‘We are Not a Nation of Softies, But We Could Become One’: Exploring the Materiality of Fitness Testing in the President's Council on Youth Fitness

Abstract

In this article, we peer into the scientific networks of humans and non-humans that were assembled to articulate youth fitness in the United States during the Cold War era when the perceived ‘muscle gap’ between United States youth and their European and Soviet counterparts lent urgency to the establishment of national fitness testing standards and plans. We draw on Actor-Network Theory as a theory/method to foreground the materiality of the body and measurement tools whilst also highlighting the contingency of scientific claims about the body and fitness. In particular, we discuss and contextualise two interrelated networks of fitness testing. First, we examine the Kraus-Weber Tests for Minimum Muscular Fitness in Children (K-W tests), whose results were published in 1953 and brought the ‘muscle gap’ to national attention. Second, we explore the networks assembled within the President's Council on Youth Fitness in order to implement fitness testing on a national scale, illustrating how they connected to, and extended, a variety of other networks, including the K-W tests. Throughout our analysis, we seek to illuminate the political implications of the technical work undertaken to articulate youth ‘fitness’.