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Sexing the World surveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite. Sexing the World contributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Latin Grammatical Gender Is Not Arbitrary 1 Chapter 1 Roman Scholars on Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex 12 Chapter 2 Roman Poets on Grammatical Gender 41 Chapter 3 Poetic Play with Sex and Gender 72 Chapter 4 Androgynous Gods in Archaic Rome 104 Appendix to Chapter 4: Male/Female Pairs of Deities 136 Chapter 5 The Prodigious Hermaphrodite 143 Abbreviations 171 Works Cited 173 Index Locorum 189 General Index 199
About the author
Anthony Corbeill is professor of classics at the University of Kansas and the author of Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic and Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (both Princeton).
Summary
From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender—masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), neuter bodies (corpora). Sexing the World surveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite.
Beginning with the ancient grammarians, Anthony Corbeill examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as "dust" (pulvis) or "tree bark" (cortex). Corbeill then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. He looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. Throughout, Corbeill shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories.
Sexing the World contributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.
Additional text
"Engaging and deftly written, Corbeill’s book should in fact be recommended not only to anyone interested in Latin language and Roman culture, but also to any curious person typing on a gendered keyboard."---Dorota Dutsch, Gnomon
Report
"Demonstrating wide reading and a command of lesser-known texts and sources, this enjoyable book offers a highly original and interesting look at gender in both Latin grammar and Roman society. It explores the grammar of nouns where gender is fluid, and takes into consideration poetic intent and Roman cultural-sexual history. There is no other book quite like it."--Michael Fontaine, Cornell University
