For the penultimate (!) 'Queer and the Classical' seminar, this week we have Ella Haselswerdt with a talk called 'Sappho’s Body: Towards a Deep Lez Philology'.

Haselswerdt frames the conversation for today as a 'speculative work-in-progress'. She starts by reflecting on the relationship of her work to her identity; at first, she conceptualized queerness and Classics as separate, but since 2016, that has changed. https://eidolon.pub/re-queering-sappho-c6c05b6b9f0b

There is room and a need for a situated, critical, and lesbian-- or 'Deep Lez'-- philology, as Haselswerdt will illustrate through three case studies.

'What can a man offer to a girl offer that Sappho cannot offer?' Devereaux 1970 asked re: fr. 31, pathologising lesbianism in the name of philology. When the discipline has been shaped by straight white men for so long, it's no surprise that the discipline is saturated with bias.

On the popularity of Sappho's homoeroticism on social media in popular culture, Haselswerdt points to @sapphobot & the #sappho tag on Instagram. She notes that Sappho Bot's homoerotic tweets perform best, though the acct deviates from Carson's translation in the case of fr. 102.

Sappho's presence is diffused throughout the Lesbian Herstory Archive in NYC in various ways: while her name adorns many books in the library openly, many references throughout the archive's ephemera are layered, secretive and coded.

'We might think of Sappho herself as an archivist': she collects people. Her poetry is rich in personal pronouns, loss, flowers, textiles, feelings, sensation: everything a capital-L Lesbian touches (fr. 125, 'I used to weave crowns').

In fr. 16, Haselswerdt reads the Helen exemplum as one of escape (maybe the most beautiful thing, 'to kalliston', is not Paris, but escape, 'kallipois[a]'). Anaktoria is to Sappho what freedom and escape is to Helen, and the possibility of Sappho's freedom lies in remembering.

Fragmentation emphasizes these poems' materiality, by means of striking absences, bringing what remains into clearer focus: the lacunae are like empty shelves of the queer archive, inviting readers to fill them.

Returning to the Lesbian Herstory Archive, many queer people today are grappling with their relationships to earler waves of lesbianism. At the same time that we feel queer nostalgia, the LHA can feel like a relic from an essentializing past.

'A Girl's Journey into the Well of Forbidden Knowledge' (2010) is Allyson Mitchell's approach to the Lesbian Herstory Archive. It is an archive of living space: everything is larger than life, maximalist, stacking interpretations in geological cross-sections.

'Part quilting bee, part public relations campaign, & part Molotov cocktail, Deep Lez seeks to map out the connections between the second position feminisms that have sustained radical lesbian politics & the current ‘third wave’ feminisms'. -- Mitchell, 'Deep Lez I Statement'

You can read the rest of Mitchell's 'Deep Lez I Statement' here: http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/deep-lez-i-statement/

Turning to various visual editions of Sappho's corpus: 1) 2011 Arion Press edition (trans. Daley, intro by duBois, engravings by Rearden, prints by Mehretu); 2) an artist book 'equal parts bandage and boudoir'; and finally 3) the famous red-figure vase of Sappho reading

The genitive of Sappho's name on the vase (Σαπφοῦς) opens up the possibilities of reading the genitive in its many uses as an 'open, oblique, and sensuous' category: personal, local, yet expansive, generous, true.

We have Nancy Rabinowitz responding, stressing the importance of grounded, situated, and personal work. Picking up on this in relation to queer history, @lbarsk asks if it is worth to fill textual lacunae in the ways we feel urged to fill the shelves of the archive.

Haselswerdt notes that there are advantages and disadvantages to every form of presentation: while important, the presentation of Carson's If Not Winter feels sterile in the ways that, say, Allyson Mitchell's kitsch maximalism does not.

Jody Valentine asks about the collaborative elements of a Deep Lez philology, and the extent to which this intervention might be digital.

Meryl Altman and @ExLibrisMatzner also ask about what modes of inquiry and writing Haselswerdt envisages for this project going forward: some ideas include a new edition Sappho in this Deep Lez aesthetic-- at once an art project and app crit.

Mathura Umachandran asks about solidarity in queer archives, how race and empire frames our scholarly inquiry. Fragments may be an escape strategy, but how well equipped is Classics to take up a Deep Lez philology when the materiality of Classics is so wrapped up in colonialism?

. @echomikeromeo asks about lesbianism as an identity versus lesbianism as a methodology or framework: it's exciting to suggest that lesbianism can be a methodology in the same way queerness is.

Tina Chronopoulos asks about the cultural barriers to accessing (esp. anglophone) work on Sappho, and the exclusionary nature of American queerness/lesbianism. Discourses in queer studies become rarefied, when these resources could be lifelines to people, especially young people.

Alright: next week we have Jordan Tannahill and Jeremy O'Harris in conversation. Also, I completely lied that this was the penultimate seminar of the series, time isn't real and there are three left!