The Re-Queering Sappho I found very empowering as a woman. I was introduced to her poetry last year and found it intriguingly refreshing. there is something about her work being fragmented that allows for women to remain unaltered by the confines of what "they think". "The fragmentation itself allows Sappho’s posterity to participate in a queer, non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal relationship with the poems." Sappho seems to be in tune with what love really looks and when reading her poetry the perspective you take is all your own. I find it fascinating that even though she writes of her love of women her poems reads neutral. she can provide us with the simplest description but in that description, she awakens your senses with words. "Softness and abundance, beautiful textiles, blossoms, overripe sweetapples, the flash image of a woman’s ankle"When I first read Sappho's work I did not realize her poems were fragments after I did some research about her the poems seem to be open-ended interpretations. I felt myself wanting to find an ending or being satisfied that there was none.
I think this reading counters, through Sappho, female objectification. Fragment 96 is a great example of Sappho telling us about the beauty of a woman without the sexualized intentions. She allows herself to feel, be seen, and no conform to the predetermined life set for women in that time. Her work embarks on the freedom of self, especially as a woman. I think her identity plays the most critical role as a poet in antiquity. I don't think she is being defiant or rebellious in her work I, however, think she embodied what many of us try to understand today. She knew who she was and her work reflected that, in spite of how she would be view.