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

by Anthony Corbeill

From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender--masculine eyes ( oculi ), feminine trees ( arbores ), neuter bodies ( corpora ). Sexing the World surveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite.Beginning with the ancient grammarians, Anthony Corbeill examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as "dust" ( pulvis ) or "tree bark" ( cortex ). Corbeill then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. He looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. Throughout, Corbeill shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories.Sexing the World contributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, History, Classics

216 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 18, 2015

Reviews

[Drianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas, but a lot of the argumentation seemed overstated and the connection between the different parts (despite it being explained) was not clear to me at all.

[Luís Branco · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is a very interesting book. Nevertheless, I'm not sure if the author clearly achieved his goal.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting academic book examining the tendency towards regularization and categorization of gender in Latin after Vergil, and how this shows up in specific words with different genders in different contexts, conceptions of divinity over time (often beginning as "dual" divinities of particular concepts showing up as a male-female pair, upon one of which the early Romans would call for whatever the situation required), and the way Romans treated intersex individuals (as sacred portents to be handed over to the state, then as legal problems since laws differed for men and women). Corbeill also corrects some of Brisson's Sexual Ambivalence, arguing that Brisson has a tendency to conflate Greek and Roman practices.