Young Women's Fitness Practices: A Critical View

The aim of this paper is to show how young Norwegian women's fib1ess practices are interwoven with cultural ideals about how the body should look and be exercised (Young 1980; Bordo 1990; Markula 1995). Specifically, we discuss how young women at a Norwegian fitness centre deal with current societal demands for doing exercise. A central theme is how young women's performance is embedded in continuous negotiations betvveen doing fitness exercise or "staying home on the sofa." Currently, exercising seems to be regarded as an important activity for perceiving women as "clever and good." The expression "to be in shape" has high value, in contrast to the negative associations attached to being lazy or bad when they "stay on the sofa." We found that women's negotiations about exercising or not exercising are closely connected to their own categories of being good (i.e. of moral worth) or lazy. Exercising thus plays a central part in women's self-acceptance and selfesteem. Borrowing the categories, "pure" and "impure" from Douglas (1984) and Solheim (1998) we understand the performance of regular fitness exercise as a modern ritual that keeps the universe of established meanings in order (Sassatelli 1999 and 2001). In so doing, we hope to shed further light on fitness performances and their consequences.