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.
Qu'est-ce qui apparaît? Qu'est-ce qui disparaît? Quels papillons? Quelle enfance? Quels fantômes? Qu'est-ce qui ainsi survit et survient? Quel rôle donner à l'écriture dans ce travail sur la lisibilité? Telles sont les questions qui dirigent ce dossier sur le philosophe et historien de l'art Georges Didi-Huberman. « Essayer voir », l'expression de Beckett magistralement reprise dans le titre de l'un essai de ce dernier paru en 2014, était une invitation, un défi qui s'est prolongé dans ce dossier selon l'esprit de liberté qui fait consensus à propos de l'homme. Un entretien exclusif avec Didi-Huberman et des textes de Georges Leroux, Sylvano Santini, Julien Lefort-Favreau, Pierre Lavaud, Alexis Lussier, Vincent Lavoie, Katrie Chagnon, Isabelle Décarie et Ginette Michaud, entre autres, sont réunis sous la direction de Guylaine Massoutre et Manon Plante.
