body and nation by emily rosenberg and shanon fitzpatrick

8/12/2019 Body and Nation by Emily Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick

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body and nation

. .

Emily S. Rosenberg andShanon Fitzpatrick, editors


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american encounters/global interactions A series edited by Gilber t M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg

This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretiveframeworks for scholarship on the history of the imposing global pres-ence of the United States. Its primary concerns include the deploymentand contestation of power, the construction and deconstruction of cul-tural and political borders, the uid meanings of intercultural encoun-ters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local. Amer-ican Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration betweenhistorians of U.S. international relations and area studies specialists. The series encourages scholarship based on multiarchival historicalresearch. At the same time, it supports a recognition of the represen-tational character of all stories about the past and promotes criticalinquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In the process, AmericanEncounters strives to understand the context in which meanings relatedto nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced,challenged, and reshaped.


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2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paperText designed by Chris Crochetire, BW&A Books, Inc.Typeset in Quadraat by BW&A Books, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBody and nation : the global realm of U.S. body politics in the twentiethcentury / edited by Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick.pages cm(American encounters/global interactions)

Includes bibliographical references and index.isbn 978-0-8223-5675-2 (pbk : alk. paper)isbn 978-0-8223-5664-6 (cloth: alk. paper)1. Human bodyPolitical aspectsUnited States. 2. United States Politics and government20th century. 3. United StatesForeignrelations20th century.i . Rosenberg, Emily S., 1944ii . Fitzpatrick,Shanon. iii . Series: American encounters/global interactions.e 743.b 614 2014327.73009'04dc232014005678

Making Brown Babies: Race and Gender after World War II was originallypublished in Window On Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Af fairs, 19451988, edited by Brenda Gayle Plummer. Copyright 2003 by the University of NorthCarolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

Cover art:Dichotomy (detail), Gil Bruvel. Stainless steel. Courtesy of the artist.


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Dedicated to

Norman RosenbergandRuthann and Christopher Meyer


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contents

introductionemily s. rosenberg and shanon fitzpatrick 1

oneColonial Crossings: Prostitution, Disease, andthe Boundaries of Empire during the Philippine-American War | paul a. kramer 17

twoMoral, Purposeful, and Healthful: The World ofChilds Play, Bodybuilding, and Nation-Building at theAmerican Circus | janet m. davis 42

threeMaking Broken Bodies Whole in a Shell-Shocked World |annessa c. stagner 61

fourPhysical Cultures World of Bodies: TransnationalParticipatory Pastiche and the Body Politics of AmericasGlobalized Mass Culture |shanon fitzpatrick 83

veThe Most Beautiful Chinese Girl in the World:Anna May Wongs Transnational Racial Modernity |shirley jennifer lim 109

six Roosevelts Body and National Power |frank costigliola 125


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viii contents

sevenMaking Brown Babies: Race and Gender afterWorld War II | brenda gayle plummer 147

eight Regulating Borders and Bodies: U.S. Immigration and PublicHealth Policy | natalia molina 173

nineThe American Look: The Nation in the Shape ofa Woman | emily s. rosenberg 189

tenSammy Lee: Narratives of Asian American Masculinity and

Race in Decolonizing Asia |mary ting yi lui

209elevenCounting the Bodies in Vietnam |marilyn b. young 230

twelveNobody Wants These People: Reagans ImmigrationCrisis and the Containment of Foreign Bodies |kristina shull 241

epilogueWhen the Body Disappears |emily s. rosenbergand shanon fitzpatrick 264

bibliography 289

contributors 317

index 321


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introduction

emily s. rosenberg and shanon fitzpatrick

Bodies attract and disgust; they are the most frequent objects ofpersonal thoughts, desires, and actions. Moreover the anthropomor-phic analogy contained in the termbody politic, an analogy that has runthroughout Western political and social traditions, most famously toPlato, illustrates the larger political and social meanings of bodies.Bodyand Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century brings together scholarship on the body with historical research on U.S.international and transnational relationships. It interrogates the con-nections among the body, the nation, and the world in twentieth-centuryU.S. history.

