Training practices, dietary choices, and resistance strategies in the gym

Abstract

In this paper I analyse the different ways in which sport and diet are put together in the context of fitness in order to construct a concept of physical ‘fitness’ that also takes on moral connotations. Drawing on the results of an ethnographic study in a Northern Italian gym, I will show how gym-goers elaborate social codes and meanings through training and specific dietary plans that are not exclusively normative – results of notions forged elsewhere: market, neoliberal ethics, common sense, impersonal power embedded by acting subjects – but as spaces of reappropriation of the body that enable processes of subjectivation and meaning attribution that sometimes resist dominant ones. In particular, I will analyse the processes of re-subjectification of certain rhetorics and practices that shape gym culture in order to achieve a state of ‘wellbeing’ that comes from learning the ability to ‘feel the body’.