The Global Gym

Gender, Health and Pedagogies

J. Andreasson, T. Johansson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137346629
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

By participating in the everyday life of fitness professionals, gym-goers and bodybuilders, The Global Gym explores fitness centres as sites of learning. The authors consider how physical, psychological and cultural knowledge about health and the body is incorporated into people's identity in a local and global gym and fitness context.

1

Introduction

During the past four decades, gym and fitness facilities have emerged as a global industry. According to the International Health, Racquet & Sports Club Association (IHRSA), which is the trade association serving the health and fitness club industry, this global “movement” generated an estimated $75.7 billion in revenue in 2012, from more than 153,000 health clubs serving 131.7 million members (IHRSA, 2013). By promoting active lifestyles, gym and fitness facilities are presented worldwide as the solution to all sorts of public health issues. The list of countries that have been affected by this development is long. In Sweden, for example, where the sports movement has traditionally assumed responsibility for voluntary physical education for children and adolescents, gym and fitness training activities have advanced to play a significant role in promoting health and bodily exercise. In Great Britain, memberships in private fitness clubs have risen steadily during recent decades, and a public survey shows that at the beginning of 2000, 14 per cent of the population attended a gym (Crossley, 2006). These figures are well in line with studies of the health club population in the United States as well (Sassatelli, 2011), and seem to be increasing continuously, spurred especially by strong commercializing forces (Smith Maguire, 2008). Furthermore, in recent years the fitness and health club industry has expanded considerably in Asia and Latin America. In the Asia-Pacific, Hong Kong alone had approximately 600 gym and fitness clubs in 2012, while China attracted nearly 3.5 million members to more than 2,600 facilities (IHRSA, 2013). Among global markets, Brazil is now second in size only to the United States, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2005) describes employment in the “service-producing” industries focusing on the general state of clients’ bodies as one of the fastest-growing industries in the labour market (George, 2008).

Consequently, at present people all around the world are using gym and fitness facilities to exercise their bodies and achieve success and health in everyday life. The physical activity pursued in these facilities is relatively straightforward. Individuals are given access to activities, machines, and equipment. With this access and the support of employed experts, they can, or are supposed to, make physiological improvements through incremental training in areas such as cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, and muscle strength. In this respect, gym participation is expected to have a direct impact on individuals’ health and well-being. Much less clear, however, is the pedagogical work that is expected to occur during this bodywork and in this particular cultural context. Indeed, recent research depicts training sessions as pedagogical encounters and suggests that fitness facilities play a significant role in teaching people how to live their lives and understand themselves (Tinning, 2010). Yet we know little about how these educational processes take place or about the lasting consequences gym pedagogies may have for individuals’ health and identity construction outside the gym. One important question we will raise and discuss in this book concerns whether this trend of going to the gym merely can be seen as an unproblematic way of achieving and learning about good health and constructing a successful identity and body, or whether there are drawbacks associated with this cultural phenomenon, possibly in the form of negative effects on people’s psychological health and self-perceptions.

The first wave of research on the gym and fitness culture began in the early 1990s, and the focus was on bodies, gender, and identity (Dutton, 1995; Johansson, 1996, 1998; Klein, 1993). Klein (1993), for example, conducted a classical field study of bodybuilding in some of the world’s best-known gyms. This study examines the creation of bodybuilding as a subculture and the tensions between it and mainstream societal norms and conventions. Since this study, the gym and fitness industry has gone through a remarkable transformation process and turned into a mass-leisure activity (Sassatelli, 2011). Today we see an increasing interest in research on the gym and fitness culture. Recently, theorists have explored aspects of gym (sub)cultures such as corporeal ideals, gender transformations, drugs, and training techniques (Evans et al., 2009; Hedblom, 2009; Helman, 2007; McGrath & Chananie-Hill, 2009; Monaghan, 2001). Others have focused on the more commercializing aspects of this culture and on how bodies are trained in order to fit into the consumer culture (Sassatelli, 2011; Smith Maguire, 2008). Processes of learning and pedagogies of the gym, however, have received little scholarly attention.

Consequently, the purpose of this book is, first, to analyse the fitness gym as a site of learning. Specifically, the book examines the kind of knowledge and expertise that is enacted by fitness professionals and gym participants as they work on their own or others’ health and fitness. Second, we also address the construction of gender within the fitness culture. Thus, we wish to illustrate various ongoing processes and extant nodes of learning/education by asking how physical, psychological, and cultural knowledge about health and the body is acquired and incorporated into people’s gender identity in a local, national, and global gym and fitness context. Finally, we are interested in how physical activity, health, and bodies are gradually drawn into a global sphere of interests. Many of the questions discussed in the book are no longer only of national or local concern, but must be understood in relation to international and global movements and discourses on sport, health, and bodies.