For the past thirty years theoretical investigations centering on thebody, a topic once considered relevant largely to the biological sciences,have inuenced most disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.1

Foucaults exploration of biopolitics and biopower initially propelledinterdisciplinary investigations of the disciplining and regulation ofsocial groups and individuals.2 Subsequent theoretical and historicalstudies have deepened our understanding of how the meanings andmarkings of bodies have come to be culturally constituted. The work of Joan Scott, Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and others, for exam-ple, explored how attributes of bodies (both individual and social) takeshape in relation to particular circumstances that create a materiality

emanating from reiterated cultural performances.3

Scholars have alsoassessed the bodys relationship to issues of personal identity, concep-tions of social order, war making, modes of production and consump-tion, and norms of physical and social health.


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2 Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick

The idea that bodily characteristics are heavily freighted with val-ues and meanings and that these signications are often linked to ar-rangements within political and social spheres remain underdevelopedin the histories of Americas relations with the rest of the world.4 This

collectionwhich presents bodies as complex, uctuating, and inter-related sites of meaning production and as loci at which relations ofpower are constructed, enforced, and resistedoffers new insights forinternational and transnational historians interested in the workingsof power. At the same time, the archival research, attention to diversestate and nonstate actors, and multisite analyses of these essays helpcreate historically grounded portraits of the transnational and transac-tional dimensions of biopolitics.

Employing work in American studies and in U.S. international andtransnational history, this collection both builds on and adds to exist-ing multidisciplinary investigations by analyzing how constructionsof physical bodies have intertwined with projections of a U.S. nationalbody and by examining the relational meanings of both. The essaysask such questions as the following: In what ways have particular bod-ies been marked as belonging to, representative of, excluded from, orenemies of the nation? How do individual and national bodies copro-duce meanings and provide signication for each other? How have re-lationships between the body and the nation changed over the courseof a roughly hundred-year period marked by massive population ows,brutal wars, economic and media globalization, the ascendency of con-sumer cultures, and dramatic recongurations of personal and politi-cal identities?

Spanning the late nineteenth to the early twenty-rst centuries,this volume is set within a conjuncture of several historical develop-ments: multiple migrations of people, efforts to constitute (and op-pose) strong national states and empires, a general shift from physi-cal to cultural views of racial and ethnic difference, rapid growth ofglobalized mass media, and paroxysms of violence and warfare. Thesetransnational historical developments, which occurred during a periodin which the United States transformed into an imperial superpower with far-reaching economic, military, and cultural inuence, provide acrucial backdrop to the individual studies. They help shape, along withthe corpus of multidisciplinary theoretical scholarship on the body, the

guiding themes of this collection.


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Introduction 3

The Essays

In engaging the ever-changing and ever-contested politics of body andnation, these essays have several main objectives. One is to encour-age conversations between scholars identifying primarily with Amer-ican studies and those identifying as historians of U.S. internationalrelations or the United States and the world. Another is to identifysignicant themes in U.S. body politics in global perspective througharchival research that examines particular historical moments andrepresentations. The goal is to open up investigative terrain, suggestnew interdisciplinary links, and invite others to rethink the changingconstructions of bodies and nations over the past century. Because theessays are arranged in roughly chronological order, it will be helpfulrst to summarize briey the focus of each and then to elaborate threemajor connective threads that run through this volume.

The opening essay by Paul A. Kramer explores debates about the U.S.militarys regulation of prostitution during the Philippine-AmericanWar. This very public controversy illuminated competing denitions ofthe U.S. empire as a moral, physical, and institutional body. In additionto providing a lens onto broader debates about colonialism and its racialand gendered implications for the United States, Kramer identies how

controversies over the inspection of foreign bodies became a specic way of conducting the much larger debate over the impact that overseasempire might have on the national body politic.

Janet Davis takes the concerns about the importance of healthybodies to healthy nations in a different direction. Extending her earlierstudy of the American circus, she shows how the mutually constitutiverelationship between the turn-of-the-century railroad circus, childsplay, and the body helped articulate national identity at home as well as

Americas exceptionalist mission on the world stage. Davis illustrateshow circus promoters promised that their activities would turn childrenand poor immigrant populations into productive and t citizens ofAmerica; how militaries and circuses learned tactics of mobility fromeach other; and how circuses taught the racial taxonomies that bolsteredturn-of-the-century imperialism.

