Abstract
Shooting sports with firearms is historically built as a “male world”. The reasons are mainly its proximity with military area and the fact that weapons are often linked to virility. Thus, women’s presence is viewed as very recent. Historical texts on Swiss shooting barely mention women. However, researchers must adopt a “suspicious” attitude and not directly believe what people say and write. Even though shooting sports is framed by manhood from its institutionalization from the 19th onward, can we assume that women neither practiced shooting nor led shooting organizations by then? In the archives, I found scattered traces of women’s presence. The women’s history in shooting sports tend to be porous as ‘blanks’ pervade the archives. Moreover, the very organization of the archives tends to ‘invisibilize’ women’s traces. Consequently, this chapter tackles the question of how do(es) the place(s) of women in the archives show us the making of a specific institutional sporting memory. I adopt a microlevel, feminist and spatial view on the archives. This chapter’s purpose is to reflect on the meaning of a sociological and historical gender-concerned knowledge of shooting sports in Switzerland.
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