SCIENCE AND LIFE

The meaning of the body: a sociological perspective on bodybuilding and fitness practitioners

Prof. Dr. Fuat Güllüpınar, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Head of the Department of Sociology, and Ph. D. student Muhammet Nurullah Çakmak, published in the journal “Sport and Society”, the study titled “The Signification of the Body: A Sociological Field Study of Body-building and Fitness Practitioners” brings a new perspective to sociology research.

The study contains information on the increasing number of body-fitness practitioners in recent years. The study, which is based on the concept of the tokenization of the body, consists of theoretical and field research parts. In the theoretical part, the historical, philosophical, social and cultural dimensions of the concept are discussed and the concept of the tokenization of the body is tried to be formed. In this context, field research was conducted to compare the conceptualization in the theoretical part with practical data. For this purpose, the process of tokenization of the body was tried to be understood through individuals doing body-fitness. For this purpose, interviews were conducted with people living in Eskişehir, belonging to different occupational, age and income groups, who have been doing body-fitness for a certain period of time.

As a result, a new type of asceticism is observed in body-fitness practitioners, which includes heavy workouts, intense diets, hard workouts, and wearing clothes that expose the body on cold days. The desire for ever more muscular bodies developed through body-fitness leads to endless striving and a sense of the impossibility of the ideal, a constant postponement of adequacy, fulfillment and satisfaction. On the other hand, there is a speculative relationship between the gaze and the body. This form of relationship significantly determines the meaning that the individual attributes to his/her own body and the ideal body. This whole process is realized through compliance and adherence to the principles of instrumental rationality.

Web: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17430437.2022.2063120