Tag: body history

The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports is proud to announce a virtual conference focused on historical and other humanities-based approaches to the study of physical culture. We define physical culture as “the various activities people have employed over the centuries to strengthen their bodies, enhance their physiques, increase their endurance, improve their health, fight against aging, and become better athletes.”

This conference intends to tackle the current issue of how bodies are marked, organised and produced as cultural entities that leave traces into the world imagery after their total or partial material dissolution. Particularly, the conference’s goal is to gather an interdisciplinary network of scholars exploring the way in which the body, or parts of it, is preserved and remembered in time in different aspects of cultural representation, in order to evaluate its cultural impact.

We understand “body” in a broad sense, both encompassing but also expanding outside of the (presumed) domains of gender, race, and sexuality to question and destabilize the boundaries of both the human and the national “body”. All disciplines are welcome, but writers must anchor their analysis in a televisual story accessible to US audiences.

The notion of ‘endangered bodies’, or bodies in danger, arises from our concern with current Western political and socio-economic tendencies and practices against the discriminated or disenfranchised Other, whose body is physically, materially and symbolically subjected to internal pressures towards normalization and homogenization.

The 2018 Yearbook of Women’s History will focus on the making of ‘the sporting body’ as a concept full of ambiguous cultural meanings and impact, and invites papers which discuss the historical formation, transformation and impact of gendered discourses, representations and practices within sport and physical culture.

One day Colloquium: May 16th 2015, Institute of Historical Research, London Many historians have pointed out that “the body” is a worryingly broad historical theme, covering topics as diverse as medicine, dancing, gesture, clothing, sexuality, gender, childhood, animals, ageing, class, death, food, race, sport, and spirituality. This one day colloquium asks if any broader approaches and directions hold these themes together....