ABSTRACT
In the third chapter, we focus on how gym practices depend on various forms of self-representation, including ordinary devices like mirrors. In addition to discussing some of the cultural and historical issues surrounding mirrors as such, we consider the many ways that they can both help gym goers to practice their movements and improve their fitness habits as well as cause harm and self-doubt or painful experiences. In this way, mirrors not only reflect images but also refract them, creating an ideology that fitness practices can end up reproducing in everyday and tacit ways. We present a broad approach to mirror self-images that considers what is seen as mirrors as the beginning of an interpretive dialogue between images we see, have seen, could see, or that we imagine might be seen by others similarly. That social dimension of mirror work, we argue, is important for understanding the ways gym goers can love and hate mirrors, need and avoid them, in equal measure. This becomes even more obvious when considering gym practices that emerged following lockdown, as some instructors became “embodied mirrors” for those no longer going to gyms.
