Negotiating the Space between East and West: Sport and Gender Politics in Swiss Women’s Artistic Gymnastics in the Cold War Era

Abstract

During the Cold War, women’s artistic gymnastics changed fundamentally and became an important battleground between East and West in the struggle for supremacy. As a supposedly neutral state and gymnastics federation, the case of Swiss sport and gender politics was left out. To analyze the Swiss case in women’s artistic gymnastics and its negotiation and positioning between East and West, written archival sources and oral histories are analyzed using a gender historical approach. By analyzing rejection and transfer through boycott, codification, sport policy, reception of coaching and sport techniques, as well as athletes’ welfare, the interconnectedness of gender and sports policy during the Cold War is explored and exemplified. The Swiss Gymnastics Federation, on the one hand, distinguished itself from the East as a reference space, which was imagined as different and indeed successful, but also harsh and totalitarian, but on the other hand, also imported and (re)produced knowledge and promising strategies. This ambivalent positioning between East and West, however, reveals both a gendered and political rejection of the other while using it as a role model and locating problems of athletes’ welfare in the East.