The Erotics of Domination

The author re-examines long-held scholarly attitudes concerning the representation of male sexual desire and female subjection in the Latin love poetry of Catullus, Propertius and Ovid. Examining first-person poetic personae that have often been romanticized by critics, she finds that male sexuality is consistently threatened as moral resolve and social status is undermined by desires that render men passively "womanish": powerless and emotional.