Since the late 20th-century, mainstream popular culture in Brazil has developed an intimate relationship with fitness culture – a vast, fluid, and pervasive network of images and commodities, bodies of knowledge, and discourses pertaining to idealised corporality and personhood.
Embodying Modernity works toward a conceptualisation of fitness culture, tracing its development and locating its broad existence in the contemporary Brazilian public sphere. Silva examines the role of fitness culture and the visualisation of 'fit bodies' within the history of western imperialism and its existing discourses of white supremacy, gender binarism, patriarchy, ableism, and heterosexism that continue to define Brazilian nationhood and power structures. Fitness culture in Brazil has developed within and through projects of national modernity and modernisation carried out by national elites looking to build a national population aligned with Eurocentric cultural practices and notions of normative bodies.
- ISBN10 0822947110
- ISBN13 9780822947110
- Publish Date 28 May 2022
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Pittsburgh Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 280
- Language English