Correcting Bodies: Eugenics Rhetoric and Twentieth-Century Ballet Manuals

This article approaches twentieth-century ballet manuals as cultural texts through which rhetorics of bodily correction might be read in relation to cisheteronormative, Eurocentric ideals that parallel eugenic thought. Drawing on seventy manuals found at two US university libraries, I analyze both linguistic and visual strategies: binary taxonomy, aesthetic judgments of defect and beauty, appeals to scientific authority, and visual regimes of whiteness and heteronormativity. I suggest that these rhetorics mirror core strategies of eugenic discourse: promoting the logic of improvement, conflating health with normative beauty, and disciplining bodies toward aspirational norms. I ask how the saturation of eugenic logics in early to mid-twentieth-century physical culture and health reform might be traced, resisted, or reflected within or alongside the rhetorical infrastructures of ballet pedagogy in the United States. Finally, I consider implications for contemporary ballet pedagogy, suggesting how we might recognize and interrupt these discourses in teaching.