ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how consumer culture contributes to the contemporary politics of health, active leisure and the body. It shows how the way body care is organized through fitness culture as a predominantly commercial culture which addresses the sovereign, even choosy consumer. The chapter looks at which kind of symbolic work happens in the gym around ideals of the body, considers the interplay between health and beauty, the emergence of fitness as a central value, closing with a reflection on the politics of active leisure and the fit body. Fitness culture has attracted contrasting diagnoses from within a host of disciplines, often corresponding to disciplinary specializations in the study of sport and physical activity at large. Beauty is often referred to within fitness discourse. It comprises features within a semantic area that refers to the body as an exterior instrument of self-presentation in everyday life, and in erotic relations in particular.
