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Print Price: $93.50

Format:
Hardback
256 pp.
5 b/w line, 14 b/w halftones, 6.125" x 9.25"

ISBN-13:
9780195395648

Publication date:
October 2010

Imprint: OUP US

Body by Weimar

Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity

Erik N. Jensen

Body by Weimar argues that male and female athletes fundamentally recast gender roles during Germany's turbulent post-World War I years and established the basis for a modern body and modern sensibility that remain with us to this day. Athletes in the 1920s took the same techniques that were streamlining factories and offices and applied them to maximizing the efficiency of their own flesh and bones. Sportswomen and men embodied modernity - quite literally - in all of its competitive, time-oriented excess and thereby helped to popularize, and even to naturalize, the sometimes threatening process of economic rationalization by linking it to their own personal success stories. Enthroned by the media as the new cultural icons, athletes radiated sexual empowerment, social mobility, and self-determination. Champions in tennis, boxing, and track and field showed their fans how to be "modern," and, in the process, sparked heated debates over the limits of the physical body, the obligations of citizens to the state, and the relationship between the sexes. If the images and debates in this book strike readers as familiar, it might well be because the ideal body of today - sleek, efficient, and equally available to men and women - received its first articulation in the fertile tumult of Germany's roaring twenties. After more than eighty years, we still want the Weimar body.

Readership : Scholars and students of sports, gender, women's studies, and the body in all fields, including sociology, anthropology, history, English and the modern languages, and kinesiology. Scholars of modern German history and of cultural and social history. General readers of sports history, especially boxing, tennis, and track.

Introduction: Building a Better German
1. Disorder on the Court: Soft Men, Hard Women, and Steamy Tennis
2. Belle of the Brawl: The Boxer between Sensationalism and Sport
3. German Engineering: Duty, Performance, and the Track and Field Athlete
Conclusion: Body beyond Weimar: Germany's Athletic Legacy
Notes
Index

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Erik N. Jensen is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Miami University, OH.

Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic - Bernhard Fulda
Weimar Germany - Anthony McElligott
Media and the Making of Modern Germany - Corey Ross
The Greatest Fight of Our Generation - Lewis A. Erenberg
The Politics of Women's Bodies - Rose Weitz
Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese

Special Features

At the cutting edge of scholarship on the body.
At the intersection of sports history; works on gender and the body; and histories of the society and culture of Germany's Weimar Republic.
Reveals that women's boxing and many of the developments attributed to Title XI have a history that stretches back to 1920s Germany.
Argues for a new look at Weimar Germany as a society marked not simply by crisis in the negative sense, but also by crisis in the positive sense - a time and place where anxiety, debate and experimentation led to remarkable innovations.