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Body Panic: Gender, Health, and the Selling of Fitness
Dworkin and Wachs analyze 10 years of health and fitness magazines to uncover how bodies are made in popular culture
Are you ripped? Do you need to work on your abs? Do you know your ideal body weight? Your body fat index? Increasingly, Americans are being sold on a fitness ideal―not just thin but toned, not just muscular but cut―that is harder and harder to reach. In Body Panic , Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs ask why. How did these particular body types come to be “fit”? And how is it that having an unfit, or “bad,” body gets conflated with being an unfit, or “bad,” citizen?
Dworkin and Wachs head to the newsstand for this study, examining ten years worth of men’s and women’s health and fitness magazines to determine the ways in which bodies are “made” in today’s culture. They dissect the images, the workouts, and the ideology being sold, as well as the contemporary links among health, morality, citizenship, and identity that can be read on these pages. While women and body image are often studied together, Body Panic considers both women’s and men’s bodies side-by-side and over time in order to offer a more in-depth understanding of this pervasive cultural trend.
Are you ripped? Do you need to work on your abs? Do you know your ideal body weight? Your body fat index? Increasingly, Americans are being sold on a fitness ideal―not just thin but toned, not just muscular but cut―that is harder and harder to reach. In Body Panic , Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs ask why. How did these particular body types come to be “fit”? And how is it that having an unfit, or “bad,” body gets conflated with being an unfit, or “bad,” citizen?
Dworkin and Wachs head to the newsstand for this study, examining ten years worth of men’s and women’s health and fitness magazines to determine the ways in which bodies are “made” in today’s culture. They dissect the images, the workouts, and the ideology being sold, as well as the contemporary links among health, morality, citizenship, and identity that can be read on these pages. While women and body image are often studied together, Body Panic considers both women’s and men’s bodies side-by-side and over time in order to offer a more in-depth understanding of this pervasive cultural trend.
235 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 7, 2021
super duper interesting
October 29, 2017
Looks at the ways healthism and body imagery is constructed within a neoliberal frame so that health is the individual responsibility of the consumer, leaving out of the "frame" any notions of collective responsibility for the availability of healthy food, the construction of walkable cities, and work patterns that allow for sufficient leisure time for exercise.
September 13, 2017
I have nothing particularly interesting to say about this book apart from that the authors have too many names between them, cannot write, and think in academic clichés. Over the last decade I read so many books about the human body that I guess I became a tough person to please in this area...
April 11, 2011
My advisor is a rockstar.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews