Re-turning to fitness ‘riskscapes’ post lockdown: feminist materialisms, wellbeing and affective respondings in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

A plethora of research has focused on how the pandemic has shifted human relations with space, place and wellbeing. Yet, to date few have focused on how the return to public spaces after extended periods of lockdown is impacting subjective wellbeing, particularly amidst a context with fluctuating levels of risk, rapidly changing policy demands and expectations, and different affective responses to such regulations. In this paper we re-turn with the voices of 17 women who were living in Aotearoa New Zealand during the early stages of the pandemic and working in the sport or fitness industry before, during and after the first national lockdown. Drawing upon insights from feminist materialist theory, we explore how indoor fitness studios materialised as ‘riskscapes’ in women’s negotiations of the affects that shaped their re-turn. Whereas some women experienced fear and anxiety in re-turning to familiar spaces ‘made strange’ through new risks, responsibilities, routines and objects (i.e. sanitizer, floor markings), others came to new appreciations for the importance of human connection offered through shared movement experiences. Conceptualizing these different affective relations as processes of becoming, we trace the multiple and more-than-human relations through which wellbeing and risk were co-implicated in particular ways of knowing-moving-­becoming in the re-turn to fitness. Recognising the effects of continued uncertainties, this paper contributes material feminist insights through women’s affective engagements with the social world, surfacing more-than-human wellbeing in the processes of re-turning to familiar spaces ‘made strange’ in and through pandemic space and time.