Book Review

Comparative/World

Study of the relationship between sexuality and nationalism promises to deepen our understanding of historical causation. Historians have long suspected that the sexual dimension had been overlooked in favor of traditional methods of analysis, and the late George L. Mosse and Peter Gay, among others, have made signal contributions to this development. Sadly, J. A. Mangan's edited work could serve as a case study of the dangers inherent in mixing sport history with critical theory. Begin with trendy Foucauldian analysis of the place of the body in modern power networks, add half-baked theories on sex and fascism with little grounding in historical documentation, find a publisher eager to expand revenues but not to employ proper editors, and one has a book ready for market.

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Mangan's conceptual framework itself is suspect and is based on the idea that the body serves the state as an aggressive and violent metaphor. Achilles, Siegfried, Lancelot, and even Rambo are tied together willy-nilly to demonstrate that the state uses naked heroes as symbols to further its goals of power and control. We learn that nudity on the Greek model was the school for fascism, and that this search for "Prometheus Unbound" reached its apogee in the propaganda image of the SS man. If the thesis is unsupportable, the mode of analysis is disturbing as well. Definitions of historical problems taken from the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences and other reference books are joined with long quotations from authors; in one section there are fifty attributions to Mosse alone. A largely derivative narrative commentary thus substitutes for original thought in the fifty percent of the book the editor reserves for himself.

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