- 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?
Over the past week, I have been in the process of solidifying my data set and making sure that I have done a sufficient job of finding evidence that supports my argument that women take part in the fitness industry within the larger social structure of the male gaze and that women also perpetuate this sexist cultural practice. I have gathered a ton of data from various TikTok videos and have been working through an annotated bibliography of sorts for each video in order to identify important themes that will contribute to my research.
A lot of the themes that I have identified are that women who take part in the fitness industry are contributing to the idea of the neoliberal self(ie), which is the notion of commodifying the self in order to project a certain image or story on social media that is inspiring and curated to represent success (Saraswati, 1). Many of the TikToks I have seen in concert with the literature I have been analyzing show how women feed into a system of curating a facade of perfection that pressures women to conform to certain behaviors and performances of self that fall in line with the neoliberal self(ie). This evidence contributes greatly to my argument that women are subjected to the social structure of the male gaze and that they also take a role in policing other women into fulfilling the requirements of the male gaze. Women continue to fall victim to sexist practices of our society that posit them as objects of male desire. I will be connecting my work to the sociological imagination through the system of mass culture. I am going to use the sociological imagination as a theoretical framework that draws different questions of self in relation to society within the fitness industry and how these two components operate as constraints for women. This form of empowerment that they experience is still within the structure of the male gaze, an inescapable system that fills mass culture. Women attempt to produce new and original content that empowers women to become replicated to a point that they meld into mass culture and the idea of the neoliberal self(ie).
I am excited about all of the content that I have collected and continue to analyze as I piece together my presentation for Monday. I have altered my final product plan slightly and will be taking a more artistic approach to representing my findings as opposed to a podcast episode. Instead, I will be simulating advertisements for different athletic apparel products that will each represent forms of motivation for women taking part in the fitness industry. For instance, the cost of the products will be some form of sociological imagination or personal autonomy (submission of 10 woman coins). The proceeds of the product price will go to the male gaze fund. Although the business appears to be women-run, it is actually manipulated by a group of men.