Gender & Sexuality Studies 2026 (GSS 2026)

Abstract

For a long time, Roman history, taken in its social and legal aspects, was written as a history of males, before Women's Studies and very recently Gender Studies tried to re-established a kind of balance, even if this last field is still little explored by law historians. The hierarchical structure of Roman society - reputed to have been highly macho - was not necessarily based on a simple sex relationship but on a gender relationship in which the individual's biological sex was not enough to fix his or her identity. Actually, many criteria relating to bodily attitudes in the broad sense (body language, clothing, hygiene, morality, personality etc.) were ultimately more important in assessing an individual's sexual identity. In this complex social game, the Romans could consider the existence of a tertium genus hominum (third form of human) between man and woman. In line with a detailed social analysis and the idea that law is an extension of social culture according to many anthropologists, we have to consider that interpretation of legal texts would require the use of a specific reading grid to assess their gendered issue. Through the exegesis of some roman legal texts relating to public and private spheres organization, we will illustrate how a gender-specific reading grid could possibly refine our knowledge of Roman law and roman society in general. We can see that legal system considers an identity in line with biological sex as observed in the treatment of specific legal cases. The latter remains marked by the binarity of the sexes, in a rigid categorization that legal operators have never succeeded in overcoming, and which has served as a matrix for subsequent legal systems during European legal history.

Biography

TBA