The connection between t bodies and t nations threads throughAnnessa C. Stagners essay, which addresses how shell-shockedsoldiers came to symbolize the nation during and immediately afterthe Great War. After comparing European and American shell-shockdiscourse and treatment, Stagner illustrates how the interrelatedrealms of medicine, psychology, and popular culture helped Americans


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construct a recuperative vision of a healthy international system led bythe United States.

Shanon Fitzpatricks essay picks up the theme of globalizing media.She examines how the American physical culturalist and magazine

mega-entrepreneur Bernarr Macfadden popularized and circulated im-ages of strong, modern bodies around the world during the early yearsof the twentieth century. In an era marked by competing nationalismsand a ourishing eugenics movement, Macfaddens globally popularperiodicals encouraged a transnational physical culture movement anda body-centric media culture marked by an ethos of self-transforma-tion. This ethos spoke to new immigrants in the United States as wellas to others who sought to hone strong, modern bodies and powerful,

modern nations.The ways immigrant diasporas and transnational mass culture com-bined to produce increasingly uid and porous national and racial cat-egories nd further development in Shirley Jennifer Lims essay on theChinese American lm star Anna May Wong. Focused on the late 1930s,Lims multisite study places Wongs image within the development of atransnational racial modernity that was increasingly identied withAmerican mass culture. In her careful staging of cosmopolitan hybrid-ity, Wong evoked fascination with racial and national difference; at thesame time, her career demonstrated how the slippages between thesecategories could be enacted as modern.

President Franklin D. Roosevelts body during the Great Depressionand World War II is the subject of the next essay, by Frank Costigliola.Costigliola explains how FDR, in both the national and internationalpolitical arenas, skillfully cultivated a exible self-presentation in which his physical impairments were projected as expertise, strength,charisma, and charm. Focusing on issues of disability, manliness, andgender performativity, Costigliola explores the discursive relationshipbetween iconic male bodies and powerful nations.

Quite another take on issues of gender at war emerges in BrendaGayle Plummers analysis of brown babies, the offspring of German women and African American soldiers during World War II. On bothsides of the Atlantic, controversies about race, gender, and nation cir-culated around the portrayal and the fate of these babies. Plummersanalysis of these controversies shows how issues connected to brown

babies illuminate policies related to both the reconstruction of postwarEurope and the transition toward dening a more inclusive citizenshipin the United States.

Natalia Molinas essay provides a complement to the theme of race


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Introduction 5

and nationalism. Focusing on three wartime periods (World War I,World War II, and post-9/11), she examines the role of medicalized na-tivism in the history of Mexican immigration to the United States. Inaddition to tracing the production of cultural representations of Mex-

icans as threats to the health of the U.S. national social body, Molinaalso calls attention to the ways disease and public health discourse haveoperated to dene who was foreign to the nation.

Turning to the era of the early Cold War, Emily S. Rosenbergs essayon the American Look examines a trope that presented America inthe shape of a fashionable, attractive young woman. Initially advancedto market American leadership in fashion design, the American Lookbecame useful in postWorld War II appeals to homecoming veterans,

in export promotion, and in anticommunist propaganda offensives.Although the early Cold War is often portrayed as the time of a mas-culinized arms race, the American Look provided a complementarydiscourse that asserted American power by emphasizing attraction youth, style, and modernityrather than force and fear.

Continuing the discussion of iconic Cold War bodies in projectionsof foreign policy, Mary Ting Yi Lui examines the Korean American diverSammy Lees role as a U.S. goodwill ambassador. Focusing on Lees1954 tour through Asia, Lui teases out the various meanings ascribedto the Olympic champions performances in different geographic andpolitical contexts. Even as Lee could embody American discourses ofpostwar racial liberalism, representations of his athletic body were alsoeasily wedded to narratives of decolonization and nation-building inSoutheast Asia.

If the American Look and an Olympic champion had been used incampaigns to persuade the world to follow a U.S. model, tactics of warparticularly lethal air wars waged from on high in areas of civil-ian populationsought to compel it. Marilyn B. Youngs essay exploresthe consequences of body count as a metric of success in wars. Used,though seldom noticed, during the Korean War, body count becamethe primary statistical way of assessing progress in defeating the en-emy during the Vietnam War. In asking Whose bodies count? Youngshows how techniques to raise body count shaped both the ferocity ofthat war and the toxic environment that Americans left (and largely ig-nored) in its aftermath.

