Roberta Sassatelli,Fitness Culture: Gyms and the Commercialization of Discipline and Fun,Houndsmills: Palgrave,2010;224 pp. £55.00. ISBN 9780230507494

Roberta Sassatelli, Fitness Culture: Gyms and the Commercialization of Discipline and Fun, Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2010; 224 pp. £55.00. ISBN 9780230507494

Once one gets past the decidedly odd cover art, Fitness Culture provides a thoughtful analysis of the lived fitness experience of gym goers in two European countries. Combining in-depth interviews with patrons and trainers, and participant observation at a variety of health clubs in Italy and Great Britain, Sassatelli provides insight into the experiences of club members, specifically how individuals understand their fitness participation. Rejecting cultural dupe models, so prevalent in consumerist analyses of fitness, Sassatelli provides a comprehensive analysis of the range of complicated and sometimes contradictory meanings that participants use to understand their continued participation in a commodified fitness culture.

Sassatelli begins by highlighting the increasing role of the fit body as a marker of status, and cites a growing body of literature that has established the physical body as central to expressions of identity. Sassatelli notes the importance of these other works, but also argues that an important piece of the puzzle is missing. Building on Bourdieu, Sassatelli notes that her emphasis is ‘on the negotiation of distinction rather than on objectified distinctions’. For example, she observed a myriad of ways that participants appropriated and transformed the gym and fitness classes to meet a multitude of social needs and the plethora of ways people negotiated and redefined ‘status’. Sassatelli observes: ‘To reinforce the distance of fitness culture from the superficiality of consumerism, fitness fans typically choose either an experiential or an empowerment rhetoric: they thus justify their practices based either on experiences of involvement and fun or on their capacity to negotiate body ideals via bodywork’ (p. 175).

Sassatelli demonstrates the complications that ensue as the role of consumerism becomes more central to the experience of constructing and understanding the fit body rather than past conceptions of citizenship and productivity. She writes: ‘The fit body is linked not to the citizen or the worker, but to the sovereign consumer, a new sacred personal characterized as autonomous and choosy’ (p.21). How consumerism infuses embodied experiences of fitness, and the negotiations made by fitness patrons, is central to her analysis. Sassatelli challenges scholars to look beyond perceptions of fitness consumers as simply negotiating physical capital, or as passive cultural dupes, to understand the embodied lived fitness experiences of current and former gym goers. Sassatelli focuses on a number of factors that shape that experience, including the space, trainers and other participants. For example, she employs George Ritzer’s (1993) theory of McDonaldization to interrogate the increasing standardization of personal training experiences and contrasts it to the perceived role of trainer in humanizing and authenticating experience for clients.

Sassaetelli further explores the layered complications to gym as a space in which the politics of visibility, of being looked at and looking, are negotiated and infused with a myriad of meanings. For example, she highlights the success in mastering movement in the mirror as ‘a victory against one’s own feelings of inadequacy and ceremonial exposure’ (p. 117). She further notes the ways that less-able participants may negotiate status through humor, comradely interactions and appropriate enactment of other behavioral norms, meaning that the fit body alone does not dictate status and centrality to the scene.

Sassatelli’s discussion of the dichotomy of discipline and fun/leisure in the fitness experience is particularly interesting. She notes that participants simultaneously understand their participation as a disciplined practice that enhances other areas of their lives, and as a leisure time activity. This tension between play and the goal orientation of exercise receives considerable attention. Yet, Sassatelli notes the experience of patrons is that of ‘holistic sensation’ or a mix of ‘action and awareness’ (p. 122). She further points to the potentially meditative functions of exercise and the heightened sense of embodiment participants reported as requiring further investigation.

Sassatelli hits upon the conundrum of living in consumer culture − the tension between the potential benefits of fitness and the role of fitness in systems of stratification and consumerism. Sassatelli is particularly critical of the naturalization of fitness knowledge as based on science and health, when many of the practices prescribed by trainers are more appearance focused. Sassatelli further notes the privilege inherent in the fitness experiences, as participants noted a host of positive benefits from energy, functionality, participation in a community and appearance-related results. She highlights how fitness and the fit body are the result of other privileged aspects of identity that make fitness more possible for some. She further notes how goals tend to conform to dominant cultural views of gender, and the current pathologization of fat.

Employing the work of Foucault (1983) she identifies the notion of ‘fitness’ as ‘a claim to truth’ that is viewed as culturally legitimate. Yet, the machinations of power are revealed in the tension between fitness as a project, and the naturalization of the fit body and the authenticity granted to fitness as a body project. Of gyms she writes, ‘they supply an interstice, integral to urban living and environment, where “the body” may be woken up to its nature.’ (p. 174) Expanding on these issues, Sassatelli notes that the search for authenticity described by participants emerges precisely at a time when the authentic has been debunked. She suggests that bodywork rests at the intersection of the body/self dualism and calls for an expansion of challenges to naturalism as a construct in which relations of power circulate.

Sassatelli demonstrates that to disavow the natural body is not to dismiss, but rather centralize the experience of embodiment. For example, as in other studies, she encountered the enactment of machine metaphors that emerge in stark contrast to the sense of vulnerability of bodily failure. Sassatelli found that participants’ reported fitness gave them a sense of control and enhanced their ability to meet the demands of a changing society and increasing economic vulnerability. It further gave them the moral boost because of the cultural legitimacy of this effort.

Sassatelli concludes with a discussion of the gym user as a ‘good consumer’ and the construction of exercise as something they ‘needed to do.’ She challenges scholars to consider participants as co-producers of the fitness scene, not simply consumers buying into an experience. In other words: ‘Fitness fans therefore help to legitimize fitness culture by realizing a particularly normative view of subjectivity.’ Here lies the primary contribution of this work, to challenge scholars to understand how participants in the social world are part of the negotiation of meaning and privilege of the consumerist fit body.