What Makes This Course Different? (continued)
I’ve noticed that euphemisms still dominate work on gender and sexuality in the classical world, but I did not want my students guessing, and I did not want them to get the impression that learning about sexuality and gender is inappropriate. To counter translations which avoid the most accurate sexual terminology and cultural context, I decided to be more direct in my lectures and in our discussions. Use of more accurate terms, however, did not mean vulgarity or crude language, but simply that we would use clinical and common terms so that no one would be misled.
Had I been teaching an introductory history course, spending one or two days trying to include women and non-citizen men would have been all that was expected of me at most. If I were talking about gender and sexuality in the ancient world and I chose to focus exclusively or primarily on women, hardly anyone would have questioned me. This acceptance of the traditional division of topics is found on the administrative, instructor and student levels. Bringing men into the picture can either be viewed as progressive or as dangerous. Designing a course only about men opens the floodgates of criticism. This is a subject that I wish to explore further in a separate paper in the near future, but let me just briefly deal with my experiences.
First, the administration had questions about why I chose the topic of men. These were actually quite easily dealt with, because the administration I worked with were quite open-minded and knowledgeable. However, their experience with undergraduates made them offer the following suggestion: get rid of the terms “men” and “man” in any title or course description, while leaving the course itself the same. I did as they suggested.
Students, too, held to notions of the traditional academic subjects. I had to deal with hostility, drop-outs, and continued worry and fear from students who continued with the course. As the semester went on, my students realized that men in classical Greece were not held to the same standards as men today, nor were male self-perceptions based on the exactly same concerns. Those moments of epiphany made the course invigorating for me and them. I’ll discuss all of these issues in great detail in another paper.
