Fragmented Germany, Medieval Revival, and Cultural Longing

Throughout the 19th century, Germany was a “patchwork of small states and cities,” and unification under a single German government did not occur until 1871.2 Prior to the end of the 18th century, Germany had been unified under the Holy Roman Empire, but conflicts with France and Napoleon resulted in the fragmentation of these states. Due to this sense of national unrest, politics played a major role in 19th century German artists’ lives. Following the devestating defeat of the Prussian army by Napoleon in 1806, Germany became an “occupied country,” and the governments of various states cooperated with Napoleonic rule and reform.3 Artists like Caspar David Friedrich vehemently opposed the occupation along with a number of other artists and creatives, creating monumental artworks that expressed a patriotic sentiment and longing for a unified nation.

Goethe’s 1772 “On German Architecture” is often credited for spurring a greater interest in Gothic architecture. This essay further identified Gothic architecture and its revival with German heritage, although several other European nations claimed this heritage as well. Goethe’s work focuses on his observations of the Strasbourg Cathedral and how, even when divorced from a religious context, the Cathedral stands as a testament to the German spirit and is a work of historical art in and of itself. Further, Strasbourg Cathedral had been on French land since the 17th century, but “Goethe chooses to recall that Strasbourg was ‘an old German city’ when the Cathedral was built,” linking Germany to Gothic architecture.4 Goethe even rejected the name “Gothic,” which had initially been used as a derogatory term for the style during the Renaissance, instead simply calling it “German architecture.” The publication of “On German Architecture” came at a perfect time, as its release coincided with the Napoleonic army’s defeat of German states a few decades later. By associating Gothic architecture with historical Germany, Goethe’s work contributed to a building sense of national identity surrounding the Gothic style, influencing the work of artists like Friedrich.

The German interest in the Gothic and the Middle Ages did not only extend to architecture, however. In 1847, Johann Andreas Schmeller compiled and published poems from the Codex Buranus that had been discovered at the Benediktbeuren monastery near Munich. Schmeller’s manuscript, entitled Carmina Burana, allowed for the original Middle Ages poetry to reach a wider audience, which later included Carl Orff. Carmina Burana includes poetry and songs from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, likely originally written by two main camps: wandering scholars and goliards.5 Wandering scholars were often aristocratic young men who were sent by their families to a monastery, although many did not truly share a religious calling. While some of these young aristocrats may have been invested in their monastic lives, some were likely disinterested and disillusioned, leading to the inclusion of satirical and cynical themes in many works by this group. Carmina Burana’s poems are no exception as many of the over two hundred poems in the collection reflect these same themes. Goliards, on the opposite end, were not monks at all but participated in a “fictitious [religious] order…with its own saint, St. Golias.”6 These traveling musicians often directed their satirical lyrics and poems at the church and other religious orders, also including themes of earthly pleasures and lust in their work. These two groups could be found throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, particularly in Germany. The discovery of the Codex Buranus and the publication of Schmeller’s Carmina Burana, much like Goethe’s writing on architecture, came at an opportune time in German history, linking historical artforms with Germany yet again during a period of significant fragmentation and longing for a shared identity between German states.

Friedrich and the Romantic Sublime

In addition to their ties to the German spirit and identity during the 19th century, Gothic architecture and Middle Ages themes became pivotal in German Romantic artworks. Friedrich’s patriotism often manifested itself as Gothic architectural imagery in his paintings, and he included a significant number of monasteries, churches, and castles in his works, particularly those that had fallen into ruin. Specifically, his obsession with the ruins of Eldena Abbey in Griefswald provided inspiration for many of his works, including one of his most lauded paintings, Abbey in the Oakwood (Fig. 1).

Friedrich’s images of Gothic ruins also link the Gothic style and the Middle Ages with the sublime. While the term “sublime” is typically used to describe natural phenomena and the depiction of the terror and awe of nature in Romantic art, it can also refer to the overwhelming sensory experience of a Gothic cathedral or ruin. In his “Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion” (1827), Friedrich Hegel asserted that “sublimity was the way by which the divine manifested itself in the natural world.”7 This can then be translated to Gothic architecture and its revivals, as Gothic architects often attempted to re-create elements of the natural world within their structures. In the 19th century, a common view prevailed that “the Gothic style was an imitation of the Nordic forests,” which can be clearly seen through the arabesque and floral motifs and patterns found throughout Gothic structures.8 Goethe himself also directly described Gothic architecture with the term “sublime,” again referencing the Strasbourg Cathedral:

The impression which filled my soul was whole and large, and of a sort that (since it was composed of a thousand harmonizing details) I could relish and enjoy, but by no means identify and explain. . . . It is hard on the spirit of man when his brother’s work is so sublime (hoch erhaben) that he can only bow and worship (nur beugen, und anbeten muss).9

Caspar David Friedrich’s body of work emphasizes the link between the sublime and the Gothic. His paintings of Gothic structures, particularly those of the ruins of Eldena Abbey in Griefswald, his hometown, provide a view of German architecture that ties the sublime with German patriotism. His most known work depicting the abbey, Abbey in the Oak Wood (Fig. 1), is one of many paintings and sketches of the ruined structure Friedrich created throughout his life. Much like his other Romantic contemporaries, Friedrich saw “such crumbling remnants as emblems of the beauty and faith of a golden age of German culture.”10 Although Friedrich’s inclusion of oak trees also allude to a “golden age of German culture” through references to the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, the ruined Gothic structure within Abbey in the Oak Wood, particularly with its bleak and somber mood, connotes a sense of “waning glory.”11 Through the dark and almost dull hues on the canvas, the viewer is confronted with what appears to be a dilapidated door or the open gate leading into (or out of) the abbey, resting just underneath a destroyed lancet window. Monks process through the doors past an open grave, perhaps recently dug or perhaps exhumed. By Friedrich’s time, Eldena had ceased all operations and had largely been lost to erosion and natural decay across a few centuries. Friedrich’s depiction of monks in a ruined Gothic abbey points to a more faith-filled German Medieval past inhabiting the present space. Looking to the past, Friedrich connected the Medieval with an “earlier and purer religious time,” which provided a foil to the increasing secularization of Germany during the nineteenth century.12

Friedrich’s now-destroyed Cloister Cemetery in Snow (1818; Fig. 2) is a similarly stark work to Abbey in the Oakwood, depicting the same ruins from a different perspective. His desolate landscape of dead oak trees in winter snow, framing the abbey’s towering windows, connect the Gothic with the sublime and, further, a sense of yearning for a past that no longer existed, creating an eerie and disquieting air within the painting. His depictions of cemeteries with Gothic ruins can be considered “deathscapes,” in which Friedrich often contemplated the separation of the traditional Church from secularization spurred by the Enlightenment. This re-connects Gothic ruins with the sublime, as Friedrich’s ruminations on death and the funerary practices of his contemporaries reflected themes of the inevitability of death and the prospect of potential salvation.

Some of Friedrich’s other depictions of Eldena Abbey are significantly less desolate, opting for a lighter tone. In an 1825 watercolor sketch, Eldena Ruins Viewed from the Northeast (Fig. 3), Eldena is depicted during the day, perhaps just after dawn or before dusk, bringing a more hopeful ethos to the painting. Similarly and painted in the same year, his Ruined Monastery of Eldena near Griefswald (Fig. 4) provides an alternative view of the abbey with his signature Ruckenfigur in the foreground, highlighting the sublime vastness of the structure and its oneness with the natural landscape surrounding it. Both of these works, while brighter in color scheme and mood than Friedrich’s deathscapes of Eldena, can be considered examples of the sublimity of the Gothic, emphasizing a longing for a unified German past.

Friedrich’s paintings of the Gothic sublime can be considered proto-Gesamtkunstwerk, total works of art in their use of terror and awe to incite an emotional response in the viewer. Nineteenth century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel can be credited as one of the first scholars to identify the Gesamtkunstwerk. His writings, particularly his Phenomenology of Spirit, Lectures on Aesthetics, and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, discuss modernity as being shaped by “Germanic, Protestant Christianity,” highlighting how art can create overwhelming sensory experiences.13 This relationship between the sensual, the Gothic, and the sublime appears frequently in Friedrich’s works as a sort of proto-Gesamtkunstwerk, an early example of what could be considered a specifically German total work of art. Friedrich’s paintings of Gothic ruins, especially those at Eldena in Griefswald with their variations in mood and tone, provide perfect examples of proto-Gesamtkunstwerk as they may fill the viewer with a staggering sense of awe, terror, and wonder at both the natural world and the Gothic as a sublime subject. Both Friedrich in his paintings of Eldena and Orff in his Carmina Burana create immersive experiences for the audience, both of which seek to revive and re-imagine a Medieval past as means to connect to German national identity and heritage.

Orff’s Carmina Burana and the Modern Sublime

Carmina Burana is based on the Codex Buranus, but Orff specifically studied the 1847 edition of the manuscript compiled and published by Schmeller. Schmeller’s collection was notably out of order and imperfect, reflecting the lack of order of the original Codex Buranus, but it was likely the only version of the manuscript that was accessible to Orff. Despite the disorder in the original Codex and Schmeller’s publication, the poems included were clearly organized into four groups: “moralistic and satirical poetry; songs of nature and love songs; drinking and gaming songs; and religious dramas.”14 In total, there are over two hundred poems and songs included in the original Codex Buranus and in Schmeller’s publication, but Orff only used 24 of them as direct inspiration and material for Carmina Burana. A number of the poems in the Codex Buranus were already set to music, employing a Medieval musical notation known as neumes. Neumes are practically impossible to decode and reconstruct in modernity and, as a result, Orff attempted to create a musical work that maintained a Medieval ethos without employing authentic musical constructions from within the Codex Buranus.

Orff begins his Carmina with the movement, “Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi.” This initial movement provides the musical backbone for the entire piece, bookending the cantata in the beginning and then again as the final movement. “Fortuna” references the first poem from Schmeller’s publication and is associated with an illustration of the wheel of fortune found on a page in the original illuminated manuscript (Fig. 5). This movement, written completely in Latin as opposed to macaronic French or German, is one of the most iconic parts of Carmina, appearing in contemporary media from television ads to full-length films. Here, themes of cyclical change and fate are prevalent, and Orff continues his cantata following “Fortuna” with similarly dramatic themes of love, yearning, and faith. These themes can be interpreted as an example of the sublime as well.

Orff’s musical expression of yearning and faith in particular is reminiscent of the sublime in works by Friedrich. These themes as previously discussed appear frequently in Friedrich’s works featuring Eldena Abbey, and the poetry lyrics within Carmina are a direct reflection of the same themes, originally written during the same period as the construction and operation of the Abbey itself. In addition, Carmina has often been referred to as “simple” and “folk-like” by musical scholars, although its music complements these themes perfectly through complex constructions of orchestra and choir. As described by German musical scholar Jack M. Stein, Carmina employs constructions including

“incidence[s] of tonic subdominant and dominant, making sparing use of chromatics…[and] dissonance… Orff establishes compulsive rhythmic patterns and then with great daring repeats them in blocks, often literally dozens of times but with very slight variations.”15

Carmina calls for an enormous orchestra and is symphonic in nature, although it is a wholly unique experience. The percussion in the piece is “unusually large” and includes over ten different instruments in this section alone.16 The sublimity expressed through these themes, along with the all-consuming musical experience of Carmina, relates to the Romantic ideals of Friedrich’s proto-Gesamtkunstwerke, yet again linking the Gothic and Medieval past to the present and the modern.

Carmina cannot be considered a complete Gesamtkunstwerk as it is largely “independent of Wagnerian influence.”17 Perhaps, however, one can consider Carmina a proto-Gesamtkunstwerk, much like the works of Friedrich. Throughout the piece, the listener is confronted with existential themes and almost ritualistic musical settings that are reminiscent of religious chants or hymns through the repetition of syllables and similar phrases. The symbolic themes of yearning and faith and the musical imagery of the wheel of fortune, fate, and cyclical change are all grounded in Medieval imagery and belief. Friedrich also incorporated imagery from the Medieval past to similarly express themes of yearning and faith, creating works of art that are not quite Gesamtkunstwerke but a precursor to it. Both Friedrich and Orff sought to use the Medieval past not to preserve it as history but to transform it and utilize it to express modern anxieties and a collective identity. Friedrich’s sublime is personal, looks inward, and is largely spiritual in nature, while Orff’s is communal and theatrical. However, both artist and composer aim to overwhelm the audience and create a transcendent experience. The rediscovered Medieval poetry of the Codex Buranus heavily links the Romantic period with Orff’s cantata thematically, and the reconstruction of the poems in Schmeller’s manuscript forms a historical bridge between the Romantic fascination with the Gothic and modern interpretations.

The Medieval past, particularly Gothic imagery in architecture and poetry, provided ample source material and symbolic vocabulary for German artists and composers to grapple with ideas of identity and the sublime. Friedrich’s paintings of Gothic sublimity and Orff’s modern orchestral and choral masterpiece both portray a continuing interest in the Gothic throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, revealing a continuous aesthetic lineage throughout massive cultural shifts. Carmina Burana and the Gothic imagery of Friedrich’s paintings serve as proto-Gesamtkunstwerke and are the culmination of the concept of the Romantic sublime found through Medieval interest, transforming visual immersion into an auditory experience.

Works Cited

“A Short History of the Sublime.” The MIT Press Reader, March 22, 2021. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-short-history-of-the-sublime/.

Bergande, Wolfram. “The Creative Destruction of the Total Work of Art: From Hegel to Wagner and Beyond.” In The Death and Life of the Total Work of Art: Henry van de Velde and the Legacy of a Modern Concept, edited by Carsten Ruhl, Chris Dähne, and Rixt Hoekstra. JOVIS, 2015.

Goodrum, R. Gordon. “‘Carmina Burana’: The Poetry of Wandering Scholars and Wayward Clerics.” The Choral Journal 36, no. 2 (1995): 9–12.

Hokanson, Alison, and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein. Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025.

Paulin, Roger. “The Past Returns.” In The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry, 1st ed. Open Book Publishers, 2016. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt19qggtt.11.

Spurr, David. “Allegories of the Gothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In Architecture and Modern Literature. University of Michigan Press, 2012. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1qv5nb5.8.

Stein, Jack M. “‘Carmina Burana’ and Carl Orff.” Monatshefte 69, no. 2 (1977): 121–30.

Vaughan, William. Friedrich. Phaidon, 2004.

Whittington, Karl. “Caspar David Friedrich’s Medieval Burials.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 11, no. 1 (2012). https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring12/whittington-on-caspar-david-friedrichs-medieval-burials.

Yri, Kirsten. “A Modern Reception History of the Codex Buranus in Image and Sound.” In Revisiting the Codex Buranus: Contents, Contexts, Compositions, edited by Tristan E. Franklinos and Henry Hope. Boydell & Brewer, 2020.

Images of the divine child of Aphrodite and Hermes are not uncommon in Imperial Roman domestic spaces. Hermaphrodite, (typically written as Hermaphroditus, although I chose in this article to use a gender neutral name and pronouns for them), appears across Imperial Roman art, from wall frescoes to sculptures in peristyle gardens. Consequently, Hermaphrodite becomes an essential figure in the Roman home, influencing public opinion on the home itself and prompting conversation between the home owner and guests. However, the perception of Hermaphrodite as a god-like figure drastically differs from that of intersex individuals with similar sex characteristics. Imperial Roman society saw intersex people as a net negative, while simultaneously understanding Hermaphrodite as a positive addition to the home. The Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture type consists of 2nd century examples of domestic artwork featuring an intersex individual, but the sculptures’ aesthetic composition independent of subject matter eclipses the Roman understanding of intersex births. This is certainly true in other cases of Sleeping Hermaphrodite-type sculptures, and their inclusion in Roman homes does not mirror Roman popular thought on intersexuality. The divinity of Hermaphrodite, and the inclusion of this figure in sculpture, makes the intersex individual in this case an acceptable possibility, while for intersex individuals born in Imperial Rome, the sheer fact of their existence was challenged by political and religious authority.

It is important to note that the Roman understanding of physical sex and gender was based on the active/passive roles filled by men and women that, according to Corbeil, “were thought to typify the two sexes.”1 Sexuality was determined based on the sexual role played by the individual. Mazo-Karras aptly explains:

“Key to the distinction of gender roles was the concept that men are active and women are passive, or that men are penetrators and women penetrated. Thus anyone who is penetrated (or is in other ways passive) is gendered feminine, and anyone who penetrates is masculine. For the Romans, to penetrate other men could be a sign of masculinity… Women who penetrate and men who are penetrated are seen not primarily as sexual deviants but as gender transgressors.”2

Further, gender was not determined on the basis of outward appearance but rather on the individual’s sexual role, whether passive or active, penetrated or penetrator. This could also theoretically be tied to the individual’s physical sex, but it was not uncommon for these roles to become reversed in certain scenarios of gender transgression. Gender transgression, here, implies that gender roles, when reversed, were not accepted in Roman society. Hermaphrodite would have been seen as a gender transgressor following this framework—the nymph Salmacis, a traditionally penetrated female, morphed her body with that of Hermaphroditus, a male penetrator, creating Hermaphrodite. One could argue that, in this case, Hermaphrodite had taken a passive role while still having more masculine sex characteristics. This kind of transgression was not taken lightly by Romans, with men who “transgressed” labeled as cinaedus, or a derogatory term for a male who desires penetration by another male. A cinaedus was seen as effeminate and lacking as a “man”, or vir, based on the gendered nature of his sexual role.3 Even so, Hermaphrodite was still an acceptable image to find in a Roman home, despite the implications of their intersex experience. This links to the idea of divine androgyny; Hermaphrodite’s divinity could have been the sole factor of their identity that made their intersexuality acceptable to Roman society, to the point that they were used as a symbolic feature in gardens. It was their divine status that allowed them to exist in Roman domestic spaces. Simultaneously, intersex people were treated poorly at the hands of religious and political officials, despite the existence of a god-like figure that bore their same body type. This dichotomy persists throughout the Roman Imperial period and provides a rather confusing and paradoxical understanding of intersex identity during this time. I argue that without Hermaphrodite’s divinity, they, along with intersex individuals born in Imperial Rome, would have likely have been viewed as something to fear. However, since Hermaphrodite is the child of Aphrodite and Hermes, a god in their own right, their intersex identity was scorned yet also celebrated. In this way, Hermaphrodite embodies both the feminine and the masculine, exhibiting divine intersexuality rather than androgyny.

Divine Androgyny/Divine Intersexuality

Divine androgyny can be defined by the proclivity of a god to embody the traits of a gender apart from their assigned gender at birth, a scenario many gods experience throughout their mythologies.4 For example, the goddess Athena was “born” from her father Zeus’s head, yet no mother is mentioned in her story. In this way, Zeus takes on a more passive gender role in the Roman view, making his gender in this tale rather ambiguous and unrelated to his physical sex. The Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture, in turn, exhibits a similar sense of gender ambiguity, however one cannot consider Hermaphrodite to be androgynous, but rather intersex. Intersexuality in the modern view is defined by the presence of sexual organs on a person that do not necessarily correspond to a binary understanding of physical sex. Hermaphrodite clearly exhibits divine intersexuality rather than divine androgyny as a result of their physical sex characteristics, not the gender they choose to present.

Hermaphrodite’s divine intersexuality originates from multiple sources. Some scholars point out that an intersex god born of Aphrodite and Hermes was worshipped through cult practice prior to the first century BCE, but the story of the spring of Salmacis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses provides a newer version of the story behind Hermaphrodite that would have been commonly referenced among Imperial Roman elites.5 Before Ovid, oral tradition may have referenced an intersex child of Aphrodite and Hermes, and that Hermaphrodite’s intersexuality resulted from their birth. However, Roman thought on Hermaphrodite largely followed Ovid’s mythology as outlined in his story about the spring of Salmacis.

As Hermaphrodite’s tale unfolds, the reader meets Hermaphroditus, a young man who catches the eye of the nymph, Salmacis, while bathing at her spring. Upon meeting Hermaphroditus, Salmacis becomes entranced by his beauty and asks the gods to morph her body with his to become one. After a physical struggle between the two, the gods grant Salmacis her wish and Hermaphroditus becomes Hermaphrodite, his male body molded with that of the female nymph.

Through Ovid’s tale, gender roles are reversed and both Hermaphrodite and Salmacis become gender transgressors. First, Salmacis subverts traditional understandings of nymphs as delicate and ready to be wooed through her actions towards Hermaphroditus. Her identity contrasts with the traditional view of a nymph as “obsessed with hunting and virginity,” and she is described by Ovid in ways that specifically counter the fragile, virginal nymph trope. Robinson points out that the behavior of Salmacis in this story directly contradicts that of other nymphs written about by Ovid:

“Salmacis is seen combing her hair and spending time on her appearance, quite unlike nymphs such as Daphne and Callisto; and she is dressed in light gauzy material, rather than something less comfortable. Her polar opposition to the life of hunting suggests a similar opposition to the life of virginity.”6

Further, Salmacis plays a different role in this story than Robinson’s “raped nymph,” and instead takes on the characteristics of a lustful god as she chases after Hermaphroditus moments before their collective transformation.7

Hermaphroditus, in turn, exhibits more feminine traits even prior to metamorphosis. When Salmacis first encounters him, Hermaphroditus “blushes” at the propositioning nymph and rejects her advances, undressing before bathing in the spring under her watchful eye.8 Here, Hermaphroditus’s actions resemble the mythological trope of the bathing goddess, communicating a sense of feminine allure to the reader. Hermaphroditus, then, becomes Hermaphrodite upon morphing bodies with Salmacis, but Salmacis disappears following their merge. Hermaphrodite is left alone, with a feminine frame and a penis, and is described by Ovid in “terms of effeminacy.”9 According to Robinson, the term hermaphrodite had a dual meaning, referring to the physical constitution of Hermaphrodite as having male and female sex characteristics while simultaneously implying that, by merging with Salmacis, Hermaphroditus had been emasculated.10 It was assumed that, through their transformation, Hermaphrodite embodied more feminine traits and was viewed as weak. However, despite the negative notions surrounding Hermaphrodite’s new physical sex and gender transgressions prior to the transformation, images of Hermaphrodite were common in Roman spaces. Hermaphrodite’s divinity is the sole factor explaining why images of them were acceptable, but intersexuality as a concept was unfathomable to the average Roman. Intersex births were viewed as an impossibility, divinely inspired phenomena that must be evidence of the wrath of an angry god.

