In the first year of my PhD, everyone was all 'are you submitting a paper to GIFCon?', 'Are you going to GIFCon?' 'What are your thoughts on GIFCon this year?'. Truthfully, I had absolutely no idea what GIFCon was. GIFCon is the Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations; it is the conference dedicated to all things fantastika hosted by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow.
It's a hard life.
I have no doubt that 'Mapping the Mythosphere' would have been excellent for my research, but Cyprus was also pretty inspiring for my research. The time spent with my family, in the good weather, and all inclusive cocktails were also pretty good, too.
GIFCon 2019 Oh well, there's always next year. The time comes for the GIFCon 2020 CfP, and I was SO READY to submit an abstract for 'Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic'. Actually, if I'm being completely honest, I hummed and harred for quite a while, because I was very conscious that I am English, and English is the only language I can speak with any competency. Maybe I was just too Anglophone for GIFCon 2020? That white guilt - paired with some encouragement from members of the GIFCon committee - actually inspired my paper. Full steam ahead.
Except that 2020 was cancelled by a pandemic. I can't think of any clever way of putting it.
GIFCon persevered and reemerged in 2021, all shiny and online and ready for a new challenge. They were keeping the theme 'Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic' and the confirmed speakers from 2020, so I dusted off my old paper and got ready for GIFCon 2021, making no sudden movements so as not to tempt fate.
Do you know who I LOVE? Pre-pandemic Shelby, who wrote her conference papers as soon as she was accepted for them. Past Shelby wrote her paper for @GIFConGLA 2020 & now it’s all ready for #GIFCon2021
— Shelby🖤’Regina Optia’ (@Judgeyxo) March 16, 2021
To cut a long story short, GIFCon was great! I chaired an excellent panel on Fantasy and Trauma; I presented on the panel 'Negotiating the Western Gaze'; and I listened to some incredible papers.
THIS HAS BEEN THE MOST INCREDIBLE PANEL 🤩 https://t.co/nNrZQIwZDW
— Shelby🖤’Regina Optia’ (@Judgeyxo) April 30, 2021
And what was my paper on, I hear you all ask????? Well...
From White Men to White Feminism: Adaptations of Greek Myth
I’m going to start with the white men part, because it can only get better from there, right?
Classicist Sue Blundell states that ‘myths have come down to us largely in the form of the sophisticated and selfconscious versions created by the educated members of the upper classes. Almost all of these people were, moreover, male.’ (1995: 15)
Until recently (historically speaking) studying the dead languages of Ancient Greek and Latin, ancient history and civilisations, and Classical Mythology have been reserved for white, upperclass men.
Then, Edith Hall recounts of ‘middle-class British men during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries painstakingly educating themselves in Greek and Latin in order to find greater professional success. Knowledge of the Classics is used in these narratives to reinforce existing hierarchies. The potential for upward social mobility through classical education is not truly democratic or revolutionary; it merely continues the trend of excluding those who are not knowledgable about Greece and Rome.’ (Hall 2008; Zuckerberg 2019: 23)
I try not to think about that one too closely, because I too have educated myself in Classics for social mobility and greater professional success, but I digress …
As Donna Zuckerberg so succinctly puts it: ‘Where the classical tradition thrives, the greatest enthusiasm for the ancient world is usually found among social elites. The similarity between the term Classics and the word class to denote social status is not accidental.’ (2019: 22-3).
Zuckerberg writes this in her book Not All Dead White Men, in which she examines how the online, Alt-Right, white nationalist, men’s rights groups (known as the Red Pill) use classical mythology, philosophy, imagery, and iconography to promote their vitriolic agendas.
