Back in 1993, I felt pleased at the response of a group of first-year students when I put up a slide of the ‘Eurymedon Vase’ in a lecture on ancient homosexuality. This was when topics on gender and sexuality had been included for the first time on the newly modularised first-year classical syllabus of the institution where I was doing a PhD and part-time teaching. As the tutor who was considered to have the least conventional research interests, I was given sessions including “homosexuality” and “Sappho”. That meant that I had the opportunity to get around an issue that typically comes up in first-year classics modules: where students with A-levels in relevant subjects can find themselves revisiting material they have already studied while students new to the study of classics can feel themselves at sea. Here was a chance to introduce evidence that was likely to be new to everybody, and I was happy with what looked like a group-wide response to showing the vase then explaining what some of its messages might be. Recent experiences have got me wondering whether I was actually being naïve and potentially insensitive. These experiences include research that I have conducted over the past few years into how to approach potentially sensitive material in the classical classroom, and the debate over trigger warnings that surfaced recently in the US.
The ‘Eurymedon Vase’ shows a youngish Greek male with a fairly wispy beard making a sexually aggressive approach to a bent-over, bearded, male in Persian clothing. It struck me in the ’90s as a useful way to illustrate the conventions of ancient Greek same sex relationships while also showing how they might be inverted, here quite possibly, for comic effect. The subject, and more specifically an inscription on the vase, suggests a date in the aftermath of the victory won both by land and sea in the vicinity of the Eurymedon in 466 BCE which, by effectively ending the threat of a Persian invasion of the Greek mainland, marks a better cut-off date for the “Persian Wars” than the Battles of Plataea and Mycale of 479. I told the students that the inscription reads, “I am Eurymedon, I stand bent over”, and quoted Sir Kenneth Dover’s assessment that it declares: “we’ve buggered the Persians” (1978: 105).
When I showed and then discussed the vase, there was a moment of silence followed by laugher. I felt that I had succeeded in my goal to show that there was a counterpart to the image of Greece as the birthplace of democracy and producer of high culture, and considered that the vase provided an opportunity to explore the mix of familiarity and difference that typically accompanies the study of the ancient world. I wanted to show the students that the same culture hailed as the birthplace of western culture was also alien and strange, yet one whose comic images we can laugh at, particularly if we try to understand the specific ancient values that are being encoded. I considered an image showing impending rape to be interesting for what it revealed about the Greeks’ own particular perceptions of gender, ethnicity and power. I felt confirmed in this view several years later on reading David Halperin’s observation that that the student of Greece “quickly realizes that the ancient Greeks were quite weird, by our standards, when it came to sex” (2002: 2).
By the time that I read Halperin’s assessment I had begun to move away from the particularist approach to classical culture that I was committed to in 1993. I no longer approached the ancient world as one solely distant from our own, to be studied in relation to cultural codes that are straightforwardly other. Instead, I had started to encourage students to reflect on the various lenses through which we today analyse classical evidence. I would try to get them to think about how these can enable us to interpret the ancient world, but also potentially to distort this world. I had begun to encourage students to reflect upon the relationship between modern and ancient concepts of sexual identity. For example, the learning outcomes for a module on ancient Greek gender and sexuality that I developed in 2005, and have been teaching iterations of since, include one that fitted with my earlier practice, namely “an ability to use and assess ancient textual and visual evidence in order to illustrate how gender and sexuality were defined and debated in ancient Greece”. Another learning outcome states that, on successful completion of the module, students will have “an ability to relate the study of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece to contemporary debates about gender, sexuality, feminism, and cultural diversity”. Student evaluations for the most recent iteration of the module in 2012 indicate, I think, that I have succeeded in my goals to encourage the students to contextualise ancient Greek gender and sexuality in relation to contemporary concepts. Comments concerning the module’s “best aspects” included “the evaluation of different theories of gender… and how it can be applied to modern day, not just antiquity”. Another student commented that “the class prompted me to question my own beliefs and preoccupations”.
However, while encouraging students to reflect on their own identities, I have become increasingly aware that such a level of personal engagement can be troubling. Several years ago, I began work with my Roehampton colleague Fiona McHardy on a project funded by the HEA to investigate the teaching of sensitive subjects in the classical classroom. We started this research in part because we were discovering that students were increasingly finding certain topics distressing – yet these were the very ones that often especially stimulated their curiosity, such as rape, domestic violence and so-called ‘honour’ killings. Among our goals were to discover how classical colleagues were dealing with sensitive topics and how students experienced such material, and to draw on the expertise of colleagues in disciplines which frequently encounter topics that students might find troubling, including psychology, anthropology, criminology and the Arts Therapies.
