Greek Dialogues - What is the sexuality of Athena? | Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies

Date and Time: Thursday 5th February 2026 at 17:00h GMT

Venue: Room 11, Lecture Block, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA

We begin Lent Term with a fascinating lecture from Professor Susan Deacy (Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow and Institute of Classical Studies) that challenges familiar modern assumptions about sex and sexuality in the ancient Greek world. Popular accounts often portray Greek attitudes as either strikingly permissive or straightforwardly binary, flattening a complex cultural landscape into easily recognisable modern categories. Over the past several decades, however, scholarship has increasingly shown that ancient Greek ideas about the body, desire, and social roles were far more contingent, situational, and symbolically mediated than such accounts suggest. This lecture situates itself within that reassessment, using Greek myth and religion as key sites through which ancient audiences negotiated questions of identity, difference, and meaning.

This paper investigates how, given the focus on intersectionality in recent research into ancient Greek gender and sexuality, in addition to the revived debates concerning essentialism versus constructionism, the moment has come to reflect on the field, to explore future areas of research, and to use Athena to do this reflecting. It explores spaces between male and female exemplified by Athena to investigate how, through this deity, ancient Greek people received, and thought beyond, gendered categories. It also considers how, through Athena, ancient Greek people may have explored ambiguities of gender and contemplated gender inversions.