Roman Intersex Identity & Its Responses

What, then, is the difference in the response of someone living in Imperial Rome to intersex identity and divine intersexuality? Divine intersexuality, seen in this case through Hermaphrodite’s metamorphosis, was acceptable in the Roman mind. However, intersex identity was not. Citing Corbeil, one can quickly understand the varying attitudes of Romans toward intersex people compared with those towards Hermaphrodite. Contrary to popular belief on the subject, intersex births were not seen as a bad omen per se, but rather the response of a god’s wrath. Essentially, an intersex birth was not predictive and did not have negative implications for the future. Instead, births of this nature were seen as a disruption in the natural world order and, according to Corbeil, “signs of divine anger.”11 Intersex births appeared to attract more attention by the Roman public in times of political or social turmoil and as a result of the implication of an angry god through this type of birth, intersex people were often “put aboard a ship and cast out to sea…where the purifying water prevented any future consequences from being visited upon the Romans.”12 As an alternative to an almost certain death, intersex children may have also been presented and handed over to political and religious authority figures, and those in power were responsible for deciding the child’s fate. In the case that an intersex individual was allowed to survive, it was understood by Roman law that “a third sex was impossible,” so matters of inheritance were determined and settled based on the genitalia or sex organs predominating the individual’s body.13 Thus, if the individual had a penis, they would be treated as male.

As such, intersexuality itself must have been seen as divine. It was seen as impossible for a person to be intersex until an intersex birth occurred, and upon their birth, their intersexuality was inherently tied to divinity and divine intervention. This may help to explain why images of Hermaphrodite were acceptable forms of decoration. Trimble argues in her essay, Beyond Surprise, that the sex of Hermaphrodite may not have mattered to Roman audiences in the way it would today. She notes that Hermaphrodite was “not an obscure mythological figure” and that an elite, educated Roman encountering a sculpture of Hermaphrodite may be familiar with Ovid’s tale or other stories surrounding them.14 Consequently, the response to viewing an artwork of Hermaphrodite would not have been a negative one, but rather it may have sparked further conversation based on the setting of the work itself. This duality between the response to Hermaphrodite and intersex births reveals that Hermaphrodite’s divinity made their intersexuality palatable and acceptable.

Hermaphrodite & Bartman’s “Sexy Boys”

Bartman’s “sexy boys” may help to explain why the identity of the Hermaphrodite was accepted, when intersex individuals were scorned by authorities. In Eros’s Flame: Images of Sexy Boys in Roman Ideal Sculpture, Bartman defines “sexy boys” as “images of youthful males characterized by a soft, just-pubescent physique and a relaxed, soignée pose.”15 These “sexy boy” sculptures had characteristics that resemble those of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture type. Looking specifically at the Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture from the Palazzo Massimo (Fig. 1), one notices the similarities in the sensual pose of the figure compared to Bartman’s “sexy boys,” including a sculpture of Paris from the Musei Capitolini in Rome (Fig. 2). One leg crosses over the other in both sculptures, and each exhibits an exaggerated stance, with weight resting predominantly on one leg rather than both. While contrapposto was a common feature in Greco-Roman sculpture from the Classical period onward, the exaggerated jutting-out of the figure’s hip emphasizes the feminine curve of the waist. Bartman notes that “just as many ‘sexy boy’ statues pose in a manner that Romans would have considered distinctly unmanly, so too do their body types suggest effeminacy.”16 This is also the case with the Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture, as the reclined pose suggests a sense of vulnerability and thus sexual availability to a male viewer only possible in Roman society through the feminine. The facial expressions of Bartman’s “sexy boys” and the Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture seem to mirror each other. Their serene faces, the Hermaphrodite in sleep and Paris awake, are similarly feminine, with soft cheeks and brow bones in contrast to angular, hyper-masculine images of important Roman men.

However, it is essential to note that the Sleeping Hermaphrodite is not a “sexy boy” and instead is divinely intersex. The difference here is that Hermaphrodite is not a man or a boy at all, but they fall into entirely different categories that defy Roman understandings of physical sex and gender. Hermaphrodite in Ovid’s story is intersex and a gender transgressor, both emphasized through divine action at the Spring of Salmacis. While the Sleeping Hermaphrodite may have a similar body posture, hairstyle, and facial expression as Bartman’s “sexy boys,” they are an entirely different kind of sculpture. “Sexy boys” here are, in essence, feminine men. However, since Hermaphrodite is neither man nor woman, one cannot claim that they are a “sexy boy.”

The hairstyles of “sexy boys” and Hermaphrodite are similar to each other, yet each sculpture represents a very different understanding of gender and physical sex. Looking back at Paris from the Musei Capitolini, he is sculpted with carefully styled, wavy hair, with a braid leading from the front of the face to the back of the head where it combines into a stylish knot. Bartman notes here that the hair styles of “sexy boys” may not always be indicative of the masculine or feminine, instead they may be something else entirely: “Some of the hair arrangements found on other sexy boy statues, however, bear little relation to traditional styles worn by either men or women. The thick corkscrew curls ringing the faces of many representations of Paris, for example, seem an artist’s invention, deliberately concocted to convey the foreign character of its subject.”17 Such is the case with the Sleeping Hermaphrodite. The hairstyle seen here is not a traditional male or female hairstyle, rather something altogether different, with curls framing Hermaphrodite’s face and a quasi-top knot atop their head. However, the reasoning for this kind of androgynous hairstyle lies, again, in Hermaphrodite’s divine intersexuality rather than being a “sexy boy” sculpture. While “sexy boys” and Sleeping Hermaphrodite have notable similarities, Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculptures cannot be seen as “sexy boys” at all.

Hermaphrodite in Garden Spaces

The Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture type was commonly found in garden spaces and influenced a visitor’s experience of one’s home. Again, it is the sculpture subject’s divine nature that makes their intersex identity understandable and accepted in the domestic space. Although there exist various arguments for the inclusion of Hermaphrodite sculptures in peristyle gardens, the figure’s dual sexuality and divinity make for an interesting experience of the Roman home that combines male and female spheres of life.

Images of Hermaphrodite were commonly found in areas of the Roman home that would have facilitated male/female interaction, combining the masculine and feminine spheres into one “hermaphrodized” space.18 Von Stackelberg comments that the movement in the home was “male-centered,” while female domestic activities were often marginalized.19 However, it is not just the simple combination of male and female spheres of life that provides a rationale for the inclusion of Hermaphrodite imagery in gardens, but the association of Hermaphrodite with their mother, Venus. Venus is both the “Italian goddess of gardens” and the mother of Hermaphrodite, providing some understanding as to why Hermaphrodite belonged in these spaces. Von Stackelberg also suggests visual similarities between the bodies of Venus and Hermaphrodite when depicted in sculpture, which may also indicate an overall acceptance of Hermaphrodite in gardens. Peristyle gardens were meant as multisensory experiences, commonly combining sculpture with flora and water features to create a unique environment for home visitors.20 The Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture would have been one of several in the garden in which it was found, contributing to a program of other loosely related sculptures that would draw the eye in a particular direction, therefore influencing the movement and conversation of a visitor.

Hermaphrodite’s divine intersexuality would have both signaled to visitors that the garden was a site of male/female sphere crossover, but could have also been indicative of the garden as a divine space itself. While Roman peristyle gardens may not have explicitly been places of worship, the depiction of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite within the space points to the divine nature of the space itself, as the garden could be considered nature controlled in contrast to the dangers lurking outside its walls. One may speculate that a particular water feature in a garden that also housed a Sleeping Hermaphrodite could also remind those familiar with Ovid’s story of the spring of Salmacis, further allowing visitors to have a physical, sensory experience of the myth. After walking through a garden, one may feel more connected to the spiritual and the divine through this multisensory experience, as if the garden itself were a liminal space between the divine and reality.

Conclusion

While the Sleeping Hermaphrodite may be a surprising figure to encounter, particularly to a modern viewer, the Roman understanding of the sculpture would likely have been quite different. Intersex births, including Hermaphrodite, would have been viewed as divine phenomena and were treated as such, while our modern understanding of intersexuality is still contested. Throughout this paper, I have argued that the divine intersexuality of Hermaphrodite and the divine nature of intersex births made the myth of Hermaphrodite and the spring of Salmacis palatable to the Roman citizen. However, intersex people in contemporaneity experience significant marginalization and systemic oppression through the belief in the “traditional” male/female gender binary. Intersexuality in Imperial Rome was an impossibility, and even today, while intersex births occur naturally, it is treated as impossible to raise a child with sex characteristics that don’t align with the binary view of sex and gender. Intersex infants today still experience invasive surgeries that seek to change the perceived physical sex of the individual to more closely align the child’s characteristics with those of a binary male or female. The belief in a third gender, a third sex, or something entirely inbetween is altogether foreign to more conservative views of the gender binary. It is my hope that viewing the Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculptures will spark more interest in the concept of intersexuality as something that even the Romans experienced, that intersexuality and gender transgression are not new but rather have occurred since the dawn of civilization.

Citations & Further Reading

Bartman, Elizabeth. “Eros’s Flame: Images of Sexy Boys in Roman Ideal Sculpture.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes 1 (2002). https://www.jstor.org/stable/4238454.

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988). http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893.

Corbeill, Anthony. “The Prodigious Hermaphrodite.” In Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Farrar, Linda. “Roman Gardens.” In Gardens and Gardeners of the Ancient World, 138–84. Oxbow Books, Windgather Press, 2016.

Mazo Karras, Ruth. “Active/Passive, Acts/Passions: Greek and Roman Sexualities.” The American Historical Review 105, no. 4 (October 2000). https://doi.org/10.2307/2651412.

McGowan, Elizabeth. “The Sleeping Hermaphrodite: Reception and Interpretation in Three Eras.” In Roman Sculpture in Context, edited by Peter D. De Staebler and Anne Hrychuk Kontokosta, 6:75–97. Archaeological Institute of America, 2020.

Robinson, M. “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus: When Two Become One: (Ovid, Met. 4.285-388).” The Classical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1999): 212–23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/639498.

Silberman, Lauren. “Mythographic Transformations of Ovid’s Hermaphrodite.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 4 (1988): 643–52. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2540991.

Trimble, Jennifer. “Beyond Surprise: Looking Again at the Sleeping Hermaphrodite in the Palazzo Massimo.” In Roman Artists, Patrons, and Public Consumption: Familiar Works Reconsidered, edited by Brenda Longfellow and Ellen E. Perry. University of Michigan Press, 2018.

Von Stackelberg, Katharine T. “Garden Hybrids.” Classical Antiquity 33, no. 2 (October 1, 2014): 395–426. https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2014.33.2.395.

Vout, Caroline. “The Erotics of Imperium.” In Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome, 1–39. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

As I sat my brother, Chris, down for an interview, I knew it was going to be weird and uncomfortable. Nobody’s the same when they know they’re being recorded.

“I know this is awkward, but bear with me,” I said, causing Chris to smile. But once I opened the recording app on my phone, he immediately straightened his posture and began speaking like a college professor.

Christopher Mark, but just Chris to everyone who knows him, is one of the shortest boys in his class. At 13 and a half, (the half is important, as he likes to frequently point out), my brother is just a few inches shy of 5’ even though his feet are bigger than mine. His daily uniform – and yes, it is a uniform for all intents and purposes – consists of some polyester joggers that have seen better days and one of several neon Under Armour sports tees. Essentially, he dresses like every other middle school boy.

His Queens accent is just as strong as our parents’, long, swooping o-a vowels, turning long into “lawng” and coffee into “cawfee.” He’s lived in Queens for as long as he can remember, a true New Yorker, born and raised, with a voice and mannerisms to match.

He’s a mirror image of his father, my stepfather, minus the pin-straight blonde mop of hair that sits on top of a buzz cut. (He insists that the haircut makes him look cool). Both him and his father, Mark, have the same black glasses frames, the same nose, and the same quirks, both swearing like sailors at any slight inconvenience. My grandmother won’t let the swearing fly, not around her anyway, so she tries her hardest to call him out with a loud, “Excuse me, Christopher, what did you just say?” to which my brother responds with an exaggerated sigh and an aggressive, “Nothing, Mima.”

Even on a random Friday afternoon, in the middle of his algebra 1 class over Google Meet, Chris’s cursing frustration could be heard from the second floor of our house.

“We’re literally doing something that’s so frickin’ easy,” he said. “We’re not learning anything right now. He’s literally teaching us why two lines are different.”

After just a few minutes of listening to his teacher drone on about slope and graph formulas, Chris left his laptop on the counter and climbed the stairs to complain about the class to me, letting a few “damns” fly as he laughed in exasperation over a subject he didn’t care about at all.

Chris has had a number of best friends over the years and they always seem to be rotating as he gets older. First it was Karl, the manipulative child soccer star. Then Chris moved on to Frankie, the kid next door. Then it was Katie, Chris’s first real crush. Now, it’s Dante.

Every day, Chris braves the biting winter cold and bikes to Dante’s house, rain or shine, and always masked.

“I was over at my other friend’s house and one day Dante was walking past, and my friend and I were like, ‘hey, do you want to come and play soccer with us?’ So, he came over to hang out and that was the first time I ever met him,” Chris reminisced. “That was five years ago, I think, in 2015. But we weren’t friends at all. We were just acquaintances until the fall of 2018.”

Chris grew up in a devout Italian-Irish Catholic household. Our family went to church weekly, sometimes daily. Everywhere you look in our family home, you can find some Catholic paraphernalia – a dried palm cross hung on the wall, a Blessed Mother figurine on the windowsill, statues of angels in the garden. But somehow, our parents thought it fitting to send him to a public school for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. Our grandmother found it only proper that he attend CCD, or Confraternity of Christian Doctrine - a title that makes it seem much more serious than it actually is.

“Every Sunday, I went to a Catholic school and I studied Catholicism and religion,” Chris said. “I needed to receive a specific sacrament – Confirmation – and Dante did it as well. From there, we started talking since we were in the same class. We ended up hanging out more and more. And then it eventually became a big thing, and our friendship has lasted pretty much two years.”

On a wintry Wednesday afternoon, despite the snowstorm coming down outside, Chris and Dante ran into the house at lightning speed, cheeks all red and irritated from the cold, hats askew, and boots covered in ice. The two shouted some expletives at each other, finding no better way to say that they were freezing and needed to warm up. While Dante unwrapped himself from his puffy parka and scarf, Chris wasted no time and grabbed snacks, microwaving some milk for hot chocolate for the two of them. Once settled, the two huddled up together at the kitchen table, listening to Lo-fi Star Wars remixes and workshopping their characters and storylines for their ongoing Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

“About a few weeks ago, me and Dante started a D&D campaign. He had mentioned to me that he’d played Dungeons and Dragons with his brother all the time and he wanted to get me into it,” Chris said as we sat on his bed for the interview. “He taught me all about the stats and, like, the different characters and whatever.”

Now, on any given day, Chris and Dante can be found working on their campaign, with Chris playing his signature character, Calidus Blackhood, a thieving gnome with a penchant for eavesdropping.

“Dante and I have really bonded over it. It’s very very very very fun,” he said. “I’m always excited to play the next session.”

From the time he was born, our grandmother, Mima, has been taking care of Chris, as she did with me. She raised him along with our parents and was with him every step of the way, from birth to his incoming adolescence.

“Well, I remember, you know, waiting for him to be born. And then the news came, and he was born. Your mom was okay, the baby was okay,” my grandmother recounted, a look of nostalgia sweeping across her face. “Subsequently, because of his condition that he had cystic fibrosis, he had to undergo surgery. And then I remember going in to see him, and he was so little. Oh, my goodness, and I was in tears just to see him, and hold him.”

Chris was born both with cystic fibrosis, a chronic condition that affects the pancreas and lungs, as well as intestinal malrotation, which caused his intestines to twist together, blocking all movement of food. He was in the hospital for two months after he was born, placed in the newborn intensive care unit after multiple intestinal surgeries as well as treatments for CF.

Once he was home from the hospital, our family began administering Chris’ daily CF treatments on our own.

“Your mom would take care of him in the morning and she would do what they call clapping,” said my grandmother. “She had this little round thing that would hit him in the chest just to break up the mucus in his lungs.”

Chris moved on from “clapping” to using a device, simply called “The Vest.” It consists of a vinyl vest that inflates and aggressively vibrates to break up mucus in the lungs. He uses this in conjunction with a concoction of multiple medications: an albuterol inhaler, a Flovent HFA inhaler, both twice daily, several Creon digestive enzymes each time he eats, and Pulmozyme, taken orally through a nebulizer.

Over the years, Chris transitioned from needing help with his medications to taking initiative and dosing everything himself.

“In the past, his mom would set it up or I would set up for him,” my grandmother said. “You know, as time has gone on and he takes his medication regularly, no questions asked. He just does it.”

Of course, there are times when Chris gets frustrated and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of effort it takes to do all of his treatments, as my grandmother pointed out.

“Once in a while, he gets aggravated because he would rather do something else instead of doing the breathing treatment, which is about 15 minutes. But basically, he’s good. He’s so good with it. God bless him. He just knows he has to do it,” she said.

In late November of 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down all public schools in the state, forcing thousands of students and teachers to transition to online learning just a few months into the school year. Chris had now been home for a month, taking all of his classes via Google Meet from our kitchen table with his lunch laid out in front of him or sprawled on the couch in the living room. He often complains about how he has no time to eat between classes, and gripes about the content he’s learning, but when I recorded him, he completely changed his tune.

“I’ve been doing well, and I’ve been succeeding and doing all my work and I was able to keep up with the class very easily, but it does come with a lot of challenges,” he said. “Oh, you got to do work, because now you’re basically all alone, because my parents are usually, like, doing work, so I have to keep track of this stuff myself. It’s a little challenging, but I also think it’s a very good learning experience.”

At this point, I had to remind Chris to talk normally and just be himself, that he could use slang and act like a normal teen instead of an adult, but he insisted that he was speaking normally.

“You’re talking, like, super professional all of a sudden,” I commented. “Why is that?”

“Seriously. I’m not trying. I’m not,” he replied, frustrated, evidently done talking to me about school.

Clearly, he didn’t want to admit how heavily online classes had been weighing on him. I’d watched him for weeks, toiling over homework on his laptop for hours, studying for tests, and sighing in frustration in the middle of his classes. He’d complain to me once his camera was off and his microphone was muted, but that seems like something he only wants family to see.

When considering queer nightlife spaces, we must also turn to their online presences, as they tend to be intrinsically linked. New York City’s queer nightlife features pop-up events at a variety of physical venues while maintaining distinct visual aesthetics within their online worlds. These distinct visuals often include memes and flyers to bolster community interest in events while simultaneously creating a linked community of individuals with similar backgrounds in physical spaces. Body Hack, a monthly trans-centered rave and happy hour hosted in Glendale, Queens, utilizes online visual communication design to create community, and its posts act as tools of collective resistance, embodying what scholar Legacy Russell coins as the “glitch.”

Body Hack began as a fundraising and mutual aid collective, hosting some events online in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, Body Hack was hosted at an astrology-themed bar in Bushwick, inviting people to dance to live DJ sets and raising money for QTPOC and sex worker-oriented organizations.1 After going fully online in 2020, PAPER Magazine pointed to BodyHack a “favorite Zoom happy hour/party [that] raises funds for trans and nonbinary communities around the world,” with a “stacked lineup” and twelve hours of music and other content.2 Body Hack exemplifies glitch—the event’s transition from fully online to in-person provided a space for attendees to don their digital skins in the physical world, creating an environment in which transgressive gender identity is, in fact, the norm.

It is essential to note the governmental influence on societal understandings of sexuality and gender on the internet, particularly in the highly polarized political climate of the United States. Within his first 90 days in his second term as president, Donald Trump stripped away rights for transgender Americans nation-wide, halting DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts in federal agencies and stating in an executive order that “instructed government agencies [must] ensure that federally funded institutions recognize people as girls, boys, men or women based solely on their ‘immutable biological classification.’”3 Within days, the White House ordered federal agencies to end “Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing” by executive order, which claimed that the Biden administration “forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)” within the federal government.4 Even the TSA website, which maintained a page explaining the rights of trans/gnc individuals while flying, changed to only include “LGB Passengers,” complying with Trump’s order to only recognize individuals by their biological sex.5 This erasure of queer and transness from the internet also extends to queer safe-havens like the Stonewall Inn. In February 2025, the letters “T” and “Q” were removed from the Stonewall National Monument website in yet another sweep of government references to queer and trans people. Although protestors quickly organized at the site, the website subsequently was left unchanged.6

The online erasure of queer and trans people also extends AFK. Donald Trump’s executive orders have also led to a mass halt in name and gender-marker ID or birth certificate changes initiated by trans/gnc individuals. Trans comedian, Reed Motti, commented on their experience with their struggle to change their gender marker and name on their government-issued ID on the queer online publication, Autostraddle, expressing their frustration with the Trump administration’s actions. Motti’s Autostraddle article listed a number of actionable items that they thought would be useful for trans/gnc people going through a name or gender-marker change process, encouraging those in the process to keep fighting and to not succumb to fear-mongering online.

Despite the fear instilled by Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric towards trans/gnc people, queer individuals and organizations remain steadfast in their efforts to look toward a liberated future. The online presences of queer people globally and locally combat efforts by various social media platforms to censor queer-centered content. This presence is, indeed, a “glitch” in the system, or “something gone wrong.”8 By simply posting online and sharing resources within the community, queer people look forward to a future in which true liberation is possible. José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia hypothesizes that

“The here and now is a prison house…Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”9

While the algorithms that power social media sites like Instagram and Tiktok can help users create their own online worlds filled with personalized content, they can also hinder the promotion of materials created by people from marginalized communities. The Instagram algorithm in particular has proved harmful for queer people, as content is often censored when it is deemed “inappropriate” or contains words or phrases that relate to queerness. Carolina Are writes about her experience as a woman on the internet, stating that women’s bodies in particular fall under scrutiny on social media, while male bodies often do not receive the same treatment. This also applies to trans and gender nonconforming bodies, as non-cis-male bodies are surveilled in a similar fashion online. Are further notes that “women’s bodies, nudity, sex and sexuality also bear the brunt of social media’s algorithmic censorship, replicating the male gaze online.”10 While the male gaze is certainly not the only factor impacting the censorship of transgender bodies online, it contributes to the “othering” of trans people online and AFK. However, by existing in online spaces that traditionally cater to the cisgender male gaze specifically, queer nightlife organizers create safe(r) online communities that also translate AFK.

