Healthy returns.

During recent years, research in health geography has engaged with peoples' health as well as diseases, an interest reflected by therapeutic geographies and geographies of public health. At the same time, studies have focused on micro-contexts such as the body, reflected in geographies of diseased and disadvantaged bodies. However, little research has combined elements of the two approaches and engaged in research on active healthy bodies and fitness. Equally the sub-discipline of sports geography provides little insight into fitness activities because this research has tended to focus on elite sports, their fans and facilities. Given these contexts, a detailed case study is presented to demonstrate the potential for geographical research on fitness. Through an observational study of a specialist gym facility, the study investigates how bodybuilding culture and place are co-produced. Indeed, the gym provides a narrative resource and a crucial setting for individual body projects and collective body culture which involve social conflicts, cohesions and hierarchies, illegal and potentially health harming activities, as well as personal comfort and therapeutic attachments. It is argued that beyond this case study, many activities crosscut health maintenance, or conversely risks to health, and the enjoyment of sports and fitness. A greater emphasis therefore at the sub-disciplinary interface of sports and health geography on hybrid 'fitness geographies' may help researchers towards a more comprehensive understanding, and coverage, of health issues in society.

Fitness Centers↗

PubMed2004

Inscribing healthification: governance, risk, surveillance and the subjects and spaces of fitness and health.

This paper considers the interface between the hygienic geographies of a fitness and exercise space and the discourses of risk and subjectivity in this era of the new public health. Using an analysis of space, power and the subject, the paper assesses the ways in which subjects govern themselves and others in public health spaces through an intensification of surveillance, in order to ensure health and safety compliance. In this paper, first, I introduce the locker room as a place of health and hygiene. Second, I set out the wider context of the inscription of health on spaces and subjects. Third, I examine the relationship between discourses of risk and subjectivity and how risk discourses are fundamental to the fabrication of subjects and social life. The paper then examines, more specifically, techniques of self- and other-governance that help to inscribe and prescribe the new public health in locker rooms. Drawing on the findings of a spatial and ethnographic case study of an urban, Canadian university locker room, I conclude that the macro- and micro-politics and economics of policing public health require both the regulation of bodies and the participation of active, health-conscious citizens in order to keep (western) neo-liberal imperatives of health in place.

Fitness Centers↗