Re-turning to fitness ‘riskscapes’ post lockdown: feminist materialisms, wellbeing and affective respondings in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

A plethora of research has focused on how the pandemic has shifted human relations with space, place and wellbeing. Yet, to date few have focused on how the return to public spaces after extended periods of lockdown is impacting subjective wellbeing, particularly amidst a context with fluctuating levels of risk, rapidly changing policy demands and expectations, and different affective responses to such regulations. In this paper we re-turn with the voices of 17 women who were living in Aotearoa New Zealand during the early stages of the pandemic and working in the sport or fitness industry before, during and after the first national lockdown. Drawing upon insights from feminist materialist theory, we explore how indoor fitness studios materialised as ‘riskscapes’ in women’s negotiations of the affects that shaped their re-turn. Whereas some women experienced fear and anxiety in re-turning to familiar spaces ‘made strange’ through new risks, responsibilities, routines and objects (i.e. sanitizer, floor markings), others came to new appreciations for the importance of human connection offered through shared movement experiences. Conceptualizing these different affective relations as processes of becoming, we trace the multiple and more-than-human relations through which wellbeing and risk were co-implicated in particular ways of knowing-moving-­becoming in the re-turn to fitness. Recognising the effects of continued uncertainties, this paper contributes material feminist insights through women’s affective engagements with the social world, surfacing more-than-human wellbeing in the processes of re-turning to familiar spaces ‘made strange’ in and through pandemic space and time.

Keywords:

• Affect
• feminist materialisms
• fitness
• pandemic
• riskscapes
• wellbeing
• women

Introduction

Working across an array of disciplines, feminist researchers have examined the impacts of the pandemic on women’s experiences of wellbeing, with social isolation, loneliness, increased domestic and emotional labour, domestic abuse, job losses, and financial strain and insecurity, all taking significant tolls (Masselot and Hayes 2020; Power 2020; Thibaut and van Wijngaarden-Cremers 2020). Research on the gendered dimensions of COVID-19 has documented the importance of home-based and outdoor physical activity and leisure practices for women’s health and wellbeing during pandemic (Clark and Lupton 2021; Thorpe, Jeffrey, Fullagar and Pavlidis 2022; Giles and Oncescu 2021; Humberstone 2021; Pandya 2021). For some, online workouts replaced participation in physical locations (i.e, gyms, fitness centers and studios, pools) which were closed for short or long periods of time as governments worked to reduce the risk of contagion (Clark and Lupton 2021; Thorpe, Jeffrey, Fullagar and Ahmad 2023). To date, few have considered how periods of lockdown (i.e. social isolation) impacted experiences of returning to physical indoor spaces of sport and fitness. Despite the heightened messaging about the mental, physical and social benefits of physical activity during pandemic, gyms and fitness studios materialized as ‘riskscapes’, prompting affective more-than-human relational experiences–of fear, pleasure, and care–with other bodies, spaces and objects.

In this paper we engage the voices of 17 women working in the sport and fitness industry (i.e. coaches, fitness instructors, gym or studio owners) in Aotearoa New Zealand (we use Aotearoa, the Indigenous word for New Zealand, from hereafter). Interested to learn about their embodied, affective, relational experiences of health, wellbeing, community and care during the pandemic, we conducted interviews (via Zoom) during and following the first ‘wave’ of COVID-19 in Aotearoa in 2020 and early 2021. Drawing upon feminist materialist theories, we respond to these voices as agentic in terms of how they are ‘entangled with other things’ (Mazzei and Jackson 2019) in pandemic fitness and research encounters. In so doing, we examine the affective respondings that are implicated in different worldings (entangled knowledges that disrupt binaries) as women (participants and ourselves) re-turn to physical indoor spaces of movement (i.e. gyms, studios) (Murris et al 2022). Feminist materialisms attune our thinking-feeling to what pandemic disruptions ‘do’ and how embodied experiences are ‘voiced’ through the negotiation of risk and wellbeing practices.

This article extends the conceptualization of individual voice beyond limited humanist assumptions that locate agency ‘within’ the subject, and pursues an ontological politics attuned to the relational processes of becoming that shape movement communities. Ultimately, we recognize how the pandemic has impacted modes of affective engagement (knowing-feeling-­moving) with the social world, surfacing more-than-human processes of re-turning to familiar spaces ‘made strange’ in and through pandemic. Engaging with feminist materialisms, we come to understand wellbeing in pandemic times as composed through multiple human and nonhuman relations and practices. Rather than being opposites, wellbeing and risk are co-implicated in space-times of disruption, dis/continuity and disjointedness that characterize the process of becoming.

Conceptual scaffolding: re-turning and riskscapes

The research design and analysis presented in this paper are shaped by the ethico-onto-epistemology of feminist materialisms. Although a broad umbrella term for a variety of theoretical orientations, feminist materialist scholars typically share a common interest in unsettling long-standing tendencies (often attributed to the linguistic and cultural turns) to prioritize the socio-cultural and discursive in the production of meaning, and work (in a range of ways) to acknowledge the agentic capacities of human and nonhuman matter (Coole and Frost 2010; Braidotti 2019; Coole and Frost 2010). Feminist scholars are increasingly engaging with new materialist approaches to advance understandings of health, wellbeing, embodiment and recovery as more-than-human, and ‘beyond humanist notions of individualised experience’ (Thorpe et al. 2023, 3; Coffey 2021; Fullagar, O’Brien and Pavlidis 2019; McLeod 2017; Smith and Reid 2018). Developing new theoretical and methodological approaches for exploring the material-discursive formation of experience, feminist materialisms are thus inspiring new lines of thinking about processes of becoming around questions of how the phenomenon of wellbeing is (re)produced and re-turned through entangled embodied relations with space, place, movement and matter.