One interviewee, a classicist, reported that he has used the “Eurymedon Vase” to make students think about rape as a metaphor for military domination. In a session where students would not be expecting a depiction of sexual violence, he showed the vase and the students started to laugh. The laughter died away when he put up a second image, a photograph of soldiers laughing over the naked bodies of their prisoners. While hearing about the students’ shocked response to the second image, I was reminded of the collective gasp by a class of mature students at a classical myth summer school in the early 2000s when, during a session on monsters, I showed an image of the gorgon followed by a photograph of Myra Hindley. The students told me afterwards that the strategy helped them understand the power of the gorgon’s stare. However, I’ve never repeated it, and conducting the interviews has helped me unpack why such using unsettling modern images to understand the ancient world needs to be done with care – if at all. After I had initially drafted this posting on Thursday 12th June, I read that day’s Times article by Katie Gibbons on the growing recognition of the extent of sexual violence against men in conflict zones. Does use of such material have any place in the teaching of ancient wartime sexual violence? If so, how should it be used? As a shock tactic to dispel overly romantic notions of classical culture? Or accompanied by trigger warnings?
The strategy of deliberately shocking students differed from the practice of many of the other interviewees. An interviewee in psychology explained that it is common practice in his discipline to emphasise at the outset that students might experience troubling, even traumatic things. One classicist commented that when she started teaching she would focus on subjects such as rape and abortion because they were good for generating spirited seminar discussion. On realising that some students had first- or second-hand experience of these issues, she began to give warnings that material to be covered might cause distress.
What Fiona and I also found out from conducting the interviews was that one never knows for certain which subjects students might find troubling. Indeed, it might be something that we as tutors consider the least likely to trigger an adverse reaction. An interviewee in Arts Therapies told us that he reappraised the role of initial “warm-up” activites after getting a group of students to close their eyes and imagine that they were on a beach listening to the waves. One of the students explained afterwards that the exercise had triggered the memory of the last time she heard her late boyfriend’s voice – calling her name as he was being pulled out by the current after they had gone for a moonlight swim.
One of the interviewees commented that one of the roles of a HE educator is to present challenging material relevant to the curriculum. If, as he commented, the very process of learning about new ideas can be troubling, it is perhaps necessary to broaden the debate beyond a focus on specific topics or evidence that students might find troubling. Instead, we should possibly be exploring what the implications are of creating conditions where students can rethink their previous world views.
However, another of our interviewees, who teaches on psychology and anthropology programmes, expressed a concern that drawing attention to the potential for trauma can make the experience of trauma appear to be normal. He warned of the danger of the placebo effect where students might begin to experience what is mentioned and advised that, as well as giving warnings about content to be covered, it is important to stress that it is also fine not to be affected. I decided to implement this advice last year in a module on ancient Greek religion – a module that raises its own potentially sensitive issues. During the previous iteration of the course, several students had found that thinking about the similarities and differences between ancient religion and modern Christianised religious outlooks had made them reflect in ways they found uncomfortable about their own religious backgrounds and beliefs. Another student told me that she felt awkward about finding the topic enjoyable rather than upsetting. I wanted to warn students that they might find the topic difficult, but certainly without marginalising those who were not affected.
Fiona and I began the Teaching Sensitive Subjects project hoping for solutions to the issues we were becoming aware of. What we have gained to date is, instead, a deeper awareness of how differently the question of teaching sensitive subjects is approached and how much work needs doing, both in classics and in the disciplines that we hoped would be able to supply us with answers. Could it be the case that if students are bothered by what we teach them, this might be because we are doing our jobs properly? When is it good pedagogic practice to deal with material that might trouble students, and what does this show about our responsibilities as HE educators? How far are tutors able to control what subjects students will find traumatic? Should we even attempt to control how students receive our teaching?
References and some suggested reading:
Fiona McHardy and I outlined some of our initial findings on sensitive subjects in Bulletin of the Council for University Classics Departments 28 (2012), 28-31. We are about to launch a blog at http://sensitivesubjects.wordpress.com/ to disseminate our findings. Various aspects of sensitive subjects pedagogy are explored in the forthcoming volume From Abortion to Pederasty: Teaching Sensitive Subjects in the Classics Classroom (ed. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy, Ohio State University Press 2014.
A group of US academics reflect on the ‘trigger warnings’ debate, and include converging views to their own in “Trigger Warnings Are Flawed”, http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/05/29/essay-faculty-members-about-why-they-will-not-use-trigger-warnings#sthash.hV15pGPg.dpbs (last accessed 16/06/14).
