Love Between Women in the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca Christy Cobb (bio) I first encountered Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women as a master's degree student at Wake Forest University. It was, perhaps, the first time an academic book spoke to me personally. It showed me the power of academia to impact people. I devoured the book. I read it, reread it, marked it up, and wrote in the margins. My copy of this book is beloved. Brooten provided me with the language, the texts, the proof, that women had been loving women since antiquity. I am certain I am not alone in my appreciation of Love Between Women. I imagine others read this book at some point in the last twenty-five years and felt similarly. For these reasons, it is an honor to add to the conversation about the impact of Love Between Women. For my contribution, I consider the ethos of ancient sexuality, which in recent years has been scrutinized by scholars. In my view, Brooten's project anticipated this conversation and also set the groundwork for current and future work on sexuality in the ancient world. Thus, I begin with an overview of the dominant scholarly view of sex in the Greco-Roman world and then provide examples of two scholars—Joseph Marchal and Maia Kotrosits—who offer alternative options to this prevalent view. I subsequently propose some possibilities for expanding upon the theorizing of sexuality begun in Love Between Women. I do this through a reading of the Acts of Xanthippe, Polyxena, and Rebecca, an early Christian narrative, that focuses on the eroticism and pleasure present in the text, specifically as they surface in the relationships between women. Brooten begins Love Between Women with a discussion of the view dominant in the Greco-Roman world concerning sexuality, that is, the hierarchical binary of active and passive sexual roles. The typical description of this view goes something like this: in antiquity, sex was understood to be primarily about penetration. One partner was active and penetrated the other partner, who passively received this penetration. The active partner was male while the passive partner [End Page 161] could be female or male, but in either case was feminized. As long as the partners remained in their stratified roles as active and passive, sex was viewed as "natural." This phallocentric view of sex in antiquity was (and is) a dominant one within scholarship. As Brooten notes, though, "social reality was, however, more complex than the ideology."1 In fact, female homoeroticism complicates this view, as not all sex between women involves penetration, and even when women were depicted through this paradigm, the woman receiving penetration was not always passive. Brooten also notes that women who refused to be penetrated by a man or who were "erotically oriented toward women" stood outside these socially accepted roles. Sexual relationships that did not fit within the active/passive paradigm were viewed as unnatural and therefore condemned; this includes, of course, female homoeroticism. In recent years, several scholars in our field have challenged this hierarchical view of sex in the ancient world as active/passive. For example, in his essay in Bodies on the Verge, Joseph Marchal rethinks this paradigm through a consideration of those on the bottom, or the persons who were depicted as the receptive participant in sex.2 In addition to examples from ancient texts, material culture further complicates the phallocentric view of sex within antiquity. Graffiti in Pompeii, for instance, suggests that both men and women experienced active pleasure while receiving penetration.3 Marchal writes, "Penetration and, or as, domination is not the whole story, even if that equation reflects the social order or at least the perspective of those at the pyramidal apex of power."4 Maia Kotrosits also challenges the penetration paradigm through a reading that focuses on pleasure instead of penetration.5 Offering a new model to counter the focus on active/passive sex roles, Kotrosits turns to the Acts of Paul and Thecla in order to "attend to some places in ancient literature that register an erotic relationality that does not fit comfortably with figurations of penetration."6 In doing so, she...
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May 1, 2023
Aleksandra Rabinovitch + 2
Open Access