Events

Work, Gender and Visual Archives

Hosted by the Department of Gender Studies

NAB, 2.04, New Academic Building, LSE , United Kingdom

Speaker

Juliette Rennes

Associate Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Chair

Sadie Wearing

Lecturer in Gender Theory, Culture and Media Department for Gender Studies


This talk draws on a collection of 500 postcards, showing women working in traditionally male occupations and professions at the beginning of the twentieth century. 400 of these postcards are from France and 100 of them are from other European countries. After explaining how the collection was assembled, the paper analyses this set of postcards in relation to various sources (particularly cultural, statistical, judicial, and police-related archives) pertaining to the access of women to traditionally male occupations. In the 1900s, the first female drivers, bill-posters and coachwomen were an event in themselves, around which passers-by would form crowds. For women, to openly carry out traditionally male occupations was perceived by the mass media as being a ‘feminist event’ attracting photographers and cinematographers. The entertainment industry produced shows featuring characters inspired by these women. This paper analyses the different dimensions of the construction of this event and tries to understand the opposite case of women who worked in traditionally male trades but who weren't at all featured in the newspapers or by any visual media. Commenting on the collection mentioned above, this session also aims to discuss the various uses of visual archives – as well as their limitations – in the study of history of gender and labour.

Juliette Rennes is Reader at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, where she is a member of the Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux. Drawings on historical sources (1880–1940), her first book (Le Mérite et la nature, Paris, Fayard, 2007) examines the genealogy of legal discrimination against, as well as of feminist struggles by, women within the labour market in modern France. She extended this work in her book Women in Male Occupations: A Visual History of Gender and Work (forthcoming in English in Sept. 2018 [2013]). Furthermore, she recently organized a large exhibition at the Musée de l’Histoire Vivante de Montreuil on this topic. In addition to her research, she contributes to the organization and dissemination of gender studies in France. She is the Co-Director of the MA programme in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the EHESS in Paris, and she recently edited The Encyclopédie critique du genre (Paris, La Découverte, 2016).