The sentient body recognized within gym and fitness cultures, but questions remain

Greta Bladh
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mid Sweden University

What does it mean “to go to the gym”? What does it feel like, and in what ways are these feelings produced differently due to social context and cultural norms? These are some questions that are implicitly asked in the book Gym Bodies. Exploring Fitness Cultures (2021) by James Brighton, Ian Wellard and Amy Clark. The authors try to answer these questions by bringing their own training bodies into the field of gym and fitness in order to provide a “rich corporeal grounding upon which discussions about the importance of ‘going to the gym’ can be developed” (p. 1). These bodies are also introduced in the first chapter of the book, in which they present their own fitness journeys throughout their lives, as they declare that the primary aims are “to provide critical sociological analyses of contemporary gym spaces and fitness practices through our own lived, enfleshed, sensuous bodies” (p. 1). By using their own bodies as research instruments and acknowledging their own experiences in the field alongside other participants, the authors try to respond to what they deem as a knowledge deficit to an otherwise well researched field, that is, the recognition of the sentient body within gym and fitness. This is achieved by drawing upon theoretical perspectives within phenomenology, as well as referring to a sociological canon of Bourdieu, Foucault and Goffman, when analyzing their own, as well as other research participants’ experiences throughout the book.

In addition to bringing the body back into the research field of gym and fitness, Brighton and his fellow authors offer a comprehensive and well curated overview of the history and development of gym and fitness, although with a self-reflective position of being Western centered. This third chapter, “A History of Gyms and the Evolvement of Contemporary Fitness”, in conjunction with chapter 5, “Gym Spaces”, are well worth a read by themselves for anyone interested of getting an introductory outline of the plethora of gym and fitness as such, as well as references to key literature within the field. So, if you are at an initial stage of heading in to the field yourself, this is the place to start.

Also, as they acknowledge, the authors are well enculturated within the gym culture through years of practice, so wouldn’t this in some ways circumscribe the potential elements of letting your data surprise you?

When it comes to the three individually written chapters, each of the authors offers an autoethnographic account of different aspects of the field such as “Being Personally Trained” (Wellard), “CrossFit ”(Brighton), and “Spinning” (Clark). By being candid about one’s own experiences in the field, as well as of the road taken to get there, the reader gets an insight of the analytical grid consisting of both the body and mind of the researcher and the theories they draw upon, through which the empirical data is analyzed. Autoethnography also reveals the researcher as an instrument in the field yielding data for research, as well as lowering the academic guard of “objective” distance, rendering the researcher vulnerable for scrutiny. However, I wonder if autoethnography is an essential necessity for making a corporeal account of gym and fitness. What is it about the autoethnographic vignettes that can’t be achieved by letting other research participants tell their stories? Also, as they acknowledge, the authors are well enculturated within the gym culture through years of practice, so wouldn’t this in some ways circumscribe the potential elements of letting your data surprise you? That said, I found the chapter written by Amy Clark about spinning most interesting, as her position did not align with the idea of the white able-bodied male, and by that was met by exclusionary practices, as the female body, still today, holds a questionable presence at certain gym spaces.

It is on this note the authors jointly set the directions not only for further research within the field, that is, questions of inclusion in terms of gender, disabilities, and age, but also encourage the fitness industry as such to work with these issues by implementing inclusive gym policies and inclusive spatial layouts. This should then be done by keeping in mind what the entirety of the book had put forth as essential in order to understand what going to the gym is all about, that is, the feeling body. The sensuous corporeality of bodies should be accounted for, since it is here that many exclusionary practices materialize. People are not so much kept out of gyms due to formal regulations keeping them out, but rather, exclusion is a felt phenomenon by the way we are approached by other people, expectations of what bodies fit where, and spatial features.

To conclude; by acknowledging their own bodily presence, as well as other participants’, the authors write the body back in as something more than a vehicle for socially constructed feelings and experiences, and break down the partitions between mind, body and environment. Although recognizing the entanglement of the body and the social, the reader is left wondering what the body really is, even though it is acknowledged as being biological and sentient, one still queries what is the matter of the body. To their defense, the chapter dedicated to the gym body is titled “Conceptualising gym bodies”, and by that elevating the body into an abstract stratosphere of academic language. It seems that there is one binary left untouched, that of matter and language. By that, in addition to letting corporeal aspects lead the way for further research, one might also ask how the corporeal becomes perceived as a distinct matter and in which ways matter acts in the process of becoming bodies, and in this case, in the process of becoming gym bodies.

Copyright © Greta Bladh 2023