My Life at the Gym: Feminist Perspectives on Community through the Body

Introduction

Introduction 쮿 1 Introduction Jo Malin I’ve lived for a long time with one kind of strength. Now I’ve developed a taste for another, for power and for perspiration. And I am not alone. —Anna Quindlen, “The Irony of Iron” As I was completing my work on the Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography with my co-editor and dear friend Victoria Boynton, I began thinking about this collection of women’s life narratives that would describe and reveal the writers’ participation in feministin fluenced communities that are grounded in bodywork and quietly exist at local gyms, fitness centers, and community pools; in dance or yoga studios and at skating rinks; and on neighborhood streets and mountainous hiking trails. At the end of each of those hectic days, as I do on most workdays, I would eagerly look forward to lifting weights or doing aerobics with my women friends at the gym, women who form a warm and sweaty community. However, at no time did I bring these two experiences together, that is, consider adding a topic entry or entries to the encyclopedia that would honor or privilege this equally important part of my life. Why didn’t we have entries such as women’s sports narratives, exercise diaries and journals, or memoirs of the gym? Why did we, as editors and also subjects of our own personal narratives and poetry, not see these particular types of stories of the body as important parts of women’s life narratives and 1 2 쮿 My Life at the Gym their autobiographical subjectivity? The life-writing texts by women that do exist mostly describe the lives of near-professional athletes, dancers, or competitors on collegiate athletic teams, written since the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 drastically changed sports for young women by focusing attention and funding on their pursuits in sports.1 Very often, my own workouts are the best part of my day. As soon as I sit down at my desk in the morning, my muscles are poised for my class at the end of the day. By mid-afternoon, I can’t wait to get there; my body craves the exercise. And, finally, at the end of the workday when I leave my office, I’m humming some of the tunes my favorite class instructors play. The moment I enter the gym, I breathe differently, wear a different expression on my face that matches my comfortable gym shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers. I eagerly anticipate the movement, the burn, the “play” of it. I also look forward to the feeling of shared enjoyment among the women I work out with and the teachers who have become models and mentors for me and my bodywork. Somewhere along the line of my nonlinear career and “life,” my work as a writer and an editor became the close companion to my life at the gym. As I sit at my keyboard and do my most abstract thinking, my body provides a simple, undeniable foundation for the work. If I ignore its muscles and bones for too long, I start to feel stiff and sore as well as isolated with my thoughts. I miss the muscle sensations, the body work but also my companions in my life at the gym. We are there to work out and to feel the results of the workout in the following days. Yet amid this physical working is a pure sense of play, the fun of throwing off professional identity for that short time with the women who move in and out of the communal space at my gym. Susan Bordo published in 1993 Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Following more than a decade after Kim Chernin’s The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, Bordo focused the attention of feminist theory and criticism on a deep cultural fear of women’s power in Western society and the growing evidence of eating disorders associated with an ever-shrinking ideal of female beauty. Bordo’s study drew irrefutable parallels between these two forces: as women gain power, expectations for feminine beauty and the pressures for women to be ever thinner increase. Today, however, women are actually growing larger, and “starving to be thin” eating disorders affect a very small minority of women in developed nations. Most current studies show that the occurrence Introduction 쮿 3 of anorexia...