02 - Kingfishers Above the Waves: The Transformative Power of Choral Alterity

In a striking fragment, Alcman comments "no more, sweet-throated, sacred-singing girls, can my limbs carry me; let, oh let me be a kerulos [a male halcyon], who flies with the halcyons over the wave's blossom having a heart without pity, lilac like the sea, a holy bird" (Alcman fr. 26). The fragment presents the relationship between male poet and parthenaic chorus as similar to the flight of mythical birds over the ocean. They are alike in species but different in gender, united in identity and freedom, yet discrete. The longing with which Alcman bemoans how old age severs him from the parthenaic chorus, combined with the retention of gendered difference within the metaphor, suggests that for the poet and the chorus, there is something uniquely precious about making maiden song. This paper argues that the preciousness of partheneia is in its ability to grant both poet and chorus a cyborg identity (Haraway) in which gendered boundaries are dissolved.

Scholarly consensus holds that Pindar and Alcman's partheneia offer a formulaic presentation of female chorality. Klinck dismisses the voice of Pindar's partheneion as a "failure" (Klinck 278) because it remains generic and lacks the intensity of Pindar's epinician "I." Swift isolates elements of parthenaic imagery that can be considered generic without imparting aesthetic judgment. Building upon previous work on parthenaic choruses (Calame, Swift, et al.), I suggest that the generic elements of partheneia allow for the queering of both maiden and poet. When Pindar writes, "it is fitting for me to think partheneia [girlish thoughts]" (Pindar fr. 94b. 33-34), he is in fact thinking them and becomes in part a parthenos.

Indeed, partheneia penetrates and impregnates the poet even outside the domain of maiden choruses. In my paper, I demonstrate how the generic features of maiden songs infiltrate even the hyper-masculinized space of the epinician, as seen in parallels between Pindar's fragment 94a-b and Pythian 12. Moreover, I suggest that this cross-pollination of girlish thoughts can be seen in the attention with which Pindar looks at female figures throughout the epinicia (to name a few, Olympian 6, Isthmian 8, and Pythian 9). I likewise argue that as the poet becomes more parthenaic, the chorus becomes more poetic, gazing, as Apollo does in Pythian 9, at the excellence of other parthenoi (Alcman fr. 1, 3) and, as Pindar does throughout the epicinia, at the excellence of elite men (Pindar fr. 94a-b).

In this project I deploy Haraway's concept of the cyborg and Preciado's idea of gender piracy for understanding the parthenos and the poet. I likewise rely upon the vast scholarly conversation around the context and occasion of both Pindar and Alcman's partheneia. My intervention is to suggest that, far from reducing female choral performance to the formulaic and generic, we ought to read partheneia as places of genuine encounter with and transformation of the self and the other. Within a space of co-creation, the binaries of writer and performer, female and male dissolve.

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Presenters

Rebekah Spearman, St. John's College

  SCS-19