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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.

This book examines choral performance, audience response, and the poetic means used by Greek lyric poet Pindar to control this response. It consists of individual studies of Pindar's eleven odes for Aiginetan victors, preceded by a brief survey of the history of the island and the nature of its aristocracy. The discussion focuses in particular on questions of mythic self-presentation in Pindar's choral songs, as exemplified by such non-literary evidence as the pedimental sculptures of the Aphaia Temple, and the parallel ‘narrative’ sections of the odes. The overall concern is with Pindaric techniques for unifying an audience and leading it into a shared experience of inspired success, but there is also a concern with the realities of athletic contest and its celebration.

This is the story of Allen Jones and his odyssey from the streets of the Bronx to a life as a professional athlete and banker in Europe, but it is also provides a unique vantage point on the history of the Bronx and sheds new light on a neglected period in American urban history. The author grew up in a public housing project in the South Bronx at a time — the 1950s — when that neighborhood was a place of optimism and hope for upwardly mobile Black and Latino families. Brought up in a two-parent household, with many neighborhood mentors, he led an almost charmed life as a budding basketball star until his teen years, when his once peaceful neighborhood was torn by job losses, white flight, and a crippling drug epidemic. Drawn into the heroin trade, first as a user, then as a dealer, he spent four months on Rikers Island, where he experienced a crisis of conscience and a determination to turn his life around. Sent to a New England prep school upon his release, he used his basketball skills and street smarts to forge a life outside the Bronx, first as a college athlete in the South, then as a professional basketball player, radio personality, and banker in Europe. This book brings Bronx streets and housing projects to life as places of possibility as well as tragedy, where racism and economic hardship never completely suppressed the resilient spirit of its residents.

This perceptive, lively study explores U.S. women's sport through historical “points of change”: particular products or trends that dramatically influenced both women's participation in sport and cultural responses to women athletes. Beginning with the seemingly innocent ponytail, the subject of the Introduction, the book challenges the reader to look at the historical and sociological significance of now-common items such as sports bras and tampons and ideas such as sex testing and competitive cheerleading. Tennis wear, tampons, and sports bras all facilitated women's participation in physical culture, while physical educators, the aesthetic fitness movement, and Title IX encouraged women to challenge (or confront) policy, financial, and cultural obstacles. While some of these points of change increased women's physical freedom and sporting participation, they also posed challenges. Tampons encouraged menstrual shame, sex testing (a tool never used with male athletes) perpetuated narrowly defined cultural norms of femininity, and the late-twentieth-century aesthetic fitness movement fed into an unrealistic beauty ideal. Ultimately, the book finds that U.S. women's sport has progressed significantly but ambivalently. Although participation in sports is no longer uncommon for girls and women, the book argues that these “points of change” have contributed to a complex matrix of gender differentiation that marks the female athletic body as different than—as less than—the male body, despite the advantages it may confer.

This book follows the paths of sports figures who were embraced by the general populace but who, through a variety of circumstances, real or imagined, found themselves falling out of favor. The chapters focus on the roles played by athletes, the media, and fans in describing how once-esteemed popular figures find themselves scorned by the same public that at one time viewed them as heroic, laudable, or otherwise respectable. The book examines a wide range of sports and eras, and includes chapters on Barry Bonds, Kirby Puckett, Mike Tyson, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, Branch Rickey, Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jim Brown, as well as an afterword and introduction.

This work explores the lives of people of sub-Saharan Africa and their descendants, how they were shaped by empire, and how they in turn influenced the empire in everything from material goods to cultural style. The black experience varied greatly across space and over time. Accordingly, thirteen substantive essays and a scene-setting introduction range from West Africa in the sixteenth century, through the history of the slave trade and slavery down to the 1830s, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century participation of blacks in the empire as workers, soldiers, members of colonial elites, intellectuals, athletes, and musicians. No people were more uprooted and dislocated; or travelled more within the empire; or created more of a trans-imperial culture. In the crucible of the British empire, blacks invented cultural mixes that were precursors to our modern selves — hybrid, fluid, ambiguous, and constantly in motion.

Female athletes are too often perceived as interlopers in the historically male-dominated world of sports. Obstacles specific to women are of particular focus in this book. Race, sexual orientation, and the similar qualities ancillary to gender require special exploration of the way they impact an athlete’s story. Central to the book is the contention that women in their role as inherent outsiders are placed in a unique position even more complicated than the usual experiences of inequality and discord associated with race and sports. The contributors explore and critique the notion that in order to be considered among the pantheon of athletic heroes one cannot deviate from the traditional demographic profile, that of the white male. These essays look specifically and critically at the nature of gender and sexuality within the contested nexus of race, reputation, and sport. The collection explores the reputations of iconic and pioneering sports figures and the cultural and social forces that helped to forge their unique and often problematic legacies. Women athletes discussed in this volume include Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the women of the AAGPBL, Billie Jean King, Venus and Serena Williams, Marion Jones, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, Sheryl Swoopes, Florence Griffith Joyner, Roberta Gibb and Kathrine Switzer, and Danica Patrick.

