Cry of Victory

A historically gendered and sexed experience is contingent upon contemporary culturally, socially, and linguistically available expressions. Attempting to understand a historical gendered and sexed experience requires understanding that moment’s present and past possibilities. The social constructionist viewpoint is that a historical individual cannot express an identity that has no presence within a particular society, this does not mean that that individual cannot express an identity that has things in common with later/modern possibilities – likenesses exist and historical individuals would be able to recognize likenesses with modern gendered and sexed identities as well – nor does it mean that a historical individual cannot imagine and describe identities that do not currently exist in a substantive manner within a particular culture.

For example, a historical identity can be “trans-like”, but it cannot be trans if that particular formulation of identity does not exist within that culture or time period. Trans-like individuals exist throughout history, but their gendered and sexed expression will never be identical with our modern understanding of the trans experience. The purpose of this formulation is not to deny transhistorical gendered and sexed associations – queerness exists across time – but to better understand historical expressions and realities of sex and gender as they existed for past individuals.

Establishing the parameters and possibilities for ancient gendered and sexed expressions is a complex undertaking; definitions within a particular society can be multiform and dependent on a variety of factors. How the Romans, for example, defined something like masculinity or femininity would be highly dependent on an individual’s social status and social environment. I think it is safe to say that we overestimate the impact of elite definitions of gender and sex, which is understandable given that the words of elite male authors is a sizable part of our evidence. Regardless, we can never know how prevalent was the dissemination of elite formulations of gender and sex norms throughout society.

One example of this is the long association among the Romans towards military action, martial courage, and masculinity which is so essential to elite formulations of manhood. A large percentage of Roman men would never lead troops or engage in military service and thus would be excluded from this exalted form of masculine performance. Another is the fact that the vast majority of Roman men would never hold a political office, an area of public life that was almost exclusively reserved for, and significant as a masculine signifier to, the elite. That this particular manhood act was so restrictive, it would be hard to establish whether political activity as a masculine act held any currency at all outside of elite society or that the majority of Roman men deemed it to be masculine.

On the flip side, as a predominately agrarian society, the vast majority of Roman men would work the land, a humble lifestyle that was often venerated by the elite as one of the most traditional forms of manhood. However, elite Roman men often seem far removed from such a lifestyle and spend a great deal of time in writing attempting to virtue signal their humble and rustic connections. How would the Romans, therefore, define a non-elite Roman masculinity?

Whispers of the Ancient Ones: Unveiling Canada’s Sturgeon Lake Village

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