Kassandra Hammel, M.A.

Women's Bodies, Health and the Female Sexual Revolution in Britain and West Germany, c. 1968-1989

This research project looks at the role of British and West German women's movements in negotiating new concepts of sexuality, bodies and health between 1968 and 1989.

In both countries, feminists closely linked the issue of sexuality with the question of female self-determination and demonstrated, for example in the context of abortion debates, that women's bodies were the object of political debates. As a reaction to mainly male interpretations, activists claimed to question previous knowledge about female bodies and sexuality, to collect new information and to circulate it. For this purpose, autonomous women's groups in both countries created opportunities to exchange information - based on body experiences supposedly common to all women - and to learn about different approaches to women's health and female sexuality through information on the female body and self-help practices. The women's movements in West Germany and Great Britain were strongly inspired by US-American models. Nevertheless, the respective political frameworks and national discourses produced different conflicts and room for manoeuvre. The comparative view thus promises more precise insights into factors and variations in the transformation of ideas about sexuality and health. At the same time, the transnational networking of female actors and their increasing demand for intersectional approaches in the 1980s will also be a key focus.

By concentrating on the production and transformation mechanisms of knowledge, the project breaks with the master narrative "sexual revolution" and instead highlights the different interpretive struggles around sexuality and the body within the women's movements. These interpretations competed with each other; but they are also part of macrosocial negotiation processes. In this way, the project not only opens up a new view on women's movements themselves, but also develops an innovative reading of the decades after "1968" from a body-historical standpoint.