Sexuality and Eugenics in Female Gymnastics in the Mid-Twentieth Century in Uruguay

Abstract

This work addresses the configuration of bodies and the type of gymnastics prescribed for women according to the leading authors of the main physical education institution in Uruguay in the mid-twentieth century: the National Committee of Physical Education (CNEF). In doing so, the processes that led to female gymnastics becoming fertile ground for the dissemination of eugenic ideas and practices, including sexuality discourses, are analyzed. The analysis focuses on three presentations by leading physical educators at the 3rd Pan American Congress of Physical Education, held in Montevideo in October 1950, as well as a study manual of Theory of Gymnastics, which was a subject taught in the Physical Education Teacher Training Course at the Higher Institute of Physical Education (ISEF). From a historical-discursive perspective, two sets of disputes are presented: those between racial justifications and material conditions, which resulted in local adaptations of Uruguayan and Latin American gymnastics, and the discursive conception of gymnastics and female bodies as something closely related to motherhood (a central element of the eugenic discourse) and the possibility of transcending this conception.