"Queering the Simile: Expressing Gender and Sexuality Through Poetic Language"

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My project, which pans across comparative literature studies, classics, and classical reception, will ask the following questions: how has the figure of the simile historically provided poets with ways of evading precise definition and signification in poetic language? How does the simile allow for non-conforming expressions of identity, and what can its future theoretical endeavours be? I aim to not only consider the role of the simile in portraying non-conforming identities in ancient literature, but also to extrapolate and discuss how it can be and has been exploited by modern writers, as well as its future potentialities. As a first step, I will analyse and assess how the figure of the simile has been conceptualised in ancient rhetorics and modern literary theory. Aristotle's definition of it in the Rhetoric and the Poetics as a longer metaphor with greater explicatory powers has often led to an understanding of the simile as a 'simple' figure of speech: different studies have, however, highlighted not only the role of the simile in inverting set gender conventions in classical literature (Foley 1978), but also its potentialities for describing identities beyond the binary (Corbeill 2015). Analysing classical rhetorical tools through a modern theoretical lens, then, provides for new understandings of poetic speech and its role within the text: I thus aim to start from ancient definitions of the simile, to then utilize post-modern theory to complicate its current meaning. Studies on the gendered nature of language (Wittig 1985) will also aid me in considering the influence of poetic expression on the formation and representation of identity, and its value within queer theory more generally. Despite this past scholarship, the role the simile plays in offering a visual telling of different possible futures and identities beyond the binary is yet to be explored: this is something I aim to do through a modern analysis of queer writings as providing utopian spaces for readers to inhabit (Muñoz 2009), thus opening up a new utopian world of representation within poetic language and literature. With this framework in mind, I will then analyse the role of the simile as going beyond the simple binary of grammatical structures, in a series of different classical texts (such as the Odyssey, the Argonautica, and the Metamorphoses) and their modern reception (e.g. Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy). The concluding part of my project will therefore explore ways of re-employing classical figures of speech for a new purpose in queer writing, developing new avenues for the queer experience through an understanding of its past (Love 2007). I thus aim to conclude with a reassessment of classical language as opening up new and future spaces for queer identities to inhabit, operating on the utopian value of poetic language (Barthes 1953).With this project, I then want to continuously draw out connections between classical literature and its value for queer writing today, operating on the idea that, as Jennifer Ingleheart puts it, 'Queer Classics reflects on, and provides a challenge to, Classics as a discipline'. To do so, I aim to employ modern philosophical, sociological and literary theory texts to re-asses and re-interpret classical texts and their past and more traditional scholarship, effectively moving across classics, comparative literature, and classical reception in my methodology. My work in reception studies and in the reassessment of classical language for future endeavors then aims to open up new avenues for queer reinterpretations and uses of the classics, engaging with current debates in literary theory and intersecting with both classics, their reception, and comparative literary studies