While many looked forward to the return to a ‘new normal’ after extended lockdown and periods of social restriction, feminist materialist insights emphasized the uncertain becoming of everyday life and impossibility of returning to what once was. Karen Barad (2014, 168), a leading feminist materialist scholar, described how re-turning is not ‘reflecting on or going back to a past that was’, but rather, a ‘multiplicity of processes’ that are inextricably entangled in a process of continual becoming. Thus, re-turning involves navigating ongoing transformations, generated through the ‘relationship of continuity and discontinuity’, the ‘joins and disjoins’, with humans and non-humans that are ‘out of joint. Dispersed. Diffracted’, yet intimately interconnected (Barad 2010, 244). Herein we suggest that engaging with feminist materialisms, and particularly Barad’s concept of re-turning, has the potential to facilitate new ways of knowing how wellbeing and risk are experienced through multiple human and nonhuman relations and space-times of disruption, dis/continuity, and disjointedness.

Pandemic riskscapes

According to leading social scientists, the contours of what Beck (1992) referred to as the ‘risk society’ have shifted with the emergence of a ‘COVID society’ (Lupton and Willis 2021), with ‘novel forms of sociality and new ways of living and moving through space and time’ (Lupton et al 2021, n.p). In a rapidly changing context, governments, organizations, families and individuals have had to make ongoing risk assessments associated with the safety of particular spaces and places. A number of researchers are exploring the spatiality of infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, in terms of ‘socio-spatial processes with complex geographies’ (Kuebart and Stabler 2020, 482). They are examining the ways the pandemic has radically shifted how people use public spaces (Simpson 2021), including health care (Veazey et al. 2021), education, public transport, public parks (Volenec et al. 2021).

While there is an ever-expanding scholarship exploring the spatiality of wellbeing during pandemic, few researchers have focused on how the return to ‘risky’ public spaces after lockdown is transforming embodied and relational experiences. Pursuing this concern, we ask, what affective respondings are surfacing in the re-turn to familiar indoor public spaces made anew through the material-discursive conditions of pandemic, and how are such relations with fitness spaces shifting experiences of wellbeing? Disrupting relations between subjectivity and fitness spaces, we conceptualize COVID-19 as an affective force producing new becomings, new ways of knowing-feeling-moving. Shaped by Deleuzian (1992) thought, we understand affect as the ‘the generative forces or intensities produced when bodies encounter one another’, with affective intensities referring to the movement of forces that bring bodies, emotions, sensations, objects, technologies, place and people into particular relations and spatio-temporal assemblages (Clark and Lupton 2021, 1226). Our focus herein is on the becoming of bodies with indoor fitness spaces as highly affective and affecting ‘riskscapes’ through and beyond COVID-19. In this sense we deploy a Deleuzian (1992) conceptualisation of riskscapes as ‘territories’ that are assembled through the intensification of certain affects, such as fear or belonging, that connect women’s bodies with gyms or fitness studios.

Throughout the pandemic, health authorities have repeatedly advocated the importance of exercise for physical and mental health and wellbeing, as well as for strengthening immunity (Chen et al. 2020; WHO 2021). Yet, participating in exercise outside of the home carried a multitude of risks. During the early stages of the pandemic, medical experts issued public warnings about exercising bodies in outdoor spaces, including modeling of the breath and sweat trails of runners and cyclists (Thorpe, Brice and Clark 2021). Responding to such risks, many modified home spaces and engaged in online fitness practices as ‘safer’ alternatives (Clark and Lupton 2021; Coen, Cook, et al. 2021). During and after lockdowns, people overwhelmingly returned to natural environments for the purposes of fitness, physical activity and outdoor recreation (Venter et al. 2021). Health organizations and the media alike touted the many benefits of outdoor exercise and leisure in ‘blue spaces’ (i.e. oceans, rivers, urban waterways, lakes) and ‘green spaces’ (i.e. forests, parks, home-gardens) for mental health and wellbeing (Lehberger, Kleih and Sparke 2021; Mintz et al. 2021).

In contrast, the return to indoor fitness spaces was much slower. Gyms and fitness centers were frequently publicized as ‘locations of interest’ with various outbreaks (Amagasa et. al 2022). A survey conducted in 2020 revealed that 46.7% of global gym members were planning not to return to gyms because of the heightened risk of contagion, and 36.6% planned on canceling their memberships (Rizzo 2020). Questions continued to be raised about the ‘increased respiratory exertion that occurs in the enclosed spaces of indoor exercise’ and the heightened risks of contagion where bodily matter (i.e. sweat, breath) may be exchanged through shared air and equipment (Lendacki et al. 2021, 321). Even with the reopening of most indoor fitness spaces, experts and the public continued to ask whether ‘the benefits of exercise’ in indoor environments ‘outweigh the risks of infection’, leaving many individuals to make their own decisions based on personalized and highly subjective risk calculations (Dominsci and Brant 2020, 585).

