Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome by Anthony Corbeill (review)

In Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome, classicist Anthony Corbeill delves into an aspect of gender and sexuality in antiquity that has received relatively little discussion, especially in early Christian studies: the role that grammatical gender—masculine, feminine, neuter—played for ancient people in organizing the world according to categories of sexual difference. Against the commonplace that “[t]he grammatical gender of inanimate objects . . . is a convenient linguistic convention, having no correspondence with any sort of imagined sexual characteristics of those objects in the real world” (1), Corbeill deftly demonstrates the degree to which rhetorically astute Latin speakers engaged the sexual connotations carried by grammatical gender, both shaping their speech in ways that exploited it and, in turn, producing speech always already shaped in accordance with its parameters.

The larger story that the book recounts is a diachronic one, though told primarily from the perspective of Roman grammarians of the late Republic and the Empire such as Marcus Terentius Varro. Chapter One explores a problem that worried the Roman grammarians: instances of Latin nouns displaying variable or uncertain gender in texts of the received tradition. In most cases, ancient perceptions of the “nature” of a given noun (i.e., its natural sex) combined with indications from morphology and usage were enough to settle the matter. But in cases where ambiguity stubbornly persisted, the grammarians recurred to a fourth and more elusive category—auctoritas. Here, Corbeill argues, ancient Latin scholars imagined a time of primeval origins in which the gender of nouns was fluid and only came to be fixed via the wise authority of the ancestors (maiores). More contemporarily, that authority persisted in the work of the poets; thus “certain poets, in particular Vergil . . . can use an uncommon gender of a noun without being accused of either ignorance or error” (38). Chapter Two explores this peculiar license of the poets in more detail, surveying a range of explanations, both ancient and modern, for the practice. Corbeill’s own proposal reinforces the previous chapter’s argument, suggesting that the poets themselves were “hoping to recall this era when genders of nouns had an inherent instability” (63)—and thereby to demonstrate a certain mastery in continuity with the more ancient ancestral authority. Chapter Three tests this hypothesis against a series of case studies. These are poetic passages (drawn from Plautus, Virgil, Catullus, and others) in which nouns are gendered in seemingly fluid or anomalous ways, evidence of “poetic exploitation” (101), so Corbeill argues, to specific semantic and other literary ends.

By contrast, the remainder of the book posits a decided movement away from this earlier fluidity, charting instead a subsequent “calcification of gender boundaries” and with it “the development of a literally heterosexual worldview” (71). Chapter Four proposes an analogy to these changing attitudes towards grammatical gender—but one that “evolved in tandem” (133)—whereby archaic Roman deities of fluid or androgynous sexual status gave way (perhaps historically, but at least in the imagination of later ancient scholars) to strictly dichotomous sexed divinities. Chapter Five traces a similar narrative with respect to the figure of the hermaphrodite, this time one in which the fate of human sexual irregularity is to lose the prodigious status that it carried in the republic, becoming in the empire simply a legal problem to be managed and situated, one way or another, with respect to the increasingly rigid binary of male and female.

Scholars of gender and sexuality in early Christianity will benefit from the uniquely positioned set of questions that Corbeill poses with respect to grammatical gender and its relationship to sexual difference across a range of registers (biological, social, literary, political), none of which, he compellingly shows, can be neatly separated. At the same time, things may not have been quite as straightforward throughout every corner of the ancient world as the book’s diachronic presentation could lead one to believe. Indeed, the very complexity of...