Modern performance reception of Ovidian scenes of sexual violence

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The Western world has a history of aestheticizing violence against women, and Ovid could well be considered one of the founding fathers of this phenomenon. Zuckerberg (2018) proved this in exposing how an online community of misogynists have appropriated classical texts, particularly those of Ovid, to legitimise acts of online violence. Morales (2020) too has recognised the link between Classics and gendered violence and recently explored how Classics have been used to protest rape culture and offer new narratives for the marginalised. In the #MeToo era, this concern is more evident than ever before. Theatre practitioners are also interested in this, and there has been a rise in performances which critique aesthetics of violence and voyeuristic spectatorship. Classics and Theatre Studies, as disciplines, are beginning to recognise these urgent concerns. But the subject has not been explored systematically to date by existing scholarship, and especially not in relation to performance of Classical texts. My research will narrow this gap, as I examine the modern performance reception of Ovidian scenes of sexual violence, particularly from the Metamorphoses but also Ovid's wider corpus. I will consider how modern performances do and might stage rape scenes and how the Ovidian text invites both performative adaptation and a resistant reception, whereby the female voice is heard and the traditional male gaze is rejected. The industry interest and the scholarly gap in this area makes this a timely project. But furthermore, my research should be a common concern to all.