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Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession de Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession

Autor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 5 apr 2024

Descoperim aici o monografie fascinantă despre transformarea exercițiului fizic dintr-o activitate de nișă într-o obsesie națională. În Fit Nation, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela analizează paradoxul american contemporan: deși exercițiul fizic este promovat pretutindeni, populația este mai puțin sănătoasă ca oricând. Ne-a atras atenția modul în care autoarea, istoric și instructor de fitness, reușește să documenteze trecerea de la exercițiul fizic văzut ca „bizarerie” în anii 1900 la industria multimiliardară de astăzi.

Cartea este organizată în șase părți care urmăresc cronologic și tematic această evoluție. În prima parte, explorăm originile „corpului de plajă” californian, pentru ca ulterior să vedem cum Războiul Rece și politicile de la Casa Albă au transformat fitness-ul într-o datorie civică. Capitolele ulterioare analizează impactul tehnologiei, de la casetele video cu Jane Fonda la rețelele sociale, și modul în care mișcări precum yoga au trecut din zona contra-culturii în mainstream-ul corporatist.

Acoperă aceeași arie tematică ca Getting Physical de Shelly McKenzie, însă Fit Nation oferă o perspectivă mult mai critică asupra barierelor de accesibilitate și incluziune. Spre deosebire de Making the American Body, care se concentrează pe profiturile industriei, Petrzela insistă pe dimensiunea politică și de justiție socială, argumentând că accesul la mișcare este un drept inegal distribuit. Această abordare socio-politică este coerentă cu lucrarea sa anterioară, Classroom Wars, unde autoarea a examinat modul în care valorile politice și sociale sunt disputate în instituțiile educaționale americane. Prin Fit Nation, ea extinde această analiză asupra corpului uman ca spațiu de contestare ideologică.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780226833361
ISBN-10: 0226833364
Pagini: 424
Ilustrații: 27 halftones
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.63 kg
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte oricui este interesat de sociologia sportului și istoria culturală a secolului XX. Cititorul va înțelege cum standardele de frumusețe și sănătate au fost modelate de forțe politice și economice. Este o lectură esențială pentru profesioniștii din industria sportivă și pentru cercetătorii care doresc să exploreze de ce fitness-ul a devenit, paradoxal, atât de vizibil și totodată atât de inaccesibil pentru marea masă a populației.

Despre autor

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela este istoric politic și intelectual, profesor asociat de istorie la The New School. Expertiza sa academică este dublată de o experiență practică vastă, fiind un instructor de fitness certificat și co-fondator al programului de exerciții Psychedelica. Este cunoscută pentru cercetările sale privind intersecția dintre politică, educație și cultură în America modernă. Lucrarea sa anterioară, Classroom Wars, a fost premiată pentru analiza conflictelor culturale din școlile americane, o tematică a tensiunilor sociale pe care o continuă și în Fit Nation.

Descriere scurtă

How is it that Americans are more obsessed with exercise than ever, and yet also unhealthier? Fit Nation explains how we got here and imagines how we might create a more inclusive, stronger future.

If a shared American creed still exists, it’s a belief that exercise is integral to a life well lived. A century ago, working out was the activity of a strange subculture, but today, it’s almost impossible to avoid exhortations to exercise: Walk 5K to cure cancer! Awaken your inner sex kitten at pole-dancing class! Sweat like (or even with) a celebrity in spin class! Exercise is everywhere.

Yet the United States is hardly a “fit nation.” Only 20 percent of Americans work out consistently, over half of gym members don’t even use the facilities they pay for, and fewer than 30 percent of high school students get an hour of exercise a day. So how did fitness become both inescapable and inaccessible?

Spanning more than a century of American history, Fit Nation answers these questions and more through original interviews, archival research, and a rich cultural narrative. As a leading political and intellectual historian and a certified fitness instructor, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is uniquely qualified to confront the complex and far-reaching implications of how our contemporary exercise culture took shape. She explores the work of working out not just as consumers have experienced it, but as it was created by performers, physical educators, trainers, instructors, and many others.

For Petrzela, fitness is a social justice issue. She argues that the fight for a more equitable exercise culture will be won only by revolutionizing fitness culture at its core, making it truly inclusive for all bodies in a way it has never been. Examining venues from the stage of the World’s Fair and Muscle Beach to fat farms, feminist health clinics, radical and evangelical college campuses, yoga retreats, gleaming health clubs, school gymnasiums, and many more, Fit Nation is a revealing history that shows fitness to be not just a matter of physical health but of what it means to be an American.

Notă biografică

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a historian of contemporary American politics and culture and associate professor of history at the New School. A certified fitness instructor, she has worked out at home and in gyms for nearly three decades. She is the author of Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture, and her work has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN. She is coproducer and host of the acclaimed podcast Welcome to Your Fantasy and cohost of the Past Present podcast. She lives in New York City.

Cuprins

Author’s Note
Introduction: What Is the Fit Nation?

