Preliminary Programme

In my presentation, I am discussing how a gendered concept of „work“ is established and challenged inside the discourse and practice of sports.

The time frame and geographical scope of my paper is the first half of the 20th Century in Germany, Norway and Denmark. In this period, physiology and medicine have been established as central area of knowledge production for and inside the sports movement. The physiology of work and its close relative sports physiology provided a basis for the understanding and evaluation of body movements. Work physiology and sports physiology shared the same interest, and made use of each other’s methods of examination and scientific results. Moreover, they introduced one dominant vocabulary, one dominant concept for describing and analyzing human bodies in motion: the concept of work. In a physiological perspective, both work and sports activities are energy-consuming muscular work that have an identical result: fatigue.
I am claiming that the assumption of specifically male and female forms of work in the disciplines of work and sports physiology are crucial for the making of a gendered sports system as it exists until today. Yet, gendering sports did not come without a price: the practices generated in a gendered sports system challenged both the concept of work and the expertise and authority of physiology inside the discourse and practice of sport. Accordingly, I am particularly interested in grasping the interrelation between bodily practices and scientific knowledge production. For this purpose, I am going to combine a broad range of textual and visual sources in my presentation. (Show less)

The postwar historiography on the German occupation of Norway during World War
II constitutes a field of knowledge where the meaning of “the war” is established and negotiated. The particular example I will discuss is the idea of work in connection
with the resistance movement. A definition of resistance as a broad
national movement – a struggle of attitudes or minds (holdningskamp) – has
been dominating both memory culture and history writing. At the same time,
resistance has also been defined more narrowly as both a civilian and a
military movement. Which agents and what kinds of actions have been
understood as contributing to the resistance? The gendered concept of
resistance work reflects an understanding of both the division lines between public
and private and the concept of politics. In this perspective, it is also necessary to look into how the history writing on the occupation relates to the development within the fields of social, labor, women and gender history. Furthermore, I will consider both the visual and the textual aspects of the historical representations. (Show less)

In my paper I am focusing on the concept work as it appears and functions in Norwegian official statistics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My main interest is the historical emergence and development of the category “working population” and the gendered aspects of this process. The division of the population in a working and a non-working part, is a main capacity of all modern systems of population statistics. I am tracing the shifting conceptualizations of work and non-work in relation to shifting regimes of economic thinking and shifting technologies of producing social knowledge, represented by the Norwegian census. A main question concerns the ways in which the census machinery is collecting, processing and presenting information on married women’s work, paid and unpaid. The economic interpretation of unpaid domestic work, and its relevance to the formal economic system, was negotiated throughout the period.

As important to the logic of the census system, as the division between work and non-work, is the sorting of individuals according to family position. In the general history of the census, it is commonly stated that a household or family principle is being replaced by a principle of individuals by the middle of the 19th century. The category “working population” is, consequently, understood to consist of individuals defined by their individual economic activity. By applying a gender perspective, I demonstrate the presence and functioning of a family principle in the logic of producing and organizing the knowledge of population. I argue that this family principle strongly influenced the production of the main category “working population” and hence the concept work, as found in the system of socially defining structures represented by the census. (Show less)