Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome

• Autores: Benjamin H. Dunning (res.)
• Localización: Journal of early Christian studies: Journal of the North American Patristic Society, ISSN 1067-6341, Nº. 1, 2017, págs. 160-161
• Idioma: inglés

• Es reseña de:

  • Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome

    Anthony Corbeill

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• Resumen

  • In Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome, classicist Anthony Corbeill delves into an aspect of gender and sexuality in antiquity that has received relatively little discussion, especially in early Christian studies: the role that grammatical gender-masculine, feminine, neuter-played for ancient people in organizing the world according to categories of sexual difference. Against the commonplace that "[t]he grammatical gender of inanimate objects . . . is a convenient linguistic convention, having no correspondence with any sort of imagined sexual characteristics of those objects in the real world" (1), Corbeill deftly demonstrates the degree to which rhetorically astute Latin speakers engaged the sexual connotations carried by grammatical gender, both shaping their speech in ways that exploited it and, in turn, producing speech always already shaped in accordance with its parameters. Scholars of gender and sexuality in early Christianity will benefit from the uniquely positioned set of questions that Corbeill poses with respect to grammatical gender and its relationship to sexual difference across a range of registers (biological, social, literary, political), none of which, he compellingly shows, can be neatly separated.