Sexuality out of bounds: Women's relationships in Ancient Greece and Rome

Recent studies regarding multiple sexualities in Greek and Roman Antiquity (or at least practices that contemporary scholars would classify as such) showed that categories used to describe sexualities were quite different from ours. In Greece and Rome, the opposition between man and woman was not the main distinction and the sexual identity of partners was not the essential criteria for the moral evaluation of an individual's sexual identity: "homosexual", just as "heterosexual", are anachronistic categories that did not pertain to this world. However, while sexual practices were often judged according to one's civic position and self-control (along with other criteria such as age or the practice itself), it appears that a group barely studied group was perceived in a peculiar manner: women engaging in sexual relations with other women. These practices elicited strong reactions from the ancient Greeks and Romans, clearly visible in their iconographic and literary depictions. From a total and dehumanizing silence (during the Greek classical period) to the moral condemnation of these practices through the construction of repulsive figures of "unnatural" women (in Rome), the Ancients reintroduced the criteria of sexual identity which did not appear to be relevant at first. The study of sources from Antiquity invites us to reconsider the relationship between the norm and the monstrous, and reveals the existence of highly codified social systems where the boundaries separating what is in and out of the field outlines the limits of what is human.