- Between weeks 8 and 14, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
This week I began to dive further into the history of women in fitness and the timeline of this history. I found a few articles that talked about what drove fitness and exercise practices in women and what historical moments shifted ideologies of women’s participation in athletic endeavors. I had trouble finding articles that were within traditional journals or databases that pertained to my subject interests, however I do not view this as a bad thing. The articles that I did find in these databases are a great foundation for understanding the history of women in the industry and I can expand on this with more contemporary examples such as articles from the New York Times and different sources that better represent women in fitness in the 21st century.
However, these articles were very thought-provoking in my own experiences with fitness in relation to thinking about how women’s place in fitness has shifted over time and the reasoning behind this shift. One of the articles touches on how women were excluded from exercise for many many years because it was seen as a risk of detrimental impact on reproductive organs. This ideology was practiced for many years, well into the 20th century. This impacted the way that women were viewed as fragile beings who were not meant to use their bodies and exert them in the same fashion as men. This ideology has certainly perpetuated over time and has translated into seeing women are weaker beings and have been idealized as thin and trim as opposed to having muscle and presenting any form of strength. Another article related the histories of women in fitness and the rise in their participation revolving around the sexual desires of men. The other articles I found had similar sentiments, going down diverging paths that covered very similar topics of discussion. Each of these articles will help me as I work into next week, trying to parse down my idea to a more niche question in order to find the proper articles and data to analyze my hypothesis.
I think that the sources that I have found so far spark interesting conversation in how I am thinking about crafting the beginning of my final product and have opened my eyes to the possibility of looking for this important information in more unconventional places such as YouTube, The New York Times, and other well-known fitness resources online. I think that looking to these sources more relevant to fitness as it is today will support my research in identifying how women fit into these spaces and their influence on other women on different platforms such as social media.
References:
Dworkin, Shari L. “‘HOLDING BACK’: NEGOTIATING A GLASS CEILING ON WOMEN’S MUSCULAR STRENGTH.” Sociological Perspectives 44, no. 3 (2001): 333–50. https://doi.org/10.1525/sop.2001.44.3.333.
Friedman, Danielle. “Exercising to Slim Down? Try Getting Bigger.” The New York Times, January 3, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/well/move/exercising-muscle-strength.html?searchResultPosition=2
Knoll, Jessica. “Smash the Wellness Industry.” The New York Times, June 8, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/08/opinion/sunday/women-dieting-wellness.html
Sailors, Pam R., Sarah Teetzel, and Charlene Weaving. “CORE WORKOUT: A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF DEFINITIONS, HYPERFEMININITY, AND THE MEDICALIZATION OF FITNESS.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 9, no. 2 (2016): 46–66. https://www.jstor.org/stable/90012238.
Wortham, Jenna. “Finding a More Inclusive Vision of Fitness in Our Feeds.” New York Times, July 6th, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/magazine/finding-a-more-inclusive-vision-of-fitness-in-our-feeds.html