October 5, 2023 - December 22, 2023
Curated by: Brianne Cipywnyk, Dr. Tracene Harvey
Gender and sexuality are terms that we hear a lot today, but to many it may seem like gender and sexual diversity are new concepts that modern societies have only recently begun to have serious and thoughtful conversations about. However, such social concepts are not entirely new. Throughout history and around the world, cultures have explored gender and sexuality beyond the boundaries of binary biological sex and traditional gender roles. A prime example is the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. Through artistic expression, such as sculpture, frescoes, and literature, ancient Greeks and Romans traversed the diversity and complexity of sexuality and gender, including same-sex relationships, hyper-masculinity, hyper-femininity, and even gender non-conformity. From the Sleeping Hermaphroditus to the love affair between the Roman emperor Hadrian and the beautiful Bithynian youth Antinous, this exhibit explores the richness of ancient expressions of gender and sexuality.
While ancient Greek and Roman society did not have the same terms for gender and sexuality as we do today, people still had diverse sexual preferences and gender expressions. The art that survives from the ancient world provides us with evidence indicating that gender and sexuality were not, in fact, set in stone. As you will see, people from the ancient Graeco-Roman world expressed gender and sexuality in multiple ways. They explored what it meant to be a man, a woman, neither, or both through lens of mythology and the divine, as well as through representations of individuals in daily life who dared to tread outside the boundaries of traditional gender roles. In our contemporary world where many people are exploring these very same ideas, perhaps more than ever, it only makes sense to travel back in time and explore the history of our gender identities.