The Global Gym Gender, Health and Pedagogies

Both by participating in the everyday life of fitness professionals, gym-goers and bodybuilders, and by analyzing fitness blogs and other sources, The Global Gym explores fitness centres as sites of learning. The authors examine the kind of learning processes that take place within the gym and the wider fitness industry, and investigate how knowledge is acquired, negotiated and embodied by different agents operating within this context. Beyond this, the book also addresses the construction of gender within fitness culture. Many images of the body beautiful and perfect body ideals are manufactured and sold on a global commercial market. Jesper Andreasson and Thomas Johansson illustrate various extant modes of learning by asking how physical, psychological and cultural knowledge about health and the body is incorporated into people's (gender) identity in a local, national and global gym and fitness context.

Jesper Andreasson is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Science at Linnaeus University, Sweden.
 
Thomas Johansson is Professor of Education at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His publications include The Transformation of Sexuality (2007) and Young Migrants (2012) co-authored with K. Fangen and N. Hammarén.

1. Introduction

2. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

3. Becoming a Fitness Professional

4. Learning Bodily Sensations: Getting the Pump

5. Gender and Fitness in the Global Blogosphere

6. Beauty, Health and Doping Trajectories

7. Healthy and Heavenly Bodies

8. Conclusions

Appendix: Method and Methodology