The Communication of Productive Fitness: How CrossFit Shapes a Branded Self Through the Embodiment of Exceptionalism
摘要
Using an autoethnographic approach and combining empirical examples, this chapter explores the ways the CrossFit body is representative of post-modern bodily/health ideals that have become commodified as a requisite for embodied, enterprising selves. By examining the communicative labor of CrossFit, we examine the cultural and organizational consequences of self-promotion. The CrossFit discourse engenders American ideals of exceptionalism through a communicative labor of the body. The CrossFit body communicates its adherence to hard work, self-discipline, and risk-taking performances. These implications have direct consequences for the rise of symbolic and gendered forms of labor in both the organization of work and the discursive construction of the professional worker. This chapter concludes with reflections on the specific embodied subjectivities that CrossFit participation promotes and its role in the post-modern economy. CrossFit as a platform for self-promotion and branding goes beyond the self-responsibilization of the neoliberal self—not asking participants to “pick themselves up by their bootstraps”—but wearing a weighted vest and holding a barbell overhead while doing it.