Title Pending 17587

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.In their funerary practices, Romans performed roles based on an intersection of identities such as gender, age, and class that while outside the bounds of normativity in daily life were fundamental to the transition of the deceased to the afterlife. Using iconographic evidence from Roman sarcophagi in addition to historical sources, this article argues that the processes of the Roman funeral allowed and even encouraged performative transgression of gender norms through the breakdown of gender binaries. Through the theoretical lens of queer theory, which considers non-normative gendered behavior and deconstructs the gender binary through intersectional approaches, this article demonstrates how normative expectations around gender were both reproduced and subverted in the funerary space. This topic can aid in furthering the dialogue on how a binary reading of gender roles in the Roman world is insufficient for understanding the multiple expressions of masculinity and femininity in antiquity.