In the context of Aotearoa, where our research took place, gyms and fitness centers became a dominant part of the political rhetoric of COVID-19 regulation. Throughout 2020 and 2021, alongside the governmental strategy of elimination, the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke about the personal and collective risks of attending busy indoor spaces, with gyms frequently centered in public discussion and debate about risk and responsibility. For example, a person attending a gym while awaiting test results (later testing positive), led Ardern to express her disappointment, with subsequent media and public condemnation of the gym goers irresponsible actions (Martin 2021). In another instance, an Auckland gym was connected to two British women who traveled across the country when COVID-19 positive. In both instances, the ‘gym’ gained notoriety as a pivotal point of transmission, not only as a place of ‘risk’ but also questionable ethics of gym-goers that then compromised the entire nation. Such discourses continue to circulate, with a widely publicized media investigation (‘Whose breath are you breathing?’) identifying gyms and yoga studios as regularly exceeding limits of carbon dioxide considered safe for limiting the spread of COVID-19 aerosols (Hancock 2022).

In Aotearoa and many other countries during pandemic times, the spaces of indoor fitness studios and gyms (like many health spaces) were being reconfigured as embodied ‘riskscapes’ via ‘different material configurations, relationships, practices and connections’, thus giving rise to ‘particular affective assemblages and perceptions of safety/risk’ (Veazey et al. 2021, 2). Engaging with Müller-Mahn, Everts, and Stephan (2018) concept of riskscapes is useful here as it facilitates ‘a multi-dimensional consideration of risk environments, considering both material threats and how people perceive, communicate, produce, and respond to them’ (Veazey et al. 2021, 2). Furthermore, taking inspiration from posthuman and feminist materialist geographies, riskscapes move beyond risk management logic to facilitate understandings of spatial, temporal, embodied and affective dimensions of risk (Andrews 2019; Duff 2018). Fitness riskscapes can be understood as ‘relational “more than human” assemblages of objects, bodies and forces’ that produce qualities of feeling or affective atmospheres (Veazey et al. 2021, 2). The normative logics of fitness spaces are disrupted (sensory hierarchies of vision and touch) through dynamic becomings, ‘perpetually forming and deforming, appearing, and disappearing, as bodies enter into relation with one another’ while navigating risk, fear and uncertainty (Anderson 2009, 79).

It is important to note here that feminists, writing in pre-pandemic times, have long examined the many different ways that women are made to feel out-of-place and ‘at risk’ in male-defined, hypermasculine sporting and fitness spaces (Dworkin 2003; Fisher, Berbary, and Misener 2018; Johnston 1996). A particularly relevant example is the work of Coen and colleagues (2021, 537) who examined the visceral gendered geographies of gym spaces, revealing the multisensorial ways that gender binaries are reproduced through ‘the imaginary, bodily haptics, the soundscape, visual fields, and material “stuff”’ of gyms. In another important feminist geographical contribution, Shee (2023, 70) engages Ahmed’s ‘sticky emotions’ to examine how fitness trainers and participants’ living in Singapore access to physical activity spaces is not only mediated by ‘immediate affective intensities of space such as energies and atmospheres’, but also profoundly shaped by their ‘sticky emotional histories and memories of racism, misogyny, and sizism’. Drawing upon interviews and diaries, the author offers a compelling analysis of how ‘people’s health engagements are mediated by their sticky emotional relations to space stretching over multiple space-times’ (Shee 2023, 70). In this paper, we take inspiration from decades of feminist geographers work on gym spaces, re-turning this work with a particular focus on women’s experiences of risk during the pandemic.

In contrast to the humanist focus on gender and emotion/affect (i.e. fear, shame) in most (though not all) feminist geographies of gym spaces to date, engaging with feminist materialisms requires a shift towards the more-than-human encounters with objects, bodies, spaces, technologies and affect (Baxter 2020). Furthermore, as most of our participants owned or worked in gyms and fitness studios run by and for women and non-gender conforming participants (with men also attending in fewer numbers), their discussions of risk focused predominantly on the affective assemblages of bodies, objects and contagion. Given that the pandemic has exacerbated inequities, the assemblage of fitness riskscapes can be understood as gendered in the ways they become enfolded into women’s embodied experience of wellbeing and affective respondings (ranging from fear to pleasure) (Fullagar and Pavlidis 2021).

Methodology: re-turning voice

The methodology shaping this project emerged through a number of feminist materialist entanglements between humanist methods (in-depth interviews), the affective engagements of interviewees and interviewers, digital recorders, transcripts, alongside thinking with theory, engaging with voice differently and writing collaboratively. As is consistent with the ethico-onto-epistemology of feminist materialisms, we were immersed in ‘entangled relation[s] of data-and-researcher’ (MacLure 2013, 228). Not only were we reading, analysing and writing with the concepts and data, we were also living through similar affective relations in our own fitness experiences of re-turning differently to fitness spaces that we considered integral to our sense of wellbeing pre-pandemic. As we chose (not) to return to our favorite fitness spaces, and as we stretched, jumped, pressed and held our bodies with(out) other humans and objects, we found ourselves moving with and against the voices of our participants. More than ‘reflecting’ on experiences, re-turning acknowledges how research processes (listening, reading, writing) (re)configure ‘voice’ in the entanglement of sweat, flesh, breath, shadows, light, hope and fear. The affective expressions (sayable and unsayable in pandemic stories) of women in this study contribute to the materialisation of feminist knowledges; our feminist thinking with moving bodies and participant ‘expertise’ involving their own and others’ fitness and wellbeing experiences. Together-apart we are entangled in a process of co-constituting this feminist research assemblage, and paying attention to the (re)configuring of voice brings into play a reverberation of more-than-human experience.

