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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
In contemporary U.S. culture, fitness has become shorthand for physical and mental self-work. Every year millions of people sweat and grunt through exercises with the hope of attaining a better body, improved self-image, and perhaps a more optimistic worldview. Although exercise transcends historical periods, as Jennifer Smith Maguire (2008) points out, since the 1970s, fitness has become an increasingly “commercialized lifestyle” associated with the consumption of certain exercise programs and branded consumer goods and fashions. Exercise trends, which may have previously been limited to urban centers, now rely on digital technologies, whether downloaded by an app, streamed on a Peloton bike or Facebook Live in order to reach broader segments of the population. Within this context of commercialized and mediated fitness, this panel asks: What kind of reinvention is promoted by contemporary fitness trends? How do contemporary fitness trends shape understandings of gender and identity?
Associating with particular fitness trends, investing time on different apps, or having an allegiance to particular instructors carry cultural associations and capital that can be as meaningful to the process of reinvention as the exercises themselves. These papers approach contemporary fitness trends such as Peloton, Pure Barre and fitness apps through the critical lenses of feminism, celebrity studies, industrial analysis, and fan studies in order to interrogate the various opportunities for reinvention they enable. Integral to each paper are aspects of participant observation and autoethnography to theorize our own investments and embodied relationships within these exercise regimes and fitness communities.
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“Together We Go Far: Peloton’s Family Values'' focuses on the networked home fitness brand that has seen explosive growth in the Covid-19 pandemic, as millions of fitness devotees were forced home when gyms were shutdown. Peloton’s popularity and cult-like fan base is cultivated not just by the classes themselves, but also by user generated communities (HardCore on the Floor, XXL Tribe, PowerZone Pack, etc.) and instructor engagement on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Under the larger ideology of company slogan, “Together We Go Far,” social media provides subscribers with the feeling that they are part of a community and this affective position is enhanced by instructor catchphrases that allow for intimacy. Whether it’s Robin Arzon referring to students/followers as “family” or Cody Rigsby calling them “boo,” instructors use affectionate language to craft connections with the audience. These feelings of intimacy are then leveraged by Peloton’s social media branding to craft what Anne Helen Petersen has called “a studio system-style star system.” Taking this star system at its center, this paper will examine how instructor’s social media is deployed around events such as Ally Love’s wedding, Leanne Hainsby and Ben Alldis’s engagement, and Robin Arzon’s daughter’s birth to examine how Peloton cultivates a family values structure that is rooted in discourses of self-care, postfeminist empowerment, and optimization. Through close textual analysis of Peloton social media postings, fan community discourse, and larger brand strategies, this paper will examine the fitness influencer economy and aspirational digital culture, more broadly.
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“Girl bosses who LTB (Lift, Tone, Burn): Pure Barre’s Fitness Feminism” examines the self-work of the popular boutique fitness franchise. Like many 20th century fitness trends, Pure Barre is a type of exercise packaged as a lifestyle and status symbol. As Elizabeth Currid-Halkett notes, citing the pricey packages, the placement of classes in the middle of the workday, and unofficial Lululemon uniform: “The barre class is the consummate example of twenty-first century conspicuous leisure.”
Rather than focusing on barre workouts as leisure, this paper considers the work of Pure Barre instructors as part of the flexible labor practices that characterize the US gig economy in conjunction with the self-work promoted by the exercises and the organization’s broader girlboss (corporate) feminism. CEO and founder Carrie Dorr has been vocal that Pure Barre is not simply a workout, but a way of empowering the (primarily white) women who go to Pure Barre, as well as the Pure Barre instructors (many of whom are hourly and work multiple jobs) and franchise owners (most of which are owned by women). Combining industrial analysis, an examination of social media branding, and my own experiences in Pure Barre classes at studios around the US since 2012, I will focus on the labor of Pure Barre to show how the lifestyle branding, the laboring of the self, and labor practices are imbricated in boutique fitness trends.
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“How to get Halle Berry’s abs: the appeal of the celebrity fitness app”
During the early months of the pandemic, I worked out regularly with Venus Williams on Instagram. Whether we did abs or arms (use wine bottles in place of free weights, she advised, as if she knew me intimately), her daily Instagram stories were a convenient and cost-efficient way for me to keep fit while keeping up with a favorite celebrity. Venus is not the only celebrity to use Instagram to provide followers with workouts and fitness motivation; Dwayne Johnson, Kate Upton, and Ellie Goulding have made training tips and athletic brand partnerships a cornerstone of their publicly performed social media identities. However, some celebrities have taken an even more entrepreneurial approach to modeling fitness ideals and selling the possibility of sculpted physiques like theirs. This paper will analyze three celebrity fitness apps that, with star power behind them, use digital culture to sell access to the dream of the perfect celebrity body: Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataki’s Centr, Halle Berry’s ReSpin Wellness partnership with FitOn, and Carrie Underwood’s Fit52. While celebrity fitness workouts are obviously not a new phenomenon, what differentiates these apps is that they provide a consistent, refreshable stream of content for fans while at the same time granting their star owners an ongoing space for media visibility. So, this paper will examine how these apps engage in gendered discourses surrounding star bodies and conventionalized notions of beauty, but it will also situate this analysis within the larger context of the industrial production and circulation of celebrity.
