Queer World-Making in Petronius' Satyrica

This dissertation is a reading of certain aspects of Petronius’ Satyrica in light of contemporary queer theory, where “queer” is understood broadly as “non-normative”. This non-normativity encompasses gender and sexuality as well as other vectors of positionality, in particular class. A popular reading of the Satyrica contends that its characters are figures of derision, and that their “lowly” escapades should be viewed over the narrator’s head, from the implied perspective of a “hidden author”. The dissertation challenges this interpretation by reading from the perspective of the characters themselves rather than that of a superior figure of elite normativity, arguing that they are in the process of creating new queer worlds. Key queer theoretical texts informing the dissertation’s approach include Edelman’s No Future, Butler’s Gender Trouble, and Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. The first two chapters explore the queer parody and reformulation by Petronian characters of two key aristocratic Roman institutions, fraternity and marriage. The first chapter examines how the central characters, Encolpius, Ascyltos, and Giton, appropriate sublime Roman fraternity in order to forge new forms of kinship in the absence of natal family, while the second focusses on the Pannychis episode, the marriage of Trimalchio and Fortunata, and the Wife of Ephesus, substantiating the myriad ways in which these episodes challenge normative conceptions of marriage and elite (reproductive) futurity. The second pair of chapters reads the Croton episode as a microcosm of the text as a whole, focusing on its paradoxical combination of biological non-reproductivity and creative fertility, as instantiated by the struggle of the younger generation to adapt to a world where biological reproduction no longer carries world-building force and normative social relations have been blighted. The fourth chapter presents a close reading of the Circe episode in light of theoretical literature positioning masochism as a mode of eroticism that privileges non-phallic means of generating pleasure. It suggests that Encolpius’ “failed” relationship with Circe exhibits a queer, masochistic aesthetic, to the side of the phallocentric impotence plot: as elsewhere, failure is productive, not paralyzing.

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