Conventionally, we began with the ethical approach from the University of Waikato, to issue an online call for participants to be part of a purposive sample selected from among our existing networks in the Aotearoa sport and fitness sector. We conducted semi-structured digital interviews (mostly via Zoom) with 17 women sport and fitness professionals who were living in Aotearoa during the pandemic. Their living circumstances during the first lockdown varied considerably, with some living alone, others in shared living arrangements, and some with partners and/or children. Interviews commenced in August and finished in November 2020. The participants ranged in age (34–50 years) and came from a variety of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds (i.e. Pākehā/NZ European, Māori, Samoan, Muslim). Although important work is being done in Aotearoa to create culturally safe and supportive sport and fitness spaces, our participants did not mention engaging in any culturally-specific practices in their re-turn to gyms and fitness studios.

All participants self-identified as women and were in paid employment in the fitness and/or sports industry. They held a range of roles and responsibilities, as elite athletes and coaches, fitness instructors, and owner/operators of their own studios (i.e. CrossFit, Yoga, boxing, functional fitness). In this way, all of the women were entrenched in cultural, symbolic and embodied economies of wellbeing, both their own and others (i.e. clients, athletes). Prior to the pandemic, these women’s identities were significantly shaped by their sport and/or fitness-related competencies and achievements, and thus we were interested to explore how their understandings of health, wellbeing and risk may have shifted with disruption to their everyday lives and livelihoods. Furthermore, our sample of fitness professionals were uniquely positioned as emotionally and financially invested in their own and others re-turning to these spaces.

The interviews were approximately one hour in duration, and then professionally transcribed. We designed an open-ended approach to each dialogue, with care taken to create a safe space for the women to tell their own stories of how the pandemic impacted (and was continuing to affect) both their working and social lives. We have examined some of the key themes emerging from the interviews elsewhere, including how COVID-19 affected their understandings of wellbeing through disrupted and revised sporting and physical activity participation, and the renewed importance of connection to people, places and the natural environment (Thorpe et al. 2023), and the women’s engagement with digital technologies for sustaining their own movement practices, as well as offering free or price-reduced online classes to support the health and wellbeing of their communities (Thorpe, Jeffrey, Fullagar and Ahmad 2023). In this paper, we focus on the women’s affective respondings post-lockdown, when they were encouraged to re-enter social life and return to their spaces of work (i.e. gyms, studios) during a time of ongoing disruption, risk, fear, and uncertainty.

While our initial methods (interviews) were human-oriented, the questions and our embodied and affective respondings moved our thinking beyond the neat categorizations of interpretative inquiry as we considered what ‘voicing’ experience ‘does’ to feminist modes of knowing. We paid attention to the shifting dynamics and disruptions of pandemic life to consider what affective relations ‘do’ to unsettle how ways of knowing are ‘voiced’. Taking inspiration from Mazzei and Jackson (2019, 67), we engaged in an embodied process of ‘(re)configuring voice’ as a more-than-human, ‘material-discursive practice that is inseparable from all elements (human and non-human) in an assemblage’. Thus, rather than conducting a thematic analysis to interpret women’s voices as an unmediated, rational truth, we were drawn to parts of the transcripts where certain words and phrases ‘glowed’ with affective intensity (MacLure 2013). Deleuze (2004, 63) refers to these moments as ‘singularities’ that attune our thinking about spoken and written voice towards, ‘turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, “sensitive” points’. Re-turning to our own pre-pandemic fitness spaces (i.e. favorite yoga studios, gyms, garage workouts for group fitness) differently, we too experienced new fears, anxieties, joys and longings (re)emerging in affective ways. Thus, reading, feeling, moving with the transcripts, we found ourselves re-turning with particular quotes and phrases, the ‘sensitive points’ of ‘tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety’, tracing the affective capacities prompted as we-they re-entered familiar spaces of sport and fitness. Engaging with feminist materialist thinking encouraged us to turn these ‘sensitive points’ over and over, rethinking women’s wellbeing as entangled in material-discursive relations.

Analysis and discussion: affective re-turnings to fitness riskscapes

In the remainder of this paper we read our data through new materialist understandings of re-turning and riskscapes. The selected quotes are not positioned here as simply representative examples of ‘voice’, they also work to surface the affects that move (us/them/you) in uncertain ways, an ongoing process of re-turning (reading-writing) with empirical material, theory, and our own bodies. In so doing, we begin with a discussion of the new affective responses prompted as women started re-entering (or avoiding) fitness studio riskscapes. Secondly, we explore how the women’s experiences of re-turning in fitness spaces, particularly after elongated periods of social isolation, renewed an awareness of the importance of touch and human connection. Through these two analysis sections, we trace the multiple and more-than-human relations and practices through which wellbeing and risk were co-implicated in particular ways as women re-turned with fitness spaces.