The fate of a group of people constructed as enemies and pollutants within the nation provides the context of Kristina Shulls study of theMariel Cuban refugees of 1980. In tracing the detention and process-ing of unwanted bodies during a perceived mass immigration emer-


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gency, Shull identies the exercises of inclusion and exclusion that re-inforced President Reagans discourse of revitalized nationalism. Whilesome refugees were rendered acceptable additions to the national bodythrough cultural training and sponsorship, Shull emphasizes that ex-

cludables became nearly invisible through a new security apparatus ofimmigration detention and private prison contracting.

The subject of privatized immigration detention facilities in theUnited States provides an apt transition to this volumes epilogue,When the Body Disappears. Reecting upon our themes of body andnation, we consider the lack of historical visibility accorded to otheredbodies whose fates might challenge Americas discourse of special be-nevolence. Examining the relative invisibility of atomic victims after

1945, the silences surrounding Americas covert wars since the 1950s,and the unknowns related to torture, rendition, drone strikes, and bio-security over the past decade, we suggest that, just as visible bodies helpconstitute the nation (and vice versa), less visible bodies and asymmet-ric visibility have helped to hide (and thus perpetuate) the exclusionsand violence of security regimes.

Rather than advance a single interpretive frame for the body andnation connection, the essays in this collection suggest a variety ofthemes. We have generally divided these themes, each of which threadthrough many of the essays, into three categories: population migra-tion and mixing, national security discourse, and mass-mediated cul-tural circulations.

Dening Bodies and National Afliations inan Era of Empire and Global Migrations

U.S. imperial ambitions, together with the great population ows of thelate nineteenth and twentieth century, mixed people across continentsand thereby challenged boundaries of all kinds. Demographic shiftscreated new borderlands, frontiers, and diasporas, generating ever-newcongurations of bodies in contact and national imaginaries.5 Inthis context of global migrations and U.S. political, economic, and cul-tural expansion, the relationship between body and nation was neitherstatic nor uncontested. Our collection illuminates how the meanings ofnew contacts fostered through imperialism and migration were played

out by and played on individual bodies.6

It also examines how trans-national population ows variously shaped, challenged, and redeneddiscourses of national embodiment.7

In keeping with a larger corpus of scholarship on immigration and


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Introduction 7

state-building, several essays in this volume identify various techniquesof exclusion, regulation, and containment deployed by the modernAmerican state in order to manage the instabilities of population mi-gration and delineate the nation.8 From the nineteenth century on,

consolidating national states throughout the world became intenselypreoccupied with regulating and shaping the bodies of inhabitants(and hence the national body) in ways that would facilitate governance,promote the growth of commerce and national inuence, and forgedominant majoritarian views of an optimal citizen. Kramers treatmentof prostitution in the Philippines, Plummers study of brown babies,and Molinas and Shulls essays on immigration control demonstratehow efforts to sort people into those who belonged and who did not

often centered on regulating border-crossing bodies. In many in-stances, perceived threats to public health and national security, oftenidentied with the bodies of racialized others, provided rationales forthe exclusion of certain people from the national body. National exclu-sion became a marker of racial difference, and racial difference simul-taneously became a justication for national exclusion. Essays in our volume ask how nation was invoked to justify containing and iso-lating boundary-crossing bodies, and how these processes also markpeople who are constituted as foreign, alien, and perhaps even beyondhumanity.

In bringing so many people and cultures into contact with one an-other, the processes of imperialism and migration did not just bol-ster classicatory and disciplinary regimes; they also fostered theproduction of new forms of knowledge about the human body that worked to sustain, undermine, and recast prevailing conceptions ofthe American body politic. In the time period covered in this volume,nineteenth-century preoccupations with anthropometry and race per-sisted but slowly gave way both to genetic science, which stressed thesuperciality of physical differences such as skin color, and to culturalanthropology, which emphasized the cultural rather than racial con-struction of difference.9 Racial segregation, antimiscegenation laws,immigrant quotas, restricted enfranchisement, and eugenics existedalongside ideologies of self-improvement, social betterment cam-paigns, and calls for pluralism, multiculturalism, and expandedcivil rights. Over the course of the twentieth century, biologically rooted

views of identity increasingly competed with new forms of scienticknowledge that bolstered claims that proper citizens were culturallymade, not biologically born. By framing the body as an especially con-tested site for national denition, our volume demonstrates how tradi-


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tions of incorporation, remolding, and mixture existed alongside andcompeted with regimes of exclusion and containment to shape bothdomestic body politics and international policies.

