Training the Body for Healthism: Reifying Vitality In and Through the Clinical Gaze of the Neoliberal Fitness Club

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors would like to acknowledge and thank Dr. Shannon Jette for her thoughtful and insightful feedback to this article and project more broadly.

Notes

The fitness assessment consists of a meeting with a personal training sales staff member (who is not required to be certified in personal training). During the meeting, members are asked a serious of questions to identify their aspirations for joining the gym and the goals they hope to attain. Afterward, the sales staff member presents a proposed fitness program. Lastly, the member is instructed through a strength training workout with the training sales staff member's guidance and “expertise.”

In this way, particular embodiments of fitness, as will be explained later in this article, are justified by (and justify) the medicalized need to “prevent disease” and the need to optimize bodily performance(s); these needs are communicated as virtuous pursuits achieved through consuming accepted knowledge(s) and (bio)technologies. It is crucial to understand what the implications are for people in trying to achieve these normalized understandings of health.

For the purposes of this article, we are not positioning this piece as an (auto)ethnography per se. Rather, we are drawing upon Amber's lived experience(s) during her employment at the fitness club as a way to analyze the broader issues, which frame such experiences—and as a way to conceptualize the value of an embodied and reflexive (auto)ethnographic approach to explicate our (field)work.

Through the practice of forging articulations, it is possible to offer informed readings of contexts, but these interpretations are necessarily influenced by various research contingencies: ontological and epistemological frameworks; varying and multiple methodological approaches; and, particular positionalities in (and access to) research sites. Therefore, we must be committed to a (physical) cultural studies practice that involves the composing of conjunctural mappings—or reconstructions—of the present (via the empirical) that are contextually bound, radically driven, subjectively derived, and, at best, only partially understood. Nonetheless, we need to believe in the value of critical contextual knowledge generation as a means for identifying the presence and operation of iniquitous power relations and formations—and for developing strategies by which we may be extricated from them.

At the same time, we must recognize the value this work has (and the insight it can offer) for those in comparable contexts and sites. Due to the contextual contingency of such research, it is important to conceive of how and where we can derive a sense of the general from the embodied particular.

In what follows, Amber is the author speaking in the first person.

This can, and should, be a progressive methodological strategy for empowerment; however, not in the sense that we are entitled to intervene and “enlighten.” Rather, such research must be conducted in sensitive and purposeful ways to help people cope with, hopefully imagine alternatives to, and possibly resist the power relations implicit within, oppressive situations.

Much of the discussion in the fitness club (amongst personal training staff and members) regarding capable individuals (and bodies) was predicated upon individuals’ knowledge about their “unique body type” and “metabolic state” in relation to such supposed factors as biological makeup, age, gender, and lifestyle—and how those individuals were able to craft their own suitable workouts in alignment with this knowledge. If members were perceived as capable in this way—even if somewhat “overweight”—personal training staff rarely, if ever, targeted those members for a fitness assessment.

Nikolas Rose (2007) compared his conception of vitality with that of Giorgio Agamben (1998) and Zygmunt Bauman (1989) to, in a sense, recontextualize the notion. The authors all acknowledge that judgments occur in the way(s) human life is valued, but Agamben and Bauman attributed such judgment to a coercive state or, in Rose's words, “a competitive struggle between states” (58). Although (and moving away from the historical context of modernity) Rose asserted that populations are no longer governed by, and through, a state-enforced eugenics. Rather, it is more appropriate to think about vitality through the lens of a “new individualized eugenics” (Rose 2007, 50) in which individuals must control and manage their own survival and well-being to improve the human population. This is consistent with our discussion of the broader shift in the way health is conceptualized in the contemporary moment: Collective interest is marginalized and the conditions that people live in are not considered (Rose 2007). Yet, it is the individual's responsibility to care for her or his own healthiness, oftentimes regardless of those conditions.