The online presences of queer nightlife organizers exemplify glitch and the potentiality of the community through their unique design elements, harnessing the power of the present moment to make this new, utopian world a reality. By signaling queer identity in disruptive, counter-cultural ways on social media platforms queer nightlife organizers glitch traditional uses of the platform and combat rampant censorship by creating micro-communities within the larger queer milieu. By owning the night and, further, owning the online domain, queer nightlife organizers seek to overcome notions of binary gender and compulsory heterosexuality, inviting trans/gnc individuals into a utopian world that translates online and AFK. This essay will primarily highlight the online presence of BodyHack, a monthly party and fundraiser that centers the trans community, hosted at Nowadays in Glendale, Queens. Although the physical space BodyHack inhabits is significant, the event’s Instagram page has become a staple in online nightlife culture.

BodyHack’s emoticon-filled Instagram bio reads, “‧₊˚ ✩°｡⋆♡ A Happy Hour + Afterparty for trans people, nonbinary cuties, & the squirrels that love us. ♡⋆｡°✩˚₊” maintaining a distinct digital aesthetic that utilizes colloquial symbols of transness and early 2000s imagery to grab viewers’ attention. BodyHack knows its online audience quite well, as the event series’s Instagram account had more than 25k followers as of March 2026, with its numbers only growing with each event announcement. Posts typically receive several hundred to thousands of likes with an active comments section. BodyHack’s online presence and AFK event promote t4t (trans-for-trans) relationships and encounters, creating an insular community that is self-contained and self-protected. The term t4t implies the breaking of cisheteronormative relationship stereotypes within queer romantic and sexual relationships. This dynamic can be found throughout BodyHack’s posts for each of their events, linking the event with queer cruising spaces.

BodyHack posted their inaugural Instagram post spotlighting their first online event in April 2020, Figure 1. This first iteration of BodyHack online raised funds for the organizations For the Gworls, based in NYC, the Sex Worker Fund, based in LA, and C.A.I.T., based in Mexico City. Through this digital event, BodyHack aimed to raise $4k for these grassroots organizations to support trans and nonbinary sex workers internationally. Their first video post featured a dynamic celestial background, blurred to look like the footage quality found on a VHS tape. At the center of the screen rests a seashell opening and closing to reveal a pearl, which resembles a disco ball and flashes letters spelling out “BodyHack” in a sans serif font. The body text on the moving shell alternates between multiple hues, ranging from pink to blue to yellow, reading, “MAY 2 2020 2PM TO 12AM (EST) / BODYHACK / CDMX / NOLA / NYC,” followed by the names of the DJs performing throughout the event. The seashell is clearly animated, but its clarity does not match the blurry background. Further, the celestial background of the post, featuring twinkling stars and animated graphics to look like computer code, does not seem to complement the seashell either. Rather, the sky and the seashell, adorned with the disco ball-like "pearl," appear to be out of place. By situating completely unrelated elements in one field, BodyHack’s graphic designers create a new world in which the absurd is celebrated. The shell and juxtaposed celestial background exist simultaneously in cyberspace, allowing the audience to enter into a dreamlike and mind-bending state.

BodyHack’s social media presence does not maintain one single visual aesthetic throughout. Its posts are sporadically and inconsistently designed, with only some overlap. However, the one area in which the images intersect is within text-heavy posts featuring a sans serif font that is easy to read. The simplicity of the font here is likely meant to ensure that the viewer pays more attention to the message and the content of the post rather than to the visuals of the post itself. BodyHack’s iteration in January of 2025 was initially advertised by a pink and white text post on a black background in simple sans serif typeface, reading, “Happy New Year!!!!! Does anyone want to start a life together and be the first person in human history to impregnate a trans woman in 2025? Meet me on the dance floor at BodyHack–Thursday, January 23rd!!” (Figure 2). The text in fig. 2 is intentionally provocative and may seem confusing to a majority cisgender audience. By inviting someone to be the “first person in human history to impregnate a trans woman,” BodyHack assumes a mostly trans/gnc audience for its posts. Is there a world in which a trans woman could become pregnant? BodyHack asks this question and invites a queer utopia to exist within Nowadays’s physical venue and BodyHack’s online world, envisioning a new space in which sex and gender are simultaneously relevant and deconstructed.

Fig. 3 of the same post includes a similarly simple composition with white-on-black background sans serif text, reading “Short King competition next BodyHack during our happy hour. The prize is me btw.” The post jokingly implies that there will be an unspecified competition among transmasc BodyHack attendees, and the prize is an anonymous “me,” or the person who created the post—likely another trans person. This plays on a cisgender stereotype of the “short king,” as described by Sophie Caldwell in a Today article from 2024.11 Caldwell explores the origin of the term, likely coined by comedian Jaboukie Young-White while expressing his frustration with the word “short” used in a derogatory or insulting context. Further, Caldwell reveals that some cisgender men under six feet tall highly identified with the “short king” moniker as a way to promote masculine-centered body positivity through a viral hashtag, #shortking, on various social media platforms, which has since garnered over one billion views on TikTok alone.

While this term was largely coined to uplift the seemingly challenging dating experiences of cisgender men who believed they were short (under six feet tall), some transmasc and masc-identifying gnc individuals have adopted the term to combat gender stereotypes and promote a sense of pride within the community. In a heartfelt article in the queer publication Them, columnist Quispé Lopez notes how adopting the “short king” label, regardless of its memeified origins, has helped them subvert the expectations and constraints of hypermasculinity, as often enforced on transmasc or masc gnc individuals. Lopez aptly analyzes their own experience as a “short king,” highlighting that, “Being tall in a world that hypermasculinizes height can dehumanize anyone.”12 Lopez further leaves transmasc readers on a hopeful note: “To all my short transmasc tops — the short boyfriends with tall girlfriends, the service twinks, the big spoons that look like a backpack cuddling their partner — I see you, king. Claim your crown.”13 When considering Lopez’s analysis, BodyHack’s use of the term “short king” celebrates transmasc gender subversion through their post. This, in turn, highlights a segment of their audience and further envisions a new version of masculinity in which short stature—often a cause for gender dysphoria among transmascs and masc gnc individuals—is highly prized, particularly within a t4t context.

Outside of their comedic sans-serif text posts, BodyHack also curates a series of event fliers for each iteration of the monthly Thursday night affair, all of which borrow from and reimagine internet and technological aesthetics from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. Visuals range from Sanrio characters (e.g., Hello Kitty) situated within glitchy graphics and pixelated frames to custom-drawn images reminiscent of 1990s anime styles. One such event flier from January 2025 (fig. 4), designed by illustrator @czechwun on Instagram, features characters in suits of cyborg-esque armor in saturated purples and pinks. This image may remind the audience of the futuristic and robotic imagery from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, which premiered in 1997. Although the show does not explicitly highlight a queer narrative, many trans individuals in its online fandom have identified with the bodily struggles of protagonist Shinji, who is recruited to pilot a giant humanoid robot called a mech in order to fight evil. Some queer fans of the show have argued that Neon Genesis Evangelion is a trans narrative, since “Shinji’s at constant war with both his sexual identity and his performance of masculinity.”14 Neon Genesis Evangelion was marketed as a shounen anime, or a show specifically catered to an audience of young boys. It’s quite possible that a generation of transfemme and gnc individuals watched this show before coming out, perhaps identifying with the gender trouble of the protagonist. The flier, then, identifies Neon Genesis Evangelion as another marker of trans identity and situates it in the canon of trans internet culture.

Shinji is not the only internet fan-favorite that maintains a trans narrative within BodyHack’s designs. The Nintendo character Birdetta, also referred to as Birdo, appears in many of the organization’s event posts, often accompanied by visuals of late 90s/early 2000s hardware. A post from November 13, 2024, references “Birdetta’s Gaming Lounge,” (fig. 5) BodyHack’s happy hour from 8-11pm that features a gaming area to play chess and one of various Nintendo Switch games. The internet has claimed Birdetta, a recurring character in popular Mario games for Nintendo consoles, as a trans icon due to an off-hand reference to her gender in a game manual. The manual for the NES game Super Mario Bros 2 (1988) refers to Birdetta using he/him pronouns but claims that the character “thinks he is a girl… He’d rather be called Birdetta” (fig. 6). Although this was likely due to a translation error from the game’s original Japanese into English, trans fans of the Mario franchise embraced Birdetta as one of their own, adopting imagery of the character into memes and online posts.

BodyHack’s designers draw on 1990s and 2000s nostalgia to attract attendees who are, then, mostly Gen Z, transgender, and involved in internet culture. This use of 90s and early 2000s aesthetics in design is often referred to online as “nostalgia core” or a “y2k aesthetic,” which incorporates elements of 90s and 2000s technological imagery with characters and motifs that were commonly seen by children growing up during that time. The aesthetic has widely been adopted by Gen Z on social media, which CNN writer Holly Thomas claims is “an understandable inclination. Romanticizing the noughties seems to play into Gen Z's reasonable desire for something recognizable, and less overwhelming than the grim (almost) post-pandemic, burning planet reality they're facing.”15 Nostalgia-core, then, become a means for queer self-expression and visibility, further emphasizing the futurity of the community at large through situating the past within the present and making it wholly new.

By including trans-coded characters like Shinji and Birdetta in their designs, along with nostalgia-core imagery and provocative rhetoric, BodyHack’s posts are “encrypted” to cisgender viewers.16 Encryption, as proposed by Russell, implies that the intricacies of trans identity, particularly as it pertains to one’s online presence, may be obscured to a cisgender audience. In this case, a cis viewer may not understand the implications of Birdetta and Shinji placed next to each other on an Instagram page filled with seemingly unrelated, provocative text. However, to a trans person, particularly a trans/gnc Gen Z individual, these images make sense in the same space. BodyHack’s online aesthetic is simultaneously distinct yet difficult to tie down, as it is constantly shifting while certain elements are constants. This “erratic” style is “intentional,” according to Russell, and “The information hidden by encryption becomes key, edges peeled back solely for those meant to see, process, understand.”17 BodyHack’s visual style is encrypted to only be intrinsically understood and interpreted by a transgender/gnc audience. It creates a unique digital space in which the audience is invited to participate in activities both online and AFK. Online presence is essential to contemporary understandings of queer existence since it has informed gender and sexuality constructions through shared learning and practices. BodyHack’s Instagram page is just one example of how one’s internet presence can translate both online and AFK, a world that exists both physically and digitally as a hybrid of both.

These posts intentionally use inside jokes and trans-centered rhetoric to both promote BodyHack and signal community over a shared understanding of internet culture. BodyHack’s event posts have evolved along with the organizers’ sense of humor, and as the US political climate became hostile towards trans/gnc people, the organizers began posting more and more absurd text posts to draw the attention of their desired audience. However, the seeming absurdity of these text posts is largely due to the cisgender-centric societal expectations for internet behavior. BodyHack’s posts are meant to scandalize a cisgender audience, subverting gender stereotypes and binary expectations. Further, the posts included here are just a few examples of the organization’s online presence as both a private and public sphere.

Russell points to the internet as being “a ‘room of one’s own,’” which speaks to the need for trans individuals to have specifically carved-out spaces on the internet to exist in community.18 Russell’s concept harkens back to Virginia Woolf’s pivotal 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” in which Woolf describes the need for women to have physical and metaphorical space to create and exist beyond the confines of the disenfranchisement placed upon them by society. Russell cites Woolf to further describe transness as “glitch,” and trans-centered internet spaces and identities as a means for this glitch to exist. Such is the case with BodyHack—the event’s online presence is a glitch in that it embodies trans identity through subversions of internet culture imposed by cisheteronormative society. Simultaneously, BodyHack’s Instagram page in particular acts as an online “room of one’s own” for trans/gnc individuals, envisioning a realm in which cisheteronormative expectations cease to exist.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

“Queer graffiti, I argue, changes the bleak hygienic aesthetic of restrooms to a vibrant, messy and communal atmosphere. And, at the same time the content of inscriptions directly challenges the hostility of transphobia and homophobia that is often felt in the space.”- Andie Elizabeth Shabbar1

Public bathrooms are largely engineered to serve cis-heteronormative society, without regard for the queer individual. Public bathrooms are battlegrounds in which one’s gender and physical sex are contested. When a transgender, nonbinary, or gender non-conforming individual enters a gendered public bathroom, the space may feel hostile or unwelcoming. Numerous transgender bathroom ban bills have been proposed in local governments across the United States, with some coming to fruition and others being dropped due to discriminatory practices. In November 2024, South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace proposed a measure to ban transgender women from bathrooms on Capitol Hill, effectively restricting one particular individual, Sarah McBride, a House Representative from Delaware who identifies as a trans woman. Mace was quoted in the New York Times stating that Sarah McBride is a “biological man” and that she “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms—period, full stop.”2 Mace’s vitriol towards McBride is not an isolated incident. Trans people are commonly banned from bathrooms across the US, with restrictive laws put in place to target queer individuals and prevent them from accessing spaces that are safe and private. Moreover, bathroom bans emphasize the role of the bathroom not as a site of privacy but of public surveillance in which one’s gender and sexuality are scrutinized by cissexist society. The gendered bathroom acts as a surveilling apparatus in which the transgender body is feared as “an inherently deceptive object of state and public scrutiny.”3 This surveillance of bodies is often perceived as “necessary” or “understandable,” particularly in times of national crisis.4

The so-called “deception” of the transgender body in bathroom spaces is largely a result of a fear of gender deviance in the United States, likely stemming from a fear of sexual deviance in public spaces. Bathrooms in queer bar and club settings are often sites for cruising and sexual connection, and the American public’s fear of authentic queer sexual expression has led to further scrutiny of transgender bathroom activity. The closure of queer bars and clubs across the United States coincides with the increasing surveillance of trans bodies in gendered bathrooms; many physical queer spaces are slowly becoming obsolete, potentially due to increased visibility of queer individuals in the public eye and cruising spaces moving online rather than solely in-person. While the two phenomena may not be mutually exclusive, they certainly run parallel to each other and as physical cruising spaces continue to shrink nationwide, bathrooms, in turn, are continuously becoming more hostile towards trans individuals. Thus, the bathrooms that exist in queer spaces, particularly bars and clubs, become hotspots for highly political speech and collective action, acting as both cruising and activist spaces.

Bar bathroom walls in Brooklyn, NY are commonly adorned with graffiti, and gender-neutral bathrooms are no stranger to this fact. In queer nightlife spaces, bathrooms are often covered from floor to ceiling with writing, stickers, and graffiti tags, creating a unique environment in which community is emphasized and celebrated. Each branded sticker or political slogan on the bathroom wall engages in a dialogue with one another, enhancing the bathroom user’s experience of the space and disrupting societal expectations for bathroom behavior. Graffiti in the queer bar bathroom invites conversation between individuals sharing an intimate moment in non-linear time. Through collaboration and participatory design, queer bar bathrooms become spaces of community building and queer safety, and the graffiti within them serves as a tool for self-expression and resistance. This, then, links with queer art production by artists like Keith Haring, whose graffiti art in public spaces provided a backdrop for queer liberation. Public, participatory design, then, contrasts with the traditional relationship between designer and consumer, in which the designer is the sole creator of a work, intentionally making meaning from certain symbols and signs, and the consumer, in turn, receives the design as it was originally intended (i.e., the FLAMER stickers found plastered on the bathroom wall at Happyfun Hideaway, Fig. 2). Participatory design ensures that the consumer also has a say in the meaning of the design and even has a hand in the design-making process itself.

Graffiti continues to weave neighborhoods together in New York City. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, graffiti on building exteriors often comes with political messages meant to bring community members together through visual language. Groups like the Bushwick Collective, a 501c(3) nonprofit organization, create murals throughout the area, while individual artists tag buildings with spray paint and markers. This process allows for collaboration between the two factions, enhancing the unique visual aesthetic of the neighborhood. However, the “street art” in question can also lead to gentrification, as there is a clear distinction made here between organizations that create street art professionally as compared to amateur muralists and graffiti artists. This distinction, while important, also seems to exist in bar bathrooms, as the established designers of a space may add to or remove what they consider “graffiti” from the original design. The interiors of the nightlife spaces in Bushwick mirror the bar’s bathrooms and exteriors. Such night-life spaces become a canvas for similar collective art-making. In his article “Living in Queer Times,” Stathis G. Yeros argues that graffiti, particularly for young, marginalized individuals, is a means to tell their stories in their own voices. “In this sense,” he states, “Communicating through graffiti is both a dialogic process and aesthetic language.”5 Although writing on a bathroom wall may be perceived simply as an act of vandalism, for queer people it can be a means for visibility and political action, as seen in the “FUCK ERIC ADAMS” slogan written in Sharpie on the Happyfun bathroom wall, Fig. 3. It is also an active means for queer individuals to find a utopian world filled with potential futures.

José Esteban Muñoz’s influential text, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, describes queerness in terms of its potential. Further, he notes that queerness is always looking towards its future rather than accepting and being complacent in its current state. Muñoz hypothesizes that queerness is “essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”6 By writing on or applying a sticker to the wall, individuals engage with moments from the recent past and look towards a future in which another will add on to (or even remove) their contribution. Tears in the wall decor combined with graffiti’d tags are prevalent throughout the bathroom, as shown in Fig. 4 with a significant portion of the pasted wall decoration torn off*.* Thus, queer bar bathroom graffiti, too, engages with the futurity and potentiality of queerness. Muñoz also describes hauntology within queer bar bathrooms, which allows the past “ghosts of public sex” to mingle with the present bathroom user, further turning the bathroom into a liminal space beyond the limits of traditional public space and time.7 The graffiti within queer bar bathrooms, therefore, contributes to a semblance of the ethereal and the utopian, as the past collaborates with the present and potential future contributions that will be added to the bathroom walls. Through an in-depth analysis of the interior of the queer bar Happyfun Hideaway, this essay will seek to understand queer bar bathroom graffiti within Muñoz’s conceptual framework. Queer bar bathroom graffiti is a collective practice that disrupts cisnormative notions of temporality and the status quo, offering queer individuals a space to express themselves and look towards a utopian vision of the future.

Written Graffiti & Potentiality

Upon entrance to Happyfun Hideaway near Bushwick’s bustling center at Myrtle Avenue and Broadway, you will be greeted by soft pink ambient lighting, bathing the bar in an otherworldly glow. As you move through the space, your eyes may be drawn to the colorful lanterns and floral accents hanging from the ceiling, the TV at the heart of the bar playing an anime episode, or even the venue’s resident goose statue, perpetually dressed for every season. Music blares from speakers in all directions, often a seemingly random blend of unidentifiable genres. In contrast to the industrial aesthetic of the above-ground train tracks of the J, M, and Z trains just outside, Happyfun Hideaway’s interior provides a cozy oasis, just as its name suggests.

Happyfun’s clientele is on the younger side, mostly older Gen-Z and Millenials who range across the gender and sexuality spectrum. The bar is more of a conversational space than one to dance on weekdays—the music is low enough that patrons can speak clearly but at a level that provides a constant background bass-thumping rhythm. However, weekends at Happyfun are rowdy, crowded, full of lively energy. Yelp user “Eduardo G.” describes Happyfun as “a gay, hipster bar with the crowd and ambiance to match.”8 The clientele is often dressed for a night out with friends with queer twists on classic nightlife fashions. Denim and chains are common sights at the bar, along with multicolored and campy eyeglasses, lots of jewelry and accessories, and all variety of unique ungendered fashions exist in the space regardless of the wearer’s assigned gender at birth. The crowd is both racially and gender diverse, providing a space for individuals from all backgrounds to come together. Drink prices are inexpensive, particularly compared to the high prices at other queer venues throughout Brooklyn. Happyfun’s signature drink, “Gay Juice,” is a frozen rum punch with guava that sells for $6 during happy hour. The bar’s accessible pricing invites individuals from varying socioeconomic backgrounds to enjoy the space equally, as drinks are affordable and water is always available at the end of the bar for free.

Happyfun has two single-stall gender-neutral bathrooms, both covered from floor to ceiling with graffiti, stickers, and book cutouts collaged onto the wall’s surfaces. The rightmost bathroom is filled with photos of Renaissance artworks, from closeups from Botticelli’s Primavera to cutouts of Michelangelo sculptures, almost all of which have been written on by bathroom users. The wall underneath is painted bubblegum pink, much like the rest of the bar’s interior. The Renaissance photos seem to have been haphazardly papier-mached to the wall, leaving spaces to view the original paint color. Atop these cutouts, bar patrons write political slogans in Sharpie and apply stickers advertising anything from local band jam sessions to neighborhood cannabis delivery services. One particular image of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus was drawn on with a pink marker, an arrow with a heart pointing down to Venus’s hand, demurely covering herself (Fig. 1). While seemingly simple and vulgar, this arrow and heart are indicators of sapphic identity and desire within a queer-centered space. Through the sign (the arrow and heart) and the signifier (someone expressing their desire for what lies beyond Venus’s hand), the graffiti artist is able to express their queerness on the walls of the bathroom.

On the opposite wall, illegible text is covered up by yet another Renaissance painting. The cutout of the Portrait of Agnolo Doni (Fig. 2) is layered on top of existing writing and collages. Here, the past, the present, and the potential future interact in a single moment. The layering of graffiti from patrons and cutouts placed by bar staff is intentional, allowing for anonymous interactions between the bar owners and patrons. One side of the wall contains a blatant example, with graffiti in black Sharpie that clearly reads “FUCK ERIC ADAMS” in bubble letter text (Fig. 3), making a disparaging comment against New York City’s former mayor. This Sharpie’d slogan is especially pertinent as New York City prepared for its mayoral election in 2025, particularly after Adams was indicted by the New York State court for receiving bribes and “illegal campaign contributions” from “foreign nationals.”9 According to a 2025 poll from Quinnipiac University, Adams’ approval rating plummeted following his indictment, and 56% of New Yorkers believed that Adams should resign from his position as mayor.10 As a former New York Police Department captain, Adams placed public safety and an increased police presence at the forefront of his political agenda. Despite this, the crime rate in NYC, especially when considering violent crime on city transit, has increased under the Adams administration, and mayoral candidates like Democrat Zohran Mamdani rallied to end Adams’ “Cop City.”11 The graffiti in Happyfun’s bathroom against Eric Adams echoes the public sentiment towards the former mayor, juxtaposed with art book cutouts that give the space a unique ethos.

