Orienting the Domus: Queer Materials and ἐκκλησίαι in Rome

Monday, November 25, 2019, 1:00 PM

Panel: “What’s the ‘Matter’ with Gender and Sexuality in the Roman World?”

Archaeological remnants bear material witness to displays and discourses of Roman sexuality, sometimes confirming (elite) literary constructions and sometimes revealing their contestation. However, the material “matters” of sex and sexuality are frequently segmented out and treated as isolated issues. Sexual materials can be curated from disparate and distant spaces (e.g., the presentation of the “secret cabinet” of Greco-Roman “sex” objects in the Naples museum). Likewise, the brothel of Pompeii often becomes the preferred site for imagining and discussing Roman sexuality. As Joshel and Peterson (2014) have observed in the context of the materiality of Roman slavery, the brothel tends to capture both popular and scholarly attention more than other spaces on this site, in particular its less visited and preserved domestic spaces. Following Joshel and Peterson into Roman households—and attending to their emphasis on the non-elite and enslaved persons who moved through and inhabited them—this paper explores material evidence of ancient sexuality within Roman (particularly Pompeian) houses. Thus, while this exploration will highlight, when they appear, sexual materials that have been found in domestic spaces, it will also use material evidence of sexuality more broadly to orient the domus—i.e., explore where and how it is constructed to permit or prohibit sexuality, or at least certain expressions of it. By “orienting” the domus in terms of its sexuality, this paper takes a queer theoretical lens that is especially informed by Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), which explores and theorizes the materiality of sexual orientations. Ahmed turns to different and less proximate objects that encapsulate the deviance of queer orientations; likewise, this turn to the domus simultaneously deviates from expected spaces of sexual deviance and finds queer deviance in a space deemed central to Roman “straightness”—i.e., patria potestas.

Turning, then, to the material spaces of early Christianity: if we assume these rooms of Rome as the spaces where Christ-followers assembled, then how does that space orient experiences of sexuality in these ekklēsiai? How would these orientations affect their interaction with Paul’s letter to Roman Christ-assemblies, especially when it draws upon Rome’s language of the Roman household—the family—to talk about kinship in Romans 8? By exploring sexuality beyond the brothel (among the many spaces where it is most popularly imagined), less visible sexual spaces can emerge in material culture. The emergence of a sexually-oriented domus is especially important for the study of early Christ-assemblies since these ekklēsiai are generally accepted and reconstructed to have gathered within Roman houses. By engaging the sexual orientation of the domus, then, it is possible to reconstruct queer materials that affected these Christ-assemblies and their interactions with textual materials. Thus, the queer material of the ekklēsia and the domus might reveal ways to think sex into texts where it is less apparent—moving sex out of the brothel and into the household, out of Romans 1 and into Romans 8, where imagery connected to this sexual materiality of Roman households abounds.