Body Shopping

Reconfiguring geographies of fitness

Bibliographic Data

ID8069409
AuthorsDerek P Mccormack (0000-0002-4228-6807, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume6
Issue2
Pages155-177
Publication date1999-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGender Place & Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0966-369X • E-ISSN: 1360-0524
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09663699925088
OpenAlexW2027471734
LanguageEN
Citations received31
References cited45

This article critically interrogates the representational politics implicated in the metaphorical and material production of geographies of embodied fitness. It is intended as a contribution to the growing critical appreciation of the ways in which humans and non-humans are worked together in the production and reproduction of cyborg or hybrid geographies. It therefore mobilises the word fitness in the literal sense of a bodily state, but also in the metaphorical sense of how diverse 'things' come to fit together, how collections of bodies and machines come to be intelligible as inhabitable worlds. But, importantly, this article also argues that this sort of analysis is inadequate if it fails to engage with the ways that the production of human-machinic hybrids is also bound up in the enactment of geographies of ontological purity, a purity that is diffracted, at least in part, through categories such as gender and race. To illustrate this, the paper briefly outlines the ways in which the fitness equipment manufacturer NordicTrack attempts to produce geographies of fitness. Specifically, it suggests that while these geographies muddy the clarity of the boundaries between categories such as male/female, human/non-human, nature/culture, at the same time they work as forces of purification, subtly and not so subtly reinforcing these very same dualisms

Aesthetics · Art · CLARITY · Embodied cognition · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Production (economics · Race (biology · Reproduction · Sociology · Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Ecology

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