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Abstract. This article examines a neglected ancient source for desire between women that nonetheless has a rich reception history in the context of female homoeroticism: the Callisto episode in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The article argues that the relationship between Diana and her hunting companion Callisto can be read as homoerotic and that, unlike many ancient accounts of female-female eroticism, neither character is represented as a tribas (a gender-deviant "woman" with a masculinized body, who seeks to penetrate other women). The Callisto episode is therefore an invaluable piece of evidence for ancient discourses on sexuality exceeding the bounds of the active/passive model.
DESIRE AND SEXUAL ACTIVITY BETWEEN WOMEN are not often represented in ancient literature, whether Greek or Latin. Scholarship on female homoeroticism has been, accordingly, less abundant than that exploring other aspects of ancient sexuality.1 In addition to smaller-scale, ad hoc investigations, several larger-scale treatments have nonetheless emerged. Hallett published a pioneering article in 1989, and three fulllength books on female homoeroticism in the ancient Greco-Roman world have since appeared: Brooten's 1996 monograph on female homoeroticism in the world of early Christianity; an eclectic collection of essays edited by Rabinowitz and Auanger, published in 2002; and, most recently, Boehringer's ambitious and insightful 2007 account, covering a variety of sources from archaic Greek lyric to fifth-century c.e. medical texts.
As such scholarship has established, many, if not most, ancient sources describing sexual activity between women attempt to impose paradigms of male sexuality upon female-female pairings. Phallocentric discourse affects not to (or actually cannot) comprehend how sex works without a penis, resulting in the "phallicization"-whether that phallus is conceived of as artificial or somehow anatomically "natural"-of one of the two female-bodied partners.2 Some modern scholarship links this phallicization to the gendered dichotomy of (masculinized) activity and (feminized) passivity: in the strictest terms of this model, all sexual acts require an insertive or "active" partner, and such a role is strongly nonnormative for women (the "passive" or receptive partner in a female homosexual pairing poses a knottier problem in terms of normativity).3 Prominent in the ancient sources, in particular those of a satirical character, is the figure of the tribas, frequently portrayed as an active-masculine woman who partakes in masculine pursuits (athletics, heavy drinking), possesses a masculinized bodily...