Our ideology is simple: Weakness is a sickness which rapidly degenerates the quality of body and mindâŠ. It means purging the willfully weak people out of your life. It means the burning away of everything and everyone which does not benefit you. Therefore, we at Vengeance, battle weakness here and at home, pledging to help you do the sameâŠ. The elite all do certain things in common. âonly the inferior strive for equality.â ⊠Instead of becoming victims to lifeâs circumstances, join the rebellion against the worldâs complacency and sloth. Take the Profane Oath to do battle against that force which degrades humankind into the disgusting, diseased, incapable, grey masses that you see before yourself. We leave no revenge up to the slavery of a god that does not exist. (Vengeance Strength Kvlt)
The mission statement of the Vengeance Strength Kvlt gym in Nashville, TN, embracing a long history of eugenic rhetoric, does not explicitly mention race, but instead relies on an extreme ideology of individualism (burn away everything that does not benefit you), social Darwinism (only the fit survive), radicalism (donât let them victimize you), and atheism (God does not exist). Additionally, it dispenses with utopian narratives (âyou too can be happier if you are more fitâ) and positions itself as against all other forms of physical fitness, including the form it is most like, CrossFit, even though it borrows heavily from the CrossFit aesthetic. The implied violence here is not directed at any one person or group, but instead takes the form of a masochistic maneuver to purge the self, and therefore society, of weakness.
Despite its vague references and neutral language, the iconography on the Web site and news stories position Vengeance Strength Kvlt as, at the very least, aligned with the alt-right. As I read through the âAboutâ page visions of Charlottesville flash across the screen of my memory. When protesters from Showing Up for Racial Injustice Nashville confronted gym founder Sky Lemyng about his ties to Operation Werewolf and Wolves of Vinland (WOV), groups tied to white supremacy, he responded, âThis business doesnât have ties to our personal lives. I think the controversial claims made against the WOV ultimately come from a place of ignorance, fear and bigotry. Vengeance is comprised of an eclectic group of people who support many different idealsâ (Wade Gervin 2017). He moved on to point the reporter to his non-white gym members for their opinion.
White supremacy has always been adept at covering its tracks and traces. Black activist and educator DeRay McKesson references this maneuver in his regular use of the phrase âwatch whiteness workâ on Twitter.1 Any time a white person is treated with more compassion, sympathy, or restraint by police or others in positions of authority than a person of color, McKesson invokes the mantra. His regular and repeated invocation of the phrase (sometimes separated by periods to add emphasis, as in âWatch. Whiteness. Work.â) operates on multiple levels. First, it highlights whiteness in a culture practiced at invisibilizing whiteness, making it assumed and therefore unmarked. Here, whiteness becomes absorbed into the fabric of âeveryoneâsâ experience. Second, âwatch whiteness workâ is theatrically framed. We are watching whiteness. We are compelled to witness its workings. The phrase implies an audience. Finally, it also implies that the whiteness is performing. It is working in a double sense of the word. It is certainly working for white people. It is also laboring, even though, as I argue in this book, it often performs effortlessness to mask this labor. Whiteness in these cases works very hard to convince its audience it is one thing, while actually being another. As performance scholar Faedra Carpenter argues, âwhiteness is by being what it is notâ (2014, 9). The white supremacist rhetoric and symbolism Lemyng mobilizes to describe his form of physical training borrows from a long, long history of purposeful disguise. McKessonâs âwatch whiteness workâ asks us to witness whiteness putting on sheepâs clothing, and then calls it out for doing so.
