Jordana Moore Saggese is Professor of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park, author of
Chapter 3 centers on the Australian heavyweight boxer Peter Jackson and the ways in which Jackson’s body features as part of a much wider and international visual program that classicized, sexualized, and eroticized the Black body in order to manage its threat to the white public after the Civil War. Also explored are the connections between Jackson’s body and the fin de siècle development of a new “physical culture,” which promoted the development (and strengthening) of the physical body. A major aim of the chapter is to explore the ways in which the body of the Black heavyweight boxer—perhaps the most threatening of them all—was consciously and consistently shaped by discourses of sexuality and how the erotic and the violent became entangled through representation.
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