TY - JOUR
T1 - Being Fit and Looking Healthy
T2 - Young Women's and Men's Constructions of Health and Fitness
AU - Wright, Jan
AU - O'Flynn, Gabrielle
AU - Macdonald, Doune
N1 - Imported on 12 Apr 2017 - DigiTool details were: Journal title (773t) = Sex Roles. ISSNs: 0360-0025;
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
U2 - 10.1007/s11199-006-9036-9
DO - 10.1007/s11199-006-9036-9
M3 - Article
SN - 0360-0025
VL - 54
SP - 707
EP - 716
JO - Sex Roles: a journal of research
JF - Sex Roles: a journal of research
IS - 9-10
ER -