‘Falling women’–‘saving angels’: spaces of contested mobility and the production of gender and sexualities within early twentieth-century train stations

Abstract

The banality of movement and the fascination with mobility meet at the very locations of arrival and departure. This contribution highlights social practices within and discourses about train stations which are interpreted as constitutive moments in the production of gender, sexuality and space. Train stations host the crossing between different spatial and social contexts, the negotiation of scales and between life cycles. Focusing on the historical moment of the early twentieth century we look at Swiss train stations as sites of heightened public concern which served to implement regulatory instruments to govern the social order of modernity. Narratives of the city as danger delineated train stations as critical turning points in the life-journey of young people, particularly for ‘impressionable’ young women. What is of interest here is how sexualities are discursively and metaphorically constructed and governed by social purity groups within the train station at the turn of the century. The way in which Station Assistance agents ‘received’, counselled and controlled the arrival of young people in the cities contributed to reiterating and (re)constructing gender and sexuality beyond national boundaries. The resulting protective and prescriptive constructions of sexuality reveal much about the complex perceptions and regulations of rural and urban sexualities and gender systems in their spatial nexus.

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