Fitness culture: gyms and the commercialisation of discipline and fun

Largely organized via commercial relations of some kind, gyms are key sites for studying consumption and subjectivity in contemporary society. Gym-goers are typically addressed as individuals who take control of both the market and themselves. Through a variety of qualitative sources – ethnographies, interviews and discourse analysis – this book, now in paperback, explores how consumers and producers collaborate in the production of the fitness scene. It examines how individuals become fitness participants, at locally sustained relationships, the framing of discipline as fun, the meanings attached to the idea of fitness and the negotiation of broader body ideals, to provide a critical discussion of fitness as lived consumer culture. Choice is revealed as a process, rather than a cost-benefit decision; a transformative, ongoing practice rather than an accomplished, rational calculation. Consumption is revealed as an ambivalent practice, with consumers increasingly asked to be active producers of cultural forms that are nevertheless largely circulated and managed by producers who need to consume much of the very same sort they produce.