The Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show: A Counter-Genealogy of Built Masculinities
- Submitting institution
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The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- BCHO3
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
- Brief description of type
- A collection of creative and critical work
- Open access status
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- Month
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- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- A multi-component output comprising performance, peer-reviewed articles, and public engagement writing, The Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show explores the relationship of physical fitness to masculine gender construction. It represents the outcome of five years of extensive archival research, ethnography, and performance practice research with several expert collaborators. By evidencing the origins of fitness culture in the performance forms of the 19th century and therefore providing a way to read the politics of theatricality in the construction of masculinities today, the project represents an intervention from different perspectives and in relation to different historical contexts into both theatre and sports studies.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This multi-component output consists of one collaboratively devised theatre piece, which I led as director, writer, historian, and performer; two scholarly peer-reviewed articles; and two public engagement web articles. The different methodologies (practice research, history, reflective and autoethnographic writing) locate the origins of the Anglo-American physical fitness movement in the physical culture shows and performances of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vaudeville theatres and Music Halls, in order to argue for a different relationship between the muscular male body and orthodox masculinity.
Dynamic Tensions is motivated by urgent questions about men, masculinities, and fitness and health in the present day: (1) how do men negotiate their relationship to the ideal of the strong, athletic, and muscular male body? (2) how can fitness be seen as an expressive practice? and (3) how do men use fitness as a way of relating to self and others? It considers these questions in the historical archive and uses performance practice as a method to propose that the muscular, athletic male body ideal is a cultural script produced through embodied acts of everyday performance. Considering these acts as performance reveals the ‘dynamic tensions’ (borrowing the term from Charles Atlas’s mail-order programme of muscle-building) between the institutions, industries, and social structures of physical fitness and the participant’s individual bodily experience. The research began in 2014 and was supported by an AHRC Leadership Fellows grant from 2016–18. It has been shared through performance practice, workshops, post-show discussions, publications, and performance documentation.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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