I think it isn't a big secret that I have issues with the "strong Foucaultian" position, that is, that sexuality is never an "inherent" characteristic but that sexual identity is entirely shaped by how a particular culture structures sexual categories and their meanings. But conversely, I'm quite convinced of the "weak Foucaultian" position that individuals will tend to channel and understand their inherent emotions and responses through the lens of the prototypes that society offers them. But I've never previously read an analysis of sexuality in classical Roman culture that made me feel like I truly understood what that meant.
Like so many historical studies (and one of the major defects in Foucault's theories), this book works almost entirely through the male gaze and through not merely male-centered, but male-dominated cultural understandings. While Williams acknowledges that lack in his sources, I think he could have gone further in interrogating the usefulness of the available Roman texts for saying anything useful about how Roman women understood their own sexuality. In working on this month's theme, I've run across references to some other articles that take up that challenge, such as an article by Sarah Levin-Richardson on sexual graffiti expressed in a woman's point of view (and argued by her to be written by women). It concerns me that the very few detailed texts exploring the theme of sex between women risk either being over-generalized or used to erase the very concept of sex between Roman women due to the ambiguities of the texts and the lack of multiple angles on the topic.
For example, two of Martial's viciously satirical epigrams and one of Lucian's similarly satirical dialogs of the courtesans form the core of unarguable depictions of sexual activity between women. All three of them adopt the Roman sexual system in viewing any sexual agency by a woman as making her "masculine". Within our contemporary discourse on gender and sexuality, there is a certain pressure to accept this depiction at face value and interpret Bassa, Philaenis, and Megilla/us as transgender men (particularly in the last case). And that to question that interpretation is to erase historic trans identity. But when examined in the context of the larger Roman sexual system, we see that it is simply not possible for someone with a stake in that system (which covers pretty much all the upper class literate men whose texts have survived) to conceive of active female sexuality as being other than masculine. In the same way that they could not conceive of "passive" male sexuality as being other than feminine. But even those scholars arguing that "passive" Roman men cannot reasonably be categorized as "homosexual" in modern terms are not arguing that they were all, instead, trans women, even though philosophical arguments like the one mythologized by Phaedrus could certainly be interpreted that way. (Some, of course, may have been, in the context of modern definitions.) Does it then make sense to accept the male-framed Roman cultural understanding that, in any sexual encounter of biologically female persons, one of them is, by definition, taking a male role, and therefore should be understood within a modern context as being a trans man? From a scholarly viewpoint, neither modern definition has validity, but withing popular culture, the two framings are set up as mutually exclusive.
In looking for an understanding of how Roman women might have understood sexual acts between women, we need to challenge the framings and interpretations put on them, not only by modern identity movements, but by their own male contemporaries. Was Martial's Philaenis simply absurdly inconsistent in her masculinized sexuality, in that she followed male sexual rules in everything except for performing cunnilingus? Or was she following a a different set of principles in which refusing to be a receptive partner for penetrative sex coexisted happily with performing oral sex on women? Was Megilla/us Roman culture's best example of a trans man? Or was that hyper-masculine social presentation the only cultural model offered that fit their desires and experiences? (And we shouldn't overlook Demonassa, also mentioned in the dialog, who also enjoys the sexual encounter with the courtesan without being masculinized in the description.)
Even with these flaws regarding coverage of female issues, Williams is the first book on this topic I've read that led me to begin to grasp how truly different the Roman understanding of sexual roles was, and how much of that understanding still lingers in Western culture today under the surface.
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