Being Fit and Looking Healthy: Young Women's and Men's Constructions of Health and Fitness

Jan Wright, Gabrielle O'Flynn, Doune Macdonald

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    133 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We drew on Foucault's notion of 'practices of the self' to examine how young people take up, negotiate, and resist the imperatives of a public health discourse concerned with the relationships between health, fitness, and the body. We did this through a discussion of the ways young women and men talk about their own and others' bodies, in the context of a number of in-depth interviews conducted for the Life Activity Project, a study of the place and meaning of physical activity in young people's lives, funded by an Australian Research Council Grant. We found that the young women and men in the study engaged the health/fitness discourse very differently: for the young men, health conflated with fitness as an embodied capacity to do physical work; and for the young women, health was a much more difficult and complex project associated with managing and monitoring practices associated with eating and exercise to maintain an 'appropriate' body shape.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)707-716
    Number of pages10
    JournalSex Roles: a journal of research
    Volume54
    Issue number9-10
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2006

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