Todd (kinesiology and health education, U. of Texas, Austin) discusses the diverse spectrum of women's exercise in the antebellum era-- especially exercise systems related to an ideal of womanhood--and the ways that purposive training influenced American women physically, intellectually, and emotionally. She also considers the contributions of several physical education figures: Sarah Pierce, Mary Lyon, William Bentley Fowle, Catherine Beecher, David P. Butler, Dio Lewis, and the phrenologist Orson S. Fowler. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Modern architecture's evolution during the interwar period represents one of the most radical turns in design history. While the role of new materials and production modes in this development is beyond dispute, of equal importance was the emergence of a distinctly modern physical culture. Largely unacknowledged today, new conceptions of body and movement had a profound influence on how architects designed not only public spaces like the gymnasium or the stadium, but also domestic spaces. Hannes Meyer, Swiss modernist and director of Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1930, colorfully encapsulated this phenomenon in his 1926 essay The New World as "the advanced school of collective feeling." In their new book, Matthew Kennedy and Nile Greenberg explore the impact of physical culture during the 1920s and '30s on the thinking of some of modern architecture's most influential figures. Using archival photographs, diagrams, and redrawn plans, they reconstruct an obscure constellation of domestic projects by Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Richard Neutra, Franco Albini, and others. They argue that the impact of sport on modern architecture was a discursive phenomenon, best understood by going beyond a mere typological reading of the stadium or the gymnasium, to an examination of how gymnastic equipment and other trappings of physical culture were folded into domestic space. The featured houses, apartments, and exhibitions demonstrate their architects' response to, and attempt to dictate, the relationship between body, and the spaces and objects that give it shape.

During the past decade, there has been an outpouring of books on 'the body' in society, but none has focused as specifically on physical culture - that is, cultural practices such as sport and dance within which the moving physical body is central. Questions are raised about the character of the body, specifically the relation between the ‘natural’ body, the ‘constructed’ body and the ‘alien’ or ‘virtual’ body. The themes of the book are wide in scope, including: physical culture and the fascist body sport and the racialised body sport medicine, health and the culture of risk the female Muslim sporting body, power, and politics experiencing the disabled sporting body embodied exhibitions of striptease and sport the social logic of sparring sport, girls and the neoliberal body. Physical Culture, Power, and the Body aims to break down disciplinary boundaries in its theoretical approaches and its readership. The author’s muli-disciplinary backgrounds, demonstrate the widespread topicality of physical culture and the body.

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title The moving body—pervasively occupied by fitness activities, intense training and dieting regimes, recreational practices, and high-profile sporting mega-events—holds a vital function in contemporary society. As the body moves—as it performs, sweats, runs, and jumps—it sets in motion an intricate web of scientific rationalities, spatial arrangements, corporate imperatives, and identity politics (i.e. politics of gender, race, social class, etc.). It represents vitality in its productive and physiological capacities, it drives a complex economy of experiences and products, and it is a meaningful site of cultural identities and politics. Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body work from a simple premise: as it moves, the material body matters. Adding to the burgeoning fields of sport studies and body studies, the works featured here draw upon the traditions of feminist theory, posthumanism, actor network theory, and new materialism to reposition the physical, moving body as crucial to the cultural, political, environmental, and economic systems that it constitutes and within which is constituted. Once assembled, the book presents a study of bodies in motion—made to move in contexts where technique, performance, speed, strength, and vitality not only define the conduct therein, but provide the very reason for the body’s being within those economies and environments. In so doing, the contributors look to how the body moving for and about rational systems of science, medicine, markets, and geopolity shapes the social and material world in important and unexpected ways. In Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body, contributors explore the extent to which the body, when moving about both ostensibly active body spaces (i.e., the gymnasium, the ball field, exercise laboratory, the track or running trail, the beach, or the sport stadium) and those places less often connected to physical activity (i.e. the home, the street, the classroom, the automobile), is bounded to technologies of life and living; and to the political arrangements that seek to capitalize upon such frames of biological vitality. To do so, the authors problematize the rise of active body science (i.e. kinesiology, sport and exercise sciences, performance biotechnology) and the effects these scientific interventions have on embodied, lived experience. Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body will be engaging a range of new and emerging theoretical perspectives, including new materialist, political ecology, developmental systems theory, and new material feminist approaches, to examine the actors and assemblages of movement-based material, political, and economic production. In so doing, contributors will vividly and powerfully illustrate the extent to which a focus on the fleshed body and its material conditions can bring forth new insights or ontological and epistemological innovation to the sociology of sport and physical activity. They will also explore the agency of the body as and amongst things. Such a performative materialist approach explicates how complex assemblages of sport and physical activity—bringing into association everything from muscle fibers and dietary proteins to stadium concrete or regional aquifers—are not only meaningful, but ecological. By focusing on the confluence of agentive materialities, disciplinary technologies, vibrant assemblages, speculative realities, and vital performativities, Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body promises to offer a groundbreaking departure from representationalist tendencies and orthodoxies brought about by the cultural turn in sport and physical cultural studies. It brings the moving body and its physics back into focus: recentering moving flesh and bones as locus of social order, environmental change, and the global political economy.

