Marjolein Van Bavel

This article examines the conflict over the legalisation of women's boxing in Mexico City in the 1990s. In 1995, Laura Serrano's Women's International Boxing Federation world boxing title put pressure on the legal system that had banned women from professional boxing in the Mexican capital since 1946. As the visibility of women's boxing grew in Mexico, Serrano publicly fought to end the ban in her home city. The Mexico City Boxing Commission's moral arguments and medical discourses about the female body became increasingly untenable as politics of gender equality won in importance. Using a range of sources, including Mexican newspapers and magazines, government gazettes, congress proceedings, and an autobiographical text by Serrano, this article illustrates the interplay of gender ideologies and institutional structures during an important period in Mexican political history. After seven decades of uninterrupted Institutional Revolutionary Party rule, power of the Mexican capital shifted to the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) when Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas became the city's first elected governor in 1997. Although the PRD politically claimed the end of the prohibition in 1998, the shift in power cost Serrano the best paid boxing event of her career. It took another legal reform that outlawed discrimination in sports to force the Commission to finally regulate women's boxing in 1999.

The 1920s and 1930s in Mexico were an important moment of transition for women’s sport, as women’s interests in sport as spectators and participants increased, giving rise to social debate. Much of these debates formed part of a broader discussion about the emergence of the ‘modern woman’ or, in the case of Mexico, la chica moderna. By focusing on the representation of the modern woman boxer in Mexican newspapers and popular media, this article analyses the socio-cultural construction of femininity through the discourse of sport in the postrevolutionary context of the 1920s and 1930s. This work considers how authors and publications with close ties to the postrevolutionary regime allocated the modern boxing woman a place within the postrevolutionary project, which provided the project a progressive appeal that argued for a true social equality. However, commentators also went to great lengths to reconcile the transgressive and modern character of women boxers with the state’s more traditional discourses on acceptable femininity and clear limits remained in place for women. Nevertheless, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a remarkable opening up of possibilities for alternative types of femininities in a context that sought to establish a new national citizen in terms of gender.

This article examines the emergence of the ban on women wrestlers from the sporting spectacle of lucha libre in Mexico City in the 1950s. Set against broader moral preoccupations about the growing popularity and visibility of lucha libre in Mexican society as a result of its broadcasting on television, luchadoras were seen as examples of transgressive femininity, which rendered attempts to make them invisible necessary. This work joins the efforts of scholars who write the history of women’s participation and exclusion from sporting activities and contributes to the growing fields of sports studies and studies of mass culture within Mexico.

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.

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.

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.