Body Eclectic: Visual Media, Urban Space and Renegotiation of Gender in Interwar Port Cities

• Applicant: Dr. Christina Reimann
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 573170762

How did gender relations change in between the wars? The project approaches this historical question from a transnational urban perspective and shifts the focus from discourse to the embodiment of gender relations and their spatial anchoring. Combining visual and written sources, it examines the extent to which the gendered order of the urban space changed over the interwar period and how this transformation interacted with changing gender identities. The project investigates French Le Havre and Swedish Gothenburg because port cities are peculiar sites to study both the transnational dimension and the local contingencies of the renegotiation of gender in interwar Europe. I suggest that previous research on interwar gender history with its focus on national developments, the discursive dimension of gender renegotiation, and on the emergence of new female forms has not given sufficient recognition to the crucial way in which (everyday) urban bodily practices have forged gender identities and relations. Basing the analysis of interwar gender regimes on an in-depth study of documentary photographs and -films will allow to integrate the transformative power of bodily practices and -performances into the narrative on interwar gender history and produce an account of interwar urbanity that is more inclusive to those urban actors who are silent in the written source material. The project challenges the usual national and metropolitan frame for studying interwar gender relations by examining urban places that are essentially constituted by and constitutive of transnational processes: port cities. Swedish Gothenburg and French Le Havre both were industrializing and internationally well-connected Atlantic port cities that hosted ethnically diverse populations with an important share of working-class people. Yet, the two cities were situated in very different legal, political and social interwar contexts, especially so when it comes to gender, which makes their parallel study particularly insightful. My study uses photography, short documentary (city) films and newsreels considering that the increasing consumption of (moving) pictures affected people’s way of walking and moving in the city. On the historical background of metropolitan modern womanhood and the flourishing urban visual culture, I analyze the renegotiation of gender relations in Gothenburg and Le Havre via bodily practices with a threefold focus: on how people moved in, used and related to the public urban space; and on their poses and gestures when relating to one another. I pay close attention to clothing and accessories that are considered as major tools through which people express and transcend their gendered identities. I interpret bodily practices on the basis of existing research on the cultural history of gesture and mobility, and situate them historically and spatially by combining images and written sources.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants