Body Panic: Gender, Health, and the Selling of Fitness

Dworkin and Wachs analyze 10 years of health and fitness magazines to uncover how bodies are made in popular culture

Are you ripped? Do you need to work on your abs? Do you know your ideal body weight? Your body fat index? Increasingly, Americans are being sold on a fitness ideal—not just thin but toned, not just muscular but cut—that is harder and harder to reach. In Body Panic, Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs ask why. How did these particular body types come to be “fit”? And how is it that having an unfit, or “bad,” body gets conflated with being an unfit, or “bad,” citizen?

Dworkin and Wachs head to the newsstand for this study, examining ten years worth of men’s and women’s health and fitness magazines to determine the ways in which bodies are “made” in today’s culture. They dissect the images, the workouts, and the ideology being sold, as well as the contemporary links among health, morality, citizenship, and identity that can be read on these pages. While women and body image are often studied together, Body Panic considers both women’s and men’s bodies side-by-side and over time in order to offer a more in-depth understanding of this pervasive cultural trend.