In the United States, as in many other parts of the world, the so-

called physical tness of individuals emerged as an important mark ofAmerican citizenship and of a strong nation.10 Essays in our volume ex-plore how state-building and bodybuilding became related processesin efforts to dene and secure national boundaries of various kinds inthe face of population ux. Kramers analysis of the regulation of pros-titution in the Philippines and Daviss exploration of the railroad circusemphasize two very different ways in which linked concerns over thephysical and moral tness of individual bodies served to bolster dis-

courses of imperial nationalism. As the popularity of sports and exer-cise grew over the twentieth century, t bodies became an increasinglystrong component of nationalism and a standard measurement for na-tional prominence around the globe.11 The studies by Stagner, Fitzpat-rick, Costigliola, Rosenberg, and Lui explore transnational processesthrough which personal health, beauty, athleticism, and physical mo-bility became signiers of U.S. national virtue on the world stage.

What role did race, along with other forms of perceived bodily dif-ference, play in dening American national identity and determin-ing markers of national inclusion and exclusion? With their focus onboth the physical and performative qualities exhibited by a range ofhistorical actors, the essays in this volume carefully historicize andcontextualize this question.12 Exclusion certainly was often racialized,but certain gures embodied contestedand changinginteractionsbetween discourses of nationhood and race. Imperialism and globalmigrations contributed to the rise of a diverse range of entertainersand media personalities who fostered varying narratives of nationalembodiment: circus performers (Daviss essay), physical culturalists(Fitzpatricks essay), the movie star Anna May Wong (Lims essay), andthe Olympic diver Sammy Lee (Luis essay) became iconic Americansprecisely because they were, in many ways, liminal gures who invitedothers to cross borders and perform their own self-constructedandeminently changeableidentities. Similarly, contested public debatesover the fate of brown babies (Plummers essay) and the place of im-migrants in American society (Molinas and Shulls essays) highlight

what Plummer refers to as the ideological slippages that attendedattempts to dene national inclusion and exclusion via essentializednotions of race.


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Introduction 9

Outsider Bodies and the Discourse of National Security

The insider/outsider and t/unt divides that shaped denitions of thenational body became powerful elements in national security discourse,especially during times of political and economic strife. Because thesymbolism around bodies emerges especially strongly in war, it is notsurprising that many of our essays focus on periods of wartime. Indeedall of our essays, although illuminating a wide variety of contexts, showthat representational practices surrounding bodies have remained atthe very center of national security discourse and of calculations of stra-tegic assets and liabilities.

The ways certain bodies became synecdochic for the nation during various twentieth-century conicts is a connective thread that runsthroughout this volume. Read together, the essays by Davis, Stagner,Costigliola, Rosenberg, and Lui build upon and also revise existingscholarship that emphasizes the close links between masculinity, na-tionhood, and national security and war.13 Stagner and Costigliola tracehow, at key moments, disabled male bodies (shell-shocked soldiersand a physically impaired president) were reconstituted as symbols ofU.S. strength and leadership via the transnational realms of psychiat-ric medicine and diplomacy. The studies by Davis, Rosenberg, and Lui

highlight how the bodies of children, women, and ethnic Americanscould become strategic assets in intra- and international negotiationsof power. In exploring how wars became sites for elevating particularformations of embodied nationalism, many of the essays draw atten-tion to the wartime policing of boundaries of gender, sexuality, race,and morality. Kramers and Plummers studies of cases in which U.S.soldiers formed sexual encounters with women in occupied territoriesshow how wartime domains of the intimate produced quite publicregulatory regimes that aimed, in the name of national security, to re-assert threatened racial and gendered hierarchies.14

How to delineate enemies and mold and destroy bodies became a par-ticularly urgent matter of public policy in wartime, and the exigencies ofthe twentieth centurys various national security emergencies thus gaverise to an array of tactics. Bodies may be ostracized, punished, tortured,killedand all of these treatments represent a continuum for dealing with outsider bodies. Such treatments aimed not simply to deliverstress and harm to individuals but to create some kind of pedagogicalritual through which to warn and discipline other potential transgres-sors.15 The various disciplinary treatments of outsiders, set within anoften transnational and extranational geography of borderlands, inspec-


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tion sites, detention centers, and war zones, constitute focal points ofBody and Nation, as illustrated in the essays by Kramer, Molina, Young,and Shull.