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“Working out and/as Working on Autoethnographic Methods in Fan Studies” aims to self-reflexively explore experiences of the fan body through six months of participation observation in various geek fitness programs and initiatives. Autoethnography is a common, albeit often unnamed or undertheorized, method deployed by fan scholars. Likewise, the term “aca-fan” is routinely deployed to acknowledge one’s personal investment and potential participation in the media object and fan communities they study, but fan scholars rarely theorize their own embodied identities and visceral experience of fandom in a sustained way. This project seeks to explore what might be gained or lost from these approaches. Drawing on Sarah Pink’s framing of “sensory ethnography” as well as emergent working within body studies, this presentation will both theorize my own embodied experience of fan fitness, as well as interrogate the role of affect in autoethnographic fan studies work.
Beginning with a brief survey of intersecting discourses that frame the fan body as “failing,” “unruly,” or “excessive,” and fitness as a site of reinvention and renewal, the focal point of this study will be Geek Girl Strong, a Patreon-funded fannish fitness program that offers both in person and virtual training for women. Rather than framing fitness as a site of discipline, this paper will explore what feminist and bodily pleasures might be generated when health and fitness regimens are “skinned” with geek culture references. In other words, how fan fitness might be less about “reinventing” bodies, but rather our relationship to media texts.
Let’s Get Physical: Fitness, Bodies, and the Politics of Reinvention
In contemporary U.S. culture, fitness has become shorthand for physical and mental self-work. Every year millions of people sweat and grunt through exercises with the hope of attaining a better body, improved self-image, and perhaps a more optimistic worldview. Although exercise transcends historical periods, as Jennifer Smith Maguire (2008) points out, since the 1970s, fitness has become an increasingly “commercialized lifestyle” associated with the consumption of certain exercise programs and branded consumer goods and fashions. Exercise trends, which may have previously been limited to urban centers, now rely on digital technologies, whether downloaded by an app, streamed on a Peloton bike or Facebook Live in order to reach broader segments of the population. Within this context of commercialized and mediated fitness, this panel asks: What kind of reinvention is promoted by contemporary fitness trends? How do contemporary fitness trends shape understandings of gender and identity?
Associating with particular fitness trends, investing time on different apps, or having an allegiance to particular instructors carry cultural associations and capital that can be as meaningful to the process of reinvention as the exercises themselves. These papers approach contemporary fitness trends such as Peloton, Pure Barre and fitness apps through the critical lenses of feminism, celebrity studies, industrial analysis, and fan studies in order to interrogate the various opportunities for reinvention they enable. Integral to each paper are aspects of participant observation and autoethnography to theorize our own investments and embodied relationships within these exercise regimes and fitness communities.
---
“Together We Go Far: Peloton’s Family Values'' focuses on the networked home fitness brand that has seen explosive growth in the Covid-19 pandemic, as millions of fitness devotees were forced home when gyms were shutdown. Peloton’s popularity and cult-like fan base is cultivated not just by the classes themselves, but also by user generated communities (HardCore on the Floor, XXL Tribe, PowerZone Pack, etc.) and instructor engagement on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Under the larger ideology of company slogan, “Together We Go Far,” social media provides subscribers with the feeling that they are part of a community and this affective position is enhanced by instructor catchphrases that allow for intimacy. Whether it’s Robin Arzon referring to students/followers as “family” or Cody Rigsby calling them “boo,” instructors use affectionate language to craft connections with the audience. These feelings of intimacy are then leveraged by Peloton’s social media branding to craft what Anne Helen Petersen has called “a studio system-style star system.” Taking this star system at its center, this paper will examine how instructor’s social media is deployed around events such as Ally Love’s wedding, Leanne Hainsby and Ben Alldis’s engagement, and Robin Arzon’s daughter’s birth to examine how Peloton cultivates a family values structure that is rooted in discourses of self-care, postfeminist empowerment, and optimization. Through close textual analysis of Peloton social media postings, fan community discourse, and larger brand strategies, this paper will examine the fitness influencer economy and aspirational digital culture, more broadly.