On sexual violence against men in conflict zones, see Katie Gibbons, ‘Thousands of Men Suffer in Silence after War Zone Rape’, The Times 12.6.14: 21 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4116256.ece (last accessed 16.06.14)
Classical homosexuality and the Eurymedon vase:
Dover, K.J. 1978. Greek Homosexuality, London: Duckworth.
Halperin, D.M. 2002. How to Do the History of Homosexuality, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, A.C. 1999. ‘Eurymedon and the Evolution of Political Personifications in the Early Classical Period’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 119: 128-141 http://www.jstor.org/stable/632314
The ‘Eurymedon Vase’ shows a youngish Greek male with a fairly wispy beard making a sexually aggressive approach to a bent-over, bearded, male in Persian clothing. It struck me in the ’90s as a useful way to illustrate the conventions of ancient Greek same sex relationships while also showing how they might be inverted, here quite possibly, for comic effect. The subject, and more specifically an inscription on the vase, suggests a date in the aftermath of the victory won both by land and sea in the vicinity of the Eurymedon in 466 BCE which, by effectively ending the threat of a Persian invasion of the Greek mainland, marks a better cut-off date for the “Persian Wars” than the Battles of Plataea and Mycale of 479. I told the students that the inscription reads, “I am Eurymedon, I stand bent over”, and quoted Sir Kenneth Dover’s assessment that it declares: “we’ve buggered the Persians” (1978: 105).
When I showed and then discussed the vase, there was a moment of silence followed by laugher. I felt that I had succeeded in my goal to show that there was a counterpart to the image of Greece as the birthplace of democracy and producer of high culture, and considered that the vase provided an opportunity to explore the mix of familiarity and difference that typically accompanies the study of the ancient world. I wanted to show the students that the same culture hailed as the birthplace of western culture was also alien and strange, yet one whose comic images we can laugh at, particularly if we try to understand the specific ancient values that are being encoded. I considered an image showing impending rape to be interesting for what it revealed about the Greeks’ own particular perceptions of gender, ethnicity and power. I felt confirmed in this view several years later on reading David Halperin’s observation that that the student of Greece “quickly realizes that the ancient Greeks were quite weird, by our standards, when it came to sex” (2002: 2).
By the time that I read Halperin’s assessment I had begun to move away from the particularist approach to classical culture that I was committed to in 1993. I no longer approached the ancient world as one solely distant from our own, to be studied in relation to cultural codes that are straightforwardly other. Instead, I had started to encourage students to reflect on the various lenses through which we today analyse classical evidence. I would try to get them to think about how these can enable us to interpret the ancient world, but also potentially to distort this world. I had begun to encourage students to reflect upon the relationship between modern and ancient concepts of sexual identity. For example, the learning outcomes for a module on ancient Greek gender and sexuality that I developed in 2005, and have been teaching iterations of since, include one that fitted with my earlier practice, namely “an ability to use and assess ancient textual and visual evidence in order to illustrate how gender and sexuality were defined and debated in ancient Greece”. Another learning outcome states that, on successful completion of the module, students will have “an ability to relate the study of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece to contemporary debates about gender, sexuality, feminism, and cultural diversity”. Student evaluations for the most recent iteration of the module in 2012 indicate, I think, that I have succeeded in my goals to encourage the students to contextualise ancient Greek gender and sexuality in relation to contemporary concepts. Comments concerning the module’s “best aspects” included “the evaluation of different theories of gender… and how it can be applied to modern day, not just antiquity”. Another student commented that “the class prompted me to question my own beliefs and preoccupations”.
However, while encouraging students to reflect on their own identities, I have become increasingly aware that such a level of personal engagement can be troubling. Several years ago, I began work with my Roehampton colleague Fiona McHardy on a project funded by the HEA to investigate the teaching of sensitive subjects in the classical classroom. We started this research in part because we were discovering that students were increasingly finding certain topics distressing – yet these were the very ones that often especially stimulated their curiosity, such as rape, domestic violence and so-called ‘honour’ killings. Among our goals were to discover how classical colleagues were dealing with sensitive topics and how students experienced such material, and to draw on the expertise of colleagues in disciplines which frequently encounter topics that students might find troubling, including psychology, anthropology, criminology and the Arts Therapies.
