The Age of Fitness: How the Body Came to Symbolize Success and Achievement

Abstract

In the wake of several books published over the last decade on the history of United States fitness, historian Jürgen Martschukat offers an international examination of the subject by considering German and American fitness cultures in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Originally published in German in 2019, Martschukat's volume synthesizes a broad array of primary and secondary literature in chapters that, while not organized strictly chronologically, provide a multilayered narrative and advance critical perspectives on several themes in contemporary Western fitness. Chapters such as “Working,” “Having Sex,” and “Fighting” follow introductory sections that establish context for recent historical dynamics. Translated by Alex Skinner, the book is written in a clear and authoritative style that allows Martschukat's interpretative stance to reach a wide academic audience.Comparative material on German history and culture comes as a welcome supplement to more well-covered American narratives. For Martschukat, what unites the story of fit bodies across contemporary Western societies is neoliberalism and the biopolitics of capitalist market forces. Evolving from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concepts of liberalism and Darwinian competition, today's obsessions with working on oneself allow advocates to express their value as productive members of society. Civic recognition follows those who “can credibly show that they invest in themselves, work on themselves, and know how to tap their own potential” (17) as opposed to others who cannot meet these modern demands.Martschukat's overtly negative take on fitness culture distinguishes his study from other recent monographs. Unfortunately, this creates opportunities for ideological heavy-handedness and overgeneralization that too often disrupt his argument. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century fitness and the media empire of Bernarr Macfadden is an example of neoliberal white male supremacy until in subsequent paragraphs it is not, and the accomplishments of women and minority groups are briefly addressed. In another chapter, Martschukat breezes from an early 1980s report in Der Spiegel on corporate workout programs to United States’ welfare reform in 1996, all examples of “mak[ing] citizens responsible for themselves as market actors, rather than protecting them from market risks through social safeguards” (63). Such forceful narration may convince readers already committed to Martschukat's brand of political engagement, but too many are left wondering whether his ideological boogeyman hunting actually explains change over time. He seems to realize this by the middle of the book, offering up a compelling chapter that links Viagra to historic and contemporary fitness culture, but he excuses himself in conclusion that “race as a category has received less attention so far in this chapter” (103). Perhaps Skinner's translation is partly to blame for the book's often jarring and obtrusive identity-based posturing, but Martschukat cannot escape entirely for failing to produce a more elegant, or at least more consistent, historical treatise.Unsurprisingly, therefore, the book's final chapter on the Western physical hero repeats familiar tropes about the late twentieth century and the “backlash” of muscular Americanism associated with the era of President Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, examples that could complicate this interpretation are passed over. For example, Jane Fonda and the explosion of female fitness in the 1980s is given one sentence. In the end, The Age of Fitness too often substitutes academic synthesis and critical consensus for historical precision in the manner of an exciting online read but one that ultimately fails as an honest study of its subject matter. Readers expecting a carefully nuanced overview and argument are better served elsewhere.