---
“Girl bosses who LTB (Lift, Tone, Burn): Pure Barre’s Fitness Feminism” examines the self-work of the popular boutique fitness franchise. Like many 20th century fitness trends, Pure Barre is a type of exercise packaged as a lifestyle and status symbol. As Elizabeth Currid-Halkett notes, citing the pricey packages, the placement of classes in the middle of the workday, and unofficial Lululemon uniform: “The barre class is the consummate example of twenty-first century conspicuous leisure.”
Rather than focusing on barre workouts as leisure, this paper considers the work of Pure Barre instructors as part of the flexible labor practices that characterize the US gig economy in conjunction with the self-work promoted by the exercises and the organization’s broader girlboss (corporate) feminism. CEO and founder Carrie Dorr has been vocal that Pure Barre is not simply a workout, but a way of empowering the (primarily white) women who go to Pure Barre, as well as the Pure Barre instructors (many of whom are hourly and work multiple jobs) and franchise owners (most of which are owned by women). Combining industrial analysis, an examination of social media branding, and my own experiences in Pure Barre classes at studios around the US since 2012, I will focus on the labor of Pure Barre to show how the lifestyle branding, the laboring of the self, and labor practices are imbricated in boutique fitness trends.
---
“How to get Halle Berry’s abs: the appeal of the celebrity fitness app”
During the early months of the pandemic, I worked out regularly with Venus Williams on Instagram. Whether we did abs or arms (use wine bottles in place of free weights, she advised, as if she knew me intimately), her daily Instagram stories were a convenient and cost-efficient way for me to keep fit while keeping up with a favorite celebrity. Venus is not the only celebrity to use Instagram to provide followers with workouts and fitness motivation; Dwayne Johnson, Kate Upton, and Ellie Goulding have made training tips and athletic brand partnerships a cornerstone of their publicly performed social media identities. However, some celebrities have taken an even more entrepreneurial approach to modeling fitness ideals and selling the possibility of sculpted physiques like theirs. This paper will analyze three celebrity fitness apps that, with star power behind them, use digital culture to sell access to the dream of the perfect celebrity body: Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataki’s Centr, Halle Berry’s ReSpin Wellness partnership with FitOn, and Carrie Underwood’s Fit52. While celebrity fitness workouts are obviously not a new phenomenon, what differentiates these apps is that they provide a consistent, refreshable stream of content for fans while at the same time granting their star owners an ongoing space for media visibility. So, this paper will examine how these apps engage in gendered discourses surrounding star bodies and conventionalized notions of beauty, but it will also situate this analysis within the larger context of the industrial production and circulation of celebrity.
---
“Working out and/as Working on Autoethnographic Methods in Fan Studies” aims to self-reflexively explore experiences of the fan body through six months of participation observation in various geek fitness programs and initiatives. Autoethnography is a common, albeit often unnamed or undertheorized, method deployed by fan scholars. Likewise, the term “aca-fan” is routinely deployed to acknowledge one’s personal investment and potential participation in the media object and fan communities they study, but fan scholars rarely theorize their own embodied identities and visceral experience of fandom in a sustained way. This project seeks to explore what might be gained or lost from these approaches. Drawing on Sarah Pink’s framing of “sensory ethnography” as well as emergent working within body studies, this presentation will both theorize my own embodied experience of fan fitness, as well as interrogate the role of affect in autoethnographic fan studies work.
Beginning with a brief survey of intersecting discourses that frame the fan body as “failing,” “unruly,” or “excessive,” and fitness as a site of reinvention and renewal, the focal point of this study will be Geek Girl Strong, a Patreon-funded fannish fitness program that offers both in person and virtual training for women. Rather than framing fitness as a site of discipline, this paper will explore what feminist and bodily pleasures might be generated when health and fitness regimens are “skinned” with geek culture references. In other words, how fan fitness might be less about “reinventing” bodies, but rather our relationship to media texts.
Bio
Elizabeth Affuso is Academic Director of Intercollegiate Media Studies at The Claremont Colleges, where she teaches Media Studies at Pitzer College. She has published in JumpCut, Flow Journal, Point of Sale (Rutgers UP, 2019), and The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (2018) She is co-editor of Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty Culture, and Identity (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), and the special issue of Film Criticism on Film and Merchandise.
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Kate Fortmueller is an assistant professor in the Department of Entertainment and Media Studies at the University of Georgia and a 9-year Pure Barre devotee. She is the author of Beneath the Stars: How actors and extras helped shape the landscape of production and Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID (both University of Texas Press, 2021).
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Kristen Fuhs is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Woodbury University. Her work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Studies, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and the Journal of Sport & Social Issues. She is the co-founder and editor of Docalogue, as well as the co-editor of the related books I Am Not Your Negro: A Docalogue (2020), Kedi: A Docalogue (2021), and Tiger King: A Docalogue (2022).
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Suzanne Scott is an Associate Professor of media studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (NYU Press, 2019) and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (2018) and Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty Culture, and Identity (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).