This fascinating book seeks to reconsider the plays of Euripides (and Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae) ‘through the lens of queerness’, as part of the general objective to ‘valorize messiness and unruliness instead of restoration and reconstruction’ (p.14). 22 scholars contribute to the volume and the variety of their approaches is itself reflective of the heterogeneity of queer reading. They are looking at far more than simply sexual behaviour and orientation: anything which amounts to the transgression of societal, generic, literary and even prosodic norms can find a welcome in the house of queerness—and Euripides is nothing if not a challenger of norms.
There are queer characters—Hippolytus has two chapters devoted to him, and Pentheus’ transphobic heteronormativity makes for a compelling final chapter as the gender-bender Dionysus wreaks havoc with his mind and his body. Electra resists the identities expected of her as a woman and rubs this in with her fake pregnancy. Orestes and Pylades are pulled out of the closet in two chapters, while the figuring of Cyclops and Silenus as Zeus and Ganymede in Cyclops burlesques the Platonic elevation of pederasty (p. 212). Other characters show queerness in other ways: Medea is a queer woman on the Athenian stage as she is a non-Greek child-killer: she has submitted to societal expectations, having married and borne two sons to a Greek male, but by the end of the play she has exploded these same patriarchal power structures. In Helen, Theoclymenus is as a character underdeveloped in the binary system of Greek vs. Barbarian: he is the typical warlike tyrant as opposed to his godlike irenic sister Theonoe, while the Greek Menelaus is a barbarian in Egypt. Euripides however enjoys foiling audience expectations of barbaric tyranny, xenophobia and warlikeness by making Theoclymenus both a tyrant who kills strangers and also a host who helps his guests. Andromache is about the queer intimacy of polygynous marriage, with a delicious scene where Hermione (who is ‘queerly attached to her natal family’) accuses the Trojans of being queer for practising incest and murder (p.150). Even animals can be queer: in Iphigenia at Aulis we have a ‘genderqueer deer’ in the form of a horned doe. Monsters—the serpent of Ares and the Sphinx—in Phoenissai represent a ‘key element informing theories of alterity’ (p.182).
There are also queer plays which push at generic boundaries: Rhesus is a ‘disobedient tragedy’ with its comic elements, its night scene in broad daylight, its cross-species transformation of Dolon: Trojan Women is a queer tragedy whose heroines are the ‘ordinary if pathetic collateral of war’ (p.43) and ‘objects rather than subjects’, while Heraclidai is an exercise in kitsch with its queer kinship and its fragmented plot. Sean Gurd sees the queerness of Alcestis in terms of its counter-intuitive elevation of failure: Apollo is oddly and happily grateful to his enslaver Admetus, while Alcestis chooses to die. There is queer rejection of ‘reproductive futurism’ in children being killed in Trojan Women, in Medea, in Hecuba: and in Phoenissai Antigone and Menoeceus represent the end of their family lines of Labdacids and Spartoi. Things are often queerly other than what they seem: Helen in the Helen was ‘image’ rather than reality at Troy; Ion has to pretend to be the bastard son of Xuthus, staying in the ‘political closet’ (p.126). In Bacchae, Tiresias and Cadmus cross-dress, the Maenads subvert male norms, and Pentheus’ transvestite emergence on stage as a woman shows the totality of Dionysus’ control.
Literary queerness is found in the ‘non-binary’ status (as neither tragic nor comic) of the satyr play Cyclops, in the unruly text of Iphigenia at Aulis, in the racial muddle which lies at the heart of Ion, even (and less persuasively) in the poet's use of antilabe and metrical resolution in Orestes. The heavy use of dramatic irony is read as queer ‘because it plays with knowledge’ (p. 139): this device allows some electric moments of drama such as the sickening mad scene in Heracles, the climax to Alcestis, the recognition scene in Helen, the unpicking of the truth in Ion, the humiliation and murder of Pentheus in Bacchae. Two metatheatrical scenes show this to devastating effect: where Medea disingenuously persuades Creon and Jason to grant her wishes, and where Electra ‘plays at being a mother as if it were a drag performance’ (p.190), faking a pregnancy to lure her mother to her death. In both scenes we see a (male) actor playing a (female) actor who is deceiving apparently powerful characters into a position of submission.
Athenian tragedians exploit mythology and Rosa Andujar shows how Phoenissae enhances the role of Laius in the Theban tragedy—a point also made in Euripides’ lost Chrysippus where Laius was cursed by Pelops for raping his son Chrysippus of Elis. This play resists the ‘chrononormative’ imperative by bringing together ‘multiple generations and family branches which are kept separate elsewhere in the tragic corpus’ (p.177), creating a new reality, in which ‘Jocasta has access to an old age’ (p.178). Phoenissae ‘upsets the normativity of the tragic form—the muthos—by subjecting it to a kitschy, hypertrophic de-formation’ (p.3) with its ‘queer construction of time, power and genealogy’ (p. 13).
All Greek is transliterated and (mostly) well translated. It is surprising that more was not made of the queerness of having all female roles played by male actors, and the urge to find queerness can produce some strained readings—Heracles’ club may be just a club (for example) rather than a ‘phallic signifier’. The surprise factors of these re-readings may thus not carry universal assent, but will constantly challenge our assumptions and force us to read the text with fresh eyes.
Open access
