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- Title
"Taking Myself in Hand": Jean Toomer and Physical Culture.
- Authors
Mark Whalan
- Abstract
This article examines how the externalisation of gender identity by 1900 configured a new type of agency of identity for consumers of Physical Culture products. I examine the importance to Jean Toomer of the publications of Bernarr Macfadden, the most successful Physical Culture entrepreneur in the US at the time, and in particular the relevance of the pose as a strategy for overriding biological determinism. Toomer's adoption of these techniques became a subversive way of obscuring physiological racial determinations, determinations which certain eugenic scientists were attempting to classify ever more precisely. I finish by examining how Physical Culture as a mode of racial obfuscation is evident in Toomer's short story "Bona and Paul."
- Subjects
TOOMER, Jean, 1894-1967; AUTHORS; EUGENICS; LITERATURE
- Publication
Modernism/Modernity, 2003, Vol 10, Issue 4, p597
- ISSN
1071-6068
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/mod.2003.0093