Revisioning Fitness through a relational community of practice: Conditions of possibility for access intimacies and body-becoming pedagogies through art making

Bessey, M, Bailey, K.A., Besse, K., Rice, C., Punjani, S., & McHugh, T. F. (2023). Revisioning Fitness through a relational community of practice: Conditions of possibility for access intimacies and body-becoming pedagogies through art making. SocialSciences 12(10). https:// doi.org/10.3390/socsci12100584

Abstract

ReVisioning Fitness is a research project and community of practice (CoP) working to reconceptualize “fitness” through a radical embrace of difference (e.g., trans, non-binary, queer, Black, people of colour, disabled, and/or fat, thick/thicc, curvy, plus sized), and a careful theorising of inclusion and access. Our collaborative and arts-based work mounts collective resistance against the dominant power relations that preclude bodymind differences within so-called “fitness” spaces. In this work, we build queer, crip, and thick/thicc alliances by centring relational and difference-affirming approaches to fitness, fostering a radical CoP that supports dissent to be voiced, access intimacies to form, and capacitating effects of body-becoming pedagogies to be set in motion. In this article, we consider how conditions of possibility both co-created and inherited by researchers, collaborators, and the research context itself contributed to what unfolded in our project and art making (multimedia storytelling). By a radical CoP, we mean that we mobilise a more relational and difference-affirming notion of CoP than others have described, which often has involved the reification of sameness and the stabilisation of hierarchies. Further, we call on leaders in fitness organisations to open conditions of possibility in their spaces to allow for alternative futures of fitness that centre difference.