One interviewee, a classicist, reported that he has used the “Eurymedon Vase” to make students think about rape as a metaphor for military domination. In a session where students would not be expecting a depiction of sexual violence, he showed the vase and the students started to laugh. The laughter died away when he put up a second image, a photograph of soldiers laughing over the naked bodies of their prisoners. While hearing about the students’ shocked response to the second image, I was reminded of the collective gasp by a class of mature students at a classical myth summer school in the early 2000s when, during a session on monsters, I showed an image of the gorgon followed by a photograph of Myra Hindley. The students told me afterwards that the strategy helped them understand the power of the gorgon’s stare. However, I’ve never repeated it, and conducting the interviews has helped me unpack why such using unsettling modern images to understand the ancient world needs to be done with care – if at all. After I had initially drafted this posting on Thursday 12th June, I read that day’s Times article by Katie Gibbons on the growing recognition of the extent of sexual violence against men in conflict zones. Does use of such material have any place in the teaching of ancient wartime sexual violence? If so, how should it be used? As a shock tactic to dispel overly romantic notions of classical culture? Or accompanied by trigger warnings?
The strategy of deliberately shocking students differed from the practice of many of the other interviewees. An interviewee in psychology explained that it is common practice in his discipline to emphasise at the outset that students might experience troubling, even traumatic things. One classicist commented that when she started teaching she would focus on subjects such as rape and abortion because they were good for generating spirited seminar discussion. On realising that some students had first- or second-hand experience of these issues, she began to give warnings that material to be covered might cause distress.
What Fiona and I also found out from conducting the interviews was that one never knows for certain which subjects students might find troubling. Indeed, it might be something that we as tutors consider the least likely to trigger an adverse reaction. An interviewee in Arts Therapies told us that he reappraised the role of initial “warm-up” activites after getting a group of students to close their eyes and imagine that they were on a beach listening to the waves. One of the students explained afterwards that the exercise had triggered the memory of the last time she heard her late boyfriend’s voice – calling her name as he was being pulled out by the current after they had gone for a moonlight swim.
One of the interviewees commented that one of the roles of a HE educator is to present challenging material relevant to the curriculum. If, as he commented, the very process of learning about new ideas can be troubling, it is perhaps necessary to broaden the debate beyond a focus on specific topics or evidence that students might find troubling. Instead, we should possibly be exploring what the implications are of creating conditions where students can rethink their previous world views.
However, another of our interviewees, who teaches on psychology and anthropology programmes, expressed a concern that drawing attention to the potential for trauma can make the experience of trauma appear to be normal. He warned of the danger of the placebo effect where students might begin to experience what is mentioned and advised that, as well as giving warnings about content to be covered, it is important to stress that it is also fine not to be affected. I decided to implement this advice last year in a module on ancient Greek religion – a module that raises its own potentially sensitive issues. During the previous iteration of the course, several students had found that thinking about the similarities and differences between ancient religion and modern Christianised religious outlooks had made them reflect in ways they found uncomfortable about their own religious backgrounds and beliefs. Another student told me that she felt awkward about finding the topic enjoyable rather than upsetting. I wanted to warn students that they might find the topic difficult, but certainly without marginalising those who were not affected.
Fiona and I began the Teaching Sensitive Subjects project hoping for solutions to the issues we were becoming aware of. What we have gained to date is, instead, a deeper awareness of how differently the question of teaching sensitive subjects is approached and how much work needs doing, both in classics and in the disciplines that we hoped would be able to supply us with answers. Could it be the case that if students are bothered by what we teach them, this might be because we are doing our jobs properly? When is it good pedagogic practice to deal with material that might trouble students, and what does this show about our responsibilities as HE educators? How far are tutors able to control what subjects students will find traumatic? Should we even attempt to control how students receive our teaching?
References and some suggested reading:
Fiona McHardy and I outlined some of our initial findings on sensitive subjects in Bulletin of the Council for University Classics Departments 28 (2012), 28-31. We are about to launch a blog at http://sensitivesubjects.wordpress.com/ to disseminate our findings. Various aspects of sensitive subjects pedagogy are explored in the forthcoming volume From Abortion to Pederasty: Teaching Sensitive Subjects in the Classics Classroom (ed. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy, Ohio State University Press 2014.
A group of US academics reflect on the ‘trigger warnings’ debate, and include converging views to their own in “Trigger Warnings Are Flawed”, http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/05/29/essay-faculty-members-about-why-they-will-not-use-trigger-warnings#sthash.hV15pGPg.dpbs (last accessed 16/06/14).
On sexual violence against men in conflict zones, see Katie Gibbons, ‘Thousands of Men Suffer in Silence after War Zone Rape’, The Times 12.6.14: 21 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4116256.ece (last accessed 16.06.14)
Classical homosexuality and the Eurymedon vase:
Dover, K.J. 1978. Greek Homosexuality, London: Duckworth.
Halperin, D.M. 2002. How to Do the History of Homosexuality, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, A.C. 1999. ‘Eurymedon and the Evolution of Political Personifications in the Early Classical Period’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 119: 128-141 http://www.jstor.org/stable/632314