Today there are a number of international stakeholders – UN organizations, international sports associations, and national and local organizations – focusing on physical exercise as a central factor influencing the health status of children and young people growing up in modern societies. For instance, modern sport is seen as a powerful tool in different social and cultural change initiatives, and especially in teaching young people and whole populations about health issues (Levermore & Beacom, 2009). The discourses of public health have changed quite dramatically in the Nordic countries and in many European countries since the 1990s. The welfare state has gradually transformed into a new system in which public and private healthcare systems coexist. Consequently, more and more responsibilities are left to the individual. This individualization of healthcare and public health has great implications for how we think about and frame our discussions and analysis of fitness and health. These processes also connect to a more general discussion on how neo-liberal discourses have penetrated how we reason about welfare, individual freedom, and consumption (Rich & Evans, 2013). The gym and fitness industry fits nicely into a neo-liberal worldview, where people are held responsible for their health on a more individual basis.

In the book, we focus on an increasingly visible group of people who are central to the development of the global gym, both economically and culturally, and who are mostly understood here as the affluent middle class. We document the emergence of this group within the particular cultural contexts of the gym and fitness culture, and as such, we are studying an affluent part of the global population. This does not mean, however, that the empirical material and analysis focus only on this stratum of the population. The empirical material also reflects the opinions of people belonging to the working and lower-middle classes.

The global fitness gym

The physical activities performed in modern societies are clearly part of a global industry. Within modern sport, for example, we have international media spectacles such as the Olympic Games and the Soccer World Cup, the Cricket World Cup, geographically mobile sports (tennis, golf), and a well-developed and influential US-based global marketing and franchise industry (Miller et al., 2001). Sport stars such as David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, Anna Kournikova, and others have become icons and beauty models by putting their perfect bodies on display in advertising and media shows.

The Americanization thesis has been the topic of considerable debate and discussion. When it comes to the gym and fitness culture, it is highly relevant to discuss how bodybuilding and fitness, and the whole industry connected to them, have been historically imbued with American values and cultural conceptions of beauty, bodies, and the individual’s responsibility for taking care of and cultivating the body (Melnick & Jackson, 2002; Monaghan, 2007). However, the roots of the contemporary fitness culture run deeper. We can trace the values concerning and different ways of approaching the body to ancient Greek body ideals, as well as to later developments in physical culture in, for example, the Nordic countries. We will return to this discussion in Chapter 2.

Another more general discussion that is highly relevant to this book can be found in the literature on the McDonaldization of society (Ritzer, 2011). Ritzer has developed a concept that can be used to analyse the development of modern and effective organizations, such as McDonald’s. According to Ritzer, four alluring dimensions are at the heart of the success of the McDonald’s model. First, the fast food model appears to offer an efficient method for satisfying many different needs and desires. The model works effectively and follows a predesigned process, including the different steps involved in producing, for example, hamburgers. Second, this production process offers the customer calculability. People can calculate how much time it will take to drive to McDonald’s, to order, receive, and eat the food. Saving time is a key issue here, and McDonald’s employees are supposed to be able to do a lot of work, quickly and for a low wage. Third, McDonald’s offers no surprises. There is an assurance that the products and services will be the same over time and space. The product will be the same in Los Angeles, Bangkok, and Stockholm. This form of predictability is central to McDonald’s success. Finally, the space created for selling hamburgers and food, with limited menus and options, allows diners to eat quickly and leave. Thus, this is a highly controlled space, where customers and workers are subsumed under a tight and closely managed system.

In accordance with the notion of McDonaldization, we will discuss whether and how similar tendencies have permeated the gym and fitness culture. Certainly, the concept of “standardization”, for example, seems to capture the changing conditions faced by the workforce of fitness professionals, as the occupation of personal trainers and group fitness instructing tends to be more and more controlled by giant global fitness organizations and companies such as Les Mills and the licensed group fitness activities they offer (Parviainen, 2011). These aspects of fitness culture are increasingly globalized, and thus it is difficult to tie specific beauty ideals, body ideals, and philosophies of the body to a certain nationality.

However, in contrast to looking at globalization as a homogenization of culture, it is also possible to use the hybridization thesis, according to which cultures borrow, combine, and incorporate different elements, resulting in syncretic and highly diverse and complex forms (Holton, 2000). In this way, globalization instead results in intercultural borrowing and innovation. Another way of approaching these questions is to differentiate between a structural-institutional level, where homogenization occurs, and an expressive-symbolic level, where we find patterns of heterogenization and diversity (Ram, 2004). Thus, global commodities, and in our case the fitness industry and culture, appropriate local traditions that strongly influence and are influenced by deep-seated social and cultural relations and ways of communicating. In this way, we get glocommodification: that is, a combination of structural uniformity and symbolic diversity (cf. Robertson’s concept of the glocal, 1995).

Urry (2003, see also 2007) describes the relation between the global and local in the following way:

The global and local are inextricably and irreversibly bound together through a dynamic relationship with huge flows of “resources” moving backwards and forwards between the two. Neither the global nor local exists without the other. The global-local develops in a symbiotic, unstable and irreversible set of relationships in which each gets transformed through billions of worldwide iterations dynamically evolving over time. (Urry, 2003, p. 84)

This seems to be a nuanced way of approaching and analysing different global phenomena (Bale & Christensen, 2004; Ram, 2004). There is evidence for the existence of local and national approaches to and interpretations of gym and fitness (Steen-Johnson, 2007). On the other hand, there is also some support for the McDonaldization thesis and arguments pointing to a growing tendency towards homogenization of the global gym and fitness culture. Throughout the book, we will relate our analysis to aspects of both the global and the local.