She looks at how men on these Reddit pages use, for example, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus to reinforce rape culture. Zuckerberg writes:
‘This book is about how the men of the Red Pill use the literature and history of ancient Greece and Rome to promote patriarchal and white supremacist ideology. [Her] goal is to lay bare the mechanics of this appropriation: to show how classical antiquity informs the Red Pill worldview and how these men weaponize Greece and Rome in service of their agenda. Anybody who has an interest in the Classics or social justice should not ignore this trend, which has the potential to reshape what ancient Greece and Rome mean in the 21st Century while simultaneously promoting dangerous and discriminatory views about gender and race. (Zuckerberg 2019: 5)
Zuckerberg draws heavily upon Page DuBois’ work in Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives, in which DuBois responds to those who have appropriated material from antiquity in the service of a conservative political agenda.
Dubois is a classicist that worries about ‘contemporary writers [that] use the Greeks to argue for their views. Their positions lend implicit support to politicians and religious leaders who advocate so-called family values, restrictions of women to their homes and the requirement of obedience to their husbands, and the dissolution of the separation between Christianity and the state, while arguing for homophobia, militarism, xenophobia, and the restriction of immigration’ (2001: 4).
In Trojan Horses, Dubois challenges these cultural conservatives' appeals to the authority of the Classics by arguing that their presentation of ancient Greece is simplistic, ahistorical, and irreparably distorted by their politics.
And, if we need any more evidence that the Classics need saving from Conservatives, I want to quickly remind you of Boris Johnson massively misquoting - truly butchering - random lines from the Iliad, in order to avoid answering a question in an Australian interview.
I fear that I am telling you all what you already know: that the Classical Tradition is predominantly populated by upperclass white men. How, then, does this relate to the theme of the conference?
When these upperclass Englishmen, these Etonian and Oxbridge-educated men monopolise the learning of Ancient Greek and Latin, and the related ancient histories and mythologies, it is an act of anglicisation and violence.
And, until relatively recently, it was this demographic doing all of the translating, meaning that Classical sources were coming to the majority of Anglophone readers through the mediated lens of these incredibly privileged academics. As Emily Wilson says in her introduction and translator’s note to the Odyssey, ‘Translation always, necessarily, involves interpretation; there is no such thing as a translation that provides anything like a transparent window through which the reader can see the original.’ (2018: 86) and that these translations are, more often than not, influenced by the politics of the translator. For instance: ‘The notion that Homeric epic must be rendered in grand, ornate, rhetorically elevated English’ (2018: 83) was kind of invented by Alexander Pope and his contemporaries.
Perhaps one of the worst things that this old guard of Classical academics did was cast the Classics as this dry, dusty, boring scholarship when really mythology is the first fantasy. You’ve got heroes going on quests, you’ve got Chosen Ones, you've got monsters and beasts, human/animal hybrids, you’ve got magic and mysticism, you’ve even got evil sorceresses (who probably aren't that evil after all). On that note, there’s even problematic male authors whose stories and characters get reinterpreted and reinvigorated in later fandom and scholarship.
In Classics, we call that “Reception”.
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| Garbati's (2008) Medusa with the Head of Perseus A subversion of Cellini's (1545) Perseus with the Head of Medusa |
As Vanda Zajko says in ‘Feminist Models of Reception’ - ‘how richly feminism [has] irrigated even the most dryly canonical of classical landscapes.’ (2011: 200) and there are a few moments of feminist Classical reception that will forever stand out. When Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin said that ‘classics has, with few exceptions, been anti-theory in general and anti-feminist in particular.’ (1993: 1); when Hélène Cixous reimagined Medusa as laughing; when Luce Irigaray read Plato’s cave as a hysterical womb; when Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, interprets the Demeter/Persephone story as a compelling representation of every daughter’s “longing for a mother whose love for her and whose power were so great as to undo rape and bring her back from death,” signifying “every mother’s longing for the power of Demeter” (Demeter Press Online). Rich also returns to Greek myth in her poetry, as did Sylvia Plath and H.D. before her.
It is from this feminist Classical tradition that the texts in my research come.
