ABSTRACT
This chapter first makes the case that philological practice, far from being a neutral or objective science, is influenced by the social positioning and biases of its practitioners. It provides a partial overview of the way misogynist and lesbophobic approaches to the corpus of Sappho’s poetry have influenced interpretation. In response, the chapter offers as a provocation a speculative, situated, “deep lez” approach to philology, borrowing the phrase from the lesbian artist Allyson Mitchell. This approach is sketched via a consideration of Mitchell’s own response to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. Reading Sappho and her corpus as a queer archive of sorts, the chapter provides a series of suggestions for a philological approach that resists positivistic reconstructions of antiquity while elevating the poetry’s resonant tension between presence and absence.
