ABSTRACT
Physical cultural studies (PCS) was born largely out of disciplinary struggles in kinesiology departments over the last few decades, where the moving body has increasingly become the site and source of conflict and contestation. The sociology of sport's turn to the body over the past two to three decades is closely linked to the concerted turn to embodiment in sociology and cultural studies during the same period. Intellectual recognition of the body as a site of contested significance in the social sciences and humanities is inextricable from any historicizing of PCS. The prevailing histories of physical culture take place in Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and show how an extended community of American and European actors, dancers, physical educators, health and fitness reformers and physical culture teachers created a spectrum of 'body cultures' that responded and contributed to modernity and artistic modernism.