During the wars that erupted from nationalistic rivalries and accom-

panied empire-buildingfrom the War of 1898 through the Iraq War of2003 and afterthe American state (like other major powers) used newmedia to demonize enemies and new technologies to boost capacitiesto kill them. Youngs examination of body count as the primary me-dium and strategic metric for gauging military success illustrates theimpact of ever more deadly and remote weaponry on civilian casualtiesof war. She considers the question of what happens when certain bod-ies are grouped as such threats to the nation (and even to humanity)

that their lives (and deaths) become faceless statistics beyond the reachof law and morality. Her themes resonate with contemporary debatesover rendition, torture, and drone technology in the security state ofthe early twenty-rst century. These recent issues are taken up at greaterlength in the epilogue, which considers the question of the historical visibility of enemy or alien bodies.16

Nation, Bodies, and Modernity in U.S. Transnational

Popular CultureThe United States, of course, was never simply a national state thatsought to count, discipline, restrict, rearrange, rehabilitate, supervise,and bring victory to its citizenry. It was also home to the growth of adistinctive popular culture that celebrated the beauty, athleticism, andmobility of individuals and promoted a widely attractive consumeristethos of self-improvement. A body-centric popular culture increas-ingly drew from the nations demographic diversity and then attainedglobal appeal during an age of expanding mass-media circulations. Therelationship among bodies, nation, images of modernity, and transna-tional mass-mediated culture constitutes the third major theme of our volume.17

Many of our essays explore how American media circulations fos-tered political imaginaries centered on representations of the humanbody. American media enterprises, for example, seemed to promoteethnonationalismthat is, nationalism based on singular ethnic iden-

tities. Forms of popular culture, including circuses, magazines, movies,and news outlets, often presented exclusionary denitions of what con-stituted an American body by celebrating certain model citizens whilemarginalizing, demonizing, or simply ignoring racial minorities, the


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Introduction 11

disabled, radicals, and the unt. Yet because American mass culture was built by a diverse group of people and consumed by global audiences,it also constructed the cultural pastiche that constituted American lifeand the nations multiethnic social body.18 American nationalism was,

after all, always simultaneously a transnationalism.19 Furthermore, asmedia reached across oceans and continents, meanings became in-creasingly shaped and reshaped within this transnational circulation.20

The essays in this collection thus suggest that Americas twentieth-century transnational media, though it often projected imagery thathelped to solidify categories of race, ethnicity, gender, tness and (dis)-ability, and nation, simultaneously worked to mix and disrupt these very same categories. Several of the studies explore how mass-mediated

representations of American bodies helped to associate the UnitedStates with a look of modernity increasingly characterized by motion,hybridity, and performance rather than by stasis, race, and essence.Daviss work on the American railway circus and Stagners on popu-lar representations of soldiers illustrate how U.S. transnational mediacirculations projected embodied narratives of American strength andresiliency. Fitzpatricks exploration of cosmopolitan primitivism inthe publishing empire of Bernarr Macfadden and Lims study of AnnaMay Wongs transnational racial modernity shed light on Americasglobal circulation of what were widely perceived to be attractive andexible modern gures. During World War II and the Cold War, asCostigliola, Rosenberg, and Lui demonstrate, such bodies became cen-tral symbols in foreign relations discourse.

At the center of Americas transnational media circulations wasthe emergence of the omnipresent modern consumer bodya highlymobile, often urban, and increasingly multiethnic, multiracial, andmultigendered gure. The modern bodymale and femalehad adistinctive style that rendered it a frame foradornment. In Jean Baudril-lards words, the human body became not just a site of consumerism butbecame itself the nest consumer object. 21 Essays in our volume ex-plore how Americas transnationally circulating media presented mod-ern bodies as ever unnished objects: they could be adorned in somefashion, or the sculpting of a seemingly unadorned body that was nelyhoned through physical culture could become its own special adorn-ment. In marrying mobility and consumption, Americas transnational

media circulations helped associate the United States with, as Rosen-berg outlines, a compelling modernity that could seduce as well asdestroy.

