Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Getting ‘In’ And ‘Out Of Alignment’: Some Insights Into The Cultural Imagery Of Fitness From The Perspective Of Experienced Gym Adherents, Ross D. Neville, Catherine Gorman

Articles

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, …