scholarly journals Adjusting Swedish gymnastics to the female nature: Discrepancies in the gendering of girls’ physical education in the mid-nineteenth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 261
Author(s):  
Johannes Westberg

During the nineteenth century, Swedish gymnastics became one of the main models of physical education in the Western world. The purpose of this article is to explore how Swedish gymnastics was adjusted to the female body and mind in the mid-nineteenth century. Using handbooks published by the Swedish educationalist Anton Santesson as an empirical starting point, this article shows how the relationship between gender and gymnastics was complicated and exhibited significant discrepancies. In part, Swedish gymnastics was marked by a one-sex model of gender differences, which meant that gymnastics was perceived as a method for catering to the deficiencies and weaknesses of the feminine nature, in an attempt to make girls and young women more similar to boys. Swedish gymnastics had, nevertheless, vital elements of a two-sex model, according to which gymnastics was supposed to realise the true feminine nature of girls. Following this line of thought, Santesson claimed that, since gymnastics merely followed the laws of the body, it could not make girls more like boys. Santesson’s vision of gymnastics also included disciplinary mechanisms, such as the partitioning of space, which were gender neutral. Apart from presenting insights into the ambiguous and contradictory notions of gender in Swedish girls’ gymnastics, this article thus also raises questions regarding whether other models of physical education were marked by similar discrepancies during the nineteenth century. 

Author(s):  
John Halsey Wood

In the midst of the roiling chaos of the nineteenth century, Abraham Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism was a strategy to maintain a Calvinist unity and engagement with an increasingly disintegrated Western world. The unity Kuyper pursued was of two kinds: intellectual and social. As a thinker, Kuyper valued coherent, interrelated systems. He took as his starting point the systematic Calvinism of Protestant scholastics and the Reformed Confessions as well as Romanticism’s organic impulse which elevated the organic and natural over mechanical and artificial. In addition to a unified mind, Kuyper also pursued a unified Calvinist community, albeit a different kind than imagined by earlier Calvinists. Under the pressures of modernity, Kuyper didn’t pursue a repristinated Calvinist culture, but a renewed Calvinist subculture.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alanna M. M. McKnight

In amplifying the contours of the body, the corset is an historical site that fashions femininity even as it constricts women’s bodies. This study sits at the intersection of three histories: of commodity consumption, of labour, and of embodiment and subjectivity, arguing that women were active participants in the making, selling, purchasing and wearing of corsets in Toronto, a city that has largely been ignored in fashion history. Between 1871 and 1914 many women worked in large urban factories, and in small, independent manufacturing shops. Toronto’s corset manufacturers were instrumental in the urbanization of Canadian industry, and created employment in which women earned a wage. The women who bought their wares were consumers making informed purchases, enacting agency in consumption and aesthetics; by choosing the style or size of a corset, female consumers were able to control to varying degrees, the shape of their bodies. As a staple in the wardrobe of most nineteenth-century women, the corset complicates the study of conspicuous consumption, as it was a garment that was not meant to be seen, but created a highly visible shape, blurring the lines between private and public viewing of the female body. Marxist analysis of the commodity fetish informs this study, and by acknowledging the ways in which the corset became a fetishized object itself, both signaling the shapeliness of femininity while in fact augmenting and diminishing female bodies. This study will address critical theory regarding the gaze and subjectivity, fashion, and modernity, exploring the relationship women had with corsets through media and advertising. A material culture analysis of extant corsets helps understand how corsets were constructed in Toronto, how the women of Toronto wore them, and to what extent they actually shaped their bodies. Ultimately, it is the aim of this dissertation to eschew common misconceptions about the practice of corsetry and showcase the hidden manner in which women produced goods, labour, and their own bodies in the nineteenth century, within the Canadian context.


Author(s):  
David Zamorano-Garcia ◽  
Paula Flores-Morcillo ◽  
María Isabel Gil-García ◽  
Miguel Ángel Aguilar-Jurado

This chapter aims to shed light on the relationship between the development of laterality and the learning of mathematics in early childhood education using the ABN method. Thus, the authors present an experience developed with 24 children of 4 and 5 years old from several sessions of physical education where laterality and mathematics were worked on in the framework of a project developed in the classroom. The neuropsychological laterality test and a psychomotor table with values referred exclusively to manual and foot laterality, and indicators referred to the ABN method were used as evaluation instruments. The results obtained indicate that students with homogeneous right- or left-handed laterality obtain better results, as well as those with crossed laterality, since they have defined their manual and foot dominance. However, students with undefined laterality obtain worse results, even showing a lateral tendency towards the use of the right side of the body.


Author(s):  
Tuija Parikka

This chapter examines the relationship between the body, globalization, and the media. It discusses how the female body is subjected to being “played” in the global media and what that reveals of gender and minority–majority relationships and of global aims and fears. The cases presented in this chapter serve as samples of “sexy violence” imagery that cannot be thoroughly explained by theories of objectification, liberation, or commodification of women but, rather, are considered in reference to the socially constitutive role of globalization. Although the female body may function to discursively dissolve, enforce, or alleviate conflicts embedded in the processes and discourses of globalization, the preoccupation with “sexy violence” imagery in the global media does not necessarily offer a solution to global concerns but, rather, plays out the fears, aims, and anxieties about globalization through violence and aggression.


