The campus community is invited to join the class of Sexuality, Gender, and Power in Greece and Rome for a guest lecture by Professor of Classics, Erika Weiberg, from Duke University entitled “Sappho Beyond Binaries”.

This talk explores the articulation of desire and embodiment in Sappho’s poems from the perspective of queer epistemology. Queer theory challenges assumptions about gender and sexuality as fixed and stable markers of identity, both across different cultures and time periods, and within a single person’s life. By reading the fragments through this lens, this paper argues that Sappho’s poetry can be understood as queer not merely in the sense that many of her poems express desire by women for women. Her poems can also be claimed as queer because they reveal that binary assumptions about gender and sexuality are insufficient for understanding the multifaceted experience of desire that her poetry articulates.