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Helena Tolvhed

About me

Helena Tolvhed (born in 1974) is a researcher and an Associate Professor at the Department of History, Stockholm University.

Ongoing research project: “Women 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

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.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Plats för makt

    2018. Ulrika Holgersson, Helena Tolvhed.

    Book (ed)

    Monika Edgren är docent i historia och professor i genusvetenskap vid Malmö universitet. I "Plats för makt" presenterar 16 av hennes vänner och kollegor kritiska essäer på teman som anknyter till hennes intressen. Det handlar, som alltid i Monikas forskning, om makt, i alla dess former: maktspel mellan historiens människor och samhällets institutioner och normer, men också den makt som forskaren har över de historiska subjekten. Essäerna är tematiskt ordnade och handlar om könsskillnadsteori, Donna Haraways moralfilosofi och aktörsbegreppet i prostitutionshistorien; om neoliberal chefsdiskurs och maskulinitetsuttryck i sånger hos kolgruvearbetare i Appalacherna respektive i nazistisk propaganda; om kvinnliga fabriksarbetare i USA under första världskriget och om mångfaldens problematik i läromedel respektive museiverksamhet; om hiphop-feminism och om den samtida litteraturens diskussioner om utanförskap respektive kroppskontroll; om kön och sexualitet i svenska beredskapsromaner och berättelser om våldtäkt i svenska domstolar; om självskärande flickor och om internetbaserad feministisk mobilisering mot sexuellt våld.                      

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  • Hälsosam femininitet och postfeministiska subjekt

    2016. Helena Tolvhed. Tidskrift för Genusvetenskap 37 (3), 77-94

    Article

    During the last decades of the 1900’s, a commercial health industry transformed a previous Swedish public health regimen characterized by strong state control. Running and exercising at gyms are now widely practiced, and new products, diets and trends appear constantly. Part of this is a booming market of health- and fitness magazines, and this article examines one of the more popular titles on the Swedish market, iForm, during the years 1987, 1997 and 2007. 

    An ideology of “healthism” has been identified as salient to neoliberal late-modern society, where health and a fit body are important lifestyle markers and metaphors for the good life. This includes historically new gender ideals – the well-trained female body and the appearance-oriented (“meterosexual”, or later “spornosexual”) man – closely associated with diet and exercise practices.

    This article discusses the “fit” woman as a historically new ideal and engages in the feminist debate on how to understand her: is she a norm-breaking emancipatory figure, or a post-feminist celebration of the strong individual communicating the message that there is no longer a need for feminist struggle?

    The study indicates that a discourse of individualism and personal responsibility gets more prominent during the time period. Sport and play are replaced by more “rational” forms of exercise, for example in the gym. The very definition of health becomes more narrow; areas such as sex and relationships has disappeared from the magazine in 2007, as has more general educational articles on the body. Instead, the focus on diet and exercise has increased.

    Furthermore, the study of iForm shows that the models used to represent “health” are conventionally beautiful, smiling, white and predominately thin rather than obviously muscular. This, I conclude, limit the destabilizing potential of the “fit” woman in iForm.

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  • A Sound Citizen in a Sound Body

    2015. Helena Tolvhed. Journal of women's history 27 (2), 37-61

    Article

    This article focuses on a rare phenomenon: a feminist sport federation active in Sweden during the 1920s. The analysis of rhetoric and ideas on women’s sport show how the association wanted to both politicize sport and enter the sport arena. Women’s sport was regarded as part of an ongoing modernization process, where women needed to develop physical strength and stamina. Through practicing sport, women would be “fit for society,” the Swedish Women’s Federation for Physical Culture (SKCFK) emphatically presented their vision of the female body as productive and capable, with strengths that should be further developed through exercise. Representatives of the federation spoke against biologizing statements about women’s fragile physique. When the activities of SKCFK faded out in the beginning of the 1930s, it meant the end of separate women’s sport in Sweden. It was not until the influence of the feminist second wave during the 1970s that gender equality was put on the agenda of the Swedish Sport movement.

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  • På damsidan

    2015. Helena Tolvhed.

    Book

    Kvinnors idrott har historiskt sett ofta betraktats som opassande och osedlig, och ansetts kunna leda till ett skadligt ”förmanligande” av kropp och sinne. Svett, andfåddhet, muskler och tävlan uppfattades länge som själva motsatsen till idealiserad kvinnlighet, och kvinnors idrottsutövning utgjorde dessutom en ovälkommen konkurrens om ekonomiska resurser. Möjligen kunde kvinnornas deltagande också ha en feminiserande inverkan på själva idrotten.

    Historikern Helena Tolvhed undersöker spänningsförhållandet mellan å ena sidan idrott som en mansdominerad och maskuliniserad arena, och å andra sidan kvinnokroppar och femininitet. Genom studier av kvinnors friidrott på 1920- och 1930-talen, av den tidiga feministiska föreningen Svenska Kvinnors Centralförbund för Fysisk Kultur, av 1960-talets rallydrottning Ewy Rosqvist och av handbollsspelare som kämpat för jämlika villkor visar Tolvhed idrotten som en historisk arena för underordning och marginalisering, men också för gemenskap och frigörelse.

    Här placeras damidrotten mitt i de kultur- och genusvetenskapliga diskussioner som teoretiserat kroppen som kulturellt formad och levd men samtidigt materiell och del av identitetsskapande processer. I relation till 1900-talets allmänna samhällsförändringar vad gäller kvinnors villkor inom politik, arbetsmarknad och utbildning diskuterar Tolvhed hur genus har skapats, utmanats och omförhandlats på idrottens ”damsida”.

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  • Kroppen och emancipationen

    2012. Helena Tolvhed. Scandia 78 (2:S), 84-91

    Article

    The article argues for sport and physical culture to be recognized as a fruitful field for gender history research. I would argue that different forms of physical activity should be considered part of the processes that create, reproduce, or challenge current gender positions - and identifications - be it symbolically, structurally, or individually. Women's sport challenges the historical linkage of femininity and passivity, as well as calling into question the 'naturalness' of the body and gender. Physical activity shapes the body in historically or culturally specific ways at the same time as the body, by embodying or challenging norms, in turn shapes history The empirical examples discussed include Svenska Kvinnors Centralforbund for Fysisk Kultur (the Swedish Women's Central Federation of Physical Culture), an association that was active in the inter-war period and had close links to Sweden's liberal women's movement. Based on a feminist analysis, bodily activity and strength are here viewed in relation to women's emancipation.

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