2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiana Tsaousi

The aim of this article is to highlight the attention given by recent makeover shows, and specifically How to Look Good Naked, to the ‘underneath’ as a way of (re)organising the female body. I examine whether this ‘turn’ or change in media’s direction is an appreciation of the real female body (an unmodified body) or whether this is a mere (re-)organisation of the body into a controllable base of overall appearance and a further embedding of Western conceptions of beauty and of the notion that the manipulation of appearance is essential to the construction of the feminine identity and to the measure of women’s social worth. Informed by postfeminist discourse and critique, I analyse the British reality makeover television show How to Look Good Naked, discuss the extent to which it actually provides an alternative to prevailing cultural discourses around feminine beauty and scrutinise the impact that it seems to have on the identities of the women who participate. I analyse how the show, as the ultimate postfeminist show, inscribes gendered identities and practices, and I examine how postfeminism has created spaces for such shows to exist and affirm hegemonic gender constructions based on consumption practices.


Author(s):  
Cezary Kuśnierz ◽  
Aleksandra M. Rogowska ◽  
Iuliia Pavlova

Background: This study examined the relationship of academic performance with the Big Five traits of personality, academic motivation, and gender in a cross-cultural context. Methods: Participants in the study were 424 university students of physical education (PE) departments from Poland (53%) and Ukraine (47%). Undergraduates completed a brief version of the International Personality Item Pool (Mini-IPIP) to assess the Five-Factor model of personality, the Academic Motivations Scale (AMS), and grade point average (GPA). Results: Polish PE students scored higher in emotional stability and extroversion and had a higher GPA than Ukrainian PE undergraduates. Gender differences were found in both personality traits and academic motivation scales. Intrinsic motivation may predict academic performance. Conscientiousness and intellect emerged as mediators of the relationship between intrinsic motivation and academic performance and gender was found as a moderator in the relationship between conscientiousness and academic success. Conclusions: Women are more motivated regarding academic achievements than men. In addition to intrinsic motivation, the most important factors for academic grades are some personality traits, gender, and cultural differences. Openness and conscientiousness in men are mediators between intrinsic motivation and academic performance. The results of this study may be useful for PE academic teachers to improve the motivation of their students.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Fiorillo ◽  
Giuseppe Musumeci

In recent years it has been conclusively shown how the position of the mouth in relation to the body affects the way of walking and standing. In particular, occlusion, the relationship between skull and jaw, swallowing and convergence of the eyes are in neuro-muscular relationship with the control and maintenance system of posture, integrating at different levels. This manuscript aims to be a summary of all the oral, occlusal and articular dysfunctions of TMJ with systemic and postural–muscular repercussions. Recent articles found in the literature that are taken into consideration and briefly analyzed represent an important starting point for these correlations, which are still unclear in the medical field. Posturology, occlusal and oral influences on posture, spine and muscular system are still much debated today. In the literature, there are articles concerning sports performance and dental occlusion or even the postural characteristics of adolescents or children in deciduous and mixed dentition. The temporomandibular joint, as the only joint of the skull, could therefore represent a site to pay particular attention to, and in some cases an ATM dysfunction could be a clue for the diagnosis of systemic pathologies, or it could be the repercussion.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margery Masterson

AbstractThis article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.


1940 ◽  
Vol 86 (362) ◽  
pp. 514-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Berkenau

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to correlate results obtained from liver tests with the nosological demarcation of psychoses. The knowledge of the outstanding importance of the liver in general metabolism (it provides 12% of the turnover of energy of the body) and of its relation to some organic diseases of brain has been the subject of numerous investigations. Expectation of finding the starting-point of any disease in the liver, however, will at first not be placed too high if one recollects that every gland is only part of a system. Even where the symptoms of liver or other glandular impairment are characteristic for limited groups of psychoses deductions must be guarded, and the discovery of an unequivocal bodily symptom does not mean elucidation of the aetiology of a mental disease.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian Zhao ◽  
Jian Sun

Abstract Background To explore the the gender differences in the relationship between dietary energy and macronutrients intake and body weight outcomes in Chinese adults. Methods Data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS, 2015) for10,898 participants aged 18-64 years. Three consecutive 24-h dietary recalls was used to assess the dietary intake. Quantile regression models for body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) were performed separately for each sex. Results Adult males showed greater absolute intakes of energy and macronutrients as compared to females as per the body weight outcomes. A 10% increase in BMI resulted in an additional intake of 0.002-0.004 kcal/d of dietary energy, 0.032-0.057 g/d of fats, 0.039-0.084 g/d of proteins, and 0.018-0.028 g/d of carbohydrates across all quantiles in males (p < 0.05). A 10% increase in WC resulted in an additional intake of 0.004-0.008 kcal/d of dietary energy, 0.051-0.052 g/d of carbohydrates across the entire quantile in males (p < 0.05), and an increased intake of 0.060-0.150 kcal/d of fat in females (p < 0.05). Conclusions Dietary Fat intake could be the risk factor of abdominal obesity in women. The importance of gender- specific evidence should be considered before promoting macronutrient allocation for the prevention and treatment of obesity.


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