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You Spin Me Right Round, Baby 쮿 65 65 5 You Spin Me Right Round, Baby Resistance, Potential, and Feminist Pedagogy in Indoor Cycling Kristine Newhall Icould say I go to the gym to keep fit, reduce stress, become stronger, and stay flexible and agile—and I would not be lying. But these reasons constitute only part of my motivation; it is only part of what gets me out of bed before 6 a.m. to lift weights or steers the car toward the gym after a long day. Because like the majority of other women in the gym, I started going to lose weight. And losing weight is still part of the reason I work out—whether or not I admit that to myself every time I walk through those doors. Since my early twenties, when I began a regular workout routine, all of the reasons I just listed have accumulated, and their importance grows as I continue to go to the gym. But the process of coming to value things such as stress reduction and building strength over weight loss is a perpetual one that requires constant negotiation. This is, in part, due to the atmosphere in the gym. I wish that the gym could be a safe and supportive space with a discernible community of members, owners, managers, and instructors that encourages all types of people to engage in and succeed at physical fitness and the creation of a healthy lifestyle. I would like it to be a community that stresses participation and sets goals that contribute to a healthy lifestyle. But that has not been my experience. Whenever I enter the gym—any gym I have ever belonged to—a ticker tape of defensive thoughts, directed at real and imaginary persons, runs across my 66 쮿 My Life at the Gym mind: yes, I can press that weight; no, I am not almost done; and yes, I was actually planning on using that barbell. I sound bitter, irritated, bordering on bitchy even. And while I don’t actually say these things, I do not want to be mired down by these feelings in a space that should be encouraging positive thoughts. But when I walk into a gym to start my workout, I am acutely aware that I have entered—if not an outright misogynist—then certainly a patriarchal space, often infused with a paradoxical homophobic/homoerotic aura. Despite encountering an emphasis on a friendly and noncompetitive space, my observations suggest that this is not enough to counter the highly gendered1 atmosphere that permeates. This chapter serves as an entry point into a larger ethnographic study of the gym in which I examine the gendered atmosphere of the space and seek to better understand the power dynamics exerted by and on members—specifically female members—and how we negotiate the often conflicting messages present in the space of the gym. My conception of the space and these dynamics is informed by Bourdieu’s concept of field: a discernible, ordered space that has a history that is recognizable to its participants. Bourdieu explicitly stated that sport itself is a field—comprised of many subfields—but here I present the gym as its own field that contains a number of subfields (1984, 208–209). In contrast to institutional and recreational sport, the gym is situated in a complex intersection of public and private space, oftentimes serving as a transition or an intermediary point between what we delineate as the boundary between home and work/public life. We fit the gym into our daily lives often in a transitional moment of the day. Perhaps in the morning we leave home, go to the gym, and go to work. Or, at the end of the day, it is work, gym, home. The clothes we wear are neither work clothes nor casual. We are not performing in the same way (though we certainly are performing!) in the gym as we do at work or at home. Working out is private leisure time spent in a public space. But it is just this complexity that draws me to investigate the space that has become integral to my daily life. So I begin this study with an account of my own participation in “gym culture,” focusing on one of the activities that has helped me negotiate my own place in the gym: indoor cycling. My work here is informed by feminist scholars of sport, including Theberge, Haravon Collins, and, later, Markula...

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