Irritate Me: Female Ambition

When we question the supposedly self-evident, our view of the world changes.

Helen Ahner explores the dreams, narratives, actions, rules and structures that shape our lives by looking at the everyday and normal with a magnifying glass. She is currently devoting herself to feelings in sport and investigating how women's ambition has changed over the last hundred years.

Are women suitable for competitive sports? In archives, Helen Ahner came across newspaper articles from the 1920s that debated this question. From today's perspective, this is an irritating discussion. For this reason, the cultural scientist Helen Ahner began to research the historical background of such discussions and the change in performance norms and feelings. Their goal: to better understand today's everyday life and the historical context. In an interview with Peter-André Alt, Helen Ahner uses the example of female athletes to show how the changed perception of the body and the feelings associated with it ultimately led to questioning and changing social rules.

The irritation serves her as an insightful feeling that opens up new questions. Her object of investigation, the everyday and supposedly banal, itself has the potential to irritate. Again and again, she has to explain why popular culture, rituals or everyday objects are scientifically relevant. Yet it is precisely the little things in which the big picture is reflected and becomes concrete: soccer boots that pinch because they were made for male norms, jovial jokes about aerobics-mad housewives that defame sporting zeal as a vain pastime, and girlboss accessories that capitalistically market female striving for achievement as a lifestyle speak volumes about the negotiation of social participation and ambition in everyday life.

(Language: German)