Towards a feminist theory of fitness

Towards a Feminist Theory of Fitness, builds on the momentum of our well-established and widely read blog, Fit Is a Feminist Issue, to engage feminist scholars, the general public, and public policy in conversations designed to promote a more inclusive attitude toward fitness than what is represented in today’s popular media and scholarly research about fitness. The project moves beyond the auto-ethnographic approach taken on the blog, where we engage critically with cultural attitudes and assumptions about fitness and sport. We propose to undertake discourse analysis of popular media – blogs, television, news sites, magazines, radio – and engage in secondary interpretation of primary empirical data (from Statistics Canada and from researchers in the field) about fitness and sport. Applying our expertise as feminist theorists, we investigate three central questions:

• What features must a theory of fitness have that makes it distinctively feminist?

• In what way does contemporary fitness culture and discourse perpetuate oppression and social disadvantage?

• How can a feminist theory of fitness tangibly promote an inclusive fitness culture,  empowerment among systemically disadvantaged social groups, and social equality, and move us beyond the popular feminine aesthetic in the West, in which thinness is highly prized?

Our objectives are both scholarly and practical. With respect to scholarship, we aim to  contribute to the feminist analysis of fitness culture with an eye to establishing criteria and a framework for a feminist theory of fitness. By feminist theory of fitness, we mean a theory that is fundamentally inclusive and that invokes gender, class, race, disability , age, and sexuality as significant categories of analysis and as dimensions of social and political inequities that may lead to systemic disadvantage. In pursuing this objective, we will take as our primary guides our first and second research questions, about what a feminist theory of fitness looks like and about the ways in which contemporary fitness culture perpetuates oppression and social disadvantage. More practically, our project has great potential to influence discourse and culture surrounding fitness.

Specifically, the inclusive fitness approach that we develop and defend supports an important direction in fitness promotion in Canada at the level of government and non-profit initiatives, particularly but not exclusively directed towards women and older Canadians. Answering our third question, we will demonstrate these tangible ways in which our research can have a social impact. We will challenge many of the default assumptions of popular fitness culture, e.g. its emphasis on youth, a restrictive range of norms for women, a valorization of strength for men and thinness for women – and develop and defend the claim that current fitness discourse perpetuates exclusion and oppression. This shift in attention and values has implications beyond theory and into public policy for Canadian fitness promotion.