Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Ava Purkiss was featured on NPR’s Code Switch last month on the episode, “Why Fascists Love Fitness."
In conversation with host Gene Demby, Purkiss says,
“Fitness has been and continues to be used to determine who is hardworking and who is lazy, who has self-restraint and who is greedy and insatiable, who can contribute to national progress through sacrifice of their body, and who takes from the nation by getting fat off of the government.”
This is in a broader conversation about conceptual fitness and its historical relationship with fascism. Purkiss adds, “When we can use fitness as a proxy to do that sort of separation, it can be a tool of soft fascism, maybe even actual fascism.”
Purkiss is the author of Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America, a monograph that explores the history of political and physical fitness for Black women.
Listen to the full Code Switch episode.
Read Fit Citizens on JSTOR.
Congratulations, Professor Purkiss!
