| This study concerns the period before the Great War when body's image was fast becoming omnipresent in postcards, stereoptic slides, media and advertizing. Its narrative describes how such changes were connected to a British centered commercial medium known as physical culture that also had a strong American component. The protean practices of physical culture included magazines and gyms as well as mail order tuition and various self-improving products. It was championed by individuals as varied as Francis Galton, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and Upton Sinclair. Its study provides a unique opportunity for investigating the links between the construction of social identities as defined by gender and sexuality as well as those tied to race and nation. As such, it offers a new context for the body's emergence as a means of both actualizing individual consumer desires and as a tool of discipline or control on the part of business and the state.; In response to machine life, past forms and historical referents have grown in importance alongside a modern view of the body as a transformative vehicle for the self. Physical culture publications, instructional schemes and exercise products were related to other contemporary movements that were both nationalistic and nostalgic (e.g., the Olympic movement) and institutionally innovative (e.g., the YMCA and Scouting). At the same time, it was a bridge linking earlier views of the body (i.e., that of Victorian reformers) to our own present day mass fitness consumer culture and its ever expanding objectification and eroticization of the body. This thesis illustrates how the textual and visual representation of the past are intimately connected to our understanding of bodies and the forces that seek to control and rationalize them. It argues that rather than confronting the end of history, both historical practice and our experience of the body have become more significant within the 'hyper-reality' of new communication technologies. |
