Gender ARC Lunchtime Seminar Series

Dr. Julie Gaucher,PhD in French Literature and Sport History, University of Lyon 1

Writing the Sportswomen: Between Tradition and Modernity

This New Character in French Literature from 1920’s to 1950’s

Abstract: Till now, Gender Studies rarely focused on the fictive character of the sportswoman. Though it is an emblematic figure that makes visible the social norms and points out the rules of gendered relations. It also shows the mutations and/or the resistances to modernity. In the first part of the twentieth century, literature was fascinated by this new figure, and tried to understand and surround its identity. Descriptions and narrations hesitated between the respect of a traditional femininity and the construction of new gendered references.

This presentation will study French fictions about sports like poems and novels, including popular literature. We will focus on the first part of the twentieth century, when modernity implicated a new gendered order. On one hand, sportswoman could appear as a symbol of emancipation: this character was in link with the ‰Û÷tomboy’. On the other hand, this figure could be understood as an original translation of the traditional ideal of femininity: sportswomen could represent mothers and wives of exception. Thus this article will aim at showing how, through a series of stylistic, narrative and semiotic processes, the fiction tried to understand one of the new female models. Dr Julie Gaucher’s research falls within an approach of Cultural History, in the intersection of different disciplines: French Literature, History of Sport, Gender and Women History. Her investigations focus on models of gender proposed in Sport Literature. In other words, she tries to define the characteristic and the values of femininities and masculinities in this specific corpus, from 1920’s to 1950’s. Her recent investigations question the representation of the body in graphic novels.

All Welcome

For more information please contact gillian.browne@nuigalway.ie