Helena Tolvhed
Contact
Name and title: Helena Tolvhed
Workplace: Department of History Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room D938Universitetsvägen 10 D, plan 9
Postal address Historiska institutionen106 91 Stockholm
About me
Helena Tolvhed (born in 1974) is a researcher and an Associate Professor at the Department of History, Stockholm University.
Ongoing research project: “W
omen on the Right and Gender Equality: The Emergence of Market-liberal Feminism in Sweden, 1970-1990”
(funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2022-2025).The project examines Swedish conservative women's challenge to both male authority and socialist feminist claims to represent “women's interests”. The project aims to intervene in a feminist historiography where activism is often viewed as a unified phenomenon. It historicizes the different understandings ascribed to gender equality, relating them to transformations of the Swedish welfare state towards the end on the 20th century, resulting from an influx of market liberalist ideas and policies. Combining a biographical approach with a discourse analytical one, the project theorizes feminist ideas as mutable across time and space. It builds on archival sources, press material and biographical sources, including interviews.
Previous research
: The project “From People’s Health to ‘Healthism’? New Femininities and Masculinities in Health and Fitness from 1970” (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2014-2018) explores changing discourses and practices on health, body and exercise during the time period from 1970 to the 2000’s.
The
book På damsidan (2015) examines sport as a historical arena for subordination and struggle, but also community, pleasure and emancipation for women. The book contains part-studies on different sports context in Sweden during the 20th century, using archive material, oral history and press material. The doctoral thesis Nationen på spel (2008) is a discourse analysis of Swedish popular press media from the Olympic Games 1948-1972, focusing aspects of gender, nation and global politics.
Research Areas:
- History of Sport and Health
- Women’s and Gender History
- Political history
The book På damsidan (“On the Ladies’ side”, 2015), examines the tension between, on the one hand, sport as a masculinized and male dominated historical arena, and femininity and female bodies on the other. Using achieve material, oral history and press material, the book analyses the construction and (re-)negotiation of gender “on the ladies’ side” of sport. Through part-studies on different sports contexts in Sweden during the 20th century, sport emerges as an area of subordination and struggle, but also for community, pleasure and emancipation for women.
The project "From People's Health to Healthism? New Femininities and Masculinities in Health and Exercise from 1970”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (2014-2017), explores changing discourses and practices on health, body and exercise from 1970 to the present.
Publications in English:
Tolvhed, Helena (2019). ”Building her body: Representing and Negotiating Femininity and Muscularity in Swedish Bodybuilding Magazines, 1962-2012”, i Yearbook of Women’s History 2018, “Building Bodies: Gendered Sport and Transnational Movements”
Tolvhed, Helena (2018). “Exercising power? The (post-)feminist politics of the ‘fit’ female body in late modernity”, i Gender, history, futures : Report from the XI Nordic Women's and gender history conference, Stockholm, Sweden, August 19–21 2015, Umeå : Sveriges kvinno- och genushistoriker (s. 139-147)
Tolvhed, Helena (2016). "Ewy Rosqvist, rally queen: Gender, identity and car racing at the beginning of the 1960s", i Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics (vol. 19 2016, special issue: Extraordinary sportswomen)
Tolvhed, Helena (2015). ”A Sound Citizen in a Sound Body. Sport and the Issue of Women’s Emancipation in 1920’s Sweden”, Journal of Women’s History (2015, vol 27, issue 2: “Modern Womanhood: Unusual Sites of Twentieth-Century Women's Empowerment in Europe and the United States.”). pp. 37-61
Tolvhed, Helena (2013). “Sex Dilemmas, Amazons and Cyborgs: Feminist Cultural Studies and Sport”, Culture Unbound. Journal of Current Cultural Research Volume 5, 2013: pp. 273–289. http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v5/a18/cu13v5a18.pdf
Tolvhed, Helena (2012). “The Sports Woman as a Cultural Challenge: Swedish Popular Press Coverage of the Olympic Games during the 1950s and 1960s”, International Journal of the History of Sport Volume 29, Issue 2 2012, pp. 302-317.
Tolvhed, Helena (2010). “Swedish Media Coverage of Athens 2004”, in Toni Bruce, Jorid Hovden, & Pirkko Markula (eds.), Sportswomen at the Olympics: A Global Content Analysis of Newspaper Coverage, Rotterdam & Taipei: Sense Publishers.