First diagnosed in 1986, Ron Athey uses his HIV-positive body—through piercing, bloodletting, penetration, and medical procedures—as text for performance pieces shown in galleries, theaters, and nightclub spaces. Connecting the ritual and spectacle of the Pentecostal tradition in which he was raised to ancient classical drama, Athey views Greek Tragedy as an act of ‘pagan worship,’ which can ‘abduct the viewer into a heightened abstract, unexpected state.’ This talk explores Athey’s redeployment of two figures from Athenian drama: Helen of Troy, reborn as Trojan Whore (1995), and Philoctetes in Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound) (2006).
Tom Sapsford is a scholar of performance, gender, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, with a specialization in imperial Latin verse. He is the author of Performing the Kinaidos: Unmanly Men in Ancient Mediterranean Cultures (Oxford 2022) and is currently writing a book on º£½ÇÍø and the Gay Counterculture.
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