weirdnature

[weirdnature]

Digital Field Notes Part I: The Gym

As I walked forward, an angel greeted me.  He beamed triumphantly as he circled the skies, a god in his own domain, and as I passed I sensed my own wings unfurling.  The potential for new heights just a few strokes away.  But it does not take long for my senses to be seized by the clang of metal against metal as something large and heavy strikes the tile floor like a projectile launched at terminal velocity.  As the chorus of clangs fill my ears, I look back to the angel and find that he has transformed into Icarus right before the fall.  It is with foolish excitement that I realize the gym is a place where human meets god, where health and harm are two sides of the same dumbbell, and where the normal and strange find ways to coexist between the equipment that they share.     

In the gym, contradictions fly in the face of logic. Television screens display live footage of two different basketball games and a slideshow of  tips for getting stronger and more fit, including suggestions to drink more water and eat healthy foods. These images provide motivation, an ideal to strive for, examples of the epitomes of health and proper workout technique. Yet, around the corner, vending machines suddenly come to life, casting a heavenly glow on the energy drinks and so-called “healthy snacks” they encase.  Like a street magician diverting your attention as he picks your pocket, these machines draw you in, attract you with lights and colors, and, after you have lost your dollar, gift you with double the daily recommended value of sugar in one drink and a full serving of pesticides and processed soy in one thin bar. 

Similarly, ellipticals are posed like runners in mid-stride, and it is their stationary movement that has a peculiar effect on all who seek to run without touching the ground.  For a moment, machine and athlete are joined, indistinguishable and inseparable, each acting on the other to create a sense of vibrancy in the machine and passivity in the athlete.  

A piece of gym equipment becomes vibrant matter, and a prime example of how a thing can “affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their powers” and “by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage…[make] things happen, [become] the decisive force catalyzing an event” (Bennet).  For it is the vibrancy of the machinery that works the athlete, and the machinery of the athlete that acts on the equipment.  When the two become separate entities again, the machine remains animated, maintaining its momentum for the next person it will ensnare.  It is this human-machine connection that creates a place of constant movement, where the lines between animation and stasis are drawn and then crossed.  Trespassing like this commonly occurs in a place where binaries are both perpetuated and challenged.         

The gym is observed as a center for self-improvement among individuals who believe that their ideal can be achieved by committing themselves to exercise. This quest for self-improvement is an all-consuming mandate that the environment of the gym places on the individuals within its boundaries. Language on posters and television screens promote being “powerful,” “great” in direct opposition to being “good,” “big,” and “conquer[ing].” 

In essence, the gym promotes an image of the ideal that individuals must strive, sometimes with great exertion, to attain. No pain, no gain, right? Perhaps. This language is an implement for culture to influence, even control, citizens. It forms barriers that define the ideal, the normal, and the strange through physicality and appearance. Machinery and other technology are utilized in order to participate in this quest for the ideal. This blurs the lines between what is naturally given and what can be artificially manipulated. In this way, even life becomes a barrier between the machine-dependent ideal and normal or strange standards. These cultural practices regarding conceptualizing ideal, normal, and strange body types as well as integrated technological use and dependence “produce what is experienced as the ‘natural,’ but many theorists also [insist] on the material recalcitrance of such cultural productions” (Bennet). Cultural influence is reinforced by promoted access to social media websites that enable the rest of society to comment on one’s physical prowess or changing appearance.

Since ability to use technology is so integral in the quest to achieve the ideal, this holds significant implications for those that do not need to use it or are unable to utilize it. Walking through the gym, the disparities between the methodologies implemented to attain the ideal body became very evident. While some follow the advice (that many of us find easy to say, but difficult to follow) of drinking more water and cutting out processed foods, others take a different route of consuming toxins in the form of protein shakes and energy bars. With bright packaging, convenience, and flavours such as “peanut butter cookie,” it’s easy to understand why there now exist machines teeming with chemical artificiality in a place originally dedicated to natural wellness. However the question remains whether such sustenance, though achieving quick results, is truly sustainable for our health. Perhaps it is those who are able to obtain the “perfect” body type without these supplements that are the pinnacle of immunity, while the normal must ingest some sort of toxin (in regards to Esposito’s writings on vaccination) to ultimately build theirs up. To take it further, maybe it is the people who cannot go without the artificial who are resigned to normal status within our culture. Immunes could be regarded as those who require little, if no, artificial assistance in achieving ideal physicality. Those who are unable to achieve the ideal physicality with or without artificial means could be viewed as the “strange” of society, without the fitness necessary to fully function within it.

The ideal body cannot be so easily defined as one specific physical appearance. The gym holds a diverse group of people who have different cultural visions of the ideal body. For the average American woman today, the ideal body is that of a small waist and wide hips, so those who adhere to the American ideal would focus their exercise on what would produce that body type. In Chinese culture, however, the ideal body for a woman is a small waist and narrow hips. Similar standards are held true for men in different cultures. The American man is expected to have wide shoulders and developed abdominal muscles, whereas the Indonesian man is expected to have more developed leg muscles. Despite variations in cultural expectations, there is one binary that remains true, albeit to varying degrees, for all genders: women are expected to exemplify softer, feminine bodies while men are supposed to exude muscular and fit bodies suited for a more agentic lifestyle.

