Body management and the quest for performative health

Thualagant, Nicole

doi:10.1057/sth.2015.28

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…2014: 38). Here, there are similarities with Thualagent's (: 193) ‘bodywork’ as a ‘will to more, or better health’ in the connection of active embodiment with the individualisation of responsibility – embodied practices simultaneously produce anxieties and risk reducing benefits.…”

Section: Translating Individual Health Needs Into Running Responsibilmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…We conceptualise the ‘experience’ of health practices via Foucault's () understanding of the interrelationship between knowledge, ‘types of normativity’ and subjectivity that are constituted materially and discursively within the conditions of advanced liberalism (Rose ). In order to articulate our focus on the labour of active embodiment, we also draw on Thualagant's () notion of ‘bodywork’ in the contemporary moment. Where parkrun resonates with Thualagant's study is in positioning health as performative (Kickbusch ) whereby bodywork becomes the corporeal means through which the process of subjectification plays out as ‘the way a human being turns him – or herself – into a subject’ (Foucault : 11).…”

Section: Situating Parkrun As a ‘Health Practice’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Where parkrun resonates with Thualagant's study is in positioning health as performative (Kickbusch ) whereby bodywork becomes the corporeal means through which the process of subjectification plays out as ‘the way a human being turns him – or herself – into a subject’ (Foucault : 11). Moreover, bodywork involves ‘not only the will to act for a healthy body but also as the will to act for a more healthy body’ [emphasis added] (Thualagant : 200).…”

Section: Situating Parkrun As a ‘Health Practice’mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Exploring parkrun as a social context for collective health practices: running with and against the moral imperatives of health responsibilisation

Wiltshire

Fullagar

Stevinson

2017

Sociology Health & Illness

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Critiques of public health policies to reduce physical inactivity have led to calls for practice-led research and the need to reduce the individualising effects of health promotion discourse. The purpose of this paper is to examine how parkrun - an increasingly popular, regular, community-based 5 km running event - comes to be understood as a 'health practice' that allows individuals to enact contemporary desires for better health in a collective social context. Taking a reflexive analytical approach, we use interview data from a geographically diverse sample of previously inactive parkrun participants (N = 19) to explore two themes. First, we argue that parkrun offers a space for 'collective bodywork' whereby participants simultaneously enact personal body projects while they also experience a sense of being 'all in this together' which works to ameliorate certain individualising effects of health responsibilisation. Second, we examine how parkrun figures as a health practice that makes available the subject position of the 'parkrunner'. In doing so, parkrun enables newly active participants to negotiate discourses of embodied risk to reconcile the otherwise paradoxical experience of being an 'unfit-runner'. Findings contribute to sociological understandings of health and illness through new insights into the relation between health practices and emerging physical cultures, such as parkrun.

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Section: Translating Individual Health Needs Into Running Responsibilmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Situating Parkrun As a ‘Health Practice’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Situating Parkrun As a ‘Health Practice’mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Exploring parkrun as a social context for collective health practices: running with and against the moral imperatives of health responsibilisation

Wiltshire

Fullagar

Stevinson

2017

Sociology Health & Illness

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“…Countless modern practices override the localism of face-to-face forms when we have organized and calculated expert systems that produce technologies and disciplinary power (e.g., Thualagant, 2016). However, as Ziguras has emphasized (2004, p. 127), these do not replace the face-to-face level of integration and constitution of embodiment.…”

Section: Alternative Treatments Considered As Enhancement Technologiementioning

confidence: 99%

Striving for self-improvement: alternative medicine considered as technologies of enhancement

Pedersen

2017

Soc Theory Health

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The notion of medical enhancement technologies has drawn attention to optimization techniques within the health area (Rose, 2007). However, this notion has evolved at the level of governmental programmes, with very little attention directed towards people's own practices. Using a social scientific body of knowledge about enhancement technologies and a Foucauldian analytical framework, this article explores how users engage with alternative medicine. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Danish users and observations of their treatment sessions, the article demonstrates how they embark on a voyage of discovery with the body to enhance their own selves and bodily resources. The discussion centres on Nikolas Rose's approach to medical enhancement technologies and Foucault's notion of 'technologies of the self'. A wider field of tension is outlined in which embodied alternative treatment practices play a role in various modalities of transforming and controlling bodies and selves. It is argued that such practices can be conceived of as enhancement technologies at the users' level by showing how they not only concentrate on treatment and body maintenance, but also foster the enabling processes of changing habits, preferences, and attitudes, and creating a subjective sense of their bodies.

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“…Spotify has identified health, exercise and wellness activities as a key area for the production of meaning to service their investment strategy. These are some of the more prominent targets for such interventions due to their centrality to many users’ sense of self and body projects and their association with intense physical and emotional experiences assumed by Spotify to be strongly related to the potential for persuasion (Spotify Advertising, n.d.c; Thualagant, 2016; Wiltshire et al, 2018). However, these are crucial aspects of individuals’ and groups’ sense of self, self-expression, identity and broadly corporeal being in the world.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spotify as a technology for integrating health, exercise and wellness practices into financialised capitalism

Till

2023

Big Data & Society

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Spotify dominates the audio streaming industry and offers an almost limitless library of music and other ‘sounds’. They have recently made various interventions into health, exercise and wellness with the development of curated and personalised playlists focused on activities such as running, weightlifting and meditation and guided workouts interspersed with algorithmically generated playlists. This article suggests that the company are developing new means of datafying health, exercise and wellness practices such as monitoring activities, heart rate, mood and broadly the rhythms and tempos of their lives. While this is presented as beneficial to users to provide a more personalised experience, analysis of patent applications, financial statements and promotional materials targeting advertisers and investors suggest other objectives. Audio consumption is combined with the newly datafied activities to ‘bundle’ users into ‘audience commodities’ to be sold to advertisers. Furthermore, such innovations, and the potential to attract advertisers, form the materials through which Spotify construct stories to potential investors about the future profitability, or at least growth in market value, of the company essential for firms integrated into ‘financialised capitalism’. This represents a further opening up of aspects of everyday lives to commercial exploitation through datafication and contributes to an attempt to reposition health-related practices as assets which can be packaged for investment portfolios. The publications analysed in this article demonstrate some of the ways in which Spotify seek to both monitor and shape practices of users to make them more amenable to financialisation.

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Body management and the quest for performative health

Cited by 6 publications

References 16 publications

Exploring parkrun as a social context for collective health practices: running with and against the moral imperatives of health responsibilisation

Exploring parkrun as a social context for collective health practices: running with and against the moral imperatives of health responsibilisation

Striving for self-improvement: alternative medicine considered as technologies of enhancement

Spotify as a technology for integrating health, exercise and wellness practices into financialised capitalism

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