Queer Bromius: LGBT versions of The Bacchae

Since Graeco-Roman antiquity, Dionysus has appeared to many as the god who traces and confuses the liminality between masculine and feminine, between excess and ritual. The subversive power of Dionysus in destabilising patriarchal and gender-sexual norms lies at the very centre of Euripides’ The Bacchae. As the tragedy progresses, Pentheus, the authoritarian and patriarchal king of Thebes, gradually succumbs to the powers and seduction of the newcomer Dionysus. As a result, Pentheus dresses up as a bacchant to join the Bacchic celebration that he himself had prohibited, where he will be finally murdered and dismembered at the hands of the followers of the victorious Dionysus.

Given the gender-questioning and subversive power of Dionysus, it is not surprising that Euripides’ Dionysian tragedy has received great attention from theatre creators interested in exploring the non-heteronormative, even anti-heterosexist, potential of this ancient tragedy. In fact, just months before the Stonewall rebellion in New York, in 1969, Richard Schechner was already exploring the same-sex erotic and physical seduction of Dionysus over Pentheus in his renowned production Dionysus in 69. Since then, The Bacchae has become the most widely used and successful ancient tragedy in the broader phenomenon of LGBT stage versions of Greek tragedy, the focus of my Queer Tragedy project.

In this seminar I will explore three productions that took place at different historical moments and geographic locations to understand how The Bacchae and its queer god Dionysus have been used to expose LGBT identities, eroticism, and politics, and thus question, dismantle, and subvert heteronormative power:  Allain Rochel’s gay The Bacchae (Los Angeles, USA, 2007); Enrique Olmos de Ita’s trans/travesti Bacantes after party (Aguas Calientes, Mexico, 2019); and Gay Sweatshop’s Lesbian version of The Bacchae, Kitchen Matters (London, UK, 1990). With these three examples, and mentions and illustrations of others, it will be possible to elucidate more precisely how and why Dionysus appears as the queer god par excellence on the international LGBT stage.

The adaptations of Greek Tragedies in Latin America

The Lisbon Flavian Seminars commenced in 2020 as a forum for Flavian scholars to share their research ideas online during the COVID-19 pandemic. The organizers have continued the Seminars on an occasional basis for scholars who are interested in the Flavian era. In 2023 we have scheduled three seminars so far:

First Lisbon Flavian Seminar (January)

Speaker: Adalberto Magnavacca (University of Geneva)
Title: “‘(In)scripti Pueri, (In)scriptae Puellae’: Mimetic Desire and Intertextuality in the Corpus Priapeorum”
Date: 27 January 2023 (Friday)
Time: 17:00 (Lisbon time)

Second Lisbon Flavian Seminar (March)

Speaker: Lauren Ginsberg (Duke University)
Title: “Sites of Memory, Sites of Violence: The Catalogue of Julio-Claudian Women in the Octavia”
Date: 24 March 2023 (Friday)
Time: 17:00 (Lisbon time)

Third Lisbon Flavian Seminar (May)

Speaker: Rosario Moreno Soldevila (Pablo de Olavide University of Seville)
Title: “Women of Letters in Martial’s Epigrams”
Date: 26 May 2023 (Friday)
Time: 17:00 (Lisbon time)

Each session of the Lisbon Flavian Seminars is envisaged as a meeting point for all scholars who are interested in the Flavian era. All scholars who wish to participate in these online seminars are welcome to register with us. A Zoom link will be sent to all registrants a day or so prior to each seminar. You can send a request for registration to one of the organizers below. If you have previously registered for the Lisbon Flavian Seminars, you do not need to send us another request unless you have not received a response from the organizers, in which case we kindly request that you contact us again. (If you wish to remove your name from the list of registrants, you need only to send us a brief e-mail message to request this.)

We hope that these online seminars will contribute to the discussion of issues of the Flavian era, including in such areas as literature, history, and archaeology, which are of concern to scholars working in this area at a time when we are all constrained by the coronavirus from attending conferences and seminars in person.