Fitness

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  4/27/2022
  

  Why Doesn't the Fitness Industry Respond to Americans' Real Needs for Exercise?

  Reporter Amanda Mull links a new book by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and the work of some outside-the-box fitness influencers to examine the mismatch between how big business sells fitness and how Americans want and need to move their bodies. 

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• SOURCE: Global Sport Matters
  2/22/2022
  

  Building a Fitness Culture with Inclusion and Creativity?

  by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

  What will it take for the culture of fitness and bodily health to draw in people with disabilities and push out narrow normative ideas of the ideal body? 

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• SOURCE: The Baffler
  2/7/2022
  

  Nevertheless, She Lifted: A Feminist Revisionist History of Exercise

  Danielle Friedman's new book on exercise culture reads against the grain to argue that fitness has allowed women to exercise strength and push against social limits. A reviewer finds this compelling but only half the story. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  1/13/2022
  

  New Book Asks if Exercise is a Path to Power for Women

  Danielle Freedman's new book identifies the paradox of exercise for women: the subversive potential of training, strengthening and developing the capability of the body is yoked to an exploitative diet and beauty culture.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/11/2022
  

  Will Omicron Break Up America's Unhealthy Cycle of January Gym Resolutions?

  by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

  Could one positive effect of the Omicron surge be that people are separating their personal motivations to exercise from the commercial imperatives of the fitness and diet industries?

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• SOURCE: The Baffler
  11/23/2021
  

  Macho Macho Men: The Queer History of Pumping Iron

  by Benjamin Weil

  "While straightness is front-and-center in the world of bodybuilding, homosexuality is everywhere and nowhere to be seen."

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• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  9/29/2021
  

  Muscle Motion:

  by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

  A 1983 home workout video featuring the Chippendales dancers reflected the convergence of multiple cultural changes in home video, fitness culture, pornography, and the mainstreaming of female desire. Everything has a history!

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  2/23/2021
  

  When Men Started to Obsess Over Six-Packs

  by Conor Heffernan

  Today's culture of Instagrammed abdominal muscles traces back to the time when nineteenth-century physical culture movements converged with the archaeological discovery of ancient Greek statuary (bodybuilders then used the new technology of photography in ways we'd recognize). 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  2/6/2021
  

  Goodbye to the Cult of SoulCycle

  by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

  The attachment of deep spiritual meaning to commercialized exercise brands creates a climate ripe for abuse and exploitation, writes a historian of fitness culture. 

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• SOURCE: Forward
  12/15/2020
  

  Joseph Pilates' Lawyer Helped Turn an Exercise Method into a Fitness Movement

  Attorney John Howard Steele was a devoted client of Joseph Pilates' fitness methods, and became responsible for safeguarding the integrity of the method as it grew into a global exercise phenomenon. 

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• SOURCE: Carleton Newsroom
  5/19/2020
  

  Carleton History Professor Wins Medals at Powerlifting Nationals

  Carleton University history professor Jennifer Evans was introduced to competitive powerlifting by a student and has moved to international competition.

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• SOURCE: Jezebel
  5/20/2020
  

  Get in Shape Girl: A Century of Working Out from Home

  by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

  The home fitness industry grew by creating and addressing gendered insecurities about masculine strength and feminine attractiveness. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/12/2020
  

  Jogging Has Always Excluded Black People

  by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

  The most enduring legacy of the racialized experience of recreational running is the surveillance and suspicion to which black people have long been subjected when using public space.