Abstract
Over the past fifty years, port labour in Europe has undergone profound transformations driven by the global rise in maritime trade, increasing inter-port competition, port exurbanization, and cycles of capitalist innovation, namely mechanization, containerization, computerization, and more recently automation. This research sits at the intersection of social geography, particularly gender geography, and port geography. It explores the reconfiguration of port labour and its landscapes—the port territory itself and the port city—through the lens of women's social and spatial integration and the restructuring of gender relations in port labour. The thesis is based on fieldwork conducted in two medium-sized, peripheral port cities in the Northern Range: Le Havre (France) and Felixstowe (United Kingdom). The port is the employment backbone of these cities and plays a key role in integrating individuals into the local community. However, port work remains an unequally distributed socio-spatial resource, with gender as a major axis of inequality (female minority/male majority). Pressures on port work are intensifying as the volume of available jobs has stabilized since 2008-2010. This study seeks to examine the extent of port labour feminization and its effects on social relations, practices, and the lived spaces of male and female port workers.The first part of the thesis details the framing and implementation of the research. To account for a system of professions extending beyond mere dock work, it introduces the conceptual category of the "world of port work" and the primarily qualitative dataset: 52 semi-structured interviews, field observations, and documentary collection, all cross-analyzed and contextualized with statistical data. The second part examines the trajectory of port territories, analyzing the destabilization of port employment basins in the context of "competitiveness" and the prospects for feminization of port work. The third part focuses on the trajectories of male and female port workers, addressing access to port work and the construction of lived spaces within the port and the city in relation to gender. Ultimately, the findings highlight progressive convergence between the practices of the female minority and those of the male majority.