History, Research Group on Political History

Within academic literature female bodybuilding has primarily been praised as a form of feminist resistance to traditional ideals of femininity. Women’s bodybuilding can be seen as a way to create ‘gender trouble’, as the hyper-muscular female body expresses a subversion of dominant gender norms. Others have, however, wondered whether and to what extent one can speak of such feminist resistance. After all, female bodybuilders seem willing to mimic and almost exaggerate traditional requirements of feminine iconography. Previous research thus considered the practice of women’s bodybuilding from normative forms of discourse. These interpretations render these women as passive rather than active agents within dynamic social processes, in which the individual and practical embodied experience are often forgotten. Interviews lend themselves pre-eminently to accessing embodied agents. By interviewing seven women who participated in bodybuilding in the eighties, the article attempts to bridge the gap between academic discourse and materiality in the study of these female bodybuilding bodies. In the experience of embodied practice, the concept of ‘feminist resistance’ was renounced. These women constructed an identity of femininity, contrasted with masculinity, and testified that gender should be worked at through performance. And although many elements within literature on ‘feminine recuperation’ were confirmed through the interviews, greater complexity was uncovered in the experienced reality. Through bodybuilding these women were provided with strength, confidence as well as being able to create an identity for themselves, incorporating traditional male characteristics. Female bodybuilding therefore contains a liberating potential on the level of personal experience, distinguished from the concept of ‘feminist resistance’ within literature.

The First World War has generally been understood as a watershed moment that transformed women’s status in society. And with regard to the entry of women into the medical profession too, the war can be seen as a turning point, however short-lived. This article sets out to study the discourses behind the ebbs and flows in British attitudes towards women medical students and women doctors, its relationship to the event of the First World War and the exceptional position taken up by the London (Royal Free Hospital) School of Medicine for Women by making use of the collection of newspaper clippings produced by the London (Royal Free Hospital) School of Medicine for Women held within the Royal Free Archive Centre.

2014 marked the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, an event commemorated in ceremonies and events around the world. This comes as no surprise, considering the central place that both World Wars occupy in our collective memory. But conflict commemoration is not just a modern-day phenomenon, nor have all aspects of war been remembered in the same way. From Simonides’ commemorative epigrams after the Persian Wars and the foundation of Battle Abbey following William the Conqueror’s victory, to the establishment of Decoration Day in memory of American Civil War casualties, communities have memorialized the impact of war in a variety of ways. On the 27th of May, research students in the UCL Department of History organised a Postgraduate Conference titled “The Commemoration of Conflict” that considered how various conflicts from the ancient world to the present were remembered and commemorated.