“Politics of Plastic Nationhood”: Sokol Mass Gymnastics and Eugenics Between Empire and Nation-States

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how mass gymnastics in East Central Europe became increasingly entangled with eugenics. It traces the proliferation of eugenic discourses alongside the medicalization of gymnastics within Sokol, a mass nationalist voluntary association. In this context, the bodies of gymnasts became crucial sites of knowledge production and ideological projection. The article introduces the “politics of plastic nationhood,” a concept that foregrounds the fierce debates within Sokol over strategies to shape the imagined body of the nation though physical exercise. It also highlights key actors in these discussions, including medical doctors, physical anthropologists, and gymnastics trainers. The article shows that four major themes shaped these biopolitical disputes: health, diversity, gender, and ability. Focusing specifically on Sokol associations in interwar Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and their prewar predecessors, the article outlines a chronology of the politics of plastic nationhood, which emerged in the Habsburg Empire and reached their zenith in the successor states. After imperial collapse, in particular, Sokol eugenicists sought to merge the diverse Slavic populations of the new states into a single “national body.” Owing to their perceived failure to achieve national unity, starting in the mid-1930s onward, eugenicists turned to rigid racial hierarchies, statism, and authoritarian politics.