State of the Field: Physical Culture

This article surveys the state of the field of physical culture within the discipline of history. Understood broadly as a society's interest in gymnasium and health cultures, physical culture has become a topic of increasing importance for historians, sociologists and performance scholars in the past two decades. Seen as a distinct field from sport history, works on physical culture have evolved from sporadic and one-off studies to nuanced discussions about the idealised body and its broader social message. As such, studies of physical culture have become excellent platforms for the often implicit ways in which body types have been used in discussions of race, nationalism, class, gender and medicine. Although studies of physical culture began over a century ago, the field has only recently begun to enjoy scholarly attention and, thereby, evolve.