Man, I feel like a woman: Men writing as Women in the Roman world. Presented by Dr Sarah Lawrence.

Much of the discourse around empathy and gender in the modern world is focused on how empathetic concern and perspective taking manifest in people in relation to their assigned gender at birth. In this paper, however, I will explore the question of individuals’ ability imaginatively inhabit the experience of a gender not their own. We have punishingly little remaining writing by Roman women in the literary corpus, but we do have cases where male authors write from the perspective of women. Perhaps most interestingly, we have Ovid’s Heroides, in which the author writes in the personae of a collection of tragic heroines, addressing the heroes who have treated them poorly. This paper will use the Heroides as a case study for testing the conscious presence and nature of cross-gender empathy as a concept in the Roman world.

Presented by Dr Sarah Lawrence, University of New England. 

Image credit: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en