This book is the first to deal with physical culture in an Irish context, covering educational, martial and recreational histories. Deemed by many to be a precursor to the modern interest in health and gym cultures, physical culture was a late nineteenth and early twentieth century interest in personal health which spanned national and transnational histories. It encompassed gymnasiums, homes, classrooms, depots and military barracks. Prior to this work, physical culture’s emergence in Ireland has not received thorough academic attention. Addressing issues of gender, childhood, nationalism, and commerce, this book is unique within an Irish context in studying an Irish manifestation of a global phenomenon. Tracing four decades of Irish history, the work also examines the influence of foreign fitness entrepreneurs in Ireland and contrasts them with their Irish counterparts.

The work of French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has been influential across a set of cognate disciplines that can be classified as physical culture studies. Concepts such as field, capital, habitus and symbolic violence have been used as theoretical tools by scholars and students looking to understand the nature and purpose of sport, leisure, physical education and human movement within wider society. Pierre Bourdieu and Physical Culture is the first book to focus on the significance of Bourdieu’s work for, and in, physical culture. Bringing together the work of leading and emerging international researchers, it introduces the core concepts in Bourdieu’s thought and work, and presents a series of fascinating demonstrations of the application of his theory to physical culture studies. A concluding section discusses the inherent difficulties of choosing and using theory to understand the world around us. By providing an in-depth and multi-layered example of how theory can be used across the many and varied components of sport, leisure, physical education and human movement, this book should help all serious students and researchers in physical culture to better understand the importance of social theory in their work.

This book examines the relationships between the Nordic social democratic welfare system (‘The Nordic Model’) and physical culture, across the domains of sport, education, and public space. Presenting important new empirical research, it helps us to understand how the paradoxical blend of social democracy and liberalism in the Nordic countries influences physical culture, which in turn contributes to a quality of life that ranks highest in the world. Drawing on perspectives from sociology, cultural studies, history, education, political science, outdoor studies, and urban studies, the book explores topics such as dance education for sport students, doping in cross-country skiing, outdoor education, the active body, and the ideology of public parks. It includes research material from across the region, including Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, and Denmark. This is fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in physical culture, sport studies, leisure studies, or outdoor studies, as well as sociologists or political scientists with an interest in Nordic politics, culture, and society.

Qualitative Research for Physical Culture is a practical guide to qualitative research methods in the multidisciplinary field of physical culture. This innovative, unique and clearly-written book provides a complete one-stop manual to designing, researching and writing an effective research project. The authors identify the '7 Ps' of research which allows the reader to navigate a clear pathway through the research process. The '7 Ps' are divded into three areas: - Design which examines the Purpose of using qualitiative methods; Paradigms of approach; and the Process of putting together a project - Doing which looks at a range of different methodological Practices and the Politics of Interpretation of such approaches - Dissemination which examines the Presentation of research and the Promise - how to judge the quality of research Exploring interviewing, textual analysis, narrative analysis and field methods such as ethnography, case studies and participatory action research, the text also includes invaluable advice on the writing process and how to critically assess the quality of research, and will be invaluable as a teaching tool or essential reference for experienced and inexperienced researchers alike.

'Giving the bst of yourself' in sports : the Catholic Church's attention to sports in past and present / Dries Vanysacker -- Holy marathon : 'running religion'? : religious interpretations of body vulnerability in the context of marathons / Kristin Graff-Kallevåg and Sturla J. Stålsett -- Gaining balance in religious training : what might sports and physical culture coaches learn from this? / David Torevell -- Corporeal enhancement and sport's spiritual dimension : a virtue ethics proposal / Tracy J. Trothen -- Training the body (stretching the mind) and moulding the spirit : sport, Christian asceticism and life as self-gift / Paul Rowan -- Towards an A to Z of faith in sport / Simon Lee -- Aesthetics and symbolism in artistic gymnastics : from martial discipline to ritual practices embodied in performance / Clive Palmer -- The metaphysical framework of transformational combat in Eastern religions and martial arts : implications for sports and physical culture training / David Torevell -- On the bodies of children : the troubling messages of American youth sports / Annie Blazer -- Jewish women and physical culture training at various Jewish Ys in early twentieth-century American culture / Linda J. Borish -- Promoting western sport and PE ideas in China : lessons learned and future directions / David Grecic -- Concluding remarks : making connections -- Questions for discussion and reflection.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.