If one looks back over the history of modern societies, it is apparent that this gendering of physical activity has never been entirely watertight. But it seemed to come undone more than ever in the 1970s. Crucial here is the feminist movement, which made the female body one of its key issues. When it came to the right to one’s body and its health, Second Wave Feminism fused the personal and political.68 Three aspects formed a highly productive mélange here. First, control over body and health was a core concern of women in their struggle for full recognition as political subjects. Second, such recognition is intertwined with the importance of fitness as the hallmark of a productive existence in a liberal society. For feminists to demand a right to fitness, then, was an obvious step. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pioneers of the first women’s movement were already doing so.69 Third, according to political scientist Nancy Fraser, feminism has embarked on a “liaison” with neoliberalism. Fraser points out that feminists have built not only on sisterhood and female solidarity, but also on autonomy and self-responsibility. Elements that are still important and productive in the fight against male privileges and an encrusted gender and social order, Fraser contends, have simultaneously promoted neoliberal values and patterns of sociopolitical order that were already gaining traction in the 1970s and 1980s. And concern for one’s body is intimately bound up with these patterns.70
Thus, knowledge of the formability of the body, generated not least by the academic study of gender, may mutate from a source of liberation into a demand. Such knowledge not only opens up the possibility of altering bodies and thus undoing the traditionally static categories of sexuality, gender, and “race.” In a liberal, competitive order, it also introduces a kind of obligation to make the best possible use of the potential to shape the body. The boom in cosmetic surgery, for example, may be described as the neoliberal offspring of the feminist ideal of the right of disposal over one’s body. This is a disposability that demands investment if one wants to achieve success in an environment of now omnipresent competition. Since the 1980s, more and more men have also begun to make great efforts to shape their own appearance, once again confirming how flexible gender boundaries, norms, and practices are.71
These tensions, contradictions, and reciprocal effects of feminism and fitness converge in the history of aerobics. The roots of this practice lie in the 1960s, when military doctor Kenneth Cooper developed aerobics as a special form of endurance training for astronauts. Cooper’s approach to exercise first achieved broader popularity in the shape of Jacki Sorensen’s “aerobic dancing” and Judi Sheppard Missett’s “jazzercise,” both of them winning women over to fitness training by combining endurance training with elements of dance.
It was Jane Fonda who then rose to become the queen of aerobics in the early 1980s. She had already become famous as an actress and political activist. Now, more than anyone else, she triggered a craze that swept across both the United States and Europe, attracting vast numbers of women. Through aerobics, all women (and not just competitive sportswomen) were supposed to learn to control their bodies, get them fit, and act with self-confidence toward them. Hence, aerobics was an important force in the feminist project, the latter being propelled in part by the pleasure and joy of movement. Yet at the same time aerobics was anything but feminist, in that it created and presented sexualized and standardized female bodies that fit a new ideal of beauty. The ideal female body of the 1980s was muscular and slim, toned and sexy. This dual movement – on the one hand self-empowerment, on the other adaptation to certain systems of norms and values – is fundamental to subject formation in liberal societies in general and thus to the recognition we can receive as their productive members. In American English, many of the new fitness practices ended in “-cize” – aerobicize, jazzercize, dancercize, powercize, and even nutricize. This is another sign that bodies and subjects were now assumed to be in a process of constant becoming. Fonda was an important ambassador for the fit female subject and for female fitness as a new ethos.72
Like no one else, Fonda also helped boost demand for special aerobics outfits. In the 1980s, aerobics – at least as much as running – was part of a new cult of fitness and consumer market. In the United States alone, about 25 million people practiced aerobics during this era, while around 70 million, half the adult population, worked on their fitness in one way or another. Many of them bore the “fit look” and were part of a new everyday culture of fitness. No matter if they were working out or not, they wore sneakers, legwarmers, leggings, leotards, and sweatbands. Spandex was the material that best emphasized shapely bodies, while laying bare the merest hint of a midriff bulge. The new Fitness Barbie, meanwhile, wore a close-fitting leotard, in addition to legwarmers and a headband, when working out in her Barbie Fitness Center. And, of course, in the burgeoning genre of the music video, fitness and toned-up, conventionally beautiful bodies were extremely popular and constantly repeated motifs.73
Workout videos were also part of the new fitness market, and Jane Fonda may be considered the inventor of this genre. At the time, the VCR was a new technology. Although manufacturers had developed various devices in the 1970s, it was not until around 1980 that the VCR began to appear in American and European households, after which it spread like wildfire. In 1982, Fonda launched her first workout video, at just the right time. Original Workout – with a beginner’s and advanced aerobics program – sold 17 million copies and is one of the bestselling video cassettes of all time. Many more tapes, later CDs, and most recently online videos followed, produced and modeled by Fonda herself, but also by many others who followed in her wake. Styling became more and more important as time went by, and the market seemed limitless. In significant part, the attractiveness of workout videos lay in the sweating, mostly female bodies that romped about in them; scantily clad in tight-fitting garments, they performed sometimes lascivious movements, while emitting moaning sounds.74 In addition, Jane Fonda supplemented the images of exercising, “beautiful” women (and a few men in the back rows) with medical- and sports science-style digressions on cardiovascular health. Another important reason for the success of such videotapes was that the video recorder opened up new fitness training options. It enabled people to exercise at home whenever time allowed, and there was no requirement to look good while doing so. They could watch the exercise guide while working on themselves, skip certain exercises by hitting the fast-forward button, and repeat or go over them again by rewinding. They could also stop the tape to slake their thirst – all on their own terms, in their own living rooms.75
Those who did not exercise at home went to a gym. Gyms had existed since the nineteenth century, and even in the early days they were meeting places whose importance went beyond physical exercise.76 So-called health clubs had also become increasingly popular since the 1950s, though exercising the body was not necessarily their patrons’ primary focus. It was not until the 1980s that gyms proliferated. In West Germany too, musty “muscle factories” in cellars, backyard shacks, or old industrial buildings – where shady types dedicated themselves to swaggering displays of strength on homemade devices – morphed into key settings for a new urban lifestyle. There were still only a few hundred gyms in West Germany in the early 1980s (compared with 8,700 in 2016, with over 10 million members). But these had begun to transform into the oases of workouts and wellness we know today, featuring an array of exercise machines, endurance, heart, and circulatory exercises, health advice, aerobics and other classes, as well as a sauna, pool, and bar. By the early 1980s, contemporaries were already referring to the new gyms as “secular cathedrals for the worship of the body.” In much the same way as running and cycling, gyms gave people the opportunity to work out beyond schools and universities, leagues, clubs, and associations – even in Germany, where the latter two institutions were deeply entrenched in the traditional sports system. The gym, moreover, was about much more than rattling through an exercise program. People met their friends there instead of at a restaurant or movie theater. As places where patrons showed a lot of body while wearing scant and tight-fitting clothes, where they sweated and moaned together, gyms created an atmosphere of intimacy that could be conducive to one’s success when flirting at the bar later on.77
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