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Articles

Getting ‘in’ and ‘out of alignment’: some insights into the cultural imagery of fitness from the perspective of experienced gym adherents

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Pages 147-164 | Received 27 Jan 2015, Accepted 27 Aug 2015, Published online: 25 Oct 2015
 

Abstract

While the identification of risks associated with sedentary lifestyles provided a strong foundation for what we understand by ‘fitness’ today, research across the social sciences and humanities has been rather more ambivalent about the term. One important cause for concern here is the cultural proximity of ‘fitness’ to consumer culture by means of the ‘fitness industry’. It has been shown, for example, that the pursuit of fitness has become increasingly, if not exclusively, a matter of attending to the body as a marker of social status: something to be consumed for; something to be consumed by others. In this paper, findings from a study on the meaning of fitness are presented in order to explore how consigning fitness to consumption activity can also overlook complex self-understandings that accrue on the basis of ongoing activity and increased experience. Specifically, findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 experienced gym-goers indicate the importance of a more generalised understanding of fitness (than has been explored in previous research), one that focuses more on the alignment of intention and action in everyday life situations than on the alignment of bodies with normative physical ideals. The paper concludes by acknowledging that, while consumption activity has become a critical component within the cultural imagery of fitness, there is a great deal of nuance yet to be drawn out when examining the relationship between biopolitical discourse and everyday practice in this context.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ross D Neville is a research fellow at the School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Birmingham. His expertise lies in sociology and in the sociology of the body in particular, with empirical work focusing on the factors that attend to and impact upon gym going as an expression of reflexive embodiment. Ross’s research interests lie in understanding the social-cultural location of ‘fitness’ – a concept which has become part of the very fabric of everyday life in modern societies as patterns of collective behaviour require us to deliberately initiate physical activity and exercise in order to be healthy. Ross’s published work on such matters can be found in the following journals: Medicine Health Care and Philosophy, Sociology of Health & Illness, Leisure Sciences and in the Sociology of Sport Journal.

Catherine Gorman is a lecturer at the School of Hospitality Management and Tourism, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland, where she is coordinator of the Leisure Management Programme. Although her doctorate was completed in the field of human geography, her current research interests include physical activity, sport and fitness, sustainability (particularly from a sociocultural perspective) and the participation of older people in leisure and tourism.

Notes

1. The historical literature indicates that the trajectory for this increased interest in, and institutionalisation of, fitness as strength, vigour, and physical readiness grew throughout the nineteenth century, eventually resulting in something of a fitness craze by the 1890s (Whorton Citation1982, Green Citation1986, Grover Citation1989, Park Citation1989, Bundgaard Citation2005, Andreasson and Johansson Citation2014). Our emphasis on the post-WW2 era simply has to do with our broader interest in the institutionalisation of risk, and tracing how fitness became less a matter of threats to the ‘social body at risk’ than a matter of constructing ‘individual bodies of risk’ (see Castels Citation1991, Petersen Citation1997, Boero Citation2007). We believe that the platform for this shift in the cultural location of fitness away from explicit attempts at social engineering towards a culture of performativity to have been largely sedimented over the second half of the twentieth century (cf. Rader Citation1991, Smith Maguire Citation2008a, Bowers and Hunt Citation2011, Byers Citation2015).

2. In fact, the following observation from Eisenman and Barnett (Citation1979) seems quaint by today’s commercial standards: ‘Apparently, many people have made fitness development so much a part of their lives that fitness-related business enterprises are becoming economically profitable’ (p. 117).

3. It is worth mentioning that, in 2008, prior to the economic downturn to follow later in the same year, the then Director of IHRSA Europe, Hans Muench, noted how not many people are aware of the fact that, ‘for the last 20+ years, our industry has grown consistently … proving itself to be recession resilient’ (cited in Amend Citation2008, p. 16). Choice words perhaps, but they reflect the anecdotal claim at least that times of economic hardship lend themselves particularly well to self-building, body-consciousness, and the need for establishing ontological security (cf. Giddens Citation1991, pp. 35–69).

4. It is the ‘politics of displacement’ rather than ‘radical politics’ which concerns us in this paper. However, it is worth acknowledging at least the radical politics that are anticipated in the seminal texts of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. For example, Horkheimer and Adorno exclaimed that the attempt to bring about a renaissance of the body in modern society must fail precisely because of the ‘body fascism’ that it promotes: ‘Those who extolled the body above all else … always had the closest affinity with killing’ (cited in Shusterman Citation1999, p. 305, cf. Pronger Citation2002). While this observation might seem like a bit of a stretch, it should be kept in mind that the original ideological context for fitness as physical readiness brought with it connotations of the ultimate willingness to sacrifice oneself for others. For a more recent account of this exercise-military-religious nexus, see Dawson (Citation2015).

5. The body is, as Bourdieu (Citation1978) equally recognised, a ‘synthesising agent par excellence, which integrates everything that it incorporates’ (p. 834); it is, as Harvey (Citation2000) summarised on more body-economic terms, ‘an accumulation strategy’ (p. 97), ‘an internal relation of the historically and geographically achieved processes of capital circulation’ (p. 114).