Happyfun’s bathroom houses both political wall graffiti and Renaissance painting cutouts, existing in the same space and moment in time. Therefore, the graffiti works engage in a dialogue between cis-heteronormative society and queer resistance while cohabitating with potential future iterations of political graffiti. The unfixed state of the design elements suggests that the bathroom is a space outside of linear time, in which past, present, and future are able to coexist in the same realm. There is also a certain irony surrounding the fact that political messages written on the walls by bar patrons are being covered up by images of Renaissance artworks. The inclusion of the art historical canon here points to a tension between the establishment and the opposition, the cis-heteronormative and the queer, that is ongoing in the United State’s polarized political climate. The art historical canon is also queered here by situating critique of a contemporary political leader within a space also containing white, Christian iconography and portraits of wealthy men like Agnolo Doni. Happyfun’s bathroom graffiti artists drastically alter the way one reads the visual language within the space. Looking beyond the present, however, we are invited to imagine a world in which queer and other marginalized people are able to coexist with the establishment or, perhaps, dismantle it completely. After all, as long as Renaissance cutouts are added to the bathroom to cover graffiti, more writing on the walls will certainly appear.

Stickers, Grassroots Organizing, and World-Building

Promotional stickers also expand the use value of the bathroom walls. The stickers on the walls of HappyFun’s bathroom advertise any number of legitimate (and some illegal) businesses or organizations, from local bands and events to illicit or legal substance delivery. On the same wall as the Portrait of Agnolo Doni resides a sticker emblazoned with bright red sans text reading “FLAMER.” The sticker itself is printed to resemble a ripped piece of paper taped to a wall. The term “flamer” is both a euphemism for queer identity—calling someone a “flamer” or a “flaming homosexual” as a disparaging remark about their sexuality—and the name of a queer-owned legal cannabis brand operating in New York. FLAMER is not just another name in the state’s rapidly growing legal cannabis market, however. It is also a grassroots political organization that links harm reduction through legalizing recreational cannabis for adults with queer politics and identity.

Cannabis legalization and queer visibility have been intrinsically linked since the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In the 1990s, Vietnam War veteran Dennis Peron opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers’ Club, a dispensary that was intended for terminally ill AIDS patients. Peron advocated for significant legislation in San Francisco, including California Proposition 215 (1996), and to allow AIDS patients to access medical cannabis, alleviating their physical pain and malaise caused by the disease.12 FLAMER is one of many cannabis brands that seeks to make recreational cannabis more accessible and safer for adults, marketing its products to queer people by an all-queer team. The brand also functions as a means for community building in New York State. FLAMER sponsors events across the state, with many centered on the queer nightlife scene in Brooklyn. FLAMER-branded stickers appear regularly in queer bar bathrooms throughout Bushwick, and Happyfun Hideaway has several iterations of FLAMER-branded stickers plastered to the bathroom or interior/exterior walls.

This brand is not just a major player in Brooklyn’s queer nightlife scene but also an organization founded by and created for queer people. FLAMER specifically markets its products to queer individuals through its internet-savvy graphic design and products. Imagery on the brand’s website is an amalgamation of blurred emojis, 8-bit GIF images, and FLAMER’s signature bright red hue. FLAMER’s marketing is clever yet a means for queer people to signal their identities to one another through shared visual literacy. The sticker in the bathroom, for example, is not just a sticker. It is also a symbol known within Brooklyn’s queer community due to the brand’s efforts in organizing events for queer people, particularly nightlife pop-up events that allow for cruising and community building. CHLOMOSEXUAL, a major name in Brooklyn’s queer nightlife scene, is a pop-up rave series run by FLAMER investor and team member, Chloe Philips. Philips noted in an interview for this project that, upon throwing a coming-out party for herself in 2023, she noted her disappointment “by the lack of queer spaces for people who weren’t cis gay men, as well as spaces that felt truly blended of people all over the queer spectrum.” Philips’s events are typically sponsored by FLAMER and tickets to CHLOMOSEXUAL raves are highly sought-after, with some events receiving news coverage in major outlets like the New York Times.13 In our interview in November of 2024, Philips described that she ensures her events “are spaces that encourage conversation—people always tell me they meet so many cool new people at my parties and that’s a direct result of just being set up to socialize with new people!” Phillips speaks to the way in which FLAMER has become a means for community-building within Brooklyn’s queer nightlife. By seeing a FLAMER sticker on the wall at Happyfun Hideaway, queer people are able to easily identify the brand name and the associated events that run alongside it, further allowing queer patrons to feel sale in their community space.

It is important to note that the graffiti and stickers referenced within this essay may not still exist in the same forms today. Although each photo of Happyfun’s bathroom was taken in 2024, the bathroom space has since changed. Some of the older graffiti has been covered, some stickers removed, and more Renaissance cutouts glued to the wall. This speaks to the ephemeral nature of this art form. The bathroom’s design will constantly continue to change as Happyfun Hideaway remains open, reflecting the attitudes of bar patrons and their political beliefs. The cultural conversation between cis-heteronormative society and queer life allows bathroom patrons to engage with political activism through collective art-making and design.

The boundaries between the public and private spheres are blurred in public bathrooms. While a bathroom is meant to be a place for a person to have the privacy to be their most vulnerable self, gendered public bathrooms are often sites of cis-heteronormative surveillance of queer people. In Andie Elizabeth Shabbar’s article “Queer Bathroom Graffiti Matters: Agential Realism and Affective Temporalities,” they aptly note that gendered signage, reflective surfaces, and the overall design of gendered public bathrooms “require that individuals conform and adhere to a binary structure that precludes identifying as anything other than male or female in this space.”14 The collective design elements within the bathroom at Happyfun Hideaway are also a result of its gender neutrality. By situating the bathroom as a single stall with a toilet and sink, surrounded by four walls with a locked floor-to-ceiling door, Happyfun Hideaway ensures the privacy of its queer patrons. Thus, the bathroom becomes a queer utopia in itself, ever changing with and outside of the present.

Bathroom graffiti within queer bars and nightlife venues offers a glimpse into a utopian future in which queer voices are heard and allowed to exist beyond the present moment. Through political statements written on the wall in explicit language and the inclusion of stickers from all aspects of the community, queer bathroom users are encouraged to contribute to the collective practice of making the bathroom their own. At Happyfun Hideaway, the graffiti and stickers within the bathroom are juxtaposed with Renaissance imagery and bubblegum pink walls, engaging the bathroom user in a dialogue between cis-heteronormativity and queerness. The bathroom, then, becomes a space of potentials—stickers and graffiti could be covered in the future by other Renaissance cutouts and, later, even more graffiti—in an ever-continuing cycle and conversation between two opposing forces. As a queer bar patron myself, I have yet to contribute to the artistic practice of adding to the walls at Happyfun. Yet, I am a regular patron who greatly enjoys spotting the new sticker and graffiti additions to the bar. While the bar does not always display other political posters or paraphernalia, the bathrooms within shed a light on the current climate found throughout Bushwick, New York, and the United States at large.

Anyway, without further ado, please enjoy the beginning!

Miles had spent the last hour on the train ruminating. They couldn’t really tell what they were anxious about in particular, but they knew something was up. Maybe it was all of the stress from their various adjunct gigs at local colleges and their exhaustion creeping up on them after grading for four hours prior. Maybe it was the fact that they’d just been dumped by their partner of over a year in a rather public display in the middle of Washington Square Park. Or, maybe it was the fact that they were on the train heading to a sex party for the first time, alone, knowing no one, and having no idea to expect. In fact, that’s exactly what it was. They were terrified.

Their best friend Paige had recommended that they go to a sex party after their breakup.

“This will be soooo good for you, I just know it,” she’d said, practically exploding with excitement at the thought. “Just watch, you’re gonna have the blues fucked right out of you!”

Miles didn’t quite believe that, but they’d still adhered to Paige’s advice after she badgered them about it for a week nonstop. When Miles finally caved, Paige was absolutely thrilled. She went online and bought their tickets that afternoon to an upcoming sex party in Brooklyn.

“This is of course platonic, right?” Miles had asked. The pair had always made it very clear that they’d never be anything more than friends. Once, in their first year of college, Miles had drunkenly made out with Paige, who, at the time, was a total stranger, after one too many shots of cheap tequila at a frat house. When they’d realized what happened the next day, Miles was mortified and, frankly, disgusted. After that, the two became inseparable, queer platonic soulmates as they both often liked to say.

“Yes, absolutely platonic,” confirmed Paige, dead serious. “I’m mostly going with you for moral support. And besides, you’ll be fine! I promise everything will be okay and you’ll have a good time.”

“You sure?” Miles asked hesitantly.

“Of course! And if at any point you stop having an amazing time, we can leave right away, ok?” She replied genuinely.

If they were being honest with themself, Miles had never been good at navigating hookups and sexual situations. Their last relationship ended after their partner stopped asking to have sex and started cheating on them with a mullet-clad Bushwick barista. After that, Miles had a string of dates and one night stands, none of which turned into anything more. Their ex had told them that they always seemed too nervous to have sex in a meaningful way, constantly hesitating and not feeling confident in themself. And really, that was true. Miles had been struggling to make a lasting physical connection with anyone aside from their vibrator for the last six years.

Of course, as the train pulled into their stop, Miles felt themself become more and more terrified for what the evening ahead would hold. They blasted music in their cheap wired headphones to distract themself as much as possible. They watched the house numbers on the brownstones go up further and further, finally realizing that they made it to their destination evidenced by the crowd of hot people smoking joints at the bottom of the stairs.

Miles climbed up the stairs, white-knuckling the bannister as they made it to the door. They rang the bell and a masked masc person with piercing green eyes answered the door.

“Hi, I’m here for the party?” Miles managed to stutter, taken aback by the handsome stranger in the foyer.

“Sounds good!” the masked masc replied, pulling up the guest list on their phone. “What’s your name?”

“Um… Miles Leroy?”

“Perfect! Found you on the list,” the masked masc said and continued. “Just a reminder, there’s no racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, xenophobia, or any other forms of discrimination in this space. If someone makes you uncomfortable, please don’t hesitate to tell a staff member with a glowing armband. Yes means yes, no means no, and consent is mandatory to engage in play. Clean up your area after use, and don’t forget to have a great time!”

Miles smiled at them, said thanks, and trepidatiously headed down the brownstone’s hallway to a flight of stairs leading to the basement. As soon as they began their descent, Miles could hear pulsing bass and snare, watching as multicolored lights dappled on the steps. Once they made it to the bottom, they heard sounds of pleasure reverberating through the walls. Moans echoed through the space and although Miles was only in the changing room, they could clearly identify the sound of a paddle hitting skin. They blushed immediately, their face becoming hot and their heart rate ramping up.

“There you are! I was worried you wouldn’t make it tonight!” Miles spun around just in time for Paige to attack them with a giant hug.

“I’m really glad you actually came!” She grinned from ear to ear.

“Look at you, though!” Miles said, grabbing her hands and pulling away to get a better peek at Paige’s outfit.

Paige’s purple eyeshadow perfectly complemented her brown skin, and her braids hung loose around her arms, accented with golden strands that brought out her stunning dark eyes. She wore an equally purple lace bodysuit that left very little to the imagination, a deep v-neck plunge showing off her curves with high cut legs and a thong in the back.

“Paige, you’re absolutely stunning!” Miles exclaimed, spinning her around.

They were still petrified to go into the party, but they knew that as long as Paige was with them, everything would be ok. Thankfully, Paige was the most extroverted person they’d ever met, so Miles knew they’d at least have a little bit of social lubricant.

“Thank you!” Paige smiled, turning her attention quickly back to Miles. “So, what are you wearing then?”

“About that…” Miles trailed off.

“What, did you forget your fit at home?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just…” Miles blushed again, turning even redder than before.

“I’m embarrassed,” they sighed, admitting it to both themself and their best friend.

“Dude, seriously?” Paige laughed. “Literally everyone here is practically naked. You don’t even have to wear clothes if you don’t want to. I’m sure your outfit is sexy enough for the party.”

“Are you sure?” Miles asked hesitantly.

The last time they’d dressed in a remotely sexy way, they were 21 and in the closet, still identifying as a cis girl and trying too hard to fit in with their college friend group. Now, though, Miles preferred to fly under the radar as much as possible, opting instead to go outside in heavy sweatshirts and baggy jeans to hide their shape. When they had top surgery a few years ago, they stopped wearing a binder, but still felt nervous that they’d be misgendered once someone got a good look at their body. Sure, they’d known how to draw attention to themself before they came out, flaunting their chest in low-cut shirts because that’s what all of their friends had convinced them was hot on them. But now, years after college had ended and several gender revelations later, they didn’t know how to feel hot in their body.

“I promise, Miles,” Paige said with a caring expression on her face. “You’re gonna look great no matter what.”

Miles took a deep breath and sighed loudly.

“Okay, I trust you.”

“Great!” Paige said with a bright smile. “Now go get dressed. I’ll see you out there!”

And, with that, Paige was gone.

Miles gnawed on their bottom lip, anxious and completely unprepared for the night. Rationally they knew that they would be ok. They just had to talk to people. No expectations, just conversation. Maybe something would happen and they’d find a hot stranger to hook up with. Really, though, it was more likely that they’d talk to a hot stranger who’d get bored with them immediately and try to make up some excuse to leave the conversation. Their heart pounded as their brain spiraled in different directions, fabricating horrible alternative realities in which they talked to hot people at the party and were ditched almost immediately.

They took another deep breath through their nose, held it, and breathed out through their mouth, repeating this a few times until their body relaxed a bit.

“I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” they muttered under their breath, looking at themself in the full-length mirror beside them in the changing area. Thankfully, they were alone and could take a moment to calm down.

“You’re hot and sexy and you’re gonna be okay,” they whispered out loud to themself.

They looked into their own eyes in the mirror, nodded, and said, “Fuck it, let’s do this.” Miles took off their street clothes, putting their sweater and jeans into their bag and pulling out their party outfit that they’d picked out with Paige.

“It’s simple,” Paige had said when they went shopping together at a BDSM shop in the West Village. “All you need is a harness and a jockstrap, and everyone will go wild for you.”

So, Miles donned the red jockstrap and matching red leather bulldog harness that the pair had picked out together, re-laced their Docs, and caught one final glance of themself in the mirror. They weren’t as confident as they’d hoped, but they admired the way the jockstrap cupped their ass and made it perkier, how the color of the harness accentuated the lines on their patchwork tattoos. They carefully caressed their top surgery scars, taking more deep breaths and mentally convincing themself that everything would be ok. They finally felt a little bit more ready than they had before.

“You got this, Miles,” they reminded themself. “Go get ‘em.”

They pulled back the lush velvet curtain separating the changing room from the rest of the party, braced themself, and walked through.

I hope you enjoyed the first bit of my romcom! Let me know in the comments what you want to see and your predictions for what happens next. I’m hoping that I’ll have the next part up shortly! Thanks so much for reading, y’all <3

When I first taught AP Art History in 2022, I compiled a list of resources that I used with students that I thought would be helpful for them. The AP curriculum includes 250 works of art that you need to learn and memorize for the exam by the end of the school year, leaving very little room for interpretation or discussion. While I enjoyed teaching the class immensely and my students really embraced the material, I found that a lot of art historical resources and interesting texts are behind paywalls or are completely inaccessible.

It’s been a few years since I’ve taught AP in the classroom, but I still maintained as many resources as possible that I found useful and engaging. These resources aren’t just for AP students, but for anyone who wants to dip their toe into the subject without having to pay out of pocket for accessible information. I divided this resource guide into a few sections, starting with general art historical survey information and diving a bit deeper into some topics that may be of interest (or things that I read that I found interesting, too). I hope someone finds this helpful and can use this guide in class as a student, for teaching tools, or even for fun.

General Art History Materials

These resources are perfect for anyone who wants to get a feel for the discipline and a general introduction to a variety of topics. Think: taking a global survey class.

The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

This website, built out by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, contains over 1000 essays on a variety of art historical topics, sorted by period and region. While navigating the site, you can filter for topic or department/gallery within the Met and explore in-depth essays on many artworks and galleries in the museum along with objects, architecture, and artworks that are not included in the Met’s collection. I used this as a resource with my AP students when they wanted a bit more information on specific movements.

smARThistory's Reframing Art History Textbook

In January 2022, smARThistory began working on a (free!) online textbook all about art history across the globe. While this is still a work in progress, it contains a wealth of information about global movements and periods, with a helpful introduction on how to look at and study art.

AP-Specific Materials

The following resources are great to use for teaching AP Art History or taking the class. They specifically cover information included on the exam, specifically the 250 works of art that are the core of the curriculum.

Art History Terms Flashcards

I used Quizlet a LOT as a teacher and had my students create physical flashcard sets for each work of art in the curriculum. This online flashcard set, created by user MmeSLucas, is available with a free Quizlet account and contains essential art terms that an art historian and student alike should know.

smARThistory's AP Art History Guide

Again, we turn to smARThistory for expertly written articles and videos on every single work in the curriculum. This is a great way to familiarize yourself with the 250 works using student-accessible language while still getting in-depth information.

College Board's Official AP Art History Site

This site is mostly helpful for teachers, especially if your school pays for AP Classroom access, but it also provides a detailed overview of the exam and curriculum resources along with past exams/practice tests that aren’t behind a paywall.

Personal Interest Materials

I compiled a few resources and articles that I used in undergrad and grad school on a number of topics that I found interesting. I hope someone else finds meaning in these and enjoys them!

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? - Linda Nochlin

This was one of the first art historical articles that I read in college. Nochlin’s writing is incredibly influential, even if at times she uses complex jargon. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists was helpful for me to develop a critical understanding of gender as it relates to the Western art historical canon, and how feminist theory has evolved since Nochlin first wrote the piece in 1971.

Orientalism - Edward Said

This book is required reading for anyone who seeks to understand the “Orientalist” movements in art history, particularly in 19th century painting. Said's work explores the European obsession with the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as it relates to art history and how art contributed to the legitimization of Western colonialism.

Is the Met Displaying Objects that Belong to Native American Tribes? - ProPublica

I know I included a resource from the Met in this guide and while I do love going to the Met, it is also important to acknowledge that it, as a major cultural institution, is incredibly flawed. This article exposes how the Met had displayed stolen and looted artifacts from Native American tribes for years without any retribution. While this was written in 2023 and some things have changed since then, it’s important to acknowledge the issues in our cultural institutions and learn to think critically about museums as a whole.

Feel free to leave comments with any other resources or articles you find useful to understand art history. I want to hear from you!

Above: practicing Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin on the my childhood Wurlitzer piano, 2020, filmed by my grandma

When I was 5 years old, my grandma presented me with a “new” piano. The instrument itself wasn’t new, but it was to me. I had just started taking elementary piano and voice lessons at a local music school and needed something, anything, to practice on. So, my grandma magically procured the honky-tonk wall piano that would be mine for the next 20 years.

My Wutlitzer upright started off as a bar piano. Crafted long before I was born, my piano lived a former life at a bar, then made its way into my great-uncle’s hands for his daughter who never learned how to play. He ended up giving it to my grandmother for free since I had just started lessons and he desperately wanted to get rid of it. The piano’s curious provenance was clear through the white rings warping the light-colored wood on the lid and by the music stand, rings that I would later contribute to with glasses of water accidentally that spilled as I played.

I learned basics first, playing with only the right hand, then the left, until I was comfortable enough to play them together. By the age of 7, I had started playing more advanced pieces. My mother decided it was time for something more challenging, so I auditioned for a children’s music program at a Queens College and was accepted on the spot. For the next 6 years, I suffered through grueling lessons with Ms. G every Saturday, during which she would chastise me for not practicing nearly enough. Little did she know that, yes, I was practicing every day for an hour or more, but felt debilitated every time I made a mistake.

I remember distinctly getting so angry over messing up many, many times while practicing a Diabelli piano sonatina at age 9 that I began kicking the piano furiously and throwing a tantrum. My mother insisted that I practice often, even though my fears of inadequacy and stage fright at that age prevented me from enjoying it at all. My grandma often reminds me how much of a nightmare I was when I practiced at that age, slamming the keys and screaming to high heaven every time I hit a wrong note.

The college children’s music program was difficult, but I made the most of it. My day started at 9am with my piano lesson, then a break for breakfast, then my 11am music theory class, another break, followed by a 1pm private voice lesson with Dr. M, and finally chamber choir practice at 3pm. Between classes, I tried to get homework done to no avail. My Saturdays were intense and packed, with very little time to breathe. Throughout my time in the program, I regularly performed for audiences of over 100 people, and consistently took exams to prove that I was capable of staying in the program. I always scored high, even though my sight reading was rather poor (and still is to this day). The pressure was often unbearable, and I found myself dreading my performances more and more as each season passed.

When I turned 12, I broke my left wrist in a bike accident, and at 13 I fractured the other. I was unable to play the piano for about 6 months, and at the time I felt like I wanted to quit. My stage fright was at its worst, and I had once run off the stage during a recital after forgetting the words to a piece completely. At 13, my mental health was in decline, and I renounced piano, playing only when I was home alone so as to not perform for others. I tried my hand at violin and viola during this brief period, but always returned to my Wurlitzer when I felt lonely or blue.

In high school, I decided I wanted to take lessons once more, this time without the pressures of performing. I met with a teacher named Sarai, who began teaching me improvisation and jazz. I needed time to re-develop my love for classical pieces, which came later in college when I met my next teacher, Jaime.

Jaime was the most encouraging and low-stakes piano teacher I’d ever had. He pushed me to play classical and jazz, allowing me to go at my pace with increasingly advanced pieces. Playing on the Steinway baby grand in my college’s practice room felt freeing, and I would consistently sneak into the room after hours just to practice. By the time the pandemic hit, I had just turned 20 and had completely rekindled my love for my craft.

I moved back in with my parents after getting furloughed and kicked out of my dorm in 2020. The Wurlitzer was still there. What had once been my music room had turned into my grandma’s office since I moved to college, but there were some remnants of my childhood scattered underneath the room’s massive bay windows. Ukuleles, three of them, rested on top of the piano lid. Two were my grandma’s from her time at the Queens Library’s senior ukulele club (which she still goes to twice a week to this day), and one was mine—a baritone uke I begged to get as a gift from her for my 12th birthday.

To keep myself company in my childhood home, where I’d started to feel like a stranger after moving out at 18, I played the Wurlitzer for hours a day. I’d developed a sense of discipline with practice over the years, playing each phrase of a new piece over and over until my wrists ached to attach muscle memory to music. But the ache was welcome. I relished in the feeling of tired hands after a long practice session, mastering piece after piece, excerpt after excerpt, and feeling a sense of calm and comfort from it rather than shying away from the instrument that had once caused my mood to plummet at my imperfections.

After the pandemic, after college, and after moving out to a new apartment permanently, I bought myself an electric keyboard. It was shitty and cheap, but it did the job for two years until I gave it to my former roommate when we eventually moved out. Recently, I moved again and decided to invest in an electric upright Yamaha with weighted keys and a solid wooden body. It’s no Wurlitzer honkey tonk bar piano, but it does the job. While I still long for my slightly out of tune childhood piano, I’ll take what I have for now.

