For years now, I have been working on Athena. One outcome of that research, around a decade ago, was starting this blog. Its title, Sharing New Research, was chosen to reflect a moment of collective energy: a conference on the goddess I was organising at my then workplace, the University of Roehampton.
With this post, I am reviving the blog, again to share new
research on Athena - this time my own.
This spring, I am in Cambridge as a Lewis-Gibson Fellow, to
work on the goddess, and to reflect consistently on the topic in a way I
haven’t been able to for a while. Indeed, not since I was a graduate student in
the 1990s have I had the luxury to return to ideas with this level of intensity.
Part of what I’m doing in Cambridge, indeed, is to engage with that earlier self. I shall be revisiting my doctoral thesis – to ask how questions I explored there now look in light of the many shifts in understandings of Athena, and about gender and sexuality.
The main goal of the fellowship is to write a chapter for an
upcoming Companion to Ancient Sexuality, edited by Allison Glazebrook
and Antony Augoustakis. My focus for that chapter will be the sexuality of
Athena and Athena as a gendered divine figure. I shall be considering how a
deity might inhabit spaces between male and female for instance, and about how
mechanisms of power, normalcy, and social order operate, and how Athena, as
goddess who is considered to police order, might be, herself, shaped and constrained by it.
As the Centre for
Greek Studies describes the project:
Drawing on literary and visual sources and modern gender theory, the research explores contested binaries, gender inversion, and alternative masculinities, contributing to wider debates on identity and the nature of the divine.
Over the next couple of weeks, I shall be developing and
testing my initial ideas in two academic talks, each titled What is the
sexuality of Athena? These papers in turn follow on from an initial
exploration of the topic at Brock University in St Catharines, Ontario last
year, chaired by Allison Glazebrook.
The first of these papers will take place at the University of Leicester Wednesday of this week.
Then, in early February, I will give a version of the paper in Cambridge. The Centre summarises my talk as follows:
Challenging modern assumptions of permissiveness or rigid binaries, the lecture explores how myth and religion reveal more fluid, symbolic ways of thinking about identity and difference. Focusing on Athena, Professor Deacy examines how ancient audiences negotiated ambiguity, inversion, and the spaces between male and female.
Over the coming months, this blog will be a place where I
share my research as it unfolds, including how it unfolds from asking the question posed by the upcoming talks: What is the sexuality of Athena?
I plan to blog next with an overview of my Leicester paper.
More soon!
