The disciplinary dimensions of nineteenth-century gymnastics for US women

ISSN： 0952-3367

Source： The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol.24, Iss.4, 2007-04, pp. : 432-479

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Abstract

This study examines the conditions and terms under which US discourses promoting gymnastics for women institutionalized those exercise regimens as vehicles of disciplinarity between 1830-1870. Specifically, it finds that those texts encouraged practices of medical examination and measurement along with a variety of additional, interconnected and significant disciplinary operations: economies of space, of distribution, and of order; logics of temporality, of individual development, and of social salvation; procedures of monitoring and of rendering normalizing judgments; mechanisms of review and of punishment through exercise; as well as the dynamics of panopticism and of self-monitoring. That array of disciplinary techniques, in turn, was meant to materially effect not only a healthy, orderly, and morally transcendent social body but also enlightened, disciplined, and idealized feminine subjectivities. As a consequence, this paper also asserts that the resistant potentialities of gymnastics for US women between 1830-1870 cannot be evaluated thoroughly without some consideration of modern power's nature, attributes, and applications.