Health, Gender and Embodiment

Health, Gender and Embodiment is an interdisciplinary research group consisting of both national and international scholars, including senior researchers and doctoral students, who are interested in research on health, gender, and embodiment.

Our research focus

This research group operates as a network through which various research projects are carried out in a supportive atmosphere, contributing to knowledge exchange and international collaborations.

The group consist of scholars within the social sciences with an interest in critical studies and theoretical explorations on Health, Gender and Embodiment. With the term health the group wants to emphasize the varied ways in which healthy and unhealthy choices and lifestyles are made/done.

Health is, however, not understood as a solely individual task but as a broader question that concerns social structures and how they form and impact upon both society and the individual.

The term gender connects to the project group's inspiration from both feminist perspectives and critical men’s studies. The issue of gender and questions concerning gender equity are central in the work carried out within the research group, stretching from projects focusing on women’s fitness doping practices to marginalization of young fathers.

With embodiment we intend to put the focus on the centrality of the human body and on the ways in which processes of embodiment are understood, lived, and experienced. Embodiment suggests lived experiences, but also implies an interest in the ways in which social processes and social structures are engraved onto bodies, impacting on questions such as agency.

This group consist of both senior researchers and doctoral students. It facilitates a forum for open discussions on research applications, publications, and a generally supportive atmosphere in the process of knowledge production within the field of health, gender, and embodiment research.

Researchers

Affiliated researchers

April Henning, University of Stirling
Greta Bladh, Umeå University
Karin Andersson, University of Graz
Marcus Herz, Malmö University
Thomas Johansson, University of Gothenburg
Anna Lund, Stockholm University
Niels Ulrik Sørensen, Aalborg University
Ask Vest Christiansen, Aarhus University
Chris Haywood, Newcastle University

Research projects

Healthism and Belonging among Group Fitness Instructors: For a Fitter Planet? (Karin Andersson)

This project investigates how healthism, belonging, and empowerment are articulated and embodied by Les Mills instructors. The study also explores how current normative societal ideologies are mirrored, reproduced, and contested within the Les Mills trainer community.

SOJUST – Educating adolescent boys for social justice: the role of schooling, physical education and school sport (Göran Gerdin)

A collaborative research project between Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden. The SOJUST project aims to examine the role that schooling, physical education and school sport plays in affording boys the desire and ability to perform more ethical and socially just masculinities. The SOJUST project is designed as a transition study consisting of surveys and interviews with adolescent boys (ages 17-24) from each country exploring their transition from schooling to adulthood with a focus on understanding broader aspects of their construction of masculine identities as linked to gender/sexuality equality and individual and societal health/wellbeing.

Thresholding emancipation: Bodies in the vicinities of gym and fitness (Greta Bladh)

The overarching aim of this doctoral project is to investigate the thresholds that impedes moving bodies to, and within gym-and fitness sites. These thresholds are are implicit, and made invisible through a neoliberal trope of that it merely down to choice to get moving, to just do it. This entails an investigatory lens of zooming in and out of focus, from myopically standing within the walls of that particular gym, to zooming out to previous experiences of training and sport, to other venues, in order to grasp the gendered vantage point of contemporary gym- and fitness practices/culture.

Titel: Skolämnet idrott och hälsa ur ett jämställdhetsperspektiv? (Inga Oliynyk)

I studien undersöks lärares didaktiska val i skolämnet idrott och hälsa och hur dessa kan förstås i relation till de av Skolverket föreslagna riktlinjerna för jämställdhetsarbete. Avsikten med avhandlingen försöka fånga upp hur genus som en meningsskapande process görs i och genom relationer mellan lärare och elever, men också relationen mellan det som formuleras i styrdokumenten och det som sker i praktiken.

Past projects

The Fitness Revolution. Gender, health and bodies (Jesper Andreasson)

The purpose of this project is to analyse the kind of knowledge and expertise that is enacted by fitness professionals and gym participants as they work on their own or others’ health and fitness. The project also address the construction of gender within the fitness culture, illustrating various ongoing processes of learning/education by asking how physical, psychological, and cultural knowledge about health and the body is acquired and incorporated into people’s gender identity in a local, national, and global gym and fitness context.

Fatherhood in transition. Masculinity, identity and everyday life (Thomas Johansson)

The primary aim with this project has been to analyze in what ways fatherhood is in transition in our contemporary and globalized society. Specifically, the project aim to identify and examine different points of intersection that can be discerned when looking at fatherhood and how these points are expressed and constructed in relation to hegemonic and marginal patterns of masculinity, the concept of heteronormativity and sexuality, as well as patterns of segregation, class and national differences.

Extreme sports, extreme bodies, Gender, identities & bodies in motion (Jesper Andreasson)

The overarching aim of this project is to investigate how athletes competing in different extreme sports acquire, negotiate and integrate their bodily experiences during practice and competition, and in relation to social and everyday life in contemporary society. The project utilizes the three selected extreme sports (and bodies) of bodybuilding, Ironman triathlon and MMA, which are discussed in terms of how athletes challenge, transgress and negotiate the meaning of the body, health and gender in contemporary society.

Fitness Doping. Trajectories, gender, bodies and health (Jesper Andreasson)

Within the context of recent developments in gym and fitness culture, this project has a twofold purpose. First, it investigate and identify different processes through which a person becomes a ‘fitness doper,’ that is, the trajectories leading to doping. Second, it also aim to problematize and possibly challenge the gender politics that have traditionally been attached to fitness doping.

Women’s fitness doping and the gendered space of an online community (April Henning)

This project investigates and dissect the meanings attached to women’s use of performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs), how fitness doping can be understood in terms of gender and spatiality, and what implications this has for women’s communicative engagement with one another within the context of online communication. The project builds on a netnographic and qualitative methodology.