Daniel Silva Lecture "Global Fitness Culture and White Masculine Corporality"

International and Global Studies Colloquium lecture “Global Fitness Culture and White Masculine Corporality” by Daniel Silva, Assistant Professor of Portuguese, Middlebury College. Lunch is free for current Middlebury College students/faculty/staff; $5 for others; RSVP by 9/24 to rcga@middlebury.edu.

This talk will examine how fitness culture – as a set of globally circulating meanings, commodities, and knowledges – reproduces discourses of Empire pertaining to valid personhood while staging and codifying the everyday praxis of racialized, gendered, and abled power through its visualized bodies. By considering visual cultural products including international fitness magazines, Hollywood film, and Brazilian television, this talk looks to locate how white masculinity is situated and centered in such media – with different forms of muscularity utilized to represent, reproduce, and augment its everyday power. As the lecture will argue, within the visual fabric of fitness culture and its relationship to global mass culture, muscularity is complexly regulated, racialized, and gendered in ways that compliment and dovetail with national narratives of racial history and exceptionalism, as in the meshing of these in Brazilian mainstream media.

Sponsored by the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs