This booktraces how various sites of Progressive Era (1809–1920) physical culture performance became sites of whiteness-in-the-making. It 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. These sites give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for women during that time. First, they demonstrate the de-racialization of whiteness through physical culture practices, illuminating the ways in which whiteness became a default identity category absorbed into the “universal” ideals of culture, arts, and sciences. Second, they show how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, they reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenic movement’s incitement towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, this study 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 marshalled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.weiterlesen