Towards a critical geography of physical activity

Emotions and the gendered boundary‐making of an everyday exercise environment

Bibliographic Data

ID8964053
AuthorsStephanie E Coen (0000-0003-3939-8792, Department of Geography and Planning Queen's University Kingston ON Canada, corresponding author), Joyce Davidson (Department of Geography and Planning Queen's University Kingston ON Canada), Mark W Rosenberg (Department of Geography and Planning Queen's University Kingston ON Canada)
Year2019
Volume45
Issue2
Pages313-330
Publication date2019-09-18
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.12347
OpenAlexW2973792898
LanguageEN
Citations received25
References cited67

In this paper, we put forward a proposal for a critical geography of physical activity that attunes to experience while centring on the socio‐spatial processes and power structures enabling and constraining physical activity participation. Drawing on our research that explored women's and men's emotional geographies of an everyday exercise environment – the gym – in a Canadian city, we show how this approach can identify otherwise invisible environmental influences on physical activity participation. Our thematic analysis reveals that the gym environment is generative of three place‐based emotive processes of dislocation, evaluation, and sexualisation that collectively configure an unevenly gendered emotional architecture of place. Through this interstitial structure, the boundaries of localised hierarchies of masculinities and femininities become felt in ways that create tensions and anxieties, which in turn reinforce gendered boundaries on physical activity participation. Two additional themes reveal how gendered motivation and individual factors mediate negative emotional experiences. Our findings indicate that emotional geographies are one way in which gender disparities in physical activity are naturalised at the scale of the everyday exercise environment. Interventions for gender equity in physical activity would benefit from being empathetically attuned to the subtleties of place‐based experiences. More widely, bringing emotions into geographies of physical activity sheds light on the larger question of the role of place in (re)producing gendered health inequities, with implications for geographical research on health and social justice. Future critical geographical inquiry is necessary to ensure that public health interventions are grounded in the experiential realities of practising physical activity in particular places

Emotive · Experiential learning · Pedagogy · Psychological intervention · Qualitative research · Social science · Sociology · Thematic analysis · Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking · Gender Studies · Psychology · Recreation, Leisure, Wilderness Management · Social Psychology · Urban Transport and Accessibility

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