Athletic Intruders: Ethnographic Research on Women, Culture, and Exercise

3. Postmodern Aerobics: Contradiction and Resistance

INTRODUCTION I was first introduced to aerobics in 1987 when I arrived in the United States. My initial assignment as a University graduate assistant was to teach aerobics classes in the undergraduate physical activities program. Soon, I became an avid aerobicizer myself. Being interested in the latest knowledge about this exercise form, I paid attention to different sources of information about the most current trends of fitness. For example, women’s magazines seemed to offer a variety of “workouts” aimed at helping women with their fitness pursuits. These workouts, however, were geared around weight loss and restructuring the body. I was guaranteed to downsize my body through “no-fail diet/fitness programs.” Or, I was promised to get in the “best shape ever” through toning programs that built sexy, firm muscles fast or honed those troublesome hips into a sleeker form. The exercise videos seemed to work on a similar premise. A myriad of video instructors advised me how to obtain “buns of steel” or “sculpt” my abs, hips, and thighs through “Fat Burning Workouts.” If magazine articles and videotapes advocated fitness for better body, what did the research say about the meaning of the women’s fitness movement? C H A P T E R T H R E E ‫ﱰﱯ‬ Postmodern Aerobics: Contradiction and Resistance PIRKKO MARKULA 53 Much of the research within my own area of interest, the socio-cultural study of physical activity, centered on women’s sport. Many scholars demonstrated that sport could be a site of resistance for women in an otherwise masculine society and that women transformed sport to correspond to their own needs and values (Birrell and Richter 1987; Birrell and Theberge 1994; Boutilier and SanGiovanni 1983; Varpalotai 1987; Wheatley 1988). In the late 1980s only a few studies, however, examined the role aerobics played in women’s lives. Some researchers were interested in the ways aerobics was represented through media. Nancy Theberge (1987) and Margaret MacNeill (1988) analyzed how television constructed the image of aerobics. Theberge (1987) argued that the women’s fitness movement was a sexualizing rather than an empowering experience for women. The goal of women’s fitness classes, according to Theberge, was not to develop physical strength or even fitness, but to increase women’s sexual attractiveness and appeal. Theberge (1987:195) concluded that such activities as dancercise, jazzersize, and the television fitness program 20 Minute Workout, “are developing women’s potential in the sexual marketplace, not in athletics: the suggestive poses assumed by activity leaders, and breathy voices exhorting participants, convey images of dominance and submission.” Thus, Theberge asserted that, in many ways, the fitness movement perpetuated women’s continued oppression by the dominant ideology of masculinity. Similarly, MacNeill (1988) reaffirmed that 20 Minute Workout, a popular televised fitness program at the time, was penetrated with influences of dominant ideology of masculinity. She claimed that although this program symbolized women’s increased opportunities to be physically active, it also reproduced patterns that subjugated women: Physical activity, yes, but on a form that stresses preoccupation with beauty, glamour, and sex appeal as status symbols. . . . Thus, women move back into positions of inferiority . . . by participating in aerobics less for reasons of fitness and personal freedom and more for reasons that reaffirm the patriarchal notions of femininity (i.e. to lose weight, to improve sex appeal). (1988:205–6) MacNeill, like Theberge, pointed out that 20 Minute Workout emphasized sexuality rather than the proper and safe exercise forms. This objectifies, according to MacNeill (1988:208), the image of the active female body into the sexually active female body and “tends to fabricate pornographic and erotic myths about how activity is to be experienced and what an active women should look like” (206). She concluded that such a presentation of the female body in motion reinforced the patriarchal subordination of women. 54 PIRKKO MARKULA This research verified my own observations: the popular media advocated aerobics as a means to improve one’s appearance. Because of this emphasis on body shape, the researchers added, aerobics sexualized and degraded women and promoted patriarchal hegemony through its practice. This view of aerobics as a “body shaper,” did not, however, correspond completely with my experience in aerobics. Regardless of the numerous hours I have spent with my women friends complaining about my body shape, and despite my occasional urges to perform reversed push-ups in vague hopes to tone some of that flab under...