Performar para seguir performando: la cultura fitness

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the culture of the body in gymnasiums. It suggests that if these spaces were, before, the redoubt of boxers and of body-builders, who sought to build strong and muscular bodies for physical competition, today they are used to build the post modern performative self. In this way, they propose new technology, practices, norms and knowledges that leave not much space for individual agency. Thus, the body that is attained within the context of the fitness culture is not a metaphor of the machine, or of the conscience’s tool, which requires discipline and training, it isn’t even the mediator of an inner being. The individual who follows the fitness culture is one who performs to keep performing. His fate is constant movement in order to respond constantly and in a flexible way to the changing commands of post-modernity.

Este trabajo analiza la cultura corporal de los gimnasios. Propone que si antes estos espacios eran el reducto de boxeadores y fisicoculturistas que buscaban construir cuerpos fuertes y musculosos, hoy están pensados para la construcción del sujeto performativo de la postmodernidad. Así, el cuerpo que se materializa en el contexto de la cultura fitness no es una metáfora de la máquina ni de la herramienta de la conciencia que requiere disciplina y entrenamiento. El sujeto de la cultura fitness es el que performa para seguir performando. Su sino es el movimiento constante para responder constantemente y de manera flexible a los mandatos cambiantes de la postmodernidad.