Our essays suggest the very diverse ways bodies coded as both Amer-


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ican and modern became dened in terms of their mobility: their abilityto travel, participate in sports, move up in the world, slide into multiplesocial roles, design a highly mobile air war that rained destruction onpeople-in-place, or conquer immobilizing conditions such as paralysis

and shell shock. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have succinctly writ-ten, Modernity meant mobility. 22 To be static or place-bound was to beon the wrong side of the future. This wedding of modernity and mobil-ity, accentuated in this age of global migrations, rapid media, and travel(with attendant restrictions on these kinds of mobility), manifests itselfthroughout our collection. In Americas increasingly global circulationsof body-centric mass culture, images of mobile, modern bodies inextri-cably intertwined with messages about U.S. national power.

The theme of media circulation, so important to emerging under-standings of transnational ows in history, highlights the global bodypolitics of Americas celebrity-driven, consumerist commercial culturethat exalted self-fashioning, self-improvement, and mobility. As one ofAmericas most important exports to the world during the twentiethcentury, body-centric transnational media circulations constructed in-uential images of the American body politic and also helped to brokerchanging relationships between the United States and the world.

These three general areas of inquirypopulation migration and mixing,national security discourse, and mass-mediated cultural circulations are necessarily overlapping and even mutually constitutive. Globalmigrations of people, for example, can be instigated by wars and con-icts, shaped by mass-media representations of citizens and nations,and given political and historical meanings through popular culture.Similarly war making in the twentieth century has been predicated onthe mass-mobilization of people, and media are frequently honed toproject certain messages about national and enemy bodies. Moreoverboth migrations and wars have signicantly inuenced the channelsthrough which body-centric American popular culture has circulated.Our essays, taken together, present specic historical examples of suchinterrelationships and show how the nexus between ever-changingmeanings of bodies and nations can deepen critical historical under-standings of international and transnational relations.


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Introduction 13

Notes1. An overview of the so-called bodily turn can be gleaned from the use-

ful and highly diverse essays found in Fraser and Greco, The Body; Blakemoreand Jennett, The Oxford Companion to the Body; Johnston, The American Body inContext.

2. See Foucault,Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Foucaultsinsights about power and the body have informed a broad range of schol-arship across many disciplines. Examples with particular relevance to our volume include Stoler,Race and the Education of Desire; Burchell, Gordon, andMiller, The Foucault Effect; Rail and Harvey, Body at Work. Attempts to re-evaluate Foucaults conception of biopolitics and biopower in light of newtechnologies, evolving theories about the body, and international and trans-national geopolitical affairs include Jones and Porter,Reassessing Foucault; Clough and Willse,Beyond Biopolitics; Debrix and Barder,Beyond Biopolitics; Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War;Melossi, Michel Foucault and theObsolescent State; Fraser, From Discipline to Flexibilization?; Kelly, In-ternational Biopolitics.

3. See Scott, Experience; Butler,Gender Troubleand Bodies That Matter; Di-prose and Ferrell,Cartographies; Fausto-Sterling,Sexing the Body.

4. Body and Nation builds on an array of studies that have examined bodypolitics within a multitude of specic national contexts. In addition to theU.S. body and nation scholarship outlined in the notes of the individual es-says in this volume (which we have generally not repeated in this introduc-tion), some examples include de Baecque, The Body Politic; Mangan,SupermanSupreme; Ross, Naked Germany; Morris, Marrow of the Nation; Crombie, BodyCulture; Ong and Peletz,Bewitching Women, Pious Men. Important discussionsof the body politics of global America in earlier historical periods can befound in Brown,Foul Bodiesand The Anglo-Algonquian Gender Frontier;Morgan,Laboring Women; Sweet,Bodies Politic.

5. For bodies in contact, see Ballantyne and Burton,Bodies in Contact. Theclassic text on the construction of nationalism and imagined communities isAnderson,Imagined Communities.

