Ma(r)king Men: Graffitied Masculinities in Pompeii

Presenters

Jordan Rogers, Hamilton College

Abstract

Graffiti containing insults concerning male homosexual acts in Pompeii—including the appellations cinaedus, fellator, pedicator, and more—have received significant interest for what they reveal about gender norms in the ancient city. While the existence of subaltern communities has been posited due to the prevalence of these graffiti, their reflection of reality nevertheless remains contested. However, spatially contextualized work—for example, Sarah Levin-Richardson’s 2011 article and Garraffoni’s 2022 chapter on Pompeii’s brothel and Matthew Loar’s 2018 article on the house of Marcus Lucretius—has demonstrated the utility of the “dialogic” approach to graffiti also in the corpus of sexually insulting inscriptions, which can be interpreted as recording processual acts of gender construction and confirmation.

This paper focuses on the graffiti, sexually charged or otherwise, in the recently renovated House of the Silver Wedding (V.2.1) that have been recorded in the peristyle and exedra (CIL IV 4181–4213). This latter space, as García y García  has suggested, was utilized alongside the two flanking cubicula for scholastic activities in the building’s final phase. Given the presumed use of this space, I therefore reconstruct the dialogues presented in these graffiti as taking place between adolescents, whose own masculine identities were being formulated and challenged through the very act of graffiti writing. In addition to drawing on comparative examples of gender formation among adolescent males and graffiti subcultures in other periods and cultures—including among stable workers in 19th century Yorkshire, secondary schoolboys in modern Zimbabwe, and teenagers participating in the hip hop subculture of New York City in the postwar period—I also contextualize these acts within ancient Roman rituals of public shaming, which routinely asserted normative sexual identities while disparaging perceived deviances from such norms.