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.
AIA-2D