I try to play every single day, attempting to master Debussy, Chopin, Ravel, and I’ve found myself slowly coming out of my shell to friends and loved ones. No longer am I debilitated by mistakes, instead laughing and embracing the mess-ups as part of the process. Unlike before, now I just play for me.

Above: practicing Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin - 5. Menuet, 2025

I’d gone to a doctor in February for an annual check up, thinking that getting sick twice a month, every month, for the last three years was normal. I called my mom before the appointment, and she fed into this delusion of health. “After all,” she said, “You’ve been stressing yourself sick since you were 5.” And it’s true, I’d been afflicted with some sort of unidentifiable virus, sinus infection, ear infection, or strep every single month that I’d been in high school. In my grad program, I consistently came to class double masked, armed with a plethora of tissues and cold medicine to keep my sniffling at bay. After all, I’d already missed five classes throughout the semester and it was only week eight.

I blamed my health on a thyroid condition that I’ve had since I was 16, convincing myself that my autoimmune disorder was solely to blame for my constant illness. Through it all, I barely scraped by in my classes, thankfully managing mostly A’s and some B’s by the end of each semester. I was lucky enough that my institution’s accessibility department advocated for me to have extensions on my missed assignments for mental and physical health. One semester, I took my first incomplete from a class and finished all of my missed work over summer break. When professors expressed frustration or concern at my skipped classes, I broke down and thought that they were being inflexible and ableist. Meanwhile, my body continued to deteriorate as I pushed through the first year and a half of my program.

Every semester, I’d started off strong, doing all of my work and attending as many classes as possible. By week four, though, I would fall off the deep end and stop coming to class, unable to get out of bed due to body aches and chills from a high fever, or feeling completely debilitated by the mountain of work I’d missed. When I saw my doctor in February and described my symptoms, the first thing she said to me was, “That sounds like extreme burnout.” And, of course, I didn’t listen.

Through the Spring 2025 semester, until the middle of March, I pushed myself to keep going. I had just finalized my thesis proposal and was furiously writing chapters for my advisor, attempting in vain to get through as much as I could before my April deadline. Then, I crashed. During my spring break, I kept trying to write my thesis and finding myself in a blocked state. I couldn’t keep going and ran out of ideas. My body shut down and I was exhausted after being sick for years on end with no respite. I talked to my therapist and psychiatrist, who both quickly agreed with my doctor that I needed a break from school. Reluctantly, I could see their point, even though I wanted to finish my degree and thought I could really make it through my last semester.

The day I contacted the accessibility office to take my leave, I cried. I felt like a complete failure. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t finish grad school in two years unlike all of my friends from college who completed their degrees quickly and had already graduated. As a “gifted” kid in elementary school, an AP kid in high school, and an honors grant recipient in undergrad, I couldn’t believe that I was burnt out and I needed a break. I’d never considered that I would ever be able to take a break from school, constantly needing academic validation to keep myself going. But, as it turned out, taking medical leave was the best thing I could have done for myself at the time.

I practically dropped off the face of the earth in my classes, not telling anyone except my department chair and thesis advisor that I was going on leave. My classmates contacted me when I didn’t show up for the fourth week in a row, asking if I was ok. I ignored most of my school emails and related messages, hiding in bed until my body regulated itself again.

After a month of not being in school, I had bounced back. Between mid-March and mid-April, I hadn’t been sick even once. Still, in September, I haven’t been sick since (knock on wood). Finally, after years of burning myself out, I had time to take a break and breathe. In the time I took medical leave, I was able to sort out my work schedule and found a new job that I enjoyed, rekindled my love for playing classical piano, and, unsurprisingly, acquired an official ADHD diagnosis.

My ADHD diagnosis was a real wake-up call for me. After starting medication and consistent psychiatry appointments, I felt determined to re-start my semester and finish out the next school year. I finally was able to regulate my mental and physical health without crashing. Taking time off from school was everything I needed and more — I ended up going on a bit of a self-discovery journey, learning about my anxieties and grappling with them as I attended consistent therapy sessions.

I’m very proud of how far I’ve come over the last six months. Sometimes, grad school can take way longer than expected. I was so determined to finish in two years that I neglected and overworked myself to a point that is hard to come back from. But, I’m glad I was able to take a leap of faith and let myself rest for a while, preparing to return even better than before.

I also want to acknowledge that, as a white queer person, my perspective and knowledge are limited by my identity. When I discuss Monkman and Miss Chief herself, I try to use terms that the artist himself uses to describe his identity as a Cree, Two-Spirit artist. I understand that I don’t have the same lived experience as Monkman due to my racial and ethnic identity, so I am limited in scope.

Nonetheless, Kent Monkman is my favorite contemporary, living artist, and his work has meant a lot to me over the years since I was introduced to him in 2019. I hope that this essay shines a well-deserved spotlight on his work and Miss Chief, and that I do both the artist and his muse justice.

In the winter of 2019, my partner and I wandered into the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a whim. Upon our arrival, we couldn’t help but stare in awe at the two massive paintings on either side of the Great Hall, flanking the doors of the lobby. It was impossible not to look at them. Bodies swirled across the canvas in bright colors. And, in the thick of it all, was a figure I could not place, yet one that felt intimately familiar. The figure, draped in a salmon silk cloth and clad in signature Louboutin red bottom heels, looked off into the distance, past me, past the museum, through time and space itself. This was the first time I was exposed to the work of Kent Monkman, and, further, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle herself.

The two painting series, entitled mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), were commissioned for the Met’s 150th anniversary and remained in the Met’s Great Hall throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Kent Monkman’s works are known for their subversions of the Western canon, but mistikôsiwak was transgressive in the context of the Museum. In April of 2023, ProPublica revealed that a significant portion of the Met’s Charles and Valerie Diker collection of Indigenous American artworks did not have clear provenance records. Journalist Kathleen Sharp noted that,

Only 15% of the 139 works donated or loaned by the Dikers over the years have solid or complete ownership histories, with some lacking any provenance at all. Most either have no histories listed, leave gaps in ownership ranging from 200 to 2,000 years or identify previous owners in such vague terms as an “English gentleman” and “a family in Scotland. Experts say a lack of documented histories is a red flag that objects could have been stolen or may be fake (Sharp 2023).

The irony of the situation cannot be ignored, even by the Museum itself. Met curator Randall Griffey acknowledged this paradox in a 2019 article, referencing the colonial past of the encyclopedic museum. He claimed that the Museum is working to repair its problematic history, citing Monkman’s inclusion in the Museum as an effort towards reparations. While Griffey neglected to reference any specific incidents at the Met that have contributed to its colonial past, he believed that,

Monkman's paintings highlight the Museum as both a byproduct and beneficiary of colonizing forces, and illuminate how encyclopedic art museums perpetuate settler perspectives of history. In this regard, his commission is part of a larger institutional reconsideration of the Museum's responsibility to attend more vigorously to new and broader perspectives on history and culture, as they relate to our wide-ranging collection (Griffey 2019).

Monkman’s multi-disciplinary artworks range in media from acrylic on canvas paintings to photography to performance art, but one thing remains the same: his inclusion of his “shape-shifting, time-traveling alter ego,” Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, in almost every one of his artworks (Griffey 2019). Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, better known simply as Miss Chief, is a visual embodiment of Monkman’s connection to his Two-Spirit identity and Cree (First Nations) heritage. Further, Miss Chief is a mythical, ethereal being whose gender is beyond the binary imagination. By situating Miss Chief in vastly different settings in time and space, Monkman creates a new vision of gender that challenges Western conventions.

In November 2023, Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon published a two-part memoir series written in the voice of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. While Monkman has revealed some of the deep lore behind Miss Chief in interviews, performances, and artworks, her story had not been fully told until the book’s release. In The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman and Gordon ensure that Miss Chief’s singular voice shines through, allowing her to tell her story in her own words. Throughout the memoirs, Monkman and Gordon have immense reverence for Miss Chief, respecting her perspective on the history of North America.

The books, subtitled, “A true and exact accounting of the history of turtle island North America,” are a tribute to Miss Chief’s omnipotence as the focal point of many of Monkman’s works. “If we have not honored her as we should,” Monkman wrote, “We ask her forgiveness, for we would never want to let her down” (Monkman 2023). Each chapter throughout the book highlights specific events in Miss Chief’s eternal life, linking them to historical fact and Cree cosmology. Monkman and Gordon took great pains to ensure that Miss Chief’s vignettes were as historically accurate as possible, including full citations from each chapter at the end of the book.

While the books are meant to be narrative accounts of North America’s colonial history, Miss Chief reveals significant details about herself and her life dating back to the beginning of time. Each event described by Miss Chief corresponds to a painting, sketch, or photograph from Monkman’s body of work. The included paintings provide necessary visual information for readers to better engage with and understand Miss Chief’s origins. In the first chapter of the memoir, Miss Chief describes her creation by the Great Spirit, Kisê-manitow, coming from pâkwan kisik, the hole in the sky, a place that cannot be understood. As Miss Chief puts it, “You can only fully comprehend it in your dreams” (Monkman 2023, 3).

Miss Chief’s backstory comes alive in Monkman’s painting, I Come from pâkwan kisik, the Hole in the Sky. This is a quintessential image of Miss Chief. She is always depicted with a muscular figure, yet softer facial features. Draped in salmon fabric, Miss Chief’s midsection is concealed from view. And, of course, she wears her signature shiny, black Louboutin red bottom heels. Miss Chief notes that, upon her creation, she was given the gift of fluidity by Kisê-manitow, which allowed her to shapeshift into any form of her choosing. She refers to it as, “the gift of being both male and female and a multitude of spirits beyond gender together in one body” (12). Pterodactyls swirl overhead in bubblegum pink drapery, and Miss Chief floats above the Earth among the clouds with a half-wolf, half-man companion at her side. The scene is bizarre yet breathtaking, weird and wonderful. Miss Chief glances off into the distance, perhaps seeing beyond what the human imagination can. High above the earth, Miss Chief experiences time differently than we can. At the start of her memoir, she recalls a time before humans, before earth: “Kayâs, a long time ago, there was only the dark fog and the one sound, a low hum that cycled through the universe. I was there, of course, but not in a way that you would understand…My experience of time is different from yours” (1).

Judith Butler asserts in her critical queer theoretical text, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology, that societal norms and expectations in a specific culture can shape the performance and view of gender by the self and by others. Take the tradition of the reclining female nude painting, for example. In these paintings, womanhood is depicted through the eyes of a cisgender white man. The women in question were often allusions to the goddess Venus, referencing the divine feminine from Roman mythology. Through these goddess images, white male artists crafted a vision of the ideal feminine that painted women as subservient sex objects often created for male pleasure. Paintings in the reclining female nude tradition, like Titian’s Venus of Urbino, are classic examples of the image of a “perfect” feminine goddess in the eyes of the Western art historical canon. Titian’s Venus is a representation of the perfect wife, a view of a woman through the white male gaze – virginal, yet available only to her husband. Later, Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque challenged Titian’s “perfect” wife, with the subject turning her back to the viewer while maintaining careful eye contact. Manet’s Olympia subverts the reclining female nude trope by depicting a sex worker at rest. Yet, all three of these paintings are only depicting the ideals of white femininity outlined by cisgender white men, and how each of the women in the paintings “does” her gender was initially determined by larger Western European culture prior to the 20th century.

How, then, does Miss Chief “do” gender? Butler defines gender as a “stylized repetition of acts” and a “stylization of the body” (Butler 1988, 519). According to Butler, one’s actions and bodily gestures are what create the idea of gender: “Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ itself carries the double-meaning of ‘dramatic’ and ‘non-referential’” (Butler 1988, 521–522). In other words, gender is consciously and subconsciously performed by every individual through repetitive actions and physical indicators. We can mark gender differences through careful observation of tangible patterns of behavior and dress that indicate how an individual sees themselves. Butler carefully outlines the difference between gender and biological sex in her essay: biological sex is a natural fact, but gender is determined by one’s actions, dress, and physical presentation in the context of a specific historical period. As Butler puts the distinction,

To be female is…a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project (522).

As Butler suggests, biological sex and gender are two very different things. To truly “know” Miss Chief, we must first see her gender as part of the historical context from which she comes.

True understanding of Miss Chief’s gender identity and presentation requires a rejection of the gender binary placed upon modern society by white, Western culture. Many global cultures and societies separate from the Western tradition identified several other genders outside of the male/female binary. It was, and still is, the norm for myriad Indigenous American nations to recognize a third gender beyond male and female. Two-spirit gender identity is a term for Indigenous American individuals who could be biologically male, female, or intersex and fulfilled certain roles in society that were not performed by men or women. According to the Indian Health Service, under the US Department of Health and Human Services, there were distinct variations between Two-Spirit identities among different tribes, but certain traits were shared (Two-Spirit 2023). Two-spirit identity was viewed as supernatural or divine, and in many cases, Two-Spirit individuals became healers or spiritual leaders (Pullin 2014). Miss Chief’s gender cannot be fully understood and envisioned through the lens of a white, Western gender binary. Monkman explicitly himself identifies as Two-Spirit and uses the same terminology for Miss Chief, as she is neither man nor woman, but entirely beyond the binary (Monkman 2023, ix).

Although Miss Chief’s gender identity does not correspond to the male/female gender binary found in Western society, Monkman still uses elements from the Western painting tradition and art historical canon to place Miss Chief within alternative contexts to bring about new understanding of queerness. The Daddies, completed by Monkman in 2016, is one such work that seeks to incorporate Miss Chief to create a new meaning of gender within Western traditional painting. In The Daddies, Monkman places Miss Chief at the front and center of a somber political scene, the only non-white, non-cisgender body in a sea of white cisgender men. The painting is a revision of a 19th century oil on canvas work, Meeting of the Delegates of British North America to Settle the Terms of Confederation, Quebec, October 1864, created by Robert Harris. Meeting of the Delegates depicts a historical conference between Canadian political leaders, all cisgender white men, in which they discussed plans for the creation of Canada as a sovereign nation. The painting, which was destroyed in a fire in the early 20^th century, was copied by Rex Woods and titled, The Fathers of Confederation, and is currently on view in the House of Commons Collection in Ottawa (Madill 2022).

Monkman’s version of the painting prominently features Miss Chief, who is seated on a blanket atop a box at the center of the political meeting. Unlike The Fathers of Confederation, in which the politicians stare stone-faced into space, perhaps gazing off into an ideal distant future, The Daddies depicts each politician as an incredulous onlooker. Each man stares at Miss Chief at the center of the painting in surprise or disdain for her. Aside from Miss Chief, certain elements have been altered in The Daddies to create a more jarring scene, even in its subtleties. For example, tables in the 2016 painting include liquor bottles and glasses that were not present in the original painting. The politicians’ skin is extremely pale, bordering on translucent, and their eyes are all a piercing shade of blue. And, of course, the footstool, scrolls, and clothing item featured in the foreground of the Rex Woods painting are all replaced by Miss Chief. Under the seated Miss Chief is a Hudson Bay blanket, which represents a “salute to… Indigenous hunters and trappers” (Madill 2022). An even more subtle detail is the text on the box beneath her, reading “Chateau Miss Chief,” perhaps a box that once contained the liquor bottles now placed on the tables before the politicians.

In The Daddies, Monkman references the long tradition of reclining female nude paintings by including a nude Miss Chief seated and reclining in the foreground. The reclining female nude trope did not provide pure inspiration for Monkman, however. Instead, Monkman depicts a two-spirit being in a traditionally Western context, bringing new meaning to Miss Chief’s gender presentation and to the piece. Madill notes that Miss Chief “has invited herself to this gathering of white men who are deciding her people’s fate, and she gestures to the fathers, asking them to consider Indigenous title to territory” (Madill 2022). Miss Chief is not an invited guest here. Instead, she reasserts her identity to the “Daddies” through her presentation. Miss Chief wears a serene expression on her made-up face, her long black locks cascading down to the small of her back. True to herself, Miss Chief wears shiny black heels with red bottoms, a reference to Louboutin and their expensive ideal of femininity. Yet, her body shape and muscular build are more masculine.

Miss Chief’s relaxed and slightly reclined pose is a clear reference to, and departure from, Titian’s Venus figure. Like the woman in Titian’s painting, Miss Chief reclines on elaborately detailed fabric, completely nude save only for expensive feminine accessories. However, Miss Chief cannot be compared to the Venus of Urbino since she is far from a Venus figure. She is a Cree deity, an ethereal being far from the constraints of Western ideals of femininity. She does not look at the viewer and refuses to give us the satisfaction of seeing her full face and body in a frontal position. Instead, she turns her back to us and makes careful eye contact with the politicians in the painting, who stare and gawk back at her. We are not her audience, the “Daddies” are. Monkman, therefore, subverts the viewer’s gaze and subjects Miss Chief to something more predatory. The “Daddies” almost mirror what the audience of a Western nude painting may have looked like – overwhelmingly white, cisgender, and male. Reclining female nude paintings have long been used to objectify women to the painting’s audience, depicting femininity as something that could be owned or harnessed by the viewer. However, here, Miss Chief’s back turned to the viewer does not allow us to objectify her. She is already appearing, object-like, to the “Daddies,” yet something has changed. They do not see her the way they would view a Western reclining female nude painting. Miss Chief is not a white woman; she is an Indigenous, Two-Spirit being who breaks the mold of traditional views of white femininity. Miss Chief’s indigeneity and subversion of Western feminine gender roles seems to shock and appall the “Daddies,” as they look at her with a sort of perverse surprise and fascination. Monkman’s The Daddies takes the Western reclining female nude tradition and transforms it into something entirely new. Through this painting, Miss Chief’s gender presentation is made clear: she objectified by the “Daddies,” yet her Indigenous identity and her ambiguous gender features identify her as “other.” Her two-spirit identity cannot be understood within the contexts of the Western gender binary, exhibited by the surprise on the “Daddies’” faces as they look on at her nude body.

Simone de Beauvoir claimed that “’one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman’” (Butler 1988, 519). This rings true across Monkman’s body of work. Miss Chief was not born any gender but chooses to embody Two-Spirit physicality and presentation through her gift as a shapeshifter. She combines elements of the masculine and the feminine with something entirely new to create a third identity, one that has existed for hundreds of years in Indigenous American tradition. Monkman is known for subverting tropes from the Western canon in his own work, and Miss Chief’s existence as an ethereal deity figure, rather than a simple reference to Venus, challenges Western norms of femininity and gender. Monkman references and reconfigures the reclining female nude trope in The Daddies, positioning Miss Chief as an essential deified figure that is beyond space, time, and traditional notions of gender presentation.

I looked at my bedside table and found a rosary given to me by my mom 20 years ago, grabbed it, and firmly grasped the beads in my hands. I don’t know what came over me to do so. I keep the rosary right next to my bed as I have since I was a child, but I haven’t used it for prayer in many years. Yesterday, though, I found myself meditating and clicking the beads between my fingers as my mind wandered.

I began to research the new pope’s politics, how he covered up church scandals and in 2012 made anti-LGBTQ+ comments, how he aligned himself with Francis on the environment and migrants, and, of course, how much he hates JD Vance. I texted my dad that the new pope is American, and he immediately responded, “Yes, a Villanova alumnus.”

Growing up Catholic in NYC, I was exposed to a broad, yet tight-knit community. My dad worked with Catholic schools for over a decade. I attended Catholic elementary school, high school, and even a Catholic college. My family went to Mass every Sunday, fasted during Lent, and prayed every day before meals. Dried palm crosses from Easters past littered the walls of my family’s apartment in Queens. My bedroom shelves were covered in votive statues of the Virgin Mary and St. Jude (the patron saint of lost causes), among many, many others. It seems that all of the NYC Catholics have six degrees of separation from each other. A single mention of Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s name either brought scorn or delight among family members, depending on who you were talking to. My high school graduation Mass was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I've been enmeshed in Catholic culture for as long as I’ve been alive.

I haven’t gone to Mass in several years. I was very involved with music ministry in high school and college, singing and playing the piano at church from the ages of seven to 21. After a while, though, it all lost its shine. I struggled with my faith and what I believed in, especially once I came out as transgender. There was a lot to grapple with considering the fact that I’d sat through a myriad of sermons about the evils of queer people throughout my life. I never saw myself reflected in my church, or really in any other church for that matter. But yesterday, somehow I found myself watching the pope speak to the crowd at St. Peter’s.

I’ve found that, while I’m not as connected to the Church as an institution these days, I still identify very strongly with my Catholic upbringing and the culture that comes with it. I easily recall the hymns I sang each week, I can recite the Mass from memory. While I’ve been alienated from this incredibly flawed institution, I still have hope that maybe, just maybe, something good will come from it.

Watching Pope Leo XIV speak to the public for the first time, I felt a mix of feelings that I hadn’t experienced in a long time - nostalgia for a faith that I am greatly disconnected from, fear for queer Catholics around the world, and, surprisingly, a slight twinge of hope for the future.

I have a lot of big, complicated feelings about Pope Leo XIV, but I hope that he does right by the people he serves, and I pray (yes, pray) that he has compassion and the understanding that the needs of the Church have changed drastically over the years. In any case, I anxiously await his papacy.

This feeling of “stuckness” hasn’t gone away since I finished and submitted my official proposal in January. Actually, every paper I’ve written for my graduate program has begun with some level of debilitating anxiety, followed by sheer panic and existential dread. I sometimes feel like I’m drowning under the pressure of the program, my back slowly breaking one vertebra at a time, until I’m buried by the sheer weight of it all.

Why am I writing so much doom and gloom today? Why did I decide to come on here to complain?

Well, I decided that I need to hold myself accountable. I promised my advisor that I’d have another chapter done by February 18th. It is now the 13th, and I have eight pages complete out of god knows how many. I have my ideas fleshed out and all I have to do is sit with it and write. Giving updates on here, while vulnerable and scary, has actually helped me measure my progress as I go.

When I first started writing more consistently on here, I was one chapter in and still had yet to submit my overdue proposal. Now, with the proposal submitted and feedback on chapter one received, I’ve started revising and getting my second chapter together. Looking back on my first post about my thesis, I feel like I’ve come quite a ways, and I need to remind myself to celebrate the little wins.

