It wasn't actually in Athens, this gathering of scholars from parts of the globe as distant as Zimbabwe and the United States, China and the Caribbean, Canada and the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Brazil. Perhaps we were supposed to think that this was just as well. One of the conference-organisers told us — as she drove us southsouth- east from Athens airport down the Sounion Peninsula — that the pollution levels in the city were now so high that the government had decreed that cars being driven into the city had to be rationed. Only cars with number-plates ending in odd numbers are allowed in the city on one set of alternate days; only cars with numberplates ending in even numbers on the other alternate days. (Of course, she said, this meant that most families kept two cars and made sure that their number-plates ended in alternate numbers — those families who could afford two cars, that is.)

We did go into Athens, though, for a reception at the Town Hall. And as the bus taking us back to the conference-locale rounded a corner, we were treated to the spectacle of a full moon above the Acropolis!

The conference, sponsored by UNESCO, and organised by Ketty Lazaris, the president of the Gender Studies Association of the Mediterranean [KEGME], was held in the Hotel Ilios, roughly twenty kilometres south of Athens. This hotel perches on a headland above the Mediterranean; it is a mere three minutes’ scamper past the bougainvillea (and the trenches being dug for new plumbing) to the beach. It is a tribute to the program of papers that we were to hear — in a lecture theatre without windows, and with desks so distant from the seats that anyone wishing to take notes had to do so on her knee or risk rupture — that most of us attended most of the papers, rather than playing truant at the beach. But, then, this was also a conference about Gender Studies and its place in shaping a future world. (It was also a comment on the dirtiness of Greek beaches: potato-chip bags blew across bodies attempting an English version of sunbaking; a plastic chair rested upside down, in the rocks, just below the hotel's terraces.