Imperative of beauty: Female body, fitness culture and the new eugenics

Abstract

This text proposes a discussion on the current female beauty imperatives, showing marks of a new eugenics in the midst of fitness culture. In order to do so, I use Renato Kehl's texts, remarkable Brazilian eugenics scholar, who in the midst of his writings proposes the physical exercise as health and beautification promoter. The history of eugenics shows us that science, able to legitimize totalitarian political regimes and atrocities against humanity, also built a body totalitarianism, in which beauty was elected as representation, dehumanizing the ugly bodies. In the same way, the women represented by the contemporary fitness culture materialize the leanness and symmetry, building, as eugenics, a unison body.