By Maya Smestad
The poet Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) can be interpreted through an erotic lens, and even viewed as a roadmap “for queer encounters” in Ancient Rome says Erin Lam, the UC President’s Post-Doctoral Fellow.
Lam kicked off the UCSB Classics department’s academic year with their talk “Cruising Rome: Queer Orientations in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria”.
They asserted that the three-volume work, written from 2 BCE to 2 AD, can be viewed as a “tongue-in-cheek” style series in which Ovid details a map of the city of Ancient Rome — including locations such as the Temple of Venus and the Portico of Livia—as a guide through the city that increases one’s chances of having an erotic or an erotic queer encounter.
Lam recognized that to the untrained eye, queer methodologies may at first appear to have little to do with ancient Roman texts. Nonetheless, it has proven to be a rich area of study, one to which they have dedicated their academic career, they said in an interview prior to the talk. They discovered that “queer theory and the classics could really go together.”
UC President’s Post-Doctoral Fellow Erin Lam identifying key terms for listeners at the UCSB Classic’s Department event, “Cruising Rome: Queer Orientations in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria”
Lam wasn’t always on track to analyze ancient texts within a queer context. They expected to further their studies in the world of STEM disciplines and first entered graduate school at UC Berkeley as an Environmental Biology major. After taking courses that focused on gender studies, Lam began to notice that theories about queer intersectionality and practices, which they were already thinking about in their day-to-day life, started to work their way into their writing.
Eventually, Lam switched academic gears and focused their energy on the Classics department, taking a modern approach to reading ancient texts. “Once I started doing it,” Lam said, “it felt like I should have been doing it the whole time.”
Their current project examines Ovid’s Ars Amatoria through an erotic lens considering “the potential for queer encounters.”
At their talk, Lam elaborated on this by referring to modern sources, such as Cathy Cohen’s essay Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens, and textual evidence from Ars Amatoria to support their arguments, with attendees following along in handouts they were given.
Identifying “queer” as a verb rather than a noun—or “queering history”—within the context of classical texts can allow for greater insight into the past, Lam said. “By shifting queer from identity to practice, we can find queerness in many more places than the evidence allows,” she said.
According to Lam, an important distinction to make when applying queer methodologies to ancient text is that one cannot say for certain whether or not an ancient text, its author, or any of their characters are “queer.” Not only are there “gaps in our knowledge” of classical texts and historical events, as Lam put it, but there are ethical concerns surrounding the assumption of others’ sexualities and gender identities.
“I don’t think it’s for anybody to say how anybody else identifies,” they said. “Especially for these people who have been dead for 2000 years.”
While speaking about Ovid’s work. Lam frequently uses the phrase “could be queer” rather than “is queer” to acknowledge this difference.
Lam stressed the need to support current queer authors or those who have characters that identify as queer.
“Why do we have to look to these ancient texts to give us that kind of validation?” they said in prior to the talk. “Why not support artists and writers who are working today who have characters that identify as queer in the way that we think of it?”
Lam concluded by encouraging the audience to “think more playfully and imaginatively with Ovid’s work” and other historical texts.
Maya Smestad is a second-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication Studies. She covered this event for her Writing Program course Digital Journalism.