6. On the politics of intimacy and bringing issues of postcolonial analysis and scholarship on the body into U.S. history, see especially Stoler,Haunted by Empire. Other relevant works include Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empirein the Making of U.S. Culture; Renda, Taking Haiti; Lipman,Guantnamo; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race.

7. On immigration history as transnational and foreign relations history,see Gabaccia and Ruiz, eds., American Dreaming, Global Realities; Gabaccia,For-eign Relations; Zolberg, A Nation by Design.

8. Inuential analyses of how modern states have gained and exercisedpower by managing and marking human bodies include Scott,Seeing Like aState; Mitchell,Rule of Experts; Anderson,Legible Bodies. On the United States,


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see Briggs,Reproducing Empire; Greene, The Canal Builders; and essays in Go andFoster, The American Colonial State in the Philippines; Campbell, Guterl, and Lee,Race, Nation, and Empire in American History; McCoy and Scarano, The ColonialCrucible. Works that place both the U.S. state and nonstate actors in a trans-

national context with implications for body politics include Connelly,FatalMisconception; Ngai, Impossible Subjects; Cullather, The Hungry World; Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution.

9. See Gross, What Blood Wont Tell. The essays in Goodman, Heath, andLindee, Genetic Nature/Culture investigate the relationship between anthro-pology and genetic science across a broad range of contexts. For the uidityof ideologies of race in the U.S. imperial context, see Kramer, The Blood ofGovernment.

10. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States offers an important his-

torical perspective on the categories of ability and tness in the United States.On American history viewed through the lens of disability studies, also seeLongmore and Umansky, The New Disability History.

11. In addition to the many works cited in the essays, examples includeKeys,Globalizing Sport; Jacob, Working Out Egypt; Guthrie-Shimizu, TranspacicField of Dreams.

12. Cherniavsky,Incorporationsprovides a provocative context for viewingmeanings of race in the context of its relationship to the global and imperialspread of capital.

13. See Nagel, Masculinities and Nations. Inuential studies that inves-tigate the gendered body politics of war and nationhood include Enloe,Ba-nanas, Beaches, and Bases; Hoganson,Fighting for American Manhood; Bederman,Manliness and Civilization; Shibusawa, Americas Geisha Ally.

14. On domains of the intimate, see Stoler, Tense and Tender Ties: ThePolitics of Comparison in North American and (Post) Colonial Studies inHaunted by Empire, 2370. The essays in Hansen and Stepputat,Sovereign Bodiesinvestigate how sovereignty is constructed within states through acts of vio-lence enacted on bodies.

15. Scarry, The Body in Pain; McCoy, A Question of Torture.16. The conclusion of Pitt,Body, Nation, and Narrative in the Americas focuseson issues of bodies that are disappeared. Casper and Moore,Missing Bodiesreects on the hypervisibility and invisibility of bodies in American culture.

17. On mass media, globalization, and modernity, see Appadurai,Moder-nity at Large.

18. The relationship between Americas multicultural population and thedevelopment of modern mass media is explored in Mizruchi, The Rise of Mul-ticultural America; Rogin,Blackface, White Noise; Ross, Working-Class Hollywood;

Pells,Modernist America.19. On America as a transnation, see especially Tyrrell, Transnational Na-tion. For a historical perspective on this topic, see Randolph Bourne, Trans-National America, Atlantic Monthly, July 1916, 8687.


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Introduction 15

20. On such circulations, see especially Weinbaum et al., The Modern Girlaround the World; Miller et al.,Global Hollywood. Important discussions of U.S.mass media, international audiences, and the limitations of so-called cul-tural imperialism can also be found in Rydell and Kroes,Buffalo Bill in Bo-

logna; Stokes and Maltby,Hollywood Abroad; de Grazia,Irresistible Empire; Ki-tamura, Screening Enlightenment. U.S. media culture and globalization at theend of the twentieth century is given further attention in the epilogue of this volume. For a useful primer on the academic eld of media reception studies,consult Staiger,Media Reception Studies.

21. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 129.22. Lake and Reynolds,Drawing the Global Colour Line, 23. The historical and

discursive links between mobility and modernity are also addressed in Cres- well, On the Move; Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Canzler, Kaufmann, and Kesselring,

Tracing Mobilities; Sternheimer,Celebrity Culture and the American Dream.

body and nation by emily rosenberg and shanon fitzpatrick

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