ABSTRACT
There has been mounting advocacy for physical activity and exercise promotion at a global level and national governments and transnational bodies such as the World Health Organization have begun to incorporate exercise participation into their agendas (Waxman 2004). As Shilton observes, “physical activity has a very diverse (and numerous) constituency of professional allies” (2008, 767). Within academia, such disciplines as exercise physiology and exercise psychology have considered exercise as their core area. Through mainly quantitative examinations, these researchers have focused on the health benefits of exercise. Yet, international studies still report a stubborn gender difference in participation levels-women exercise less than men (TNS Opinion and Social 2010). For many years, feminist research (e.g., Hargreaves 1994) has highlighted women’s complex relationship with embodiment and physical activity. This relationship, rooted in culture, is difficult for quantitative scientific approaches to explore. Yet, qualitative social science analysis has been less prominent in the field of exercise and feminist research even less so. However, the recent fascination of the (feminine) body as a social construction has resulted in a corresponding interest in fitness and exercise from a variety of critical social perspectives. Our book intends to contribute to this growing body of literature that examines the socio-cultural aspects of women’s exercise. In addition, all the authors take a specifically feminist perspective into their analyses of the fit, feminine body. In this introduction, we aim to locate these examinations within the existing socio-cultural literature of women’s fitness which, in general, has focused on two broad topical areas: the media representations of the fit body and the lived experiences of the exercisers. These foci have also resulted in a series of binaries that, rightly or wrongly, tend to characterize feminist research in fitness. To highlight some of these tensions, we first detail the major findings by the fitness media research and then recount feminist research that concentrates on women’s lived experiences within multiple forms of fitness.