Analytical and theoretical framework

Theoretically, our research interest is aligned with a social constructionist approach to knowledge and knowledge production (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Hacking, 2000). We are mainly interested in how societal and cultural changes permeate, and to a certain extent also form, individuals’ behaviours and lifestyles, but also in how individuals can relate to, resist, and partake in slow and structural societal changes. We will investigate how particular subject positions (identities) are being created through bodily practices and social interaction within the gym and fitness culture. We will also explore the inter-subjective ways in which we learn – through socialization and the internalization of values, routines, ideals, and practices – who we are and where in the world we belong. We will argue that, in a gym and fitness context, physical skills are not to be regarded as distinct abilities or objects that can easily be transferred from one person to another, for example from a personal trainer to his/her trainee. Rather, we see physical skills and learning processes as inter-subjective, for example as being created by action and in relational and communicative encounters between different individuals in specific cultural contexts (Schiro, 2008). More precisely, a person’s sense of “who he/she is” is understood as intimately incorporated into bodily action. When people act/perform, they learn. They gain experience in relation to their surroundings, and in this way they also develop an understanding of themselves, what they can do, and how others perceive them. In other words, the ways in which people use and understand their bodies are also expressions of integration between learning processes and the ongoing process of identity and gender construction (Biesta, 2006).

Formulating a theory of social practice, Lave and Wenger (1991) claim that learning, thinking, and knowing are relations among people in action and arise from the socially and culturally structured world. This means that learning must be understood by looking beyond traditional dichotomies between cerebral and embodied activity, abstraction, and experience. Rather, learning implies a relation to social communities. Understood from the point of view of personal trainers, for example, the process of learning how to become a fitness professional is inevitably interwoven into a system of relations to, for example, gym owners, gym-goers, media representations, and so forth (Sassatelli, 2011). Hence the education of a fitness professional is to be understood as integrated into a larger system of relations, implying that such an education also means that the individual is gradually becoming a different person, which in turn reshapes relationships, provides new opportunities, and enables changed positions in the relational systems in which the individual partakes.

In addition to zooming in and focusing on micro-processes in the fitness gym, we will also analyse and discuss how bodies are formed and transformed in relation to and through intersectional patterns of power and resistance. We will use case studies and extensive empirical material to discuss the McDonaldization thesis and to analyse glocal aspects of the gym culture (Robertson, 1995). The overall ambition is to place our case studies and theoretical analysis within the larger sociological framework of cultural sociology and gender theory.

The gym and fitness culture has been thoroughly analysed as a gendered phenomenon (Johansson, 1998; Markula, 2001). On the one hand, the transformations of gender and sexuality taking place in late modernity are characterized by rapid alterations of how identities and bodies are perceived and understood. On the other, this field of expertise and practice also upholds and maintains hegemonic structures of masculinity and polarized gender identities. To understand historical developments in the gym culture, we also must analyse and dissect the whole phenomenon in relation to hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987, 1995). We will use this concept to point at certain structural changes and transformations in the gym culture. In our interpretation, this is not to be regarded as a static concept, only usable to talk about dominance and stable hierarchies, but as a dynamic concept that points at possible transformations of power structures and gender relations. There are also considerable differences between how hegemonic structures take shape and manifest themselves on different levels. On a global and international level, there are often clear patterns of male dominance and stereotypical gender divisions, whereas these patterns are more scattered and nuanced on other levels, for example the national and local. Against the background of Connells’ theory of gender, and recent developments and critiques of the concept of hegemony (Anderson, 2009), we will highlight throughout the book how gender is enacted, performed, and transformed in different contexts (Hearn, 2004; Howson, 2006; Johansson & Ottemo, 2013; Wedgewood, 2009).

When observing bodies, movements, and postures in the gym, it also becomes obvious that gender is performative, and thus that we can dissect how these processes are enacted and take place in everyday life (Butler, 1990). The gym is a physical and material space, but also a symbolic and cultural space in which gender is negotiated and transformed. To a certain extent, the processes and actions taking place in the gym enable radical gender identity transgressions as well as the development of hybrid, and to some extent also “new”, subject positions.

The mass media’s images of young, beautiful, well-defined, and successful people have come to affect larger and larger groups of people. Moreover, we are seeing rapid developments in a number of contemporary body techniques: for example dieting methods, plastic surgery, and training techniques belonging to the spectrum of bodybuilding and fitness. The possibility to learn about how to transform the body has to a certain extent changed people’s ways of relating to the body. Today there is a large corpus of literature on the sociology of the body (Johansson, 2012). Here, we primarily use three different perspectives, all of cultural-historical importance, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
• 3  Becoming a Fitness Professional
• 4  Learning Bodily Sensations Getting the Pump
• 5  Gender and Fitness in the Global Blogosphere
• 6  Beauty, Health and Doping Trajectories
• 7  Healthy and Heavenly Bodies?
• 8  Conclusions
• Appendix: Method and Methodology
• Notes
• References
• Index