Here are some of those wins from this week:

• Wrote eight whole pages of text for chapter two, including citations and relevant images listed

• Submitted a discussion board assignment for my Monday class

• Went to work and class, with the exception of one day off due to a chronic illness flareup

• Saw friends and loved ones consistently and received emotional support

So, it seems that things are going a bit better than they may seem at the moment. All I can do is keep going and doing my best, even if I need to extend a deadline or write a little bit less content for a few days to rest. I’ve just started to learn the true value of rest, and how “resting” doesn’t mean doing work in bed. For many years, I worked myself to the bone and burned out from the pressure I put on myself. I would have consistent chronic illness flare-ups, similar to the one I’m having at the moment. I’m thankful that I’ve been slowly learning to take care of myself more and more, and that I will be okay whether or not I get everything done on time.

But how about you? For the grad students reading this, I want to know how your thesis process is going. How are you feeling? What are the coping skills you have in your toolbox that have been helping you get through the process?

And for people that have finished their theses for a masters program, what is a piece of advice you wish someone had told you when you were working on your thesis or final portfolio?

Let me know how everything is going for you in the comments. I’ll be posting more frequent updates from here on out to hold myself accountable. Follow along on this journey with me, and share what your experience has been.

I came out almost 10 years ago as transmasc, which has come in a number of forms since I was 16. First, I went straight to “man,” asking my friends to use he/him pronouns for me while we all suffered through the social instability of attending an all-girls Catholic high school. I’d come out as bisexual a few months prior, but the label alone didn’t quite feel right. I would cringe every time the school principal would remind us that we were all “bright young women,” as if a woman was all I could ever aspire to be, as if I were stuck in an endless cycle of inevitable suffering as only a woman would know. My high school experience, like that of many other trans people, was strange, although my friends were understanding of my pronoun choice and took me very seriously. I remember dating a boy for a few months and feeling debilitated every time I would open my mouth to tell him, “not a girl” when he introduced me as his girlfriend. I never had the guts to tell him, although I’m sure he’s heard through the grapevine of New York City Catholic high school gossip among our mutuals.

After my boyfriend and I broke up, I poured myself into college applications, only receiving reasonable offers from two northeastern Catholic universities whose politics leaned right-of-center. I chose the one that gave me the better scholarship offer, grew my hair back out from a buzz cut to a ponytail, and entered my freshman year with a pained smile and she/her pronouns once again. I was the “bi friend” in my first few social groups, all of which ended in a “ditch or be ditched” situation. By the time I met my partner, J, at the end of my sophomore year during the height of the pandemic, I was in the full throes of she/herdom, identfying solely as a cis-sapphic and rejecting any feeling of masculinity I had once embodied.

The photos of me between my senior year of high school and my junior year of college are a stark contrast to photos before and after this period. My gender journey took an abrupt halt. At my good Catholic college, the visibly trans students were ostracized and called slurs on campus on an almost-daily basis. The gender and sexuality alliance was insular, and I guess I wasn’t the right fit for them. I worked all through my undergraduate years, taking six classes a semester for a double-major-double-minor, and slowly losing myself in the grind of 30-hour work weeks on top of my courseload. Gender? I hardly knew her! My journey of self-discovery came to an abrupt, seemingly permanent pause, and my mental health declined to the point of frequent manic/depressive episodes, leading to a close call with hospitalization in my junior year. While this was not all the result of a fear of coming out, my identity crisis certainly contributed to my poor mental health among many, many other factors.

I’d never had any interest in drinking or parties, yet once I entered college, that was seemingly all there was to do. My solace at the time was playing the grand piano in one of the dorm basements, the only place I could be by myself and sit with my feelings. After partying relentlessly for two years, 2020 brought about the pandemic, and I was again living with my parents, lonely, and trying to get through the year in one piece.

When I met my partner J that same year, I began considering my gender again. But it wasn’t until 2021, my senior year, that I felt ready to at the very least experiment with other pronouns. She/they became they/she became they/them, and that stuck with me until more recently when I spoke to a trans-affirming doctor.

I’d started HRT very briefly in 2023, about two years ago, when I wasn’t quite sure I was ready. I had testosterone gel prescribed by an online doctor, and never followed up after taking one dose and giving up. I kept forgetting to take my t until it became a joke with my partners that I was getting cold feet. In reality, though, I was getting cold feet. I didn’t know how to talk to my family about wanting to transition, and I’d only briefly mentioned it to my parents and grandmother. I worked in an industry that was largely a cis-boys’ club, and even when I asserted my boundaries with pronouns, my managers never seemed to care.

This year, I finally said “screw it” and went to a doctor. After years of a crippling fear of medical procedures, I braved a primary care appointment at a trans-affirming office in Brooklyn. I wasn’t sure I’d feel comfortable enough to ask about testosterone again, but when the doctor asked about my pronouns and how long I’d identified this way, I realized how long it had been since I first came out. I realized over the last several years that my gender journey was far from over and my dreams of physically transitioning in high school had never fully gone away. So, I reluctantly admitted to the doctor that I wanted to start testosterone again. Without blinking, she said, “Cool! I’ll send a low dose to the pharmacy for you and we’ll follow up in a few weeks.” I had blood work done that my partner, R, graciously coaxed me through, picked up my t-gel, and didn’t look back.

I’m a few days back in the habit of taking testosterone. It feels interesting to apply the cooling alcohol-based gel to my upper arms every day. The smell is noxious, and the sensory experience of the absorbent gel on my hands is disgusting. But, I also know that this gel is an elixir of life, the difference for me between mental clarity and demise. I am ready for second puberty, for hair in funny places, for a deeper voice, for all of it. I told my parents, and they were shockingly accepting. It’s strange and wonderful and an utter adventure. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for me in 2025.

Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and birthdays were the highest of holy days in our faith, calling many to the table of plenty. Antipasto, always antipasto, covered the dining room table in medallions. I would only ever eat the olives off of people’s plates, refusing to even look at the artichokes. Every year, the leafy greens would curse our kitchen, dripping in extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette. The sun shifted from mid-sky to dipping just below the horizon, and the black olives on my plate disappeared in favor of pasta, of chicken, and later, of home-made pumpkin pie. Voices filled an otherwise silent hallway, hello and goodbye kisses echoing in the vestibule. All would remain long after the departure of our guests, after it was just us three left to our own devices.

Mom started letting me make the lasagna when I was old enough to reach the stove. Of course, I was still too short to open any of the cabinets up above, yet she trusted me with the pasta-filled boiling water and the bitter tomato sauce that she refused to put any sugar in for lack of authenticity. She cooked, I assembled, and we fell into a rhythm, creating a little Ford auto factory for Italian food. While Channel Thirteen blared in the background, I meditated on the burning sensation on my hands as I weaved the pasta, fresh from the pot, layer by layer, into a baking pan. Pasta. Sauce. Ricotta. Mozzarella. Rinse, dry, repeat. I constructed the dish like a Swiss architect, carefully folding one noodle into another. God forbid each sheet of pasta laid in the same direction. “You have to criss-cross them,” said my cousin, “otherwise grandpa would roll in his grave.” The lasagna was my sworn duty. I was the next heir; only I could make pasta so delicious, as my mother would always remind me. She still likes to remind my relatives, as if being the only daughter with straight A’s weren’t enough to warrant success. Yet, I take pride in my craft, the zing of the homemade sauce and sweetness of the manufactured cheeses contrasting with the bite of my mother’s preferred, hard, al dente pasta.

CW: death of a family member, funerals

When I was young, there was a “Big Danny” and a “Little Danny” in my family. I wasn’t yet Dani, but I was certainly the littlest one. At a whopping four feet tall, I was the smallest out of my family members and still am to this day. Big Danny, my paternal grandfather, and Little Danny, my uncle, welcomed me into their family with open arms when my mom married my step-dad, inviting me in with classic Italian-American boisterous hospitality.

Little Danny worked at a local funeral home with my dad as a funeral director, only leaving the profession a few years back to teach full-time. Little Danny has a morbid sense of humor, regaling the family with stories of bodies he picked up during house calls, gross details included. I grew up at the funeral home, playing journalist on the office typewriter while my dad sat me on his knee and Little Danny consulted with families to “make arrangements” as he calls it. I couldn’t have been more than four years old.

The funeral home was mostly Catholic, much like my parents’ families. My mom and I frequently attended wakes, being together in community when someone close to us passed. I spent most of my time in the funeral home before its open hours, when my parents first started dating. I remember playing hide and seek there with my dad, and he and Little Danny always recall how my tiny feet could be seen behind the chair where I always hid. I was a creature of habit, crouching in the same spot to see if my dad and his brother could find me, yet again.

Death has been a part of my family as long as I can remember. Both of my parents lost a parent in the 1990s, their deaths looming over me like a shadow. Funnily enough, my parents had met in elementary school, but it wasn’t until they’d reconnected at my great-grandfather’s wake at the funeral home that they started seeing each other. My dad, apparently, was working that night.

I remember going to wakes and funerals at the Catholic church near our house from a very young age. I don’t remember the names of everyone I visited, but I have a distinct memory of the fetid stench of lilies pervading the funeral home. At every wake I went to, huge floral displays, always of pink-and-white lilies, stood towering over the open (or closed) caskets. I began associating the scent of flowers with the dead.

I didn’t know most of the people I saw at wakes and funerals as a child. I was often the only kid there, either sitting quietly with a book or walking around and chatting with people like a small adult. According to my mom, I was known as the “talking baby” among her friends due to my penchant for striking up conversation with anyone I saw. What intrigued me most, though, were the photos of the deceased throughout the visitation room. Most of the caskets were open, but the person inside was unrecognizable compared to their photos. These people had full lives of joy and family and love, and there was always something comforting about being in a room full of people who all loved the deceased in in different ways.

Big Danny passed away in 2018. My grandmother told me one morning before I went to school in a very casual tone, and I hopped on the train, numb and in shock. His wake came, and the flowers smelled horrible. Little Danny had made arrangements for his own father’s wake, and I recited a psalm at the funeral Mass. I felt somewhat disconnected from everything over the course of the few days of the wake, watching as people I didn’t know filled a table with Mass cards, praying for Big Danny’s intercession and promising a Mass in his honor at their church of choice. I still have the prayer card with my grandfather’s face on it somewhere in my apartment, complete with a prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel written on the back.

“St. Michael the Archangel,

defend us in battle.

Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.

May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,

and do thou,

O Prince of the heavenly hosts,

by the power of God,

thrust into hell Satan,

and all the evil spirits,

who prowl about the world

seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”

Across Medieval Europe, the prospects of witchcraft and pagan belief were villainized, even though just a few centuries—if not decades—earlier, Christianity had once been ruthlessly punished in the same way. Renaissance Italy’s revival of Classical ideals caused a somewhat unwelcome discrepancy between the way paganism was treated by the Catholic Church and the return of artists, architects, and philosophers to Greek and Roman ways of life. This included a revival of art styles and created a new interest in Platonic philosophy and classical theology, sparking new ideas about magic and witchcraft throughout Europe.

Magic and magical rituals were used in Renaissance Italy to manipulate one’s world, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Church. Magic was used by the impoverished and princes alike, but the economic and intellectual disparity between educated, wealthy practitioners and magicians of lower social strata caused a rift between the two groups, exposing the poor to the wrath of the Church in the form of witch hunts and the Roman Inquisition, while the practices of the rich, especially rich men, were largely ignored.

Marsilio Ficino was an elite scholar and the son of Cosimo de’ Medici’s physician. In the 1460s, Cosimo de’ Medici gave him a house and instructed him to translate all of the known works of Plato from Greek into Latin.1 As a result, Ficino developed a borderline obsession with Plato’s ideas of philosophy, inspiring him to create his magnum opus, “Platonic Theology,” in 1469, and his other influential work, “Three Books on Life,” in 1480 (Turner 1997, 150). “Platonic Theology” divided the person into five separate beings and explained that pagan symbolism, practice, and imagery were not meant to replace Christian practices, but some aspects of Classical theology could be used as a supplement in the arts to create meaningful allegories, and some medicinal and astrological practices were viewed as beneficial. “The Book of Life” aimed to portray to Ficino’s reader that he was not only a philosopher but a physician as well, and described ways in which his own medicinal theories could be used together with rituals, astrological occurrences, and magical remedies to promote a harmonious body and lifestyle. As a unit, these books bolstered a growing interest in natural and spiritual magic among elite Florentine scholars, including Lorenzo de Medici and his inner circle.

In “Platonic Theology,” Ficino describes five separate, yet unified, levels of being: body, quality, soul, angel, and god. The soul is the mid-point between these levels of being and binds all of nature together. According to his philosophy, the soul is an omnipresent force and human beings have both an individual soul and a collective, or “world,” soul that binds each person to nature (Ficino 2001, 249). As human life continues, the soul naturally becomes tarnished and begins to break away from the natural order, and it is the job of the physician to realign the soul with nature. The third section of “The Book of Life,” aptly entitled “How to fit your life to the heavens,” describes the ways in which one can combine physical action, such as making music or speaking, with astrological events occurring at a precise moment to replenish the soul and gain desirable outcomes. This section also delves into the arrangements of talismans, images, stones, minerals, and animals to unite the physical and spiritual worlds and to realign one’s soul with the anima mundi—the soul of the world (Ficino 1980, 87).

One key aspect of realigning one’s soul with the anima mundi is ensuring that one’s actions are arranged in accordance with the stars and astrological occurrences. As described in the third Book of Life, “our spirit draws the spirit of the world through the rays on the Sun and Jove,” and as such, we should seek to make our bodies agree with these planets, along with the planet Venus, to achieve a harmonious outcome (Ficino 1980, 96). This can be achieved through timing one’s use of medicines based on where the planets are in the sky at a given point, or when specific zodiac constellations are passing. Along with the use of herbal medicines according to stellar movements, Ficino believed that images and talismans could be used to acquire remedies and solutions from the heavens. The effects and power of these images were based on a variety of factors, including the material the talismans were made of and which celestial images are portrayed on them. For example, in chapter 18, Ficino describes an image that would bring happiness and strength, with “the image of Venus as a little girl, holding fruits and flowers in her hand, wearing yellow and white, in the hour of Venus, with the first face of Libra, or Pisces, or Taurus ascending with Venus” (Ficino 1980, 147).

In conjunction with his philosophies about astronomy, Ficino placed a great importance on the figure of Venus. Not only was Venus a planet that could be used to remarry the soul to the anima mundi, but she was the goddess of love from Classical mythology. To Ficino, the ideas of love, beauty, and the soul were completely intertwined. His interest in love, and more specifically Venus, stemmed mainly from his study of Plato’s Symposium, and he emphasized the concept of a common truth found through the all-loving, immortal, and collective soul of the world (Ficino 1985). As a result, Venus was used as a symbol of this all-loving “world soul” in artworks throughout the Italian Renaissance.

Ficino’s Neo-Platonic influence can be found in Botticelli’s masterpiece, Primavera. Created in the early 1480s, this tempera on wood painting currently resides in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and is visited by thousands each year. As its title states, the painting aims to capture the coming of Spring according to the Roman rustic calendar. According to A. Richard Turner, the painting moves

“from right to left, beginning where Zephyr, the wind deity of early spring, seizes the nymph Chloris, who metamorphoses into the flower-clad Flora. Venus, with Cupid and his flame-tipped arrow of love above, welcomes us to her bower with a specific rhetorical gesture of greeting, while the Graces dance around to the side” (Turner 1997, 152).

The left-most figure is Mercury, the messenger god and bringer of summer. Some have hypothesized that Mercury was modeled off of Lorenzo Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, the owner of the painting Fisher 2011, 12). The painting was commissioned to reside above Lorenzo’s wedding bed, and this fact combined with the themes of spring and fertility make this painting a Neoplatonist’s fantasy.

While some argue that the Primavera is not a truly Neoplatonic painting, it does contain symbols, allegories, and themes directly influenced by Marsilio Ficino’s philosophies. The most obvious of these themes is Venus standing in the center of the painting, engaging the viewer and drawing the eye of the audience towards her. As the most prominent figure, Venus’s presence gives the painting a flirtatious and loving air. Along with this obvious symbol of love, Botticelli places the three Graces on the left of Venus, possibly referring to Ficino’s representation of the Graces as the three cardinal planets for aligning the soul: Venus, Jupiter, and the Sun (Ficino 1980, 99). Botticelli’s portrayal of Cupid aiming his arrow at the Graces alludes to Ficino’s commentary on the idea of the two Venuses— he hypothesized that there must be two Venuses with individual companions and each Venus was responsible for a different type of love. The one depicted here with Cupid, her companion, could possibly be a representation of the one attributed to the world soul, bringing love and fertility to the cardinal heavenly bodies that correspond with human action (Ficino 1985, 54).

While these ideas may seem far-fetched due to the proclivity of Renaissance painters to use Classical symbols in their works, Primavera may have been loosely based off of sonnets and poems written by Lorenzo de’ Medici, or Lorenzo the Magnificent, a close personal friend of Marsilio Ficino and a Neoplatonist in his own right (Dempsey 1992). The patron of the painting, Lorenzo Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, was brought up under the guidance of Lorenzo the Magnificent and was a student of Marsilio Ficino (Wind 1980, 113). While these facts suggest Neoplatonic influence on Botticelli’s masterful painting, the origins of the painting still remain a mystery.

While Lorenzo the Magnificent's inner circle, known to the public as the Florentine Academy, regularly practiced the rituals described in "The Book of Life" and discussed Marsilio Ficino's religious philosophies, the Church initiated a witch hunt to punish those in lower socio-cultural status who practiced similar rituals, labeling them as heretics. Ficino’s followers were able to escape the wrath of the Church on account of a distinction made in “The Book of Life,” separating learned Neoplatonic magical practice from the “demonic” practices of Europe’s witches, devaluing practices in poorer communities (Ficino 1980, 88).

In 1487, a German Catholic priest named Heinrich Kramer published the Malleus Maleficarum, an influential treatise on witchcraft. This treatise described in great detail the supposed actions of witches and demonic activity that seemed to have plagued Europe since the Middle Ages. In addition, it distinguished between humanist practices of astrology and maleficium, or magic that involved intercession with pagan gods to benefit or hurt others (Levack 2016, 26). In response to the Maleficarum, Pope Innocent VIII released a Papal Bull throughout western Europe, giving permission to local authorities to try and punish those convicted of the crime of witchcraft.

While the Pope’s main concerns were in Northern Germany and France, no region remained untouched by the continent-wide witch hunt. In Italy, prosecutions for witchcraft had been a staple since the late 14th century and were mainly provoked by the preaching of observant Franciscan friars to local congregations. Most trials were conducted by papal inquisitors, who attempted to marry their witch hunt with other heretic trials and religious concerns (Herzig 2013, 249). However, with the release of Malleus Maleficarum, the paranoia surrounding witchcraft and magic drastically increased.

The Vatican launched the Roman Inquisition in 1542 after hundreds of women were tried and burned as witches beginning in the late 1400s. This Inquisition was begun by the Curia to weed out all types of heresy from the Italian public. While it didn’t spread to all parts of the peninsula, the Inquisition took a firm hold in Siena. At first, inquisitors were only concerned with curbing the growing spread of Protestantism, ideas of the Reformation, and scientific discovery deemed heretical, including many of Galileo’s theories, but they quickly evolved to involve cases of the invocation of demons, abuse of sacraments, or apostasy (Herzig 2013, 249).

Witchcraft had seemed to constantly exist in Europe, especially in the Middle Ages. The Black Death plague in the 14th century instilled fear in the hearts of millions, preventing doctors and healers from using their usual techniques to cure the general public. With a lack of explanation for the outbreak, Europeans began to target vulnerable groups, such as Jewish people, Romani, and pilgrims, for bringing a curse upon the sick (Nirenberg 1998). These marginalized groups continued to face continued prosecutions of witchcraft through the Renaissance and beyond. The increasing popularity of Neoplatonic thought and teachings during the Renaissance placed the Church on high alert to witchcraft, magic, and heresy of all sorts, yet again drawing the public eye to the most vulnerable. This is not to say that the 15th century revival of Neoplatonism directly caused the Roman Inquisition, but it, along with the publication of Malleus Maleficarum, brought increasing attention to the idea of the magical and began to spread fear based in hundreds of years of discrimination against members of lower classes, especially immigrants and those practicing non-Christian religions.

Witchcraft and magic were both feared and glorified during the Italian Renaissance, sparking different reactions from the Church and the general public. While the Church largely turned a blind eye to the practices of the Florentine Academy and the superstitious astrological teachings of Marsilio Ficino, the Curia launched inquisitions throughout Europe to prosecute those in lower classes that practiced magic. While the Church no longer condones continent-wide inquisitions to contain heresy, parts of Europe are still largely biased against those that the Church perceived to be witches in the past. Although Ficino’s teachings and ideas did not spread far past the Florentine Academy and the Medici palaces, Neoplatonist philosophy influenced many of our most beloved works of art and inspired the usage of Classical pagan iconography and symbolism in tandem with Christianity.

Bibliography

Bullard, Melissa Meriam. "The Inward Zodiac: A Development in Ficinos Thought on Astrology." Renaissance Quarterly43, no. 4 (1990): 687-708. doi:10.2307/2862785.

Collins, Ardis B. The Secular Is Sacred: Platonism and Thomism in Marsilio Ficino's Platonic Theology ..The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.

Dempsey, Charles. The Portrayal of Love: Botticellis Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Ficino, Marsilio. The Book of Life. Translated by Charles Boer. Irving, TX: Spring Publications, 1980.

Ficino, Marsilio. Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love. Translated by Sears Jayne. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1985.

Ficino, Marsilio. Platonic Theology. Translated by Michael J. B. Allen. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2014.

Gombrich, E. H. "Botticellis Mythologies: A Study in the Neoplatonic Symbolism of His Circle." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes8 (1945): 7. doi:10.2307/750165.

Herzig, Tamar. "Witchcraft Prosecutions in Italy." In The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, 249. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. The Malleus Maleficarum. Translated by Montague Summers. New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1971.

Levack, Brian P. The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 2016.

Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Turner, Almon Richard. Renaissance Florence: The Invention of a New Art. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005.

Voss, Angela. "The Natural Magic of Marsilio Ficino." Historical Dance3, no. 1 (1992): 25-30. doi:10.1163/9789047400547_013.

Walker, D. P. Spiritual & Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.

Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. London: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Introduction

The Empress Theodora ruled with her husband, Emperor Justinian I, from 527 to 565. Her origins are consistently debated by scholars and historians, and the her reign is seldom acknowledged in contemporaneity. However, she ruled, essentially, as an equal to her husband and quickly became one of the most powerful women in Byzantine history.

