Idealized Bodies and the Visual Turn after the First World War: American Children's Public Health Campaigns

Abstract

As children's public health education in the United States became significantly invested in visual instruction and pleasurable learning experiences following World War I, these methods sought to redefine healthy bodies through a twofold approach: appeals to the burgeoning film industry and idealized celebrity bodies, and a wide-reaching program of statistical measurement initiatives. In this process the child's body was reimagined through the trope of the movie star – an immaterial and depthless projection immune from the physical effects of war – and also abstracted via mass statistical measurement programs that paralleled contemporary eugenics practices. Both methods aimed at a de-materialization of the body to ward off the painful reality of physically weak, malnourished children and the badly damaged bodies of returning veterans. Thus, post-WWI children's health education became an ambivalent corporeal topography in which the body functioned as a site of play and imaginative edification caught between the deeply misguided scientific idealism of eugenics and new forms of presenting physical perfection through modern cinema and beauty culture.