Familiar spaces ‘made strange’: navigating fear, risk and responsibility

Living through a global pandemic has thrown into doubt many people’s sense of security and continuity as we (researchers, our participants, each other) grapple with the entanglement of human and non-human forces that unsettle assumptions about human control and agency. For the women co-constituting this research – all experts in their own and others’ healthy, moving bodies prior to pandemic – wellbeing practices were disrupted and turned over in the process of becoming ‘with’ uncertainty and risk. Moving (and still) bodies negotiated familiar spaces that were ‘made strange’ through the emergence of new risks attached to the presence of other bodies and responsibilities for care. Thus, in our inquiry, we tuned into how risk feels and is experienced in relation to embodied wellbeing practices as entanglements with the material-discursive world. The material conditions that generate risk and/or keep us safe from something that we cannot ‘see’, require an understanding of how risk is experienced through sensory relations. In contrast to rational, calculative discourses, ‘risk affect is the qualitative, embodied, feeling dimension… that is signified by emotional turmoil in relation to the meaning or meaninglessness of identity and relationships (loss, grief, anger, disengagement etc)’ (Fullagar 2005, 47).

Risk is felt as a visceral sense of fear and imagined danger that materializes through the affective resonance of images, objects and discourses in a highly digitally-mediated pandemic world. As we have discussed elsewhere, during the initial stages of COVID-19 in Aotearoa, immune systems (and those of loved ones), housing insecurity, poverty, government policies, access to ventilators, masks, sanitiser, hospital beds, government policy, scientific modeling, beliefs, attitudes towards women, and more, influenced women’s experiences of wellbeing, risk and fear (Thorpe, Jeffrey, Fullagar and Pavlidis 2022). Following the initial lockdowns in 2020, as women re-turned to social spaces of work, fitness and leisure, new fears and anxieties emerged, prompting an array of affective responses. Ahmed (2014, 68) suggests ‘that fear is felt differently by different bodies, in the sense that there is a relationship to space and mobility at stake in the differential organisation of fear itself’. In this way, fear mobilizes vulnerabilities, makes (dis)connection tangible, and incites various passions. The disruption of familiar habits of connection was voiced with intensity by some women in the re-turn to social spaces:

[I was] noticing the part in me around that shift that was really resistant to coming out of lockdown because it had become familiar and there was a sort of social awkwardness, just not quite knowing how to be out in the world. Part of me just wanted to stay inside and be quiet, and going into the studio and being there felt like a lot (Aurora, yoga studio owner).

I don’t know if people were necessarily concerned about their own health and safety, but more like, ‘am I doing this right?’ Because it was so new for everybody, there was more of this fear around like, ‘should I be here, or do I put my mat here or there, or do I use the block, and if I use the block do I spray it down?’ so all of these worries (Claire-Lee, yoga studio owner)

New outlines on the floor, posters on doors, new rhythms and routines to minimize risk all marked the material transformation of fitness spaces, disrupting embodied memories of routine and normative protocols. New habits regarding hygiene and safety were also produced through embodied negotiations of risky encounters, where familiar spaces were ‘made strange’, re-turning memories of what was, with experiences of what now is:

So, we taped up the whole room. We found there was a bunch of different information floating around in the fitness and yoga world around social distancing and how much space was needed. So, there was the uncertainty around doing all of those things. And also, it felt a little unnatural. Like hello, and standing distanced on your mat, and having friends coming up and being like, nope can’t hug me (Aurora, yoga studio owner)

I think the markers on the floor and having that physical distance mapped out for you felt really unempowering, like we can’t make our decisions based on where we put our bodies […] and they had disinfectant and a lot of stuff like that and it was quite strong, you could feel it in the back of your throat (Hannah, yoga contractor).

The appearance of new objects, the lingering smell of cleaned surfaces and rearranged spaces reverberated through women’s stories of navigating the shifting dynamics of proximity and distance. Familiar greetings (e.g. hugs) and the presence of new objects (i.e. markings on the floor, disinfectant, posters) and new protocols for doing movement practices with familiar people and objects, entangled with the absence of some bodies, generated an affective atmosphere that infused women’s re-turn to fitness. These absences and unseen risks exerted agentic capacities as they shaped the contours of pandemic fitness riskscapes, disrupting affective atmospheres (loss, fear, anxiety, dread, belonging, dis/connection) of wellbeing.

Upon their re-turn, some noticed that not only had the physical spaces changed, but the bodies in the room, moving together, were also marked by those who did not come back after lockdowns. Barad (2010, 264) writes on the ways that missing bodies (or hauntings) are material, and suggests that feeling into material absences can enable us to listen and learn from their ‘speaking silence’ (also see Taylor and Gannon 2022). In fitness riskscapes, missing bodies illuminated the presence of illness, death, uncertainty and inequity, these hauntings were felt by the women as silences that held stories, often too raw to verbally articulate. The ‘sticky feelings’ (Ahmed 2014) of fear and anxiety produced by absent bodies resonated through the affective dynamics of individual and collective embodiment that composed wellbeing communities:

I have seen that it is taking a while to get back to normal [numbers] in classes […] Some people are very wary and I don’t know if that’s because of their families, maybe they have someone near them that is unwell and they don’t want to put them at risk? I don’t know (Hannah, yoga contractor).

