ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to show how studies on women's gymnastics in Uruguay are an example of the transnational circulation of ideas around eugenics and their effects on discourses on sexuality and gender. In addition to dialogues concerning women's gymnastics, the process of institutionalizing physical education in Uruguay was produced through a substantial transnational transit and circulation of ideas, agents, techniques, and instruments fundamentally derived from their central sources of power in the United States and Europe. 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.
