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" Swimming in Disputed Waters: "
Clendening, Logan
Dickinson, Edward R.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1104844
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2272842071
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| Main Entry
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Clendening, Logan
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Dickinson, Edward R.
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| Title & Author
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Swimming in Disputed Waters:\ Clendening, LoganDickinson, Edward R.
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| College
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University of California, Davis
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| Date
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2019
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| student score
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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234
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| Abstract
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This dissertation analyzes the conceptions of the body, gender, and race that emerged at public places to swim and bathe across twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany. Utilizing a series of case studies spanning the 1920s to the present, I argue that the public display of lightly-clad, nude, or covered bodies at these sites fueled wider debates about gender and morality, channeled conceptions of national or racial health, and delineated boundaries between secular norms and public displays of religion. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, shrinking swimwear and the sudden preponderance of mixed-sex beaches and pools led moral conservatives (particularly the Catholic Church), the political Left, the radical Right, and Germany’s burgeoning nudist movement all to interpret this popular shift in gender attitudes as emblematic of a broader cultural flux. The ensuring “culture war” over gender, which escalated in the early 1930s, shifted drastically after the Nazi takeover. Redrawing the body politics of public pools along racial lines, the Nazis understood these spaces as tools for strengthening the nation that also needed to be “cleansed” of the perceived threat of Jewish (and during the war, other “non-Aryan”) bodies. In the postwar years through the early 1960s, West Germany witnessed a brief resurgence of conservative efforts to combat alleged moral problems associated with immodest bathing attire and nudist beaches, which Catholic morality leagues perceived as only the latest iteration of a political and cultural battle unleashed in the 1920s. But changing leisure norms and the generational changes wrought by the “sexual revolution” tempered these debates from the late 1960s on. In the 1980s, however, but particularly since the turn of the twenty-first century, court cases involving Muslim parents seeking to withdraw their schoolchildren from co-ed swimming lessons on religious grounds, as well as the wearing of burkinis by some Muslim women and girls, have made swimming central to debates about secularism, cultural integration, gender, and religion in contemporary Germany and Europe. This expansive approach reveals how contested notions of the body and “Germanness” evolved across a century, and offers wider implications for understanding how religious and cultural differences ascribed to bodies in public spaces have shaped inclusionary and exclusionary processes of national identity formation in the modern world.
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Ethnic studies
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European history
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Gender studies
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Religious history
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Social psychology
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