We did have people canceling for different reasons, financial impact on their income, and we had a lot of people who had health related issues that it was too risky for them to come back to the gym, so lots of cancellations […] the interesting thing is, I’ve seen members that have come out of lockdown who were the last people I would have expected to have major anxiety about it, but they have a lot of anxiety now. And still to this day, they are still very very anxious about the whole thing (Teresa, gym owner).

I was fizzing to get back into the studio [but] the first two weeks were slow [and] that was harder for me than lockdown. I was just so excited to be back in, I didn’t expect people to be that cautious about coming back in… it was almost like my worst fears were coming true – it was like – is this it? Do people not want to do in-person yoga classes anymore? Are we going to survive this? (Claire-Lee, yoga studio owner)

These comments speak to the intensities of re-turning to fitness ‘riskscapes’–fears, concerns and anxieties–that pressed upon some more heavily than others, emphasizing the politics of vulnerability:

For some people it was just like back to normal as though nothing had ever happened and it was just business as usual. And then for other people, they still had that sense of caution and still being really vigilant about keeping space and wiping stuff down […] so I feel like there was just this wide spectrum of people in how they were approaching things (Naomi, personal trainer)

Opening back up, I was noticing different people’s complacency with cleaning protocols, and realizing that while some people are quite comfortable, the next person might be sat there saying nothing but thinking ‘oh my gosh you didn’t clean that,’ so you don’t know where they are sitting with that and you don’t know how safe they feel coming into the studio. So it was sort of a strange territory to be in (Taylor, dance studio owner).

Taylor refers to familiar spaces (i.e. her studio) that were made ‘strange’ as fitness riskcapes became entangled with pandemic-related objects, bodies (both those present and absent) via affective relations. Importantly, strangeness here refers to feeling safe (or not), surfacing the politics of vulnerability and complacency in terms of assumed, but often invisible, privilege (i.e. healthy and able-bodied in contrast to those immuno-compromised or at heightened ‘risk’ of COVID-19, or in caring roles).

Acknowledging the new physical, emotional and spatial needs of those attending their classes, some of our participants responded with utmost care when preparing for the reopening of fitness spaces under new conditions of risk management:

I definitely sent out a lot of emails to people and talked to people just to try and reassure people that this was what we were doing and if they wanted me to wear gloves, I would wear gloves. And if they wanted me to wear a mask, I’d wear a mask. And we could train outside. Just trying to make people feel as comfortable as I could make them feel under the circumstances (Naomi, personal trainer)

I do a full clean up of the gym […] I go in and then just wipe everything, just clean up every single nook and corner. Then everything’s sparkling and ready for the members to come in and start training (Mia, gym owner).

I had these golden acorn stickers, so I put them on the floor where people would put their mats and they knew that they were distanced. We cut the number of people in the classes and tried to encourage people to bring their own mats and props, just to minimize that uncertainty about touching things (Claire-Less, yoga studio owner)

Wearing gloves, providing sanitizer, cleaning the gym, floor markings and limiting class numbers were enactments of care and responsibility by fitness professionals for their movement communities. Yet, as Duff and Hill (2022) write about wellbeing as social care, agentic capacity is more than an individualized experience of fitness. These professionals are entangled in ‘a series of social, affective and material techniques for restoring complex socio-material assemblages’ of wellbeing in pandemic time-space (Duff and Hill 2022, 1). Naomi’s (personal trainer) comment suggests how women leading movement communities were navigating their own (and others’) oscillating experiences of fear and joy:

One of my clients is in her 70s and she wanted to come back and train but she wasn’t that comfortable coming into the gym itself. So fortunately, the place I work has lots of nooks and crannies and so we were able to train outside. Even if the weather wasn’t that great we were able to go somewhere under cover and I could still do that.

Fear and safety, risk and joy were not being experienced as oppositional affective intensities, and women fitness professionals were engaging an array of practices to support those in their communities who were vulnerable and fearful.

Despite their efforts to support their clients and communities in re-turning to their fitness studios and gyms, these tensions took a significant emotional and financial toll, impacting their health and wellbeing drastically. In response, some made the difficult decision to close their doors, whereas others changed their business models (i.e. reducing offerings, staff, blend of online and in-person classes) to keep the physical spaces of their fitness studios and gyms open. Voicing tension and uncertainty, Claire-Lee’s story emphasizes both financial strain and vitality of the ‘thing’ or studio space for joyful interactions:

There are so many little boutique fitness and wellness spaces that are struggling […] And you have to go with it and adapt, but it is really difficult […] I have two studios, so paying for two and having less coming in, is really hard. I am at that point where I am thinking about consolidating into one physical space because I need to lower those overheads, but I still do think that it is so vital to have that physical space. And then on a bad day, I think maybe I don’t want a studio at all, but I’m like, the thing that brings me the true joy in what I do is the face-to-face interaction, but I’m also like maybe there are different ways that we can work, so I feel like I’m in a bit of a circular loop with that.

