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In our own time, the expression 'body fascism' is commonly used in the mainstream media and in popular cultural discourse, having become part of the modern English lexicon. It tends to denote an infatuation with the body beautiful at the expense of substance, a celebration of physical fitness, muscular self-control and slavishness to style to the detriment of intellect and spiritual self-awareness. Significantly, the expression most frequently appears on the fashion or lifestyle pages of leading newspapers or fashion magazines, and while largely satirical in its application and ultimately derogatory in its connotation, an aspirational undertone is also often discernable. To be a 'body fascist' is to be a man or a woman pre-occupied with outward appearance and aesthetic self-perfection, as 'body' becomes the far more meaningful element of the expression, and the evocation of the term 'fascist' is merely adjectival. 1 Thus in its current usage, the term 'fascism' tends to signify some form of fanaticism, accompanied by a lack of self-irony, with little more substantial political meaning attached. For example, a recent book by Brian Pronger on the technology of physical fitness is titled Body Fascism, and nowhere in the substantial introductory chapter is there any attempt to account for the use of 'fascism' as a master term as it has clearly breached its historically and politically identified moorings.2 In the field of sociology, Marvin Prosono's development of the expression 'fascism of the skin' to describe the commodification of the body in consumptive capitalist society does a better job to justify the appropriation of the political term, even if its subject matter is Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Jerry Springer Show, and Abu Ghraib, concluding that 'in a fairly perverse irony of history, that bodily aesthetic, which was heralded by the Fascists of the last century as signaling evidence of a superior race, was not a casualty amid the ruined landscape of the Second World War'. 3 Notwithstanding the current usage and the slippage of the term, an actual cult of body fascism existed in Britain in the 1930s, an embodied fascism to which adherents dedicated themselves body and soul. It is the intention here to return to the roots of the culture of body...