Part One: When Sweating Was Strange
1. Performing Civilization
2. No More Fat Cats or Ladies of Leisure
3. Sanitizing—and Selling—Fitness
4. The California Beach Body Is Born

Part Two: Slimming the Soft American
5. White Plains, the White House, and the Paradox of Prosperity
6. Fitness Makes Us Strong, Not Soft

Part Three: From Margins to Mainstream
7. The Future Belongs to the Fit
8. Training for Life, Body, and Mind
9. The “Tanny Touch”
10. Slimming on the Small Screen

Part Four: Movement Culture, Redefined
11. Yoga and the Counterculture
12. Kenneth Cooper and Aerobics Universalism
13. Run for Your Lives!
14. Title IX and Its Limits
15. Swap the Fat for Your True Self

Part Five: Feel the Burn
16. Daytime Disco
17. The New Gospel of Fitness
18. Turning Up the Intensity
19. Not Quite Sports

Part Six: Hard Bodies and Soulful Selves
20. Beyond Aerobics with Chanting
21. Strong Is the New Skinny?
22. It’s Not Fitness, It’s Life

Part Seven: It’s Not Working Out
23. Exercising in an Age of Uncertainty
24. Eat, Pray, Buy
25. The Limits of “Let’s Move”
26. The Pandemic and the Peloton
27. Broken Equipment
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Recenzii

"Petrzela takes us on a whirlwind journey. . . She traces how the United States simultaneously became obsessed with working out and failed to provide necessary resources for it."

“Petrzela demonstrates that chic, pricey gyms have an outsize influence on our collective mentality around fitness, and she does so effectively. Her analysis of elitist workout culture has a sharp edge. . . . [Fit Nation] provocatively and firmly argues that fitness is not an unmitigated good in American culture.”

"Petrzela’s account moves at a quick-lap pace: She scans the market from top to bottom, from the Equinox gym to the Zumba class in a local church hall."

"This author does an excellent job exploring cultural trends and patterns related to exercise over time, offering insight on how exercise may represent not a health modality for all but instead an exclusive subculture.
Petrzela raises interesting questions regarding the negative impacts of exercise behavior on US culture and prompts readers to critically assess what solutions or attitudes might be helpful for the future."

“Petrzela has brought us an intellectually rich and delightfully informative history of how people in the United States have understood, obsessed over, and changed their bodies. In a thorough look at the trends, characters, and ideologies that have informed the body politic and the politics of bodies, Petrzela helps us recognize the weight of constant messaging from industries trying to convince the public to seek perfection endlessly. An important and enjoyable read.”

“America’s current obsession with fitness, exercise, and wellness has a deep and fascinating history, one that Petrzela has been at the forefront of illuminating as a historian, writer, educator, activist—and instructor. In Fit Nation, Petrzela brings to bear her tremendous narrative gifts through a rich cast of characters and entrepreneurs while deepening our understanding of the complex social, cultural, political, and economic forces that have helped to shape our bodies figuratively and literally. Whatever your relationship to exercise, this entertaining and transformative book is a must-read.”

“Fit Nation is a comprehensive, analytically rich history that offers an expert guided tour of fitness entrepreneurs and practices. Petrzela uses the lens of fitness to offer a fascinating history of transformations in conceptions of masculinity and femininity, consumption practices, and entrepreneurialism. The result is a political history of ideas—about the body, community, and the proper relations between the state and the individual—that is not only fascinating but strikingly relevant.”

“This is the book I’ve been waiting for my whole career! As someone who has straddled the fitness industry and public health academia for decades, I truly cannot underscore strongly enough the importance of what Petrzela has so perfectly and poignantly presented here. Both long overdue and impeccably timed, Fit Nation is a necessary key to the future of fitness.”

"Throughout, Petrzela critiques the fitness industry's lack of attention to poor, working-class, and nonwhite communities, and marshals a wealth of information into a coherent narrative. This is a valuable survey of what exercise means in America."

"A pensive survey of the evolution of exercise in America and a pessimistic view of our nation's current fitness."

"Invariably eloquent. . . Ms. Petrzela's method is to present the history of the millennium as a history of fitness — annotated and exhaustively footnoted. There's something curiously absurd, tendentious, and remarkably true about that, particularly if one looks at fitness, wealth, and self-realization — all forms of aspiration — as symptoms of the drive and insatiability of an almost romantic culture."

"[Fit Nation] charts the evolution of our collective attitudes toward exercise. . . . Petrzela shows how working out went from a bizarre pastime to being an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. She also reveals the double-edged sword beneath it all--how exercise can be both empowering and elitist at the same time."

"Offering a timely look at American exercise culture, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela traces how fitness shed its negative associations — weird, narcissistic, and effete — to become a widely embraced moral good by the end of the 20th century. . . . Fit Nation is ambitious in scope, and Petrzela marshals a kitchen sink of evidence to plot this history."

"Fit Nation touches on the origins and evolution of a wide variety of fitness modalities and the fitness industry itself. Moreover, Petrzela does an admirable job discussing how technologies from television to videocassettes and social media have altered the practice and perceptions of fitness."