From there, I argued that Penelope in Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad typified white feminism. To be clear – the character of Penelope, NOT Atwood. Penelope is a princess, without any understanding of her own privileges, which is particularly demonstrated in the contrast between her and the maids in the novella.
A good example of this is when Penelope recounts her awkwardness when all of the men compete to marry her, treating her like a prize to win and a piece of meat, then the maids sing about how rape is a daily occurrence in their lives.
So where in contemporary adaptations of Greek myth do we see characters that engage with contemporary theories of gender and move beyond the anglophone? We’ve had the white men and the white feminism, so what comes next?
In Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire we see a more intersectional mythic adaptation, and in Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy there is intersectionality and a move beyond the anglophone.
Shamsie’s Home Fire is an adaptation of Sophocles’ plays Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannos, but this is no straightforward retelling. In Home Fire, the myths of Oedipus and Antigone are never mentioned, but their stories and characters are mirrored. Shamsie uses the well-known themes of political turmoil and paying for the sins of one’s father that are present in the Theban cycle to write a novel set in modern Britain, dealing with the themes of Britishness, British-Asian culture, Islamophobia, and radicalisation. Oedipus becomes Adil Pasha, Antigone becomes Aneeka, Ismene becomes Isma, and Polyneices becomes Parvaiz.
Kamila Shamsie has said that ‘Antigone […] has, at its centre, the question, what is the relationship of state to citizen?’ (Major & Shamsie 2018: np.). Creon decrees that Polynices cannot be buried in Thebes, and condemns his body to rot outside the city, something which would not happen in modern Britain - as Shamsie says, ‘We have hygiene laws, if nothing else’ (Ibid., np.) - but when one interprets this decree as ‘you have no claim to this land, you have no place here, living or dead’ (Ibid., np.), the parallels between ancient myth and modern politics become overt.
I think this is a really important novel to mention in this paper because, while Home Fire is written in English and is largely centred around British politics and citizenship, it really challenges the idea that both Britishness and Classics are reserved for rich white people. In Home Fire, we can really see Classics moving beyond what Susan B. Brill has described as ‘a scholarly discipline [traditionally] defined in Eurocentric, ethnocentric, and androcentric terms’ (1994: 400).
This brings us onto Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, which is a queer Scots retelling of Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe myth in Metamorphoses 9.
For more on Iphis and Ianthe, check out the first in my Queering Myth series!
The Greek myth of Iphis and Ianthe is set in Crete with an uncanny amount of Egyptian gods, and most famously told by a Roman, yet Smith’s retelling is quintessentially Scottish.
The novel is set mostly in Inverness and is written partly in Scots. The Scottishness is exacerbated by the Pure corporation within the novel, which is marketing bottled Scottish water to Scottish people, despite the water in their taps being both more Scottish (as the Pure water is filtered in India) and more pure (because the bottled water is poorly tested).
They market the water as ‘Eau Caledonia’, which pretty much just means … Scottish Water.
When I say that Girl Meets Boy is a queer Scots retelling of Iphis and Ianthe, this is perhaps best shown in the intertextual references, such as when Anthea says ‘Reader, I married him/her.’, thus queering Jane Eyre and when, instead of “I do”, she says ‘aye’ and ‘Ness I said Ness I will Ness’, inserting the Loch Ness Monster into James Joyce’s Ulysses, therefore both queering and Scots-ing (for lack of a better word) adaptations of Greek myths.
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| I know this is a dragon, not the loch ness monster, but I love 'Pete's Dragon' so much. |
What I really tried to do with this paper is really look at the word ‘Beyond’ in ‘Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic’. We start with white men dominating the field of Classics and the translations and adaptations of it, but we then have a movement towards feminist and non-anglicised Classical Reception in contemporary literature. But what I am really looking forward to is the greater beyond: how fantasy literature could be used to truly move Greek mythology further beyond its anglocentric, ‘Eurocentric, ethnocentric, and androcentric’ perspectives (Brill 1994: 400).
So, GIFCon, maybe see ya next year?
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