Marjolein Van Bavel postdoc researcher FWO

Research Marjolein Van Bavel

Research team

Expertise

Marjolein Van Bavel is an expert in histories of gender and corporality, with a specific emphasis on women who transgress social and bodily norms. Marjolein considers women’s transgressions as potential motors for emancipation or historical change. This interest has translated itself in research on (1) Mexican women who have participated in the sporting spectacles of boxing and lucha libre (wrestling) in Mexico since the 1930s, (2) in Dutch and British women who posed for the men’s magazine Playboy since the 1950s, and (3) in Dutch women bodybuilders since the 1980s. Marjolein is also an expert in the method of oral history.

Gender, Nationalism, and Sports: Women's Cycling, Boxing, and Catch-Wrestling in Belgium and Mexico in the 1920s to 1990s. 01/11/2023 - 31/10/2026

Abstract

In today's media attention on female athletes, an image exists that women have only recently become more involved in sports due to feminist activism, gender equality, and marketing strategies. But this image does not correspond with reality. While largely hidden from the historical record, women and popular sports have long gone hand in hand. Yet, the existing body of scholarship on sports and nationalism focuses almost exclusively on its relationship to masculinity. This has not only obscured women's early participation in sports but also failed to grasp the complex link between the growing popularity of sports, national identities, and the participation and exclusion of female athletes. This research project seeks to rectify this blind spot in historiography by examining the history of women's cycling, boxing, and catch-wrestling in Belgium and Mexico between the 1920s and 1990s. Drawing on diverse sources, from written and visual historical sources to oral histories, this project provides visibility to largely forgotten historical actors and includes their voices in the historical record. By employing a transnational and intersectional approach to history, it investigates women's sports participation, national responses, and how this has been tied to the gendering of sports and national identities. This allows for a more complex understanding of the interactions between the local, national, and international domains and challenges euro-centrist visions in history.

Researcher(s)

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Project type(s)

  • Research Project

To fight at the margins: the history of women in boxing and lucha libre in Mexico (1930-2000). 01/11/2020 - 31/10/2023

Abstract

This research project examines the participation of women in boxing and the wrestling sport of lucha libre in Mexico between 1930 and 2000. It responds to the relative lack of academic attention for the complex mechanisms and effects of gender transgressions by women (i.e. women taking up roles that have culturally been coded as masculine), which have served as motors for historical change and emancipation. My innovative approach confronts the findings from a more conventional historical research practice based on newspaper and archival sources with the qualitative analysis of narratives obtained from oral history interviews, which allows me to investigate both the socio-cultural constructions that impacted women's involvement in boxing and wrestling in Mexico, and the ways in which individual women experienced and navigated such discourses. Central attention is paid to the relations of power in the field of boxing and lucha libre in Mexico, and how these are tied up with gender, ethnicity, social class and commercialisation. This enables me to move beyond the dichotomy within current academic debates about women in combat sports in the Anglo-American and European context, that either constructs this participation as a form of liberation or, due to its perceived sexualisation, as a continued form of exploitation. This project provides new insights about discourses of self-sexualisation, employs an intersectional approach, and decentralises western perspectives in history.

Researcher(s)

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

  • Research Project