During the last decades of the 1900s, a commercial health industry transformed a previous Swedish public health regime characterised by strong state control. Running and exercising at gyms are now widely practiced, and new products, diets and trends constantly appear. Part of this is a booming market of health- and fitness magazines, and this article examines the representation of healthy femininity in one of the more popular titles on the Swedish market, iForm, during the years 1987, 1997 and 2007. An ideology of healthism has been identified as salient to neoliberal late-modern society, where health and a fit body are important lifestyle markers and metaphors for the good life. This includes historically new gender ideals – the well-trained female body and the appearance-oriented man – closely associated with diet and exercise practices. This article discusses the “fit” woman as a historically new ideal and engages in the feminist debate on how to understand her: is she a norm-breaking emancipatory figure, or a post-feminist celebration of the strong individual communicating the message that there is no longer a need for feminist struggle? The study indicates that a discourse of individualism and personal responsibility grows increasingly prominent during the interrogated time period. Sport and play are replaced by more “rational” forms of exercise, for example in the gym. The very definition of health becomes more narrow; areas such as sex and relationships have disappeared from the magazine in 2007, as has more general educational articles on the body. Instead, the focus on diet and exercise has increased. Furthermore, the study of iForm shows that the models used to represent “health” are conventionally beautiful, smiling, white and predominately thin rather than obviously muscular. This, I conclude, limit the destabilizing potential of the “fit” woman in iForm.
In this article, I discuss sport and physical activities as a field of empirical investigation for feminist cultural studies with a potential to contribute to theorizing the body, gender and difference. Sport has, historically, served to legitimize and reinforce the gender dichotomy by making men "masculine" through developing physical strength and endurance, while women generally have been excluded or directed towards activities fostering a "feminine suppleness". The recent case of runner Caster Semenya, who was subjected to extensive gender tests, demonstrates how athletic superiority and "masculine" attributes in women still today stir public emotions and evoke cultural anxieties of gender blurring. But the rigid gender boundaries have also made sport a field of transgressions. From the "Soviet amazon" of the Cold War, transgressions in sport have publicly demonstrated, but also pushed, the boundaries of cultural understandings of gender. Gender verification tests have exposed a continuum of bodies that cannot easily be arranged into two stable, separate gender categories.In spite of the so called "corporeal turn", sport is still rather neglected within cultural studies and feminist research. This appears to be linked to a degradation, and fear, of the body and of the risk that women -once again -be reduced to biology and physical capacity. But studies of sport might further develop understandings of the processes through which embodied knowledge and subjectivity is produced, in a way that overcomes the split between corporeality and discursive regimes or representations. Furthermore, with the fitness upsurge since the 1980s, the athletic female body has emerged as a cultural ideal and a rare validation of "female masculinity" (Halberstam) in popular culture. This is an area well-suited for "third wave" feminist cultural studies that are at ease with complexities and contradictions: the practices and commercialized images of the sportswoman are potentially both oppressive and empowering.
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