Recorded history of Byzantium during this time was largely written by prolific historian, Procopius, who was known for creating dramatic narratives surrounding historical events. Thus, several of his works have little basis in fact, yet they are still referenced as an accurate account of the Byzantine world, particularly surrounding Theodora’s life and reign. Current scholarship has begun to uncover details about her life that were overshadowed by Procopius’s negative portrayal of powerful women. Through a careful analysis of architecture and art created during the era of her reign, one can begin to understand the truth behind Theodora’s history and, further, the historical context and cultural influences of her reign.

Empress Theodora

Empress Theodora was a polarizing figure in the Byzantine world, her past shrouded with ambiguity. Procopius crafted his masterwork, Historia Arcana, or Secret History, as a commentary on relationships and politics within the imperial and governmental sphere. Historia Arcana, now viewed as borderline blasphemous by some scholars, provides a view of Theodora’s life and origins that may not be found elsewhere. According to Procopius, Theodora was raised somewhere in the Middle East – Syria, Alexandria, or Cyprus – and was employed as a dancer and sex worker, although her true origins are unclear. Born to a bear keeper, “Theodora was a product of the Hippodrome and the stage” (Foss 2002, 141). Procopius claims that she increased her social status through her profession and eventually met Justinian I who fell madly in love with her, making her his consort. Procopius describes her as vindictive, vengeful, and spiteful towards other members of her court, particularly other women (141).

However, Procopius’s Historia Arcana does contain morsels of truth, as uncovered by other Byzantine scholars. Procopius explicitly describes Theodora as a “harlot queen,” claiming that “she had many lovers and many abortions” (Foss 2002, 150). While “harlot” certainly is not an appropriate word to describe the future empress, there is some truth in Procopius’s assertions. Theodora worked alongside her sister, Comito, as a dancer and mime, later becoming a well-known hetaira, or a performer and courtesan. Evans’s research reveals that Theodora and her sister were known to perform strip-teases which corresponded with popular stories of the time (Evans 2011, 33).

The theatre was no place for “respectable women” and performers were often referred to as the “scum of society” (32). They commonly lived at the margins of society. Thus, Theodora would have been raised in relative poverty, likely forced into her profession due to lack of opportunities for low-income Byzantine women. According to Procopius, Theodora’s performances were a source of notoriety, and she found that people would either stare and leer at her or would turn away in scorn. Syriac historian, John of Ephesus, referred to Theodora as “Theodora from the brothel” in his writings, further emphasizing the low opinion of “respectable” Byzantine citizens towards theatre performers (7).

To Procopius’s merit, some of his assertions about Theodora’s sexuality may be true. Some texts show that Theodora gave birth to a daughter after several abortion attempts failed. Her daughter was certainly not Justinian’s since Theodora gave birth around the age of 15 – long before she met the emperor. However, little detail of her daughter remains (35). Theodora and Justinian’s marriage remained completely childless, which could likely be attributed to Theodora’s history of abortive attempts while working as a performer and former courtesan.

However, without the background provided by Procopius in Historia Arcana, Theodora’s history looks quite different. Fisher and Foss both note that Theodora was a pious woman who prioritized her faith over anything else. Foss cites contemporary texts and research surrounding her early life, which is somewhat obscured without Procopius’s sordid details. Some contemporary scholars argue that Theodora was the daughter of a devout Monophysite father and was raised in a faith-filled household which later influenced her religious sympathies as Empress. She was only permitted by her family to marry Justinian provided that she maintained her Monophysite faith (Foss 2002, 142). As a result of her devotion to her faith, Theodora became an outspoken advocate for religious freedom and protected Monophysites from persecution during her reign. She was known within the Coptic and Syriac Churches as “the believing queen” and the co-founder of both churches, where reverence towards her continues in the contemporary era (Evans 2011, 7).

Monophysitism, initially defined in the Council of Chalcedon in 451, was the belief that Christ was not equally divine and human. Instead, he had divinity with no regard to his humanity. This idea was challenged during the 4th through 6th centuries, and as the Church further debating the nature of Christ, Monophysitist beliefs fell into obscurity, facing discrimination from Church authorities. The Council of Chalcedon spurred this discrimination, asserting that Christ had both human and divine natures. Thus, Theodora’s devout Monophysite faith was challenged by Church authorities and was called into question throughout her life. Monophysitism was declared heresy by Chalcedon, although this was disputed in the Orthodox church after the schism between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Despite the persecution her subjects faced for their faith, Theodora was allowed to continue practicing Monophysitism, even after her ascension to the throne in 527 (Foss 2002, 143).

Theodora protected Monophysite laypeople and clergy alike from persecution, hiding them in her palace and providing food, water, shelter, and clothing for them after they fled their homes out of fear of Church authorities (143). She hid a powerful bishop in her home for about 10 years until it was safe for him to reenter society after the onset of systemic religious persecution in the 530s that was introduced by Justinian. The pope attempted to excommunicate Theodora for her beliefs and in retaliation, Theodora and one of the members of her court, Antonina, the wife of general Belisarius, attempted to install a new pope to prevent further persecution of her people. Theodora was known as, Foss aptly states, the “protector of her church” (143).

Procopius seldom mentions Theodora’s pious nature and neglects to describe her faith in any detail. Instead, he reduces her, simply, to Justinian’s wife and consort, emphasizing her penchant for vengeance and vindication. The term consort that Procopius suggests minimizes Theodora’s identity and breadth of power within Justinian’s court, since she held significant influence over her husband for the entirety of her reign. Contemporary Byzantine scholars have noted that Procopius’s Historia Arcana was likely based on gossip and his own preconceived notions about women in the empire. While his work was intended to discredit Justinian and his court, Procopius consistently sought to minimize Theodora’s role in Byzantine history by demonizing her. According to Fisher, Procopius’s prejudice against women is clear in his work as he “apparently hated domineering women,” subsequently attacking Theodora and members of her court, especially Antonina (Fisher 1978, 253-279).

When compared to contemporary scholarship surrounding Theodora’s history, Procopius’s Historia Arcana must not be taken as an accurate account. Rather, Historia Arcana can be reduced to a combination of fact and fiction, only loosely based in truth. The same can be said of Antonina; Procopius reduces her power by describing her similarly to Theodora – vengeful and vindictive – while ignoring her influence on her husband Belisarius. In some ways, writes Fisher, “Antonina reflects and extends the characterization of Theodora,” further proving Procopius’s prejudice toward independent women (Fisher 1978, 267).

The Nika Rebellion

The Nika Rebellion was a violent series of riots and battles between warring factions which led to instability and fear within the imperial family and Byzantine leadership. Two separate factions of chariot performers from the Hippodrome, known as the Blues and the Greens, were each supported by different government leaders. The factions essentially worked as unions, both in the arena and out, and the government could not function without their support, as each faction held a specific stance on political, religious, and social issues. Justinian and Theodora both supported the Blue faction, and Theodora’s partiality in particular likely stemmed from her life in the theatre and her experiences as a worker in the Hippodrome as a young woman. According to Evans’s account, Theodora and her sisters were jeered during one of their first performances, and the Blues were kind enough to take them in since there was a vacancy for new performers. Evans states that “The Blues had rescued [Theodora’s] family from penury and the family reciprocated by transferring its loyalty to them” (7).

Tensions between imperial leaders and the Blue and Green factions came to a head in 532 following widespread corruption of leaders along with a failing and waning war against the Persians (Greatrex 1997, 62). The city was burned by the Blues and Greens, who then fought on a united front. The united factions, referred to as the Nika, sought to install Hypatius as the emperor. The factions held an improvised ceremony for Hypatius, calling him Augustus and adorning him with imperial regalia (77). Once this occurred, Justinian moved to seal off the palace to protect himself, attempting to take the path of least risk. However, Theodora stood firm. She believed that Justinian should take an offensive stance against the riots to protect himself and current imperial leadership from the people seeking to remove them from power. The violence peaked within five days of the start of the riot, right as Hypatius was installed as interim emperor. While senate members pressed for a conservative, low-risk approach to the riots, Theodora ensured that Justinian’s court and the imperial leadership remain assertive in their efforts. Procopius quotes her in his History of the Wars: “‘No other policy seems best for those whose fortunes have come into the greatest peril than to act vigorously in the best possible way’” (Evans 1984, 380). Theodora continued to cite ancient leadership and political ideology to support her point. As Evans states, Theodora asserted that, “Royalty...was a fine burial shroud; the aphorism, which seems to have been famous enough, had it that “tyranny,” not “royalty” was the shroud” (380).

Her words emboldened Justinian’s followers and influenced them to continue to fight for him and imperial leadership. While it is unclear if Procopius’s quotations from Theodora’s speech are completely accurate, Theodora was still amain influence in spurring Justinian’s troops to continue fighting to end the rebellion. Procopius’s recollection of her speech certainly alters the reader’s understanding of her role in curbing the conflict. Without her powerful words and passion, it is likely that Justinian would have been removed from power, and that he and Theodora along with the rest of their governing body would be executed. Not only did Theodora end a riot purely through powerful words, she also saved the lives of important imperial officials with the goal of maintaining the stability of the empire.

It is conflicting to learn that Theodora crushed a rebellion that may have benefitted the Nika, as the performers and laborers in this faction were not entirely represented in government. Her words largely speak to her power over the political sphere in Byzantium at the time, rather than her compassion for her people. Nonetheless, she was simultaneously seen as an equal to her husband, evidenced through the architecture and art within churches constructed throughout her reign.

Hagia Sophia—The Church of Holy Wisdom

While the original foundation of the church dates to c. 4th century CE, Hagia Sophia did not see significant modernization and construction until the reign of Justinian I. The original cathedral was destroyed two separate times – once in the mid-5th century in a fire and a second time in 532 as a result of the Nika Riots. After its destruction, Theodora and Justinian became its patrons, funding its renovation. The church was reconstructed a second time after a major earthquake caused the main dome to collapse in 558, after which extra supports were added both inside and out to protect the church from further natural disasters (Murray 2003). The interior floor plan consists of a narthex running perpendicular to two upper galleries, one large dome surrounded by two smaller semi-domes, a central nave, and a small apse at the far end of the building, later converted to a mihrab following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. Minarets were added on the exterior along with the mihrab when Hagia Sophia was converted to a mosque under Ottoman rule.

Images of Seraphim, or three-winged angels and heavenly guardians, flank the pendentives of the main dome. These figures, while somewhat terrifying, draw the eye upwards, creating leading lines that meet at the center of the church’s main dome. While the center of the dome now contains Arabic script and verses from the Qur’an, it is likely that original mosaics from the 6th century were covered in plaster following the Ottoman invasion. Current scholarship has revealed that there may be a monumental mosaic of Christ hidden underneath layers of plaster in the dome, but there is no way to respectfully remove the plaster and Qur’anic script to uncover it due to the building’s history as both a church and a mosque, as well as concerns over the structural integrity of the dome itself (Hagia Sophia: Istanbul’s Ancient Mystery).

The Hagia Sophia was not just known for its beauty and splendor. It was also an important site for both Justinian and Theodora, providing a monumental backdrop for their reign. The Hagia Sophia was the site for Theodora’s coronation ceremony just three days after Easter Sunday. At this time, the oath of office was administered, and both Theodora and Justinian would have been confirmed as Augustus and Augusta of Byzantium (Evans 2011, 54). However, this coronation would have occurred prior to the drastic renovation of the church, when it was still a Basilica and not the massive sacred site it became after construction in the 530s. Theodora and Justinian authorized the reconstruction jointly, evidenced by the placement of Theodora’s monogram on the capitals of the church directly alongside Justinian’s (54).

Despite Theodora’s power and influence in the Byzantine world, she was still relegated to a lower status due to her gender. Since she was a woman, she was forbidden from sitting with her husband at religious services within Hagia Sophia. Theodora was no exception to the gendered rule, and she and her court were expected and forced, to sit in the church’s gallery or on the floor separate from men. However, despite the poor institutional treatment imposed on Byzantine women of all social strata, Theodora remained a generous donor and patron of Hagia Sophia. Her and Justinian contributed significant funding to maintain the church, so much so that it had a well-paid fixed staff, with 60 priests, 100 deacons, 40 deaconesses, 100 doorkeepers, 25 singers, and 110 readers (16). The Emperor and Empress ensured that bishops maintained a steady salary that rivaled that of military and government officials and exempted most clergy members from military service depending on their rank (16). Hagia Sophia was, in essence, a manifestation of Justinian and Theodora’s power over all aspects of the Byzantine world, proclaiming that even Christendom was under their control.

Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna

The Basilica of San Vitale was also built during the reign of Justinian I and Theodora. The mosaics found on the interior walls, apses, and ceiling are arguably some of the most iconic from the Byzantine Empire, and many of the images of Christ, saints, and other holy figures are some of the only ones left in early Byzantine churches before the 8th and 9th centuries. This is likely due to widespread iconoclasms sponsored by their respective contemporary emperors and broader leadership.

Ravenna, Italy was restored to Byzantine control in 540 following a long occupation by the Goths. While construction on the Basilica had begun before the empire took full control of the region, it was not completed until after the expulsion of the Gothic king. To emphasize their new control over the area, Justinian I and Theodora had mosaics created in two of the Basilica’s apses.

Historian Judith Herrin describes the octagonal plan of the Basilica “unusual,” as it does not share many of the typical characteristics of Byzantine churches built during that era (Herrin 2020, 161). It is likely that the floor plan was inspired by Middle Eastern architectural styles which spread throughout the Mediterranean during this period (163). The ceiling above the altar is decorated with elaborate mosaic images, from floral and vegetal designs to religious imagery. The mosaic artists worked quickly and efficiently, ensuring that the plaster underneath was at the perfect consistency to accurately place polychrome and gold tesserae to create stunning religious scenes, including stories from the Hebrew Bible, the Twelve Apostles, and various male saints flanked by animals and vegetation (166).

“The church of S. Vitale was not completed for some twenty years. By that time, Ravenna was in Byzantine hands; the church was finished under imperial patronage and decorated with mosaics of Justinian and Theodora, as a symbol in reconquered Italy of the magnificence of the empire” (Browning 1987, 74).

The San Vitale Mosaics

Theodora

Theodora is shown wearing a deep purple chlamys – a type of robe or cloak that would rest on a dress or tunic – atop an embroidered gown, or gunna. Theodora’s gunna is embroidered with a scene of the three Magi from the Christian Bible woven in golden thread (Munroe 2012). She is covered in jewelry on her head and shoulders, including a maniakis collar and a crown, or a stemma, which was attached to hanging strands of mother-of-pearl and precious stones called a prependoulia (Munroe 2012). As the empress, Theodora would have had the most elaborate outfits out of her court, although they were similarly dressed in hand-woven fabrics and brightly colored silks. Munroe notes that the silks may have been of Sassanian manufacture, mirroring woven tapestries from the same era found in Egypt. Theodora holds a jeweled chalice in the mosaic, moving her hands to her side as if giving a gift.

The mosaic rests in an apse in the Basilica of San Vitale, and the church was created through generous donations and patronage by Justinian I and Theodora. Thus, the chalice may be representative of the basilica itself, as Theodora seems to hand it to an attendant at her side who willingly accepts it. Her transfer of the chalice mirrors the gifts of the Three Magi woven on her robe – the shading and tone of the chalice is similar to that of the golden thread used to weave the images of the Magi, and her gift of the jeweled chalice evokes the gifts of the Magi to Christ during the story of the Epiphany as described in the Book of Matthew. Theodora’s crown is surrounded by a golden halo, emphasized by a burgundy outline, further pointing to her close relationship with the divine.

Theodora is standing directly underneath a turquoise apse, mirroring those found in San Vitale. Her retinue is flanked by rectangular columns in a traditional Corinthian style. The columns are also jeweled with gold, white, and green tesserae, reflecting the design of the chalice and the jewels on Theodora’s stemma. A fountain sits atop another fluted Corinthian column, with stark white tesserae and elaborate shading to make the texture seem almost like marble. It may be a representation of a baptismal font, further reflecting the architecture of the basilica within the mosaic. A male attendant at Theodora’s side pulls back an ornately woven curtain, perhaps inviting her to walk through an entrance. The court seems to be moving towards the doorway since the body language of each member motions towards the left side - the women’s faces in profile are oriented towards the doorway and each woman’s robes flow towards the right side, implying movement to the left.

Although the members of her retinue are not explicitly named in the mosaic, one might infer that Antonina is featured since she was a prominent female figure in the Byzantine world and a friend to Theodora. This inference can be made based on Antonina’s clothing and features alone. Theodora and Antonina share robes of similar hues – both are a dark brown with gold embellishments on the fabric’s edges, as well as accents of red and green within the details that mirror those on the vibrant red and green borders of the mosaic. Antonina’s head is covered with a headwrap that matches her intricate cream-colored shawl. At the edge of the shawl is a gold accent, which may be a brooch representing a crest. This brooch is also indicative of Antonina’s political standing as both the wife of famed general Belisarius and Theodora’s closest advisor and confidante. The only element of Antonina’s outfit that matches the remainder of Theodora’s court are her red shoes, just barely visible under several layers of woven cloth. The other female members of the court have similar facial structures and are viewed in profile. However, one can distinguish Antonina due to her unique features and frontal view.

Unlike the other members of the court, Theodora and Antonina look directly at the viewer, making eye contact with calm, collected stares. Their political relationship and friendship were integral to Byzantine society during this period, especially since Foss emphasizes Antonina’s significance in Theodora’s life, providing support during Theodora’s ongoing protection of persecuted Monophysites (Foss 2002, 146). As both Fisher and Procopius state, Antonina’s characterization somewhat mirrors that of Theodora; both were powerful women who exerted influence over their husbands to rise through political ranks.

Justinian

Justinian is flanked on both sides by members of the clergy, important generals, and military personnel with an emphasis on the figure dressed in gold vestments to his left. The figure is clearly the Archbishop Maximianus of Ravenna, and his name is clearly marked above his head. Maximianus became the archbishop after 540 CE, following the long rule of the former Archbishop, Victor. Victor had been one of the patrons of San Vitale and had major influence over the creation of Justinian and Theodora’s mosaics. Justinian’s mosaic originally included Victor at his side, but his portrait was later removed and replaced with that of Maximianus following his death (Herrin 2020, 168). In his hands he holds a cross while Justinian gestures toward him with a golden bowl full of bread. A second priest holds an ornate book, likely the Bible, and a third holds burning incense. These objects are essential to the Orthodox liturgy, and specifically reference the blessing and distribution of the Eucharist. Justinian leads the procession, his head adorned with a halo, emphasizing his essential role as both a political and religious leader. Each member of the clergy, along with Justinian, face the viewer at a frontal position, and they seem to approach the onlooker with their holy procession.

The soldiers flanking Justinian on his right provide a striking foil to the religiosity of the scene. Each of the soldiers has a similar facial structure, mirroring the homogeneity of Theodora’s court, and they face Justinian, almost in profile to the viewer. It is likely that the figure directly to the right of Justinian is Belisarius, a powerful general, imperial advisor, and husband to Antonina. Although the figure between Belisarius and the soldiers is unnamed, one can infer that he is another important member of the military, perhaps a general himself due to the similarity in costume to Belisarius. The stark contrast between the religious and the imperial show two separate sides of Justinian – he was both the leader of an empire and an important figure in the church.

Cultural Significance

Theodora’s mosaic resides in the holiest part of San Vitale - in an apse flanking the altar, directly across from a matching mosaic of Emperor Justinian I. Scholars note that the placement and overall presence of the mosaics in San Vitale is unique. Byzantine rulers typically were not portrayed within churches, regardless of their patronage. While mosaics of Theodora and Justinian would have been common throughout the Byzantine world during their reign, a church seems like an odd choice of placement. Of course, mosaics would have been present in public and imperial spaces, serving as propaganda supporting the empress and emperor. However, Herrin notes that prior to the mosaics in San Vitale, images of royalty had no place in sacred settings (72). In fact, neither Theodora nor Justinian had ever visited Ravenna during their lifetimes, and would have never seen San Vitale in person. Why were their mosaics present in the Basilica if they had never even seen it?

According to Herrin, images of Arian Gothic rulers were prevalent in Ravenna and the Northern Italian region in the 6th century prior to Byzantine occupation and control. Once Byzantium had taken control of Ravenna, it became essential for Theodora and Justinian to assert their power and dominance since the capital of the empire, Constantinople, was far from the area. Ravenna was on the outskirts of the Byzantine empire, so it was imperative that the imperial family assert their influence over a potentially volatile population. Theodora and Justinian’s mosaics served to portray the power of Byzantium and the rule of the imperial family over the region, as well as emphasizing the new influence of Catholicism as the imperial religion.

Conclusion

Was Theodora the “harlot queen” or the “believing queen?” Without her own voice, it is impossible to create a fully accurate picture of her life. Procopius’s accounts of Byzantine history are some of the few recordings we have describing Theodora, and his blatant misogyny and insensitivity paint her as vindictive and vicious. However, we cannot discount Procopius entirely. Although it seems that his opinions on Theodora were fickle at best since his accounts of her character differ greatly between Historia Arcana and History of the Wars. His writings provide some background information about Theodora’s early life which can be interpreted through a feminist lens to counteract his cruel depictions of the empress. Theodora was both a “harlot queen” and “believing queen,” even if harlot is too derogatory a word for her. Various sources reveal that Theodora was likely a dancer and courtesan, but was also a deeply religious woman who protected a persecuted group. Even though her origins were quite humble, she eventually became the most powerful woman in Byzantium and practically an equal to the emperor. Regardless of her past, Theodora managed to rise through the ranks, becoming a close advisor and confidante to her husband, particularly in times of peril. This is clear through her rousing speech during the Nika Riots, her influence in the fight against Monophysite persecution, and laws she enacted that outlawed forced sex work and protected women working as performers. Her background complemented her position of power later in life; Theodora was an advocate for those living on the margins of society, assisting her husband in changing a constantly shifting Byzantine culture.

Bibliography

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“Empress Theodora with Her Retinue.” Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, n.d.

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Evans, James Allan. The Power Game in Byzantium: Antonina and the Empress Theodora. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011.

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Maybe I don’t have the stamina to be queer during pride. Dancing the night away at 3 Dollar Bill feels like a performance, the Bush a stage to act. I’m tired. So tired. Yet I can’t stop myself from feeling the pull of the pulsing bass, Charli xcx singing about the color of her underwear to an intoxicating beat, and Kylie Minogue proclaiming, “Padam, padam!” I walk to the bar, get a single drink, try to dance, and leave. Is everyone doing this waltz through the motions, or am I alone?

