Sappho’s Son(s): The Queer (Re)productive Complex across the Theater of Dionysus
Introduction: Queer and the Classical & New Terminology
This series is a follow-up on a presentation that I gave this past March at the 2022 Queer and the Classical conference “You Better Work”: Queer Labor, Queer Liberation.
The theme of the conference was my starting point — RuPaul’s song centers queer labor in musical performance while also acting prophetically towards the capitalist enterprises he’s achieved as a result from the crowning of his success (yet like Peppermint and Bob the Drag Queen, we won’t get into the fracking). These themes — queer labor, musical performance, prophetic action, capita-list enterprises, and crowned success — are all exemplified in the playwrights of fifth-century drama.
Yet Ru is not the origin of Black queer femme performance, and so I rely on the Black queer theorists who explore his popular/devil-music foremothers, particularly the jazz-blues figure of Billie Holiday. My Black queer femme co-philosopher-and-rabble-rouser Forever Moon first put me onto Angela Davis’ Blues Legacy and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holliday, which I paired with Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals to more fully consider the performer in terms of her politics (Davis), fleshiness (Musser), and storied narratives that could be crafted from her fragmentary archive (Hartman).
I find the history, mythology, and musical innovations of and around Black femme queer musical performers a fascinating parallel to consider alongside the archival fragmentation of the queer brown ancient musical performer Sappho. This consideration is definitely in concert with the talk that Emily Greenwood gave this past March around Black Sappho in reception and looking towards considering the ancient Sappho as a blues singer. It is also building on the research of Sarah Derbew — particularly her article “(Re)membering Sara Baartman, Venus, and Aphrodite” in thinking through the stagings of Black female performance in conjunction with longstanding narratives around ancient goddesses of desire.
This series is therefore looking towards the figure of Sappho and her relationship to fifth-century tragedy as a-kin to Billie Holliday and the pop-music genre — as an innovative foremother, whom others attempt to replicate. They both have many “children” in the sense of artists who are deeply influenced and swayed by their performances. Musser uses citation in lieu of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming to speak to an aspect of this phenomenon, and so I aim to seek out some of these sapphic citations from the fifth-century dramas, most especially of Euripides.
Billie Holliday has a lyric (from her favorite song, as Davis notes) that is useful in thinking through some of these threads I’m pulling out of tragedy to weave together:
“Some other spring
I’ll try to love
now I still cling
to faded blossoms
fresh when worn
left crushed and torn
like the love affair I mourn…”
— “Some Other Spring” (1939)
Known for the iconic gardenias that she’d wear in her hair, her lyric calls back to an ancient echo, an observation of a turn-of-the-(2nd to 3rd)century (CE) grammarian, Athenaeus. In his Dinner with the Sophists, he observes:
“I see that the slaves are now bringing us crowns and perfumes. Why’s it, when crowns that folks are wearing fracture, they’re said to be in love?” (Deip. 15.669c)
He speaks on the relationship between how one adorns their hair and how it acts as a reflection of their perceived mentalities. He also notes that the garlands are a way to signal one’s relationship to the gods. He quotes (7th-6th BCE) Sappho and her observations around the gods preferring those who wear a crown when they are offering sacrifice, as she tells her companion Dika to crown her hair with flowers, as a means to historically anchor his observation in the ancient lyri(ci)sts (Deip. 15.674e).
In the late fifth-century BCE, these ideas came to a head in the comedy Women of the Thesmophoria by Aeschylus, when a widowed garland-maker offers testimony against the playwright Euripides, claiming that his productions had caused so much atheism that she was losing out on profits (Thes. 443–458). Through this anonymous citizen woman trying to feed her children, there is a view into the broader hair-oriented industry around religious belief systems and musical performance culture.
In thinking through what we may call the theatrical industrial complex of the Theater of Dionysus, the etymology of complex is incredibly useful for thinking through the different trilogies and tetralogies performed: at the roots are the Latin cum + plecto as something that is embraced, interwoven, braided together. It is not dissimilar to the encircling that each playwright hopes to achieve with his dramatic entries — to be embraced by the masses and crowned with a garland of victory. These strange loops — to riff both on Douglas Hofstadter’s book, as well as the Tony-winning musical it inspired — are both self-referential and self-reverential, displaying a canon of each playwright’s artistry as well as an attempt to lionize themselves in a performative religious festival. Some of our early celebrity icon culture.
The connection between ideas of the self, originated in the brain, combined with performative competitions for crowns are connected at the root — quite literally — by hair. These entangled epistemologies predate Hofstadter’s theorizing around the web of narrative signals that make up the pluralist “I” and stretch back to the foundations of performative religion in Ancient Greece. Therefore, in light of pluralism, I read Greek tragedy as a relationship between two complexes — a god-complex and a choral-complex. Gods and choruses are foundational to Greek tragedy, and their interplay around authority is fascinating. A god is not singular — many gods are choruses themselves of multiple belief systems woven together. And choruses are not inherently tied to a god — Hartman proves in Wayward Lives that the Greek chorus has the capacity to inspire belief systems elsewhere across time.
In many ways, this theorizing of the god-complex and choral-complex maps onto my primary myth theory of mycorrhizal mythophony (which was inspired by Mathura Umachandran’s keynote speech at the last QatC conference). Thinking through god- and choral-complexes in terms of fungi, the mushroom (per)forms this representation. Gods are essentially the “fruit” of mushrooms — the caps, stalks, gils of godhead, sporing out their influences unseen through the air. They are connected to the broader choral “weave”, the net-working hairs that sound-track through the chthonic realm, enabling new fruits to pop up seemingly out of nowhere.
