A Priapeia Latina e a produção de outras sexualidades

Abstract

This research investigates how the Carmina Priapeia complicates Michel Foucault's reading of ancient sexuality and broadens the understanding of the constitution of desiring subjects in Roman Antiquity. Based on the ideas present in History of Sexuality project (1976, 1984, 2018), the way Foucault privileges self-regulation practices is problematized, thus projecting a partial image of the greco-roman world, marginalizing obscene discourses, power relations, and sexual experiences that do not conform to this model. Based on a power analytics specific to the genealogical approach, a selection of poems from the Carmina Priapeia is examined, observing how such texts mobilize the obscene and violence as techniques of power that produce forms of existence that escape the scheme of the “self-care”. In this way, the research expands the horizon of discourses on Roman sexuality, offering a reading that complexifies the historiographical debate, incorporates and brings into focus reinstates silenced practices and desires not addressed in Foucault's narrative.