These comments speak to the cultural configuration of fitness spaces produced through the affective forces of COVID-19 and creative solutions (‘different ways that we can work’) that involve human and nonhuman relations (Thorpe, Jeffrey, Fullagar and Pavlidis 2022).

In their re-turning, the women grappled with new understandings of fitness spaces that they had previously known as owners, staff and participants. Prior ways of moving and interacting in these spaces were made strange, and women experienced hesitations and fears–their own and others–whilst learning to move amidst gyms and studios that had now become sites of potential contagion. Re-turning was not simply a matter of re-entering fitness spaces as sites of wellbeing, rather it was a process of becoming through more-than-human ‘riskscapes’. Fitness studios were altered by entangled relations with bodies, monetary loss, affects, objects, which in turn produced new ‘affective atmospheres’ in the negotiation of risk and responsibility.

Shared space and the affective intensities of (re)connection

Extended periods of social isolation, and recurrent waves of heightened viral spread and risk of contagion, have prompted new noticings and respondings to human and non-human touch. For some, the possibilities of reaching out and connecting with other bodies, was a source of much anxiety and fear. For others, there was a deep longing to move together with bodies in the same shared spaces. The disruption caused by the pandemic to their familiar rhythms and routines, and relationships with people and spaces of movement, prompted new noticings about the importance of such shared experiences for their individual and collective wellbeing. For example, Aurora spoke of the many ways that movements spaces can support varied dimensions of wellbeing:

I think (the yoga studio) is a space and offering that covers many things for many people. It’s not just their physical movement, it’s also something for their mind and spirit and also community and this safe haven and so many different layers.

For many of the women in our study, they were excited to re-turn to familiar spaces that had previously brought much joy and were relieved to reconnect with moving bodies after relying on virtual classes for an extended period of time.

During the lockdown/s, digital technologies forged new relations for our participants enabling different temporal, spatial and affective connections and ways of supporting their communities during phases of lockdown (Thorpe, Jeffrey, Fullagar and Ahmad 2023). Using such digital technologies, they were able to maintain their physical movement practices, but the social, embodied and affective dimensions of such experiences were very different. While digital connections had been valuable during the lockdown/s, participants were unable to fulfill their desire for the visceral and affective qualities of human connection. Emotionally, affectively and physically, they found digital technologies limiting their relations with others. The following statements evoke a deep longing for human connection in and through shared movement experiences in the same time and space:

I am sure there are some people that would want to do Zoom only, but I want to see people. I want to see them face-to-face, you have different conversations. And I am all about looking after them as a person and not just about their muscles (Jolene, gym owner).

I definitely enjoyed a new way of life rather than the grind of all day everyday in the studio face-to-face, just for a change it was nice. But it was also nice to get back because I really realize that I need that connection. What I established from it all is that I just really like having people in front of me and I am not good at being behind a computer all day. (Taylor, dance studio owner).

Such comments echo Brennan (2020, n.p), who states, ‘as useful as they have undoubtedly been, the simulacra of virtual technologies that have helped bring us together while keeping us safely apart, are ersatz; a poor substitute for the embodied human interaction and touch that are a cornerstone of our humanity’. When re-turning to physical spaces of shared movement experiences, some of our participants came to re-prioritise the affective and sensual intensities of moving together with others, and found a renewed appreciation for being in the presence of others’ breathing, sweating, warm, messy and smelly human bodies. Or, coming back to Barad (2020), the women valued the felt connection of sharing movement experiences, where the belonging of bodies exceeds the limits of language. Being in proximity to human connection, their ‘infinity of others’ (and with the self) was aroused (para 1).

While some of our participants recognized the many possibilities for connection (pixels, voices, faces, personal objects and spaces) offered through digital technologies, the majority realized how much they valued connecting with others through the immediacy of physically moving (non-pixelated) bodies. A number of the women spoke about the joys of the affective and corporeal relations of ‘being’ in the physical presence of others post-lockdown:

I just think two hearts beating in the same room is different from beating in separate places, if you know what I mean. Like you can just feel the energy when you are in the same room with somebody. That physical presence when you are next to somebody, rather than through a screen. You notice when you are in a room and people are moving together there is that shared energy. Whereas, I mean you could do the same movements online all you like, but it is not the same (Hannah, yoga contractor)

I think we seek those moments of togetherness more than we realize. I think fundamentally we seek that in each other, we want that closeness. […] it speaks to our kind of humanity, it’s about us being creatures together (Winifred, yoga studio owner)

In re-turning to shared movement experiences, some of the women acknowledged new noticings and affective respondings to the built spaces of physical movement (i.e. yoga studio, boxing gym). For example, Winifred recalled the joys of moving with others again:

Lots of people said that they are happy to be back in the shala [yoga studio], you know, just that sanctified space. Between those walls and with that light and with one another, physically with one another. […] one of the most profound things was lying down in savasana [relaxation pose] next to a person a meter and a half away, either side and in front and behind you, en masse, in a room, just lying down together.

