On 10 May 2019, the annual Lova Study Day was held in Leiden, organised by Jasmijn Rana. The theme of the day was Gender Moves and brought together scholars, students and others who were interested in gender, sports, and dance. The seminar was organised to celebrate Lova’s 40th anniversary, and explored how gender is enacted and reproduced in movement and how gendered movement contributes to dismantling and/or reinforcing ideas and norms about gender. While people move their bodies in different ways across time, the concept of gender might move along, and vice versa. What is the effect of the change in physical movement on the way we come to understand ‘gender’? Does the increasing participation of women in sports have an effect on gender categories and how these categories are characterized? Does the influence of the queer movement have an effect on what we understand as ‘gender equality’ in sport, dance, physical exercise and moving in general? Lova’s annual study day connected people working on sports, dance, physical exercise and other embodied practices and to further discussions on the relationship between movement, embodiment and gender.
There were two keynote speakers: Alex Channon from the University of Brighton gave the lecture Martial Arts, Embodiment, and the Subversion of Gender, and Kathy Davis from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam gave the lecture Dancing Tango: Hyper-Heterosexuality, Queering, and Other Subversive Moves. Six presentations were done in two-panel sessions.
Panel session 1: Sport
1.Kathrine van den Bogert (Radboud University Nijmegen) – Girls only? Moving boundaries of gender and sexuality in girls’ football in the Schilderswijk, the Netherlands
2.Caroline Zieringer – En-Gendering Space: Female recreational boxing in South-East London, embodied knowledge and space.
3.Amisah Zenabu Bakuri (University of Amsterdam) – “Staying healthy and looking sexy”: physical activities, sexuality and well-being in the Ghanaian and Somali Diaspora in the Netherlands
4. Mara Lin Visser –Roller Girls: Performance of Gender in the Roller Derby Community of Barcelona. A visual ethnography in process
Panel session 2: Dance
1.Marion Quesne (Université François Rabelais de Tours) – Lindy Hop: transgression or conformity?
2.Anita Datta – Dancing Transwomen, Smoking Lesbians, and the Diasporic Femme: Reflections on Explicit vs. Everyday Performances of Queer Feminine Bodies in Kolkata
3.Krizia Nardini – Twerking classes and feminism in Barcelona, a critical auto- ethnographic account
One of the presentations was by way of a live stream through Skype from Barcelona as the presenter could not travel to Leiden. The study day was a huge success with more than seventy people attending throughout the day. The meeting was closed by a ceremony in which the Lova Marjan Rens Master’s Thesis Award 2019 was handed out by honorary LOVA member Prof. Dr. Willy Jansen.