with a variety of approaches to the relationship between gender, sexuality, and representation. Kampen’s volume brought new attention to the role of gender in viewership (especially women as viewers and consumers of art), to the social and political effects of the gaze, to the body as contested territory onto which social, religious, psychological, and political norms were overwritten, to ways of theorizing desire, and to later receptions of ancient sexual material. Moreover, many of the contributions bridged the scholarly divide between the interpretation of public monuments and consideration of small-scale arts and domestic scenes, demonstrating the effects that  monumental art could have on individuals and the ability of non-monumental art to help construct or destabilize larger institutions and power structures.
In this panel, we honor Kampen’s legacy by assessing the current state of scholarship on sexuality and visual representation, focusing on the progress we’ve made since the volume was published and future directions for growth. In keeping with the goals of the original volume, we seek abstracts from a variety of approaches (e.g., art-historical, archaeological, socio-cultural, literary, theoretical) and ancient Mediterranean cultures. We welcome new work on topics of importance to the original volume (the social/political implications of viewership, the gaze, the body, desire, etc.), as well as scholarship influenced by methodologies and topics that have gained visibility since Kampen’s publication, such as queer and trans theory, embodiment, affect, and culture contact.
Please send abstracts that follow the guidelines for individual abstracts (see the SCS website) by email to Deborah Kamen (dkamen@uw.edu), not to the panel organizers, by March 1, 2015. Please do not identify yourself anywhere in the abstract, as submissions will be blind refereed.