The women in our study articulated new ways of knowing human connection (i.e. ‘other people’s faces close’; ‘the shared energy’ of moving together in the same room) through a visceral sense of loss and connection, proximity and distance in their human and more-than-human pandemic encounters. For some, the desire to return to co-present activities was also a longing for connection that materialises through the learning-becoming sensory body that responds to particular places and people (i.e. gyms, studio) each with distinctive atmospheres, histories and hauntings. We also acknowledge that, as fitness professionals, the women in our sample are financially and emotionally invested in processes of reducing risk and re-turning fitness spaces as ‘safe’, pleasurable and meaningful, both for themselves and their clients and customers.

Importantly, as described in our first analysis section, these feelings of comfort and enjoyment upon re-turning to indoor fitness spaces were not experienced similarly by all of the women. In our own rememberings, both joys and fears were associated with our re-turning to studios and gyms. As such, any analysis of embodied movement practices in new pandemic ‘riskscapes’ requires thinking through the complexities that accompany entangled human and nonhuman relations in order that we might accord greater value to the ethos, infrastructures and practices of care and connection. The affective relations that sustain movement-based intimacies and more-than-human wellbeing spatialities are significant in terms of supporting diverse women who experience risk differently. In the more-than-human geographies of pandemic, women are experiencing risk in new ways, thus there is a need to understand the multiscalar worldlings of different women and the points of connection that the gym and fitness spaces afford.

Conclusion

The pandemic is radically shifting human relations with space, time and matter. While much of the literature has focused on the new spatial, embodied and affective relations emerging during extended periods of social isolation and lockdowns, to date, less focus has been placed on the processes of re-turning to familiar spaces and places, that no-longer ‘feel’ the same in a context of rapidly changing risks. In this paper, we examined fitness spaces (i.e. gyms, studios) as ‘riskscapes’, with the post-lockdown re-turn to these indoor spaces prompting an array of affective respondings from the women who work, train and move in these locations. Whereas some women were surprised by the emergence of new fears and anxieties, others came to new appreciations for the importance of these shared movement spaces for their individual and collective wellbeing. Engaging with feminist materialisms, and particularly the concepts of re-turning and riskcapes, we highlighted how the disruptive effects of COVID-19 produced visceral and affective knowledge of wellbeing as relational and through connection with human and non-human forces during a time of risk and uncertainty. While not intended as a comparison with male fitness instructors, we found that women invested considerable care and compassion towards their clients’ affective respondings to processes of re-turning to fitness studios and gyms. As evidenced in other pandemic social spaces (i.e. the home, healthcare), the emotional labor involved in the provision of care is often highly gendered, and largely invisible (Power 2020).

Whereas some experienced new fears, anxieties and concerns re-turning to fitness spaces, others embraced opportunities to move together in shared physical spaces that were meaningful to them. Such affective respondings (i.e. fear, pleasure) also prompted new noticings and relations with objects (i.e. sanitizer and disinfectant felt in ‘the back of your throat’), bodies (those presenting and moving in new ways, and those absent) and spaces (i.e. markings on the floor, separating bodies, changing movement patterns). For the women in our study, living through a pandemic and post-lockdown re-turning to indoor social spaces produced embodied ways of knowing risk and wellbeing that moved beyond individualised models of selfhood to recognise the profound entanglements of moving bodies, non-human objects and surfaces. In this sense, wellbeing enfolds risk relations in the process of becoming, rather than being defined in opposition (i.e. fear or pleasure, risk or safety).

In sum, imagined fitness and wellbeing communities are always becoming, responding to and learning with human (i.e. instructors, owners, clients) and non-human matter (i.e. virus, technologies, vaccines, policy documents) across time (before, during the different waves, and an imagined ‘after’ the pandemic) via digital (Zoom, scanning QR codes) and physical indoor (the home, studio, gym) and outdoor (yard, park, forest, beach) spaces. Considering that experiences of living through the pandemic are continually changing, and the after effects of enduring such disruption continue to surface in new ways (i.e. new anxieties and fears, studio closures, economic struggles for fitness professionals, shifting policies), we suggest that further research is needed to examine how women’s experiences of wellbeing are shaped through opportunities and inequities entangled in their fitness and sport relations with the more-than-human pandemic world.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Professor Kanchana N. Ruwanpura for amazing Editorial support throughout this process, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive feedback. Your time and energy are much appreciated! Thanks also to Dr Nida Ahmad for her important contributions to early stages of this project, and to our participants for taking the time to share their pandemic fitness experiences with us. Professor Thorpe is grateful for the support of a Royal Society Te Apārangi James Cook Research Fellowship (JCF-21-UOW-001).

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Holly Thorpe

Professor Thorpe is a sociologist of sport and gender at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the co-author of Feminist New Materialisms, Sport and Fitness: A Lively Entanglement (with Julie Brice and Marianne Clark, 2020), and co-editor of Sport and Physical Culture in Global Pandemic Times: COVID Assemblages (with David L. Andrews and Joshua I. Newman, 2022). Contact: [email protected]

Allison Jeffrey

Dr Allison Jeffrey is an assistant professor of experiential studies in community and sport at Cape Breton University, Canada. Her current research engages feminist posthuman theory to broaden understandings of mature moving bodies in yoga, dance and outdoor adventure sports.

Simone Fullagar

Professor Simone Fullagar is an interdisciplinary sociologist at Griffith University, Australia. Professor Fullagar has published widely on gender equity in sport, mental health, active communities and social well-being.