This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US. Not unlike recent arguments about the healthcare system, this project forwards physical culture as part of an ensemble of institutions that historically and ideologically privilege and invest in white middle- and upper-class bodies, ensuring they have the fitness needed to succeed as productive agents in the workplace and the world. The following chapters refuse to forget the paradoxical history of fitness in the US. That history and those who made it have both empowered and demeaned women, offered economic transcendence while abjectifying the economically disenfranchised, and uplifted Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities while also denying them access to and excluding them from gyms and programs. Physical fitness programs have done all of this while remaining celebrated by federal government, social welfare, and educational institutions. Fit is the desired state of being. Everyone, it seems, should engage in physical activity and exercise, and want to be fit. Such widely circulated assumptions enable moral and ideological equivalencies to be made about a personâs value to themselves as well as society. For instance, the cover of Bernarr Macfaddenâs Physical Culture magazine barked, âWeakness is a crime. Donât be a criminal!â at its readers for decades in the early twentieth century. You can now buy a t-shirt bearing the phrase, along with an image of Bernarr Macfadden flexing, on Zazzle, an Etsy-type online market (Physicalculture). Such nostalgic cross-marketing demonstrates the broad array of powerful institutions and media through which corporations and ideologies compel people to work on our bodies. The ubiquity of such messages and products masks the way such ever-present incitations to workout sideline ideals of community and connection by asking us to focus solely on ourselves. Why has the physical fitness movement been, and continue to be, so white? How were individual exercise routines meant to shape entire populations to act and perform âwhitely,â as performance scholar Megan Lewis suggests, over time and why?2 How do private acts of self-management enable categorical differentiations of class, race, and gender?
In this book, I trace how various sites of physical fitness performanceâknown in the Progressive Era as physical cultureâbecame sites of whiteness-in-the-making. My book investigates five sites: Steele MacKayeâs Americanized Delsarte philosophies between 1871 and 1873, physical director Dudley Allen Sargentâs work at Harvard and the Harvard Annex for women 1889â1914, Minneapolis YWCA physical director Abby Mayhewâs physical culture curriculum 1893â1897, Bernarr Macfaddenâs physical culture publications 1891â1915, and the physical culture exhibitions performed at the Model Indian School at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis. These diverse sites were part of an explosion of physical culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the US. I focus on physical cultureâsystematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expertâbecause tracing how people practiced physical fitness in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, program accessibility, and ideologies of individualism combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. I choose to explore these sites because they give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for women during that time. First, they demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical fitness practices, illuminating the ways in which whiteness became a default identity category absorbed into the âuniversalâ ideals of culture, arts, and sciences. Second, they show how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions and production design, audience, and promised profitability. Third, they reveal fraught connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenic movementâs incitement toward more reproductively efficient white bodies. Finally, to conclude I look at the remains of these ideologies and practices as they manifested in the rise and fall of CrossFitâa high-intensity physical training program. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, this study 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.
Why Performance
Performance theory provides a means to address how physical culturists utilized exercises and discourse in specific communities across cultural strata as a way to shape individual bodies andâthrough repetition and reproductionâentire populations. Looking at physical culture through the framework of performance allows us to see how bodies imbibe, transfer, proliferate, and remember specific physical culture practices. By looking at how everyday, mundane âtechniques of the self,â affect global ideological, symbolic, social, and economic orders, this project refigures the position and impact of eugenics on physical culture in the US.3 Additionally, I argue that performance serves as a citational strategy that frames in a historical momentâeither in photographs or live exhibitionsâa specific bodyâs or bodiesâ practices. Performance is crucial to understanding how these daily routines and habits became a ânaturalâ way of being and moving through the world for a modern subject. Using performance as a framing mechanism allows me to examine how physical culture practice moved through and among bodies, making visible its historical contingency. By looking at moments in Progressive Era physical culture that expose the contingency of certain naturalized practices, I aim to open spaces to consider how physical culture might help us be governed, and govern ourselves, âdifferently and, perhaps, less.â4
The repeated references to government, management, and regulation in Progressive Era physical culture demonstrate the ways it aligned with emerging ideas of what Foucault referred to as liberal governmentality.5 To summarize his series of lectures on biopolitics, Foucault suggested that he spoke of liberal governmentality ânot as a theory or an ideology, and even less, obviously, as a way in which âsocietyâ ârepresents itself,â but as a practice, that is to say, a âway of doing thingsâ directed towards objectives and regulating itself by continuous reflectionâ (Birth 2003, 318). As a ...