Poetics, Perversions, and Passing: Approaching the Transgender Narratives of<i>Thesmophoriazousai</i>

Ruffell, Isabel

doi:10.5406/illiclasstud.45.2.0333

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

References 53 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…13 This laterality -expressed in Greek by the preposition para -is fully enacted by the Inlaw during their para-tragic performances, their par-odies of Euripides' Andromeda, Helen, and Palamedes. My conceptualization of trans-form is an effort to theorize the 11 Ruffell (2020b) provides an important analysis of the various, plural "transgender modes" with which one could -heuristically -align the play's characters. Even though she operates in a primarily historicist interpretive framework, Ruffell seems to believe, like I do, that, casting Agathon, the biographical figure and the literary character, or other characters in the play as "transgender" carries the danger, inherent in every historical narrative, of drawing up linear, implicitly teleological, accounts that locate a point of origin, erasing ruptures and discontinuities: see Amin (2018).…”

Section: Trans-form: Women At the Thesmophoriamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lavery (2020). Building on Lavery, Deihr (2022) sees Women at the Thesmophoria as implicated in a system in which trans ( * ) people can never reach their destination, in which they are unable to become but rather must be what they do not want to be; see also Ruffell (2020b). The anti-identitarian approach that I follow seems to me to allow for the widest spectrum of notions of transness and transing, notions that also include trans ( * ) embodiments without or with partial or ongoing medical and surgical transitions.…”

Section: Trans-form: Women At the Thesmophoriamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…124Derrida (1993a, 70) makes us see aporia as "the possibility of an impossible" or the "possibility of the impossible" or "the manifestation of the possible as impossible. " 125 On comic antagonistics, see, with different orientations and emphases,Ruffell (2002), M Wright (2009;,Biles (2011), andTelò (2016)…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Resistant Form

Telò

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression? The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic experimentation with language invites a radically “oversensitive” hyperformalism, a formalistic overanalysis that disrupts, disables, or even abolishes a range of normativities (government, labor, reproduction, gender). Exceeding not just historicist contextualism, but also conventional notions of laughter and the logic of the joke, Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis uses Aristophanes to fully embrace, in the practice of close or “too-close” reading, the etymological and conceptual nexus of crisis, critique, and literary criticism. These exuberant readings of Birds, Frogs, Lysistrata, and Women at the Thesmophoria, together with the first attempt ever to grapple with the comic style of critical theorists Gilles Deleuze, Achille Mbembe, and Jack Halberstam, connect Aristophanes with contemporary discourses of biopolitics, necrocitizenship, care, labor, and transness, and at the same time disclose a quasi- or para-Aristophanic mode in the written textures of critical theory. Here is a radically new approach to the literary criticism of the pre-modern – one that materializes the circuit of crisis and critique through a restless inhabitation of the becomings and unbecomings of comic form.

show abstract

Section: Trans-form: Women At the Thesmophoriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Trans-form: Women At the Thesmophoriamentioning

confidence: 99%