Women’s Fitness Practices in Postfeminist Culture: Discourse Analysis of Affect and of Bodies Dis-Appearing in Workout

Abstract

This article presents an intersectional qualitative analysis of how young South African women of different racial identities relate to their bodies while talking about their fitness practices. The analysis addresses the debate on women’s aesthetic (self-)objectification, which is commonly considered as manifest in their workout routines. In a study of interview data, the routines are approached via critical discursive psychology and discursive psychology of affect. The study investigates the role of affect in positioning oneself as the subject of fitness practices. Examining the relationship between the lived and ideological aspects of participants’ workouts, the article finds that the surveillance of women’s bodies is negotiated as more than a “choice” to be the self-disciplined agent of one’s bodywork. The analysis explores these negotiations in terms of the distinction between living one’s body as an evaluated surface or as a sensing flesh. Discussing the findings, the article explains how discourse analysis refines an understanding of the role of fitness in embodying femininity.

Keywords:

• Affect
• body/embodiment
• critical discursive psychology
• discourse analysis
• fitness
• intersectional analysis
• postfeminist culture
• South Africa

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to both reviewers for their instructive insights into this paper and to Claire Sisco King for her kind editorial assistance.

Notes

1 The “male gaze” (Mulvey, 1988) refers to the sociocultural and psychological implications of the systemic surveillance of women’s bodies, wherein patriarchal norms regulating women’s corporeality are reinforced by men and women alike (see also Berger, 1972).

2 In this article, the term bodywork is used with reference to the nonprofessional undertaking of exercises aimed at reshaping one’s appearance and health, as well as balancing the body and mind (MacNevin, 2003).

3 Both Mulvey’s (1988) conception of the male gaze and Young’s (2005) feminist phenomenology refer, respectively, to heterosexual cis men and heterosexual cis women.

4 “Colored” is one of the four main racial groups defined by South African law, constituted by people of mixed (mainly African, Indonesian, and European) ancestry; the South African term “colored” is not a derogatory term, as it is in the United States.

5 The subset consisted of four black, five colored, five Indian, and 10 white participants.

6 See my transcription notes in the appendix for a list of the symbols used in the following extracts and their meaning.

7 Bronwyn’s constructions of her full involvement with body actions problematize Young’s (2005, p. 44) conception that women, whose psyche is pervaded by the male gaze, move self-consciously, do not fully involve with physical objects, etc.

8 Cultural contingency is one possible explanation of the findings among black participants; I do not mean to generalize them in a culturally determinist way. As stated, body’s dys-appearance in fitness was common among all four groups.

9 It is crucial to pinpoint this possibility in fitness, as fitness is commonly considered to reproduce aesthetic surveillance.

10 For example, “When [. . .] I can’t concentrate anymore, [. . .] and I go for a run” or “If . . . I’m angry or upset about something, I either go to the gym or play squash.”

11 See also Glapka (2018a).