Disability and Intersectionality 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.