Say it with fluids: what the body exudes and retains when Juvenal’s couple relationships..

Say it with fluids: what the body exudes and retains when Juvenal’s couple relationships go awry

Abstract

The satires of Juvenal are ripe with bodily fluids; among them, bile, milk, sperm, stomach contents, tears, urine and vaginal secretions appear either as gender-specific fluids or in relation to both men and women, depending on how the satirist sets out to characterize the exuder's behaviour, and, as a corollary, to categorize the exuder according to the aim of his satirical discourse. This chapter investigates the types of behaviour with which Juvenalian bodily fluids are connected, whether the fluids themselves are negatively or positively connoted, or whether it is the context in which they appear that taints or graces the satires' protagonists. It intends to show that bodily fluids are used as strong markers, by their traditional or untraditional use and display, of the propriety or impropriety of both men's and women's behaviour. Some fluids, such as milk and sperm, are positively connoted and accordingly used in the satires to show how men and women should behave in order to fit the traditional, expected model of gendered behaviour, while other, biologically non-gendered fluids such as tears or urine are used in a culturally loaded way as markers of out-of-bounds behaviour, even more so if they are intentionally and publicly leaked or retained. The chapter concludes, from these observations, that Juvenalian bodily fluids play an important role in the satirist's conveying of his message concerning men's and women's proper or improper roles within the conjugal relationship.

Keywords

• Ancient History,
• Gender Studies,
• Roman History,
• Gender and Sexuality,
• Gender,
• Roman social history,
• Juvenal,
• Roman Literature,
• Couples Relationships,
• Roman satire, with special emphasis on Juvenal,
• Bodily Fluids

In: Totelin, Laurence (Ed.), Bodily Fluids in Antiquity. Londres: Routledge, 2023 (2021)