The Desires of Elagabalus

The third-century Roman emperor Elagabalus has enjoyed a remarkable surge in queer interest in recent years. The 2020s so far have seen Elagabalus featuring in high-profile publications in queer classical scholarship, in a new biography for general readers, in educational resources for teaching LGBTQ+ topics at school, in an extensive stream of creative, social media, and online public history content, and even in a nation-wide public controversy in the United Kingdom on the emperor’s relabelling as a trans woman in a regional museum. This article asks what stands behind this surge in popularity, which earlier developments it builds on, and what questions and problems this figure’s contemporary appeal raises. It draws on affordance theory to tease out the distinctive affordances that the figure of Elagabalus, as he emerges from the late antique sources, proffers to queer readers across time, while also deliberately adopting a longue durée perspective to inquire into the complex histories of reception and appropriation through which he accrues his contemporary significance. This two pronged approach makes it possible to trace and demonstrate how this figure’s distinctive poetics of negation and inversion, combined with its reception historical inflection point in fin de siècle aestheticism, render Elagabalus a figurative embodiment of currently predominant but conflicting strands in queer thinking, living, and struggling—the antisocial and the utopian—, and how his life and afterlife encapsulate the aporetic dilemmas that attach to these two strands’ conflicting desires and investments

Afterlife · Antique · Appropriation · Emperor · Fetishism · Liminality · Poetics · Queer · Temporality · Classical Antiquity Studies · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Interdisciplinary Studies: Technology, Society, and Humanities