When sports ministry first emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, its founders imagined male celebrity athletes as powerful salespeople who could deliver a message of Christian strength: “If athletes can endorse shaving cream, razor blades, and cigarettes, surely they can endorse the Lord, too,” reasoned Fellowship of Christian Athletes founder Don McClanen. But combining evangelicalism and sport did much more than serve as an advertisement for religion: it gave athletes the opportunity to think about the embodied experiences of sport as a way to experience intimate connection with the divine. As sports ministry developed, it focused on individual religious experiences and downplayed celebrity sales power. When sport became an avenue for embodied worship, it forced a reckoning with evangelical teachings about the body. Christian female athletes, now the largest population in sports ministry, increasingly turned to their own bodies to understand their religious identity, and in so doing, came to question evangelical mainstays on gender and sexuality. What was once a male-dominated masculinist project of sports engagement became a female-dominated movement that challenged evangelical ideas about femininity, marriage hierarchy, and the sinfulness of homosexuality.

Stunts are fundamental to the movies. Stuntwomen examines the largely unexplored profession of stuntwomen in the American entertainment industry from the silent movie era to the 2000s. To their unique line of work, stunt players bring a combination of skills—athletics, acting, courage, adaptability, and a willingness to take risks. Minorities and women in the profession have battled institutional discrimination, unequal pay, and little access to higher positions. The book describes how stunt work began, its development over the decades, and its inherent dangers. It also charts the history of film and television, the rise of visual effects, and vital social changes—such as the civil rights and women’s movements—that influenced the growth of women’s action roles onscreen and improved opportunities for both actresses and stuntwomen. Most changes have been difficult and slow, however. From the 1920s on, stuntwomen were in a classic David and Goliath battle against the system to gain the work that might injure or even kill them. Since the 1970s, as the number of stuntwomen has increased, they have actively challenged their working conditions, sometimes successfully, but often not. Today’s new generation of stuntwomen has different expectations. Inequities still exist, but these stuntwomen’s talent, audacity, and onscreen feats will prevail.

In this first legal analysis of Title IX, the book assesses the statute's successes and failures, using a feminist theory lens to understand, defend, and critique the law. While the statute has created tremendous gains for female athletes, not only raising the visibility and cultural acceptance of women in sports, but also creating social bonds for women, positive body images, and leadership roles, the disparities in funding between men's and women's sports have remained remarkably resilient. At the same time, female athletes continue to receive less prestige and support than their male counterparts, which in turn filters into the arena of professional sports. The book provides a richer understanding and appreciation of what Title IX has accomplished, while taking a critical look at the places where the law has fallen short. The book fully explores the theory, policy choices, and successes and limitations of this historic law.

In 1968, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) implemented sex testing for female athletes at that year's Games. When it became clear that testing regimes failed to delineate a sex divide, the IOC began to test for gender—a shift that allowed the organization to control the very idea of womanhood. This book explores sex testing in sport from the 1930s to the early 2000s. Focusing on assumptions and goals as well as means, the book examines how the IOC in particular insisted on a misguided binary notion of gender that privileged Western norms. Testing evolved into a tool to identify—and eliminate—athletes the IOC deemed too strong, too fast, or too successful. The book shows how this system punished gifted women while hindering the development of women's athletics for decades. It also reveals how the flawed notions behind testing—ideas often sexist, racist, or ridiculous—degraded the very idea of female athleticism.

Once a winter pastime for socializing and courtship, skating evolved into the wildly popular competitive sport of figure skating, one of the few athletic arenas where female athletes hold a public profile—and earning power—equal to that of men. This book chronicles figure skating's rise from its earliest days through its head-turning debut at the 1908 Olympics and its breakthrough as entertainment in the 1930s. The book credits figure skating's explosive expansion to an ever-increasing number of women who had become proficient skaters and wanted to compete, not just in singles but with partners as well. Matters reached a turning point when British skater Madge Syers entered the otherwise-male 1902 World Championship held in London and finished second. Called skating's first feminist, Syers led a wave of women who made significant contributions to figure skating and helped turn it into today's star-making showcase at every Olympic Winter Games.