I’ve never felt true burnout until experiencing Pride as an adult. At 19, Pride was day drinking, afternoon toking, and night drinking again, all underage with a shitty fake and a prayer. Years later, it sometimes feels pointless, trivial activities to escape the mundanity of the everyday. Yet the night goes on, and we wake up the next morning, exhausted and hungover, still high from the 3am joint shared between strangers.

We return to work as baristas, actors, retail associates at thrift shops—all the stereotypical jobs—or maybe we’re lawyers, corporate office workers, journalists, educators, doctors, anything. And then, like clockwork, we do it all over again, risking health and wellbeing for any crumbs of community.

Why do we do this? Pure hedonistic desire? Perhaps for a semblance of some collective understanding that we’re all here together, with the same beating heart, bodies moving to the bass. José Esteban Muñoz posits in Cruising Utopia that queerness is situated as a past, a present, and future, always looking to break traditional binaries and seeking more liberated times to come. Queerness is more than just how we present; it is a state of being constantly in flux. As Muñoz puts it, queerness is “essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1). Maybe that’s why we party the night away during Pride and beyond. We might be seeking a new world in which we enter into a utopian state outside of spatial and temporal constraints defined by cis-heterosexual society—perhaps a world in which queer people exist as a liberated community, breaking free from cultural norms and the status quo.

Being trans for me is in and of itself a utopian state. My gender is beyond the boundaries placed on me, existing in a new plane of reality that can only truly be understood by myself and my trans siblings. My body is not corporeal but ethereal, and I can make the decision to live inside of this world’s strict binary or reject it completely. Pride, while overwhelming and pinkwashed by some, can also be a time of community-building and further collective action towards liberation for all. That’s why we do what we do. Along with the wild and freeing feeling of a queer-centered rave, we run the world by our rules, shedding our outer skin like snakes and showing our fresh scales to the world at large.

A Pedagogical Nightmare

In 1969, Yale’s campus was suddenly invaded by a 24-foot-tall, 3500-pound sculpture made by Claes Oldenburg. The subject matter—a humungous tube of lipstick sitting atop caterpillar tracks that looked like they had been removed straight from a military tank. Oldenburg’s Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks rested stoically in Yale’s Beinecke Plaza, directly in view of both the university president’s office and a prominent World War I memorial, a popular site for anti-war protests in the late 60s and early 70s. Student protesters could often be found climbing up and down the WWI monument in the plaza, conducting rallies and demonstrations against the Vietnam War in favor of the Black Panthers, and advocating for full co-education at the university (Yale University n.d.). Nonetheless, once the “Lipstick” appeared on the scene, students began climbing on it as well, mounting political events on the iconic monument.

“Lipstick” was sponsored by a group of “dissident students” known as Colossal Keepsake Corporation from the Yale School of Art and Architecture (Williams 2008, 117). The group decided to commission Oldenburg to create the sculpture as a direct affront to the university administration and to its complacency to the needs of the students, especially those who were actively expressing their political opinions through protest with no action or positive reaction from Yale as a larger entity. It seemed to the Colossal Keepsake Corporation that the interests of the university had begun to merge with the increasing pro-government, pro-establishment, and highly consumeristic culture seen throughout the United States during the Vietnam War, and the group wanted to challenge this in the most public way that they could.

However, “Lipstick”’s purpose was not just an aesthetic one. The Corporation had it created as a podium for protest, placing it in the middle of the plaza to show the university administration that students were not afraid to speak up and speak out about the socio-political issues of their day. “[W]e picked the most prominent and provocative site that we could find,” Oldenburg later remarked of Beinecke Plaza, where the monument was installed “in front of the War Memorial and the president’s office” (Williams 2008, 117). Yale student Stuart Wrede went so far as describing Oldenburg’s placement of the piece as a “bloodless coup,” saying that, “We [the students] would utilize the very mechanisms by which the university survived – alumni gifts – to implement our coup.” Students from the Colossal Keepsake Corporation also aided in the construction of “Lipstick” at a North Haven studio. When the monument finally arrived on campus in the afternoon of May 15, 1969, students began to assemble it and Oldenburg inflated the lipstick’s red tip. Upon doing so, Wrede described, “A mighty roar went up from the crowd. The University police could not have stopped the event without a major confrontation” (Wrede 2011, 129-130). While Oldenburg claimed to not have attempted to incite any political action, he later stated that “Lipstick” was indeed a political piece. “Acts by artists of a political nature are very rare. This was probably the closest thing to a political monument I’ve ever done,” Oldenburg said following the sculpture’s creation (Williams 2008, 117).

Gendered Consumerism?

In “Lipstick,” we see an enormous abstract representation of a tube of lipstick atop caterpillar tracks. The actual lipstick feature itself is a combination of cast resin and polyurethane enamel, the reddish, almost orange, tip rising out of a brown metal tube. To the average passerby, it might not read as lipstick at all, but rather as a sort of abstract cylinder rising up from the ground. The caterpillar tracks, completely cast in steel and aluminum, look as if they had been chopped off of the bottom of a military tank and dropped on the Yale campus. “Lipstick” has never quite fit in with its surroundings and seems like an odd choice for a simple college walkway. It sits directly in the center walkway of Morse College in the middle of a concrete courtyard. Its current resting place is directly off of New Haven’s main road—Broadway—which boasts Yale’s Barnes & Noble-sponsored bookstore, an Apple Store, numerous big-name clothing stores (think: North Face and J. Crew) and a slew of Yale gift shops that dot the block. In a way, “Lipstick’s” final resting place almost seems insulting to the sculpture’s original character and meaning.

Lipstick is often seen as one of the most feminine objects found in our society and has been traditionally associated with women and stark gender roles, which required women to always be presentable and “put their face on” for male approval and attention. American society consumerist, especially during the early and mid 20th century, had an obsession with female beauty, and lipstick became a symbol of womanhood. Beginning in the 1920s and 30s during the golden age of film, lipstick was a necessity for every woman, no matter her status in society. Lipstick ads could be found in every magazine, boasting new colors and new formulas for the modern woman to try. This quintessential female symbol was also the height of American consumerism, as makeup was produced en masse and was heavily marketed as not just a want but a direct need, as if a woman who didn’t own the newest, prettiest color of lipstick wasn’t a woman at all.

Initially, Oldenburg created “Lipstick” with a balloon-like tip that could easily be inflated or deflated at will. Although the balloon was actually quite difficult to inflate and was quickly replaced with a metal tip, the symbolism behind it remains the same. Here, the giant lipstick image juxtaposes with the hyper-masculine symbol of war in the caterpillar tracks, which look as if they were removed directly from a military vehicle. The female element of the lipstick provides a direct contrast to the more masculine caterpillar tracks, almost comparing war to a commodity and a product of American capitalism, just like the building beauty culture in the United States. As such, the original balloon tip may have been a reference to a male erection, giving the lipstick element a phallic shape. In turn, this brings on an entirely new meaning to the piece—men and women were equally intertwined with consumerism and commodity culture, although that manifested in very different ways between genders and gendered products.

Oldenburg’s initial idea for “Lipstick” manifested in postcards that now reside at the Tate in the United Kingdom. These postcards depicted gargantuan tubes of bright red lipstick rising from inside of London’s famed Piccadilly Circus. One postcard shows the tubes of lipstick as a monument in the middle of the square, rising high up into the air, dwarfing the surrounding buildings by comparison. Even in his early postcard version, Oldenburg saw lipstick tubes as inherently phallic objects, and he used the monumental makeup forms to add an extra element of sexuality to the seemingly raunchy area that was Piccadilly Circus in the 1960s. Oldenburg even said about his earlier postcard, “For me, London inspired phallic imagery which went up and down with the tide—like mini-skirts and knees... like the up-and-down motion of a lipstick” (Tate n.d.).

Following his exploration of lipstick imagery in his 1960 postcard, Oldenburg began drafting ideas for his later monument. When he was commissioned by the Colossal Keepsake Corporation to create the sculpture, Oldenburg designed a series of lithographs detailing how it would look and what it would do. In one of his initial lithographic sketches, first created in 1969 and later published in the early 70s, Oldenburg had intended to insert a mechanism into the lipstick tube that would allow the tip to go up and down back into itself. The lithograph shows an electrical cable attached to a lever that would create a retractable and relatively realistic lipstick tube. However, it still isn’t clear whether Oldenburg had actually intended to include this mechanism in the final product or if it was just a rough idea that was later discarded in favor of a more accessible balloon.

Yale: A Political Hotspot

In 1969, both the Vietnam War and the Cold War were at their heights. Woodstock, the hippie movement, and anti-war protests were sweeping progressive circles throughout the nation. Yale became one of the forefronts of major protests. Although the university administration was relatively conservative, many of the students subscribed to left-leaning ideologies and were heartily involved in social movements. Protests were held consistently in Beinecke Plaza in support or opposition to both university happenings as well as larger-scale movements. Students created coalitions and organizations to further their political agendas and would sponsor protests and rallies. Protesters would often climb up the plaza’s World War I memorial and would proudly display their signs, yelling out rallying cries and manifestos to onlookers below. Sit-ins were common and protests were often dispersed by university officials; when that didn’t work the police were called. At one sit-in on behalf of Colia Williams, a Black dining-hall worker who had been fired unjustly, 44 Yale students were suspended, and disciplinary actions were taken (Yale n.d.).

Yale University as a whole, especially the School of Art and Architecture, were influential in cultural movements in the late 60s. Eve Blau described it as “one of the key sites at which the trajectories of political activism and postmodern critique intersected, generating a cultural landscape and political subtext for the cultural radicalism that followed in their wake” (Blau 2016, 131). As a result, “Lipstick” had found a perfect site in Beinecke Plaza. In early 1970, just after “Lipstick” was installed, mass protests and demonstrations broke out on the Yale campus following the trials of several members of the Black Panthers and the increasing anti-war sentiment towards the military action in Vietnam. The intensity of these protests resulted in “Mayday,” one of Yale’s largest demonstrations which resulted in a bomb explosion in a nearby New Haven park, the deployment of the National Guard to disperse protesters, and the use of tear gas to discourage students from continuing their demonstrations (Blau 2016, 148). Many of the protests during this period were intensified by the presence of “Lipstick” as it was specifically installed in the plaza as, essentially, a podium for student advocacy.

Oldenburg’s Pop Art

Claes Oldenburg is known for his largescale public monuments, often placed in prominent and influential areas throughout the 20th century. Although Oldenburg’s childhood and upbringing was far from typical—his father was a diplomat and his family often moved between the United States and Norway, he attended Yale University and the Art Institute of Chicago, and apprenticed under artist Paul Wieghardt—his art career began with easel paintings and magazine illustrations in the early 1950s (The Guggenheim n.d.). However, upon his move to New York City in the late 50s, he became exposed to Happenings art, which often consisted of narrative, theatrical pieces that required audience participation (The Guggenheim n.d.).

Soon after his exposure, Oldenburg began creating Happenings-style works and mounting them in galleries throughout the city, leading to critics praising him as a genius pop artist. His works consisted of multimedia components which often commented on American consumerism, much like “Lipstick.” For example, his 1961 display, The Store, was a room made to look like an actual store, with fake cakes and food in display cases made of plastic and cast resin. The Store saw a myriad of iterations as it traveled from gallery to gallery, sometimes becoming more abstract with oddly shaped sculptures on the wall or becoming more extreme and large-scale by making the cakes into giant inflatable structures. Over the next several decades, Oldenburg’s works would become increasingly monumental. He often collaborated with his wife, an artist named Coosje van Bruggen, to construct his later pieces, which included a giant sculpture of a pair binoculars, placed right in the heart of Venice Beach, California. Oldenburg’s works have been featured in numerous museums throughout the course of his life, including the Guggenheim and the MoMA. Even after his death in 2022, Oldenburg still remained an influential staple of the Pop Art movement, and he continued to create more private, commissioned works of art in his New York City studio until his passing (Kennedy 2017).

Works Cited

Blau, Eve. “This Work Is Going Somewhere: Pedagogy and Politics at Yale in The Late 1960s.” Log, no. 38 (2016).

“Claes Oldenburg.” The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, n.d. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/art ist/claes-oldenburg.

“Happenings.” The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, n.d. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/move ment/happenings.

Kennedy, Randy. “Claes Oldenburg Is (Still) Changing What Art Looks Like.” The New York Times, October 16, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/t-magazine/claes-oldenburg.html.

Tate. “‘Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London’, Claes Oldenburg, 1966.” Tate, January 1, 1966. https://www.tate. org.uk/art/artworks/oldenburg-lipsticks-in-piccadilly-circus-london-t01694.

Williams, Tom. “Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969.” Grey Room, no. 31 (2008).

Wrede, Stuart. “Revisiting 1968-69: On Novum Organum and Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks.” Per- specta 44 (2011).

“Yale Alumni War Memorial,” n.d. https://visitorcenter.yale.edu/tours/women-yale/yale-alumni-war-memorial.

Reclining female nude paintings are exactly what their name suggests — paintings of women without clothes resting on a couch, a bed, or another cushy surface. Usually, the women in question are white and have body types and postures that may not always be realistic at all. These paintings are largely a product of the time period and culture in which they were created, many of which have been painted by (you guessed it) cisgender white men. While this is not always true, particularly in contemporary examples of the genre, many reclining female nude paintings are idealized versions of the female body under the surveilling eye of the male gaze.

It’s important to make a distinction between “naked” and “nude” in an art historical context. Nudity, here, has a sexy and sensual connotation, where the unclothed body attracts sexual attention from others. Nakedness, however, implies embarrassment and the primordial state of being unclothed, a private activity that may inspire shame, especially when considering the implications of Christianity and the Garden of Eden/Adam and Eve story.

Nudity in reclining female nude paintings in particular is often meant for a cisgender male audience to look upon the woman in question and treat her as a sexual object. You’ve probably heard the term “the male gaze” before. This painting tradition and genre arose from the male gaze and the objectification of women. The term “the male gaze” is applied in a sociological context to refer to a worldview in which women are simply seen as objects, catering to a male audience. The male gaze also implies the unwilling sexualization of women, particularly in media and visual arts. It has been a staple in advertising, music, movies, and more, especially over the past century, but the male gaze has roots in the tradition of artworks that actively objectify women. Thus, the reclining female nude finds itself situated in a long line of artworks from the European art historical canon that portray women’s bodies under male ownership.

Origins of the Reclining Female Nude

The “reclining female nude” painting was likely introduced during the Italian Renaissance. Throughout the Italian Renaissance, artists sought to identify themselves with Classical (ancient Greek and Roman) thinkers and creatives who venerated the “ideal” body. Ancient Greek artists, particularly sculptors, were interested in the musculature of the body underneath the skin, creating works that portrayed what were believed to be the ideal body proportions. (I won’t dive too deep into this, but I’ve included some further reading on this at the end of the article.) In any case, the origins of the interest in the nude form, male and female, originated in antiquity and the study of the body in a more scientific context.

In Renaissance Italy, well into the Mannerist and Baroque movements, we see some of the first examples of reclining female nude paintings, many of which were images of the goddess Venus. As the goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality from Greek and Roman mythology, portraying women as Venus figures was a simple yet effective means for male artists to depict women in a sexual way. Among the earliest examples of reclining female nudes produced during the Renaissance is Sleeping Venus (1510). Giorgione’s painting inspired a long line of future artists to create similar reclining nude paintings of women depicted as goddess figures.

Following Giorgione’s painting is likely one of the most famous images of a reclining nude—Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538). Within this iconic painting, a nude woman is seen reclining on a bed, leaning on her right elbow. Her blonde hair cascades over her shoulder, exposing her bejeweled ear. She wears a golden bangle on her right arm and delicately holds a clump of reddish flowers in her hand. On the other hand, she wears a ring and carefully covers herself, shielding her body from the viewer’s eye. At the foot of the bed, we see a small dog curled up and asleep. In the background, a woman kneels on the tiled floor, rummaging through a chest as another woman holds a large swath of embroidered fabric. Venus’s pale skin contrasts with the sharp white sheets upon which she lies, making the contours of her figure pop. The further contrast of the sheets and the deep red of the mattress, as well as the dark velvety curtain behind her bring out the woman’s skin tone and draw the eye to her as the focal point of the painting.

The Venus seen here was meant to present to the viewer the epitome of female beauty and eroticism through her exaggerated curves and the detailed focus on her hips and breasts. Although her pose is sensual, the sheets below her suggest the subject’s purity, as if she belongs to the viewer alone, and the deep crimson of the mattress covered by the sheets alludes to absolute and utter love for the viewer. She looks directly at the viewer, certainly to a male audience, as if attracting his attention and inviting him into her bed.

It is likely that the woman portrayed here is based on the wife of Guidobaldo della Rovere, the prince of Urbino, named Giulia Varano da Camerino (Grabinski 1999, 13). Scholars have argued that Venus of Urbino was meant to be a representation of the ideal marriage as a lesson for the prince’s young wife—demure yet alluring, submissive, sensual. The dog resting at the foot of the bed is likely a symbol of loyalty and faithfulness in marriage, leading to the idea of marital piety, as if the Venus portrayed is only meant for her husband’s attentive eyes. The women in the background, one kneeling and one standing, are most likely handmaids, as they are dressed and unadorned by jewelry and fine outfits. Instead, they may be symbols of servitude, perhaps suggesting that in a marriage, a woman is a servant to her husband.

19th Century Revisions

Although the 16th to 19th century is quite a jump, I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the reclining female nude genre in 19th-century France. La Grande Odalisque (1814) is a Neoclassical iteration of the genre that points to the larger socio-cultural themes of the time.

The woman in the painting is identified in the title as an odalisque, or a woman acting as a concubine in a harem. Here we see a similar distance in the viewer’s gaze—the painting’s subject is surrounded by imagery from Turkey and the Middle East, including a peacock fan, a turban on her head, and a hookah pipe to the side of her feet—allowing the audience to gaze at the woman in question and objectify her since it was understood that she primarily existed in this space for male pleasure.

his painting is also a prime example of Orientalism, an art movement in 19th century Europe which fetishized the Middle East and North Africa particularly during a time in which France maintained colonial rule in these areas. Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, and Linda Nochlin’s essay, “The Imaginary Orient,” are required reading if you want to learn more about these types of artworks and how their legacy was not as accurate as artists wanted viewers to believe. In fact, the “Orient” being depicted in this type of art was not an accurate depiction of these regions at all, but an version in which people living in the Middle East and North Africa were made to seem “savage” or less-than. Colonial ideology was pervasive throughout these artworks, and it is essential to remember that these scenes were not accurate depictions of race, class, and culture at the time.

Moving to the late 19th century, another reclining nude enters the scene and shocks all of Parisian society. Her name is Olympia (1863) and her exhibition at the Salon des Refusés sent shockwaves throughout the art world.

If you went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art within the last year, you may have seen this painting exhibited in the Manet & Dégas show, with hundreds of tourists crowding around her to take a photo. When she was revealed at the 1865 Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected) in Paris, her audience may have had a similar reaction. The painting received an overwhelming number of bad reviews from critics and viewers, but why is that? Olympia may look like any other nude painting in the contemporary eye, but to the 19th century Parisian, this was scandalous.

The subject matter for works selected to be in the Paris Salon was quite strict and had to fall into one of a few categories; works of art could acceptably be made of Christian, Classical mythological, or historical themes, but scenes of the everyday and mundane themes were not typically seen as legitimate. Manet’s Olympia was exhibited in a separate salon, the Salon of the Rejected, that displayed works that had been rejected by the officials running the Salon.

Olympia makes reference to the pose and overall look of Venus of Urbino, but the painting itself would have been read much differently. Olympia would have been one of many names for sex workers in 19th century Paris, leading the viewer to understand that the painting’s subject was a sex worker herself. Her maid brings her flowers, perhaps from a previous customer. Even the inclusion of her maid seemed scandalous. By including a Black woman at the center of the painting, Manet situated Black women and sex workers on a level playing field with more traditional paintings of Venus figures, asking the viewer to think critically about race and class in artworks created at the time.

Along with the context of the two female figures in the painting, Olympia’s form is not idealized in the same way as Titian’s Venus. The brushstrokes used in the painting are clearly visible, whereas paintings that were deemed more acceptable would have completely smooth, invisible brushstrokes. Further, Olympia’s facial expression confronts the viewer with an almost-aggressive stare, rather than an inviting smile that lets the viewer in. Viewers would have been shocked both at the name of the painting and the implications of the scene, instead of viewing a traditional Venus nude.

It is also important to discuss the Black woman in the painting. Laure, the model for the painted figure, was often painted by Manet in various scenes, and was likely a well-known model for other artists as well. I’ve attached an article below with more information about Laure from the Pallant House Gallery that should shed a bit more light on her background.

Why are there so many nude paintings in museums?

Here, I wanted to pause and talk about the Guerrilla Girls, an arts and political advocacy group who asked this very question in 1989. Their campaign, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, asks that very question. The photo included below is a more recent iteration of the campaign, updated in 2012.

In 1989, the Guerrilla Girls were asked to design a billboard for the Public Art Fund in NY. They then decided to count every single painting of a nude woman in the museum and submitted their billboard. What came next was an advocacy campaign that spanned through decades in NYC.

I remember seeing this ad on my NYC public bus going to school one morning in the 2010s when the ad was circulating once more. It’s funny to think that this seemingly simple, yet effective, but ad was one of the driving factors that pushed me into pursuing an art history degree.

Do women still have to be naked to get into the Met? This is a question I can’t answer by myself. I still find these paintings beautiful, albeit objectifying under the cis-heteropatriarchy. I could go on and on all day about them and spend hours talking about how much I both love and hate these paintings, but I think I’ll end here for now.

Thanks for reading my art history ramble! More to come :)

Required Reading/Works Cited

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “The French Academy in Rome.” The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, October 1, 2003. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/frac/hd_frac.htm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres | Odalisque in Grisaille | the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” n.d. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436708.

Mitchell, Dolores. “Manet's 'Olympia': If Looks Could Kill.” Notes in the History of Art 13, no. 3 (1994): 39–46.

Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?” In Art and Sexual Politics, 25. Collier, 1973.

Rosand, David. “So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch.” Studies in the History of Art 45 (2993): 100–119.

Sorabella, Jean. “The Nude in Western Art and Its Beginnings in Antiquity.” The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, January 2008. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/nuan/hd_nuan.htm.

“Victoria Amoris’: Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino.’ a Commemorative Allegory of Marital Love.” Artibus Et Historiae 20, no. 40 (1999): 9–33.

Zygmont, Bryan. “Smarthistory – Painting Colonial Culture: Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque,” n.d. https://smarthistory.org/painting-colonial-culture-ingress-la-grande-odalisque/.