6. More than this, Berrett (Citation1997) has observed how commodities produce bodies in a far more banal sense too acknowledging how Americans were gradually ‘invented’ into a state of atrophy as a result of consumer culture: ‘The housewife [now] spent a mere fifty calories dumping clothing in the washing machine as opposed to 290 scrubbing it and hauling it to the clothesline; power lawnmowers afforded men similar ease’ (p. 808).

7. By this, we mean that the gym – or ‘fitness clubs’ as they are more often referred to in the industry literature – functions as the primary unit of analysis for knowledge which is produced about and disseminated across the fitness industry. Industry reports tend to discuss the vibrancy or contraction of fitness industry primarily in terms of the number of gyms, and then secondarily in terms of their distribution, average number of memberships, membership profile, average number of visits, member retention, attrition, etc.

8. Regarding this overtly negative cultural imagery, prior to the initiation of the project, we had come to a place analytically where there was strong justification for having said that:

As consumers pursue physical capital they occupy the consumer role of pseudo-sovereignty, believing in the subjective attainment of capital, yet naïve or ambivalent towards the mechanisms that drive and promote its consumption … Through their quest, physical capital and its symbolic derivative becomes, not only desirable, but also perpetuates a process of domination that is, essentially, self-imposed. It is this political play of embodied difference that perpetuates the apparently universalizing dream of physical capital and, thus, keeps the treadmills literally and economically turning. (Frew and McGillivray Citation2005, pp. 173–174)

Or, as Bauman’s many forays into the modern consuming body indicate, fitness is:

… a never-to-be-reached horizon looming forever in the future, a spur to unstoppable efforts, none of which can be seen as fully satisfactory, let alone ultimate. Pursuit of fitness, its little triumphs notwithstanding, is shot through with incurable anxiety and is an inexhaustible source of self-reproach and self-indignation (Bauman Citation1998, p. 23)

9. Attempts at rationalisation, we have acknowledged elsewhere (Neville et al. Citationin press), have clearly contributed to an important and substantial body of research on reflexive embodiment in contemporary society. However, as Crossley’s (Citation2006a, Citation2006b, Citation2006c) work has argued:

[G]rand theories of body work which pronounce … from on high … typically make no distinction between reasons for starting a form of body work and continuing[,] they often fail to distinguish different meanings … that attach to the body … fail to consider the pleasures and purposes of the body at the level of the lived body, the social nature of some forms of bodily doing … [and] the fact that running around for an hour or pushing weights can restore an agents sense of their self and agency intrinsically, whatever its wider consequences … For them ‘my body’ is the body I think about and project discourses onto, not the body I am; the body that feels pleasure and pain. (Crossley Citation2006a, p. 47)

In other words, while they give us an important initial indication of the cultural location of gym-going, and they often frame it in such a way as to be revelatory of broader social theories or social processes (for example, as regards the body in relation to capitalism, consumerism and consumer culture, critical theory, feminism, modernity, neoliberalism, patriarchy, postmodernism, the risk society, and so on) they are not overly concerned with telling us about what it is actually like to go to the gym.

10. This is entirely appropriate and might be pursued in line with Phoenix and others’ (Citation2005) work on ageing and narratives of decline, for example.

11. That Liam’s and Kevin’s accounts of fitness neatly reflect how the Other can function as a constitutive feature even within the identity formation processes is a matter that we have pursued elsewhere, and will not rehearse here (Neville et al. Citationin press). Though, as we have indicated in the text, it is worth pointing out here that there is clearly scope here for advancing our understanding of social status in this context beyond interpersonal comparisons of form to consider the role of interpersonal comparisons of function. These points are revisited in conclusion.

12. Louise mentions ‘confidence’ in this context, but this is clearly something she experiences as an outcome of practical accomplishments as opposed to only interpersonal comparisons.

13. We are thinking here, for example, of MacIntyre’s (Citation2007, p. 191) definition of virtue as ‘an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving such goods’.

14. In line with the general message of exercise beneficence literature since Morgan (Citation1985), all participants self-reported as having positive experiences of going to the gym and working out: of ‘feeling good’, ‘feeling happy’, ‘feeling great’, ‘feeling fantastic’, ‘feeling that you’ve achieved something’, ‘feeling as if I have done something good for myself’; of being ‘full of energy’, ‘in a great mood’, ‘on a high’, etc. Expert knowledge of this literature even seemed to feed into participants’ self-descriptions: ‘Well, obviously there’s the biological side of it; those little endorphins flying around your body are quite nice’ (Louise); ‘It usually sets me up for the day … in terms of energy and mood … because [of the] release of serotonin’.

15. For a review, empirical study and typology of pleasure, the ‘forgotten dimension of physical activity’ research, see Phoenix and Orr (Citation2014).

16. We borrow the phrasing here from an essay by Jerry Morris who was generally regarded as the founder of physical activity epidemiology. The exact quote is as follows: ‘We in the West are the first generation in human history in which the mass of the population has to deliberately exercise to be healthy. How can society’s collective adaptations match?’ (Morris Citation2009, p. 11, cf. Blair et al. Citation2010).

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