ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a snapshot of ethnic minoritized young people’s self-representations in fitness and health, displaying their visual storytelling and visions of the self, as well as how they negotiate, challenge, and subvert the media’s dominant narratives of the white ideal body. The chapter is organized in three sections. In the first section, Never Perfectly White, but “Eat Good, Do Exercise, Take Care of Your Body, and Look Good,” I demonstrate how ethnic minoritized young people are caught up within the colonial relationship of the normal/abnormal body defined by whiteness, struggling to develop a “healthy subjectivity.” In the second section, “Moving in NYC: … It Opened My Eyes,” I show how ethnic minoritized young people’s counter-stories—stories from the “perspective from below”—(dis)engage with whiteness while disrupting essentialism, crafting a “different” yet positive picture of their own embodied experiences of fitness and health. In the third section, I conclude the chapter by offering “A Final Picture” that conveys the potential of rewriting the body through ethnic minoritized young people’s storylines and that recognizes, highlights, and destabilizes whiteness while advancing images of ethnic minoritized young people.
