Volume 9 Issue 2

In this article, I discuss the presence and power of guilt in health and fitness discourses. As an intangible force, guilt has material—often negative—effects on women's lives; it is an active ingredient in gendered societal messages celebrating and ...

In this essay, we distinguish between fitness and sport and provide a feminist account of fitness to set the stage for analysis of the conflict between norms of femininity, heteronormativity, and fitness. We examine the medicalization of fitness to show ...

Philosophical analysis has paid scant attention to the gender inequalities women athletes face compared to the myriad ways in which social science shows that athleticism values masculinity and devalues femininity. Athletic endeavors diverging from ...

Although women have long been participants in martial sports, norms of “proper” feminine comportment can interfere with their success. Iris Marion Young's “Throwing Like a Girl” argues that, in physical activities, many women experience an inhibited ...

Many of the messages we receive about fitness can undermine well-being and promote bodily dissatisfaction and intersectional injustice. To address this, I argue in this essay that we should broaden the goals of fitness to include preparation for life ...

In this essay, I examine the question of whether one can ascribe to ideologies of fitness and feminism as a rhetorical problem of identification. Using Burkean notions of consubstantiality to illustrate conflicted identity frameworks within narratives of ...

Feminists have criticized self-defense training, arguing that by focusing on the targets of sexual assault, it constitutes a form of victim blaming, and that it is particularly ineffective against the most common forms of sexual assault. We argue here ...

Bruce Grierson's What Makes Olga Run? and Margaret Webb's Older Faster Stronger investigate the science of aging and exercise, the place of physical competition in women's lives, and the social backdrop against which women strive for personal goals as ...