The gym was divided: the upper level held machines for cardio exercises, and the lower level was reserved for weight lifting exercises. To achieve a narrow body-type, the typical exercise that must be done would be cardio. Indeed, the vast majority of women working out could be found on cardio machines.  However, while cardio is essential for assisting in burning fats, it does not offer the best assistance in developing upper- or lower-body strength and definition. Such development is achieved mainly through weightlifting activities, which might explain why the ground floor was populated almost entirely by men. The socially constructed binary of gender expectations was physically present in the spatial arrangement of bodies according to sex.  That is not to say challengers did not exist, though, as members of both genders trespassed into unconsciously segregated areas.  Stereotypically-masculine-looking men could be found on the normally feminine ellipticals and stairmasters, placing their own masculinity into question.  And perhaps even more striking, were the normally soft, feminine women carrying their own weight in the testosterone-infused maze of free weights and strength machines.  

Walking into the gym felt as if we were walking into another world, at once a part of a college campus and also completely separate from the rest of it. Here, people come dressed in black leggings and form-fitting tank tops. Others arrive clad in basketball shorts and t-shirts that they might not normally wear outside at the risk of being too casual. It certainly felt strange and out-of-place to be strolling through the rows of people engaged in cardio and weight training while dressed in jeans and sandals rather than spandex and sneakers. We were outsiders, both in clothing and action, immune from the physical exertion everyone else was subjecting themselves to: shortness of breath, pounding hearts, microtears in the muscles, sweat building on foreheads. People were making themselves vulnerable—exhausting their legs and arms and lungs—in order to gain endurance. They were making themselves temporarily weaker in order to become stronger.  Further, if exercise was only a means to stay healthy, then having well defined muscles or running for long periods of time would not be the primary focus. According to Esposito, “… immunity is a condition of particularity: whether it refers to an individual or a collective, it is always ‘proper,’ in the specific sense of ‘belonging to someone’ and therefore ‘un-common’ or ‘non-communal.’” Having a ‘perfect’ body allows us to stand out from the crowd and be unique. We raise those that have superhuman abilities and treat them better than the rest. Maybe that’s our desire to separate ourselves from earthly things and join the gods in all their splendor and glory. In contrast, not being able to do some basic tasks, such as walking without getting tired or lifting somewhat heavy objects is seen as weak and undesirable—something that places you with the disabled, the old, and the sickly.

Often times, it is easy to see academics and athletics as being separate or even opposing. Athletes are recruited and are, in some cases, exempt from the academic requirements of other students. Maybe it is in part this greater leniency, as well as the stock characters in our pop culture (e.g., the stereotype pitting the underdog nerd vs. captain of the football team), which perpetuates the brains/brawn and mind/body divide, and groups together the academic with the civilized and the physically powerful with the more primitive. A quick and simple walk through the gym started breaking down those walls. A cursory examination of the gym may lead to the conclusion that physical appearance is our primary benchmark for differentiating between the ideal, the normal, and the strange. Upon a more in-depth look, however, one can see that some are pushing the boundaries of the mental capabilities such as their ability to overcome all-consuming thoughts of exhaustion and weakness, improve their dedication, and change ingrained habits. The gym was a place people went to test their limits, challenge their boundaries, and become the best version of themselves. Thus, it became a place that wasn’t its own entity apart from the university, but a continuation of it; a place of overcoming cognitive inhibitions through physicality and reshaping the corporeal through intellectual exercise. The boundaries between the rational and physical as well as the gym and academia are demonstratively blurred.

In a similar fashion, the lines between the natural bodies we have been given and the transformations available through technology have been transgressed rather extremely. Not content with our own natures, we seek to transcend the human - the primitive - and enter into a new form civilization: of engineering the naturally given body into a hybrid of the organic and the mechanical. Dysmorphic forms of the body, which conform to culturally approved binaries, are more and more becoming the norm. Enormous weight loss and bodybuilding represent two extreme bodily forms that are both ideal and strange. Ideal in that they represent superhuman ability and strange in that they represent bodily forms that are not naturally facilitated. The gym is a unique environment that enables humanity to challenge natural and cultural boundaries.

To be sure, healthy discourse challenging culturally construed categories and the language used to reinforce it is necessary, but it’s vital that we don’t use singular attributes to identify the ultimate value of people. If we are to believe that humanity is interconnected with all sorts of vibrant matter, then the sum of its parts would be infinite. The ideal, the normal, and the strange should not be defined solely by current culturally created categories that define human worth through individual, and sometimes artificial,  pursuits of health and extreme physical prowess. In the words of Ruth Hubbard:

Health and physical prowess are poor criteria of human worth. Many of us know people with a disease or disability whom we value highly and so-called healthy people whom we could readily do without. It is fortunate for human variety and variability that most of us are not called on to make such judgments, much less to implement them.

Associated with this post are several popular hashtags that people who work out at the USF gym use on social media posts regarding their workouts