Based on the theoretical contribution coming from the post-structuralist current within the field of gender studies, the present text seeks to analyze sport and fitness culture as contemporary spaces of the production of gendered bodies. For these purposes, I analyze the discourses and practices that operate in the education of female bodies, which I see as sites where several types of intervention geared toward a normative femininity emphasizing beauty, grace and harmony of forms operate. This is a representation of femininity which, once it has been taken as a model, marks all other bodies, appearances, ways of being and acting. For my discussion of these representations I present three fragments in which I analyze some of the processes through which the gendering of women´s bodies unfolds in sport and fitness culture: a) sport and fitness as sites for the gendering of bodies; b) the female body turned into spectacle; c) upsetting bodies: transgressive femininity. Through these fragments I assert that the words beauty, health and fitness culture, when directed toward women, seem to take on new meanings, related as they are to restriction, containment, selfcontrol and self-modification. Considering that in contemporary society the hygienic, beautiful, healthy and sexually appealing body is the hegemonic representation of femininity and a prime image denoting normality, bodies diverging from this type become “the other”. That is, they become bodies of excess, of corpulence, bodies that spill beyond their (proper) boundaries, in other words, contemporary deformities that can be corrected - among other means - through adherence to fitness culture: a space of virtue, of “hygienization” of bodies, appearances and subjectivities. |
