Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era: Watch Whiteness Workout

This book explores the racial inequality behind the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s–1920s). It focuses on physical culture, particularly among middle- and upper-class white women, and how it was used to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The author argues that physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its conventions, audience, and promised profitability, and reveals troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movements.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 202 pages
Publication date: 17 November 2021
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG

This comprehensive work aims to unveil the underlying racial disparities that shaped the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the United States during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). Focusing on physical culture, which encompasses systematic, non-competitive exercise guided by experts, the book delves into the practices of middle- and upper-class white women in particular. By tracing how these individuals engaged in physical culture, particularly during this period of liberal progressivism and reform, the author reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood converged to obscure whiteness beneath the façade of progressivism.

The book's sites provide a comprehensive portrayal of the diverse strata of physical culture among white women during this era, showcasing the process of unracialization through physical culture practices. By illuminating how whiteness in the United States became an ingrained default identity category integrated into the "universal" ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author demonstrates how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audiences, and potential for profitability. Furthermore, the chapters shed light on troubling connections between the daily habits promoted by physical culturists and the eugenics movements, which aimed to create more reproductively efficient white bodies.

Through the examination of written, visual, and embodied texts, the author urges a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and presents it as a vital site of analysis for performance scholars interested in exploring how corporeality is mobilized by and capable of challenging local and global systems of power.

Weight: 292g
Dimension: 210 x 148 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783030587666
Edition number: 1st ed. 2020