Title Eugenics and physical culture performance in the progressive era : watch whiteness workout / Shannon L. Walsh

Published Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, [2020] ©2020

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 202 pages) : illustrations Series Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history. Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: Exorcising a Forgotten Physical Culture -- Chapter 2: Progressive Era Physical Culture and the Aesthetics of Whiteness -- Chapter 3: Dudley Allen Sargents Classed and Classing Fitness: Nature, Science, and Mimetic Exercise -- Chapter 4: These Walls Could Not Contain Me : Social Motherhood at the YWCA -- Chapter 5: Racialized Surrogates in Bernarr Macfaddens Physical Culture -- Chapter 6: Exercise for Assimilation: Physical Culture for Indigenous Girls and Women -- Conclusion: Community Fitness for Social Change? Summary This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). This book focuses on physical culture - systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert - because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for white women during that time and demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical culture practices. By illuminating the ways in which whiteness in the US became a default identity category absorbed into the "universal" ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, the chapters reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movements drive towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, the author insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power. Shannon Walsh is an Associate Professor of Theatre History at Louisiana State University, USA. She has published in Theatre Annual and Theatre Journal. She also edited Sporting Performance: Politics in Play (2020). Shannon L. Walsh is Associate Professor of Theatre History at Louisiana State University, USA. She has published in Theatre Annual and Theatre Journal. S he also edited Sporting Performance: Politics in Play (2020) Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCOhost, viewed December 2, 2020) Subject Eugenics -- United States -- History -- 20th century Eugenics -- United States -- History -- 19th century Physical fitness -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century Physical fitness -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century Equality -- United States -- History -- 19th century Equality -- United States -- History -- 20th century White people -- United States -- Attitudes -- History -- 19th century White people -- United States -- Attitudes -- History -- 20th century Equality Eugenics Physical fitness -- Social aspects Social conditions White people -- Attitudes United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918. United States Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9783030587642 3030587649

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