During the spring semester of 1998, I designed a course entitled “Ancient Greek Men: Gender and Sexuality.” I had the honor of teaching this course in the fall 2000 semester as part of a special program in one of the residential learning centers. When I designed this course, I was a bit naïve. Surely I was not really teaching something so different or so unique; I had merely been unable to find other courses, textbooks, or introductory articles easily accessible to undergraduates. In the year and a half between course design and teaching, I found new studies, new books, and new ideas that focused on the gender and sexuality of men. New research and theory seems to be exploding currently on the topic of men in antiquity, but most of it is inaccessible to the majority of undergraduates who have a desire to learn about men as well as women. Today, I want to talk about why I chose men as my course focus and how it differs from many courses about women or gender and sexuality in ancient civilizations.
Why a Class about Men?
My own research and interests have developed slowly over the years. I began with a simple interest in learning about women in history, particularly ancient civilizations. I noticed that the courses I could take followed a pattern. At introductory levels there were courses that focused solely on women. Men might be added, but exclusively as the brokers of power and authority. Theory and cultural comparisons appeared in higher-level courses. Finally, some coursework has added the dimensions of class, race, and ethnicity to the mix. I saw not a single course focused on men.
Other fields in history seem to have started to include men as part of gender and sexuality discussions as both agents and objects, so I went outside the available classical courses and started to read everything I could get that related to gender in antiquity. The vast majority of classical studies and ancient history had the same focus as my academic programs. In the last few years, studies of antiquity have moved beyond this model of men as active creators and enforcers of patriarchy or the topic of “homosexuality” in an attempt to decipher what being a man meant in Greece or Rome. Many courses and studies now focus on looking at both men and women, as my brief study outlined in Appendix I will demonstrate.
But what specifically made me work on a course about Greek men? Students I have interacted with have asked questions about men and masculinity. Focusing on Greek men would give students some answers, but in small packets so that those with no background in classical civilizations would more easily understand the material. I went back through the various syllabi that I had and compared them to what I’d learned in other courses about gender and sexuality in history.
