All-American sport for all Americans: Collegiate gridiron as citizenship practice during the early Cold War

This dissertation tells a cultural history of collegiate football (gridiron) and physical education in the United States during the early period of the Cold War (1947-1964) through the lens of cultural citizenship and governmentality. By placing the rise of gridiron and physical education within the context of the Cold War the research takes a historical approach to problems of culture and politics. I argue that gridiron and physical education served as a "regime of bodily transformation" that participated in the social production of masculine, white citizens that could fulfill the state's Cold War needs as disciplined, patriotic workers and warriors. The citizenship frame highlights the simultaneity of race, class, gender, and sexuality within the US's global imperialist strategies. It also spatializes processes of self-formation or subjectification since citizenship is ultimately about tying self-directed actors to society embodied in a liberal nation-state that acts purposively within international networks and alliances. The empirical support for the dissertation comes from textual analysis and coding of newspaper, magazines, and trade journal articles from the era as well as relevant secondary sources. I further analyzed reports from the National Collegiate Athletic Association; television production manuals; court cases; educational films; popular and scientific books on health and fitness; and government pamphlets. This dissertation contributes to a growing literature on physical cultural studies but extends that literature by using a history of gridiron and physical education to theorize citizenship during an era of liberal governmentality, often referred to as Fordism.