Overview
- Traces how various sites of Progressive Era (1890–1920) physical culture performance became sites of whiteness-in-the-making
- Demonstrates the de-racialization of whiteness through physical culture practices
- Shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History (PSTPH)
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About this book
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 movement’s 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.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Shannon L. Walsh is 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).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era
Book Subtitle: Watch Whiteness Workout
Authors: Shannon L. Walsh
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-58763-5Published: 17 November 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-58766-6Published: 17 November 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-58764-2Published: 16 November 2020
Series ISSN: 2947-5767
Series E-ISSN: 2947-5775
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 202
Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Theatre History, Performing Arts, National/Regional Theatre and Performance, Dance