Fitness at a distance: towards marginal differences in global fitness

Abstract

ABSTRACT This research paper studies fitness as a leisure activity in the context of Thailand. It considers fitness as the interplay between both consumption and production and globalisation and localisation. I conduct an autoethnography to study the effects of using a global fitness application on training my body and recreating self for fitness. My study thus focuses only on fitness as a form of home workout. I use Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the ‘consumer society’ to critically investigate how the global fitness culture and the quest for the ideal body affect the recreation of body and self, and how body and self in the local context appropriate the global fitness culture and the ideal body. I look only at relevant elements of Baudrillard’s theory, including socially created needs, the significations of the body and marginal difference, which I regard as social processes of recreating the body and the self. By drawing upon Baudrillard, I contend that home workouts reproduce the self with marginal difference and that significations of the body respond only to the models of the global fitness culture and the ideal body.