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Training Bodies, Building Status: Negotiating Gender and Age Differences in the U.S. Fitness Industry

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Abstract

What role does the body play in facilitating interaction across status differences? Whereas previous scholarly work has focused on “roles” and “specialized knowledge,” I investigate how bodies, appearances, and physical abilities are also consequential in these exchanges through the concept of “bodily capital.” Coined by Bourdieu, bodily capital provides a way to understand why individuals invest time, energy, and resources into their bodies, and what they expect to receive in return. As a concept, bodily capital is necessarily broad as it encompasses a variety of forms, including athletic prowess, attractiveness, physique, muscle tone/strength, agility, and other modes of embodiment. Because the body is integral to a variety of status distinction-making processes, individuals invest in and exchange bodily capital to increase their relative status in specific fields. Drawing on interviews with 26 personal trainers and 25 clients, as well as more than one year of participant observation, I find that trainers and clients use bodily capital to negotiate gender and age differences, either by re-arranging interactional power dynamics or resisting stereotypes. The type of bodily capital that allows for such negotiations to take place, however, is the hegemonic thin-toned ideal—a classed and largely raced form of bodily capital that has purchase in the U.S. fitness industry. Although individuals in the study were able to use this form of capital to enable successful cross-status interactions, doing so reified the dominance of middle-class, white bodily aesthetics. Thus, while bodily capital may challenge some status hierarchies, it reinforces others.

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Notes

  1. “Fitness Central” and all individuals’ names used are pseudonyms.

  2. Belfanti and Giusberti (2000) argue that fashion became the primary way to reinforce class divisions through appearance, particularly when second-hand clothing merchants began selling a wider variety of colors, fabrics, and styles to classes outside the nobility.

  3. Bourdieu uses “bodily capital” (Bourdieu 1984) and “physical capital” (Bourdieu 1978) interchangeably in his work; both terms function as synonyms for “embodied cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1986). Although some theorists have utilized the “physical capital” concept (Shilling 1993; Maguire 2008), I use the term bodily capital due to its more immediate corporeal connotations, and to avoid confusion with the term “physical capital” used by economists and political scientists to describe non-liquid assets and material wealth (Boix 1997).

  4. Bourdieu’s treatise on gender, Masculine Domination (1998), has been criticized by feminist scholars (McCall 1992) who argue that he positions gender inequality as subordinate to social class inequality (Lovell 2001).

  5. Connell’s (1987) formulation of this idea was termed “emphasized femininity” to reinforce its subordinate relation to hegemonic masculinity. However, Schippers (2007) has explored the concept’s utility for analyzing relationships between femininities.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my interviewees for their time and participation in this study. I am also grateful to Karin Martin, Howard Kimeldorf, Renee Anspach, Esther Newton, Laura Hirshfield, Emily Kazyak, Zakiya Luna, Carla Pfeffer, Kristin Scherrer, Kim Greenwell, and Alexandra Gerber, as well as the Qualitative Sociology editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful input on earlier drafts of this article.

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    David J. Hutson

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Hutson, D.J. Training Bodies, Building Status: Negotiating Gender and Age Differences in the U.S. Fitness Industry. Qual Sociol 39, 49–70 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-015-9319-y

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