In the vein of a choral-weave, this series might seem like it is popping out of nowhere. Originally, I conceived of my QatC presentation as a review and critique of the volume Queer Euripides, mostly in trying to think through new ways of queer citation practices (after Musser) that might help us bridge community for queer scholarship in the future. But the central issue being discussed by students behind the scenes (or underground) regarding that issue was still within the broader capitalist framework that we were all trapped in. My paper and presentation were myopically focused on the professors who I thought could change rather than the students who’ve already changed so much. And so in focusing on queer labor, I instead wanted to reorient (or disoccident, as we may come to know) my work so that it was actually reflective of the values that I want to build with fellow students. Because we can read queer theory all day in classics — when it comes to queer praxis (2014), however, that’s a much different story.
On the note of queer praxis, I also wanted to clarify some of my own methods of introducing new concepts into the field, particularly in coining terminology as its own form of queer economy (or echonomy, as we may come to know later). Similar to the choral networking hypha-e that I theorize around in terms of musical myth — as well as the roads in and out of the orchestra that the chorus of tragedy operates — I aim to make pathways in and through different form(ation)s of scholarship to help a broader academic ecosystem.
And so in lieu of the original critique I was envisioning, I would instead like to offer pathways in and through my own research — different forms of consideration around ancient tragedy that I would like to share and disperse throughout the junior academics as best I can, which requires some emergent terminology (in step with adrienne maree brown).
Inviation: a term for the queer kids who don’t always receive invitations, and instead often find themselves rejected from a former/formal oikos and finding themselves in the streets, or in vias. Inviations are inroads towards new futures, since the queer are often not invited — or because sometimes there is a need to withhold the t(ea). I take great inspiration from the deeply material praxis that Stefani Echeverría-Fenn engages in for my coining of this term.
(Perhaps perviations, or through-roads, have an alternate potential here, in thinking through a reclamation of queer perversity?)
Ironically, after all this talk of queer theorists, I also need to give a serious shoutout to some hetero scholars whose work outside of queer theory I’ve been building off. A large part of my own interdisciplinary bridge-work tends to look towards the research of scholars who don’t directly engage with the different theoretical landscapes that I do and finding ways to create inroads between them in order to imagine new strange net-works of scholarship. And so I’m very grateful to four scholars in particular whose work and persons have helped me think through this series.
First is Anna Conser, who’s radically changed how I view choral music in Greek tragedy. Her excellent dissertation on the musical design of tragedy centers pitch accent comparison, metrical analysis, and female musicians to build compelling cases for new avenues of considering musicality on the ancient stage. She’s also made some pretty fantastic Excel coding to help with endeavors towards composing music for Greek tragedy. We both staged a production of Medea at Whitman College this past spring that built upon her research, particularly in analyzing Euripides’ use of musical history citation to innovate his own new musical history making via myth (but more on that in the section on Medea and Bacchae).
Next up is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, theorizes around the field of classics as a haunted house, which has encouraged me to think through the scenes (following Hartman) of the haunted plantation and how it parallels the stagings of the haunted oikos in Greek tragedy. The ghosts of tragedy echo this point (from Aeschylus’ Choephoroi to Euripides’ Hecuba to the playwrights themselves in Aristophanes’ Frogs) as well as the more meta aspect of the mythic systems that form their own canonical hauntology in terms of performance and theatrical reception. More recently, I’ve now come around to considering what sort of sound-tracks the haunted oikos and plantation produce between one another across time and space.
Third is Joshua Billings, for his most recent book The Philosophical Stage: Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens, which presents a fascinating argument that tragedy as a form should be considered a part of the history of philosophy. It also presents one of the most compelling case studies of a series of fragments that I’ve seen in quite some time, in analyzing Euripides’ Antiope and the role of musicality in understanding fifth-century notions of sophia (wisdom) and authority. It provided a practical example for me to draw upon in my more poetic theorization around Sappho and fragmentation for my essay “On Dressing Down Myth”.
Finally, I must credit Paul Eberwine with not research, but practice — specifically the two of us regurgitating everything we knew about tragedy to one another while desperately trying to fight jet-lag for a week in Dubai back in March. From pacing through an archaeological museum where I worked out many of the arguments in this series, to a taxi ride where we discussed how we read tragedy and what we brought to the text when we did so, to giving me vital feedback on my workshop “De-composition of Black Echology”— Paul provided endless patience for engagement and proved a fast friend halfway across the world. It was in talking to him that I realized how I was braiding Conser, Padilla Peralta, and Billings’ theories into my own complex of my approach to tragedy, and that I was most at home translating the intersections of their research into my own colloquial way (which is essentially what I’m attempting to do right here).
Reading female musicality in the (metrical) footnotes, theorizing around the classical hauntings that are staged time and again, understanding the broader form of tragedy in the history of intellectual inquiry, and pulling all these threads together with fellow students are all central to my exploration of Sappho’s influence on the fifth-century stage.
And so, without further ado…
Sappho’s Son(s), The Series:
Prelude: Cosmetic Death Drive in the late 440s (Antigone & Alcestis)
Inviation I: Philo-/Ero-sophia & Disoccidental Mousika (Medea & Bacchae)
Inviation II: Nappy (V)io-lations & Queer Capita-lisms (Trojan Women & Ion)
Inviation III: Classical Myths/t/ripping & Afro-Echonomy (Helen/Andromenda & Women of the Thesmophoria & Orestes)
Inviation IV: Lesbian Transporation & the Cruising Gaze/Gays (Hippolytus & Iphigenia in Aulis)
Inviation V: Complex(tens)ions, or Que(e)rying Queer Euripides (Electra²)
Encore: Rosyfingers Plucking Blues, a psapphic-pisces-season playlist
