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oai:figshare.com:article/34041453 2026-10-01T08:13:53Z portal_1188 item_type_8 month_year_10_2026

Disability and Intersectionality in Classical Athens Robert Edward Jones (25155337) N/A <p dir="ltr">This thesis examines how impairment became disabling in classical Athens. It argues that disability should not be treated as a fixed bodily condition, a stable identity category, or an emic Athenian concept. Instead, disability is used as an etic analytical term to describe a relational continuum of experiences produced through the interaction between impairment, functional demand, cultural representation, social response, status, gender, age, wealth, household resources, and access to support. The thesis defines this process as the disability interaction.</p><p dir="ltr">Focusing on mobility, visual, and communication impairments, the thesis first develops a disability studies informed framework and then examines how Greek thought conceptualised impairment through bodily norms, vocabulary, and cultural representation. It shows that Greek could describe bodily limitation, incapacity, damaged function, and conspicuous bodily deviation, but did not gather impaired people into a single coherent category equivalent to modern disability. The thesis then considers narrative and social responses to impairment, including mockery, rejection, pity, care, support, medical treatment, assistive strategies, and healing cult.</p><p dir="ltr">The second half of the thesis applies the disability interaction to marriage, economic activity, military service, political participation, and religious life. It argues that impairment became disabling only in relation to the specific demands and expectations attached to each form of participation. These effects varied sharply between citizen men, citizen women, metics, slaves, children, elderly people, wealthy households, and poor households. Disability in classical Athens was therefore situational, intersectional, and unevenly produced.</p> 2026-10-01T08:13:53Z Text Thesis 10.83056/mmu.34041453.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Disability_and_Intersectionality_in_Classical_Athens/34041453 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Open Access after 2028-09-03