Anthony Corbeill. Sexing the World

Anthony Corbeill has long been engaged in the anthropological investigation of the ancient Romans, and especially in the interrogation of their most alien cultural practices. His first book, Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic (1996), explored Cicero’s theory and practice of humor in oratory from his elite metropolitan insider perspective rather than the conventional viewpoint of rhetorical handbooks. In Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (2004), he interrogated the significance of gestures in the contexts of prayer, mourning rites, and political invective, and drew together textual evidence to reconstruct the embodied materiality of Romans in a variety of spatial contexts. With Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome, he extends his scope to analyze the correlation of biological sex with grammatical gender in the Latin language, Hellenistic Roman poetry, and descriptions of intersexual bodies and the unsexed gods of archaic Rome in a tour de force of philological, linguistic, anthropological, and historical research.

Art · Cicero · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Invective · Literature · Politics · Chinese history and philosophy · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy