Defending the Nation

Abstract

This article examines U.S. Women’s Gymnastics both as a contemporary site of public fascination and as a historically situated discourse. In doing so, the article argues that early U.S. women’s gymnastics functioned as a means of subjection that was understood to cultivate desirable (White, bourgeois) femininity. Nevertheless, elegance, beauty, and perfected femininity do not adequately explain the appeal of U.S. women’s gymnastics. Instead, U.S. women gymnasts also function as limit figures that mediate cultural anxieties and conflicting desires regarding national identity in the U.S. popular imagination.