While the figure of the archaic poet Sappho and the scanty extant text of her poetry have played a significant role in the history of sexuality, details of her biography and the social significance of her desire for women are ultimately impossible to recover. As a part of a larger project seeking non-positivist ways to construct contemporary queer identification with Sappho, this talk intertwines the philological reception history of her fragmentary poems about textiles and weaving with contemporary queer and feminist handicraft. Fiber artists and practitioners have long used their craft and craftiness to play with and subvert normative gendered expectations in both the political and aesthetic terms. These comparanda provide both metaphorical and material insight into Sappho’s sensory lyric world, while also casting light on questions of memory, marginality, labor, high versus low art, and text versus paratex.

Dr. Ella Haselswerdt is Assistant Professor of Classics at UCLA. Her current book project, Epistemologies of Suffering: Tragedy, Trauma, and the Choral Subject, argues that tragedy uses the formal fluidity of lyric expression and the peculiar nature of the chorus’s subjectivity to represent and fashion meaning from moments of extreme violence and intimacy. She also researches classical antiquity through the sometimes intersecting lenses of queer theory and queer identity, with a particular interest in Sappho and contemporary art