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COPYRIGHT 2005 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
NORTH AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE CAN BE CHARACTERIZED BY ITS obsession with fitness and exercise. American consumers spend billions of dollars annually on exercise products (Howell) as diverse as health club memberships, whey supplements, yoga videos, and zip-up sneakers. Cultural institutions encourage this focus on exercise; in the media, a dramatic increase can be seen in the number of exercise articles written for women's magazines over the last thirty years (Wiseman et al.), and specialty magazines and TV programs targeting specific exercise segments have proliferated (Featherstone). In addition, government exercise and health propaganda has been widespread (Leepson).
Learning why exercise has become such an important part of modern North American culture has proceeded along many fronts. Researchers have examined individual motivations to exercise by using beliefs and attitudes (e.g., Jayanti and Burns; Williams et al.), normative health models (e.g., Moorman and Matulich), and social comparison theory (e.g., Frederick, Havitz, and Shaw; Gulas and McKeage). At the group level, researchers have examined exercise differences based on age, gender, and ethnicity (e.g., Duke; Howze, Smith, and DiGilio; Jackson and Henderson). At the institutional level, researchers have started to explore the role that the media plays in presenting different views of health (Andsager and Powers) and fitness (Duncan and Messner). However, these pockets of research in social psychology, health, sociology, communication, and sports marketing are difficult to integrate into a coherent story about the way that exercise permeates our culture. Although Thompson and Hirschman's poststructuralist model of the body is most apt at illuminating several aspects of exercise culture, their focus on the overall "socialized body" leaves other important exercise elements in the shadows.
This article introduces a framework to help us understand exercise as a modern cultural phenomenon. I will argue that Arthur Frank's typology of "body use in action" can be applied to exercise consumption situations to explain individuals' exercise behaviors and identities. In addition, the typology helps us to understand how advertising and the media exert pressure on exercise consumers and instill complex cultural meaning in exercise products. In-depth interviews with six exercisers support the usefulness of the typology and provide insight for its application in the real world.
Because Frank's typology and its application to exercise, advertising, and the real-life behavior of individuals are intertwined, I will describe the interview method before presenting the typology and situating it in relevant literature. This outline avoids needless repetition of main ideas and integrates conceptual theory, previous empirical research, and key support from the interviews.
Method
Three male and three female exercisers who were graduate students at a southwestern university were asked to participate in in-depth interviews to discuss their exercise behavior. To be eligible, participants had to meet the minimum government standard for regular physical activity, defined as a half-hour of light to moderate exercise at least five times per week ("Most Americans Fail"). To ensure natural responses, students who had no specialized knowledge of exercise, fitness, marketing, or advertising were selected. Participants were between the ages of 23 and 30, had body weights in a normal range for their heights, and exercised between four and nine hours per week at weightlifting, aerobics, racquetball, exercise machines, basketball, softball, jogging, in-line skating, and walking.
Participants met with the author individually and were asked to describe several aspects of their exercise behavior, including times when exercise went well and went poorly, the reasons they liked and disliked exercise, and their preferences regarding working out alone or with others, and with men or women. They also were asked to describe how they felt when they could not exercise, the products they needed in order to exercise, and an individual who did not exercise. Finally, informants were asked to articulate why they thought they exercised. The interviews were semistructured; questions were open-ended, and participants were allowed to lead the discussion to topics of interest to them. Each interview took between one and two hours to complete.
Responses to the interview questions were taped and transcribed. Responses were classified into themes by the author using a grounded-theory method in which categories were allowed to emerge from the data (Strauss and Corbin). These themes were then compared with the characteristics of Frank's typology in an attempt to find support for or evidence against the usefulness of this cultural theory to explain exercise behavior. Finally, each participant's entire set of responses was examined individually in order to place him or her into one of the four quadrants of Frank's typology, as described in the next section of the article.
Clearly, based on this method, the qualitative results of these interviews are not intended be generalized to all exercisers. Instead, the interviews provide a litmus test of whether this cultural model can be useful in facilitating understanding of real-world consumers. The interviews revealed that all informants take their exercise behavior seriously. This seriousness is evidenced by the total amount of time that these busy individuals devote to exercising, and also by their explanations of how they feel when they cannot exercise. Participants stated that when they were unable to work out, they felt frustrated, irritable, grumpy, mean, out of sorts, stressed, tired, sluggish, and miserable. The importance of exercise for these individuals makes them good informants regarding the values and expectations that surround exercise in our society. In addition, these participants are poised to become part of the most lucrative market for exercise products--defined as consumers between the ages of 25 and 54 who exercise at least three times per week and who earn $35,000 or more per year (Grieves)--making them of particular interest in a study focused on the culture of consumption.
Frank's Typology of Body Use in Action
Frank developed his typology of body use in action to create a sociological explanation of the way that individuals use their bodies to react to cultural forces. Frank combines accepted social and cultural theories of the body into a general model that identifies four body "types" that each react in a standardized manner to the world around them. Frank's discussion of his model remains at an abstract and conceptual level; he does not attempt to integrate empirical evidence into his theory.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Frank proposed that there are four ways that individuals use their bodies to react to social pressure: (a) disciplined bodies act through regimentation, (b) mirroring bodies act through consumption, (c) dominating bodies act through force, and (d) communicative bodies act through recognition. These types of actions differ on four dimensions: predictability of control, production of desire, association with others, and association between the self and the corporeal body. Figure 1 outlines the four body types and their relation to the four dimensions.
Frank does not apply his typology to any specific cultural context, including exercise. When he provides examples, they are far-ranging and include the body actions of soldiers, dancers, and medieval holy women. Despite this, I believe that Frank's typology shows great promise as a framework to organize literature regarding the culture of exercise, to classify individuals into exercise identity segments, and to explore the relationship between advertising and the meanings of exercise products. Each of Frank's body types will be examined in turn, with reference to these three areas.
The Disciplined Body
Frank describes the disciplined body as lacking; the disciplined body is never good enough. To combat these feelings of inferiority, the disciplined body controls its actions through predictable regimentation that reduces, but does not eliminate, its sense of lack. The disciplined body turns its focus and action inward, and thus is monadic--that is, it is concerned only with itself and acts in isolation. The regimen that this body type follows also forces the disciplined body to become dissociated from itself--for example, the body's hunger and pain are felt as separate from the self.
It is possible to describe exercisers in terms that are similar to Frank's disciplined body. The fitness boom of the 1980s corresponds to a perceived lack of social control in America (Stein). Individuals share psychocultural anxiety--feelings that include anxiousness, self-doubt, and insecurity--as a response to ongoing and rapid social change (Gillett and White). Individuals feel a lack of external self-control; they are helpless in the face of global issues such as war and poverty (Stein). Consequently, individuals turn inward; if they cannot control and change their world, they will control and change their own bodies through exercise. Exercisers create a personal, individual, monadic solution to life's problems (Klein). Many popular forms of exercise are monadic in nature. In group aerobics classes or weight rooms, participants have little interaction with each other; they work out in unison, but not together.
Another...
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