The Boys, ‘The Girls’, and ‘The Heroes’: Reading Gender in CrossFit Kids Magazine
摘要
In this chapter, I draw attention to some of the ways that certain ideas about children, childhood, and gender are (re)produced in CrossFit Kids Magazine (CFKM), a monthly eZine produced from 2011 and 2015 and that coincided with the introduction of CrossFit Kids programming in the United States. Drawing on findings from a discourse analysis of the magazine, I identify and reflect upon some of the ways that CFKM relies upon, reproduces, and resists ‘traditional’ tropes of gender in their discursive framing of young bodies. From one perspective, I propose that this particular sporting text might be read as a natural extension of neoliberal ideology, to the extent that it actively (re)produces healthist rhetoric and relies heavily upon dominant Western narratives which perpetuates a ‘need’ for relentless bodily self-improvement. From another perspective, such a reading overlooks a concurrent and at times contradictory narrative that both upholds and challenges certain historical ideas about the child as an idea, including what and who a child is, what children need in the context of physical activity, and what they are capable of doing, each of which are ideas that have historically (and not unproblematically) been gendered. When taken as a whole, I propose that CFKM destabilizes certain gender-based stereotypes with respect to its representations of sporting bodies but that its often-overt overreliance on (hetero)sexist ideas works to negate any real discursive resistance. I suggest that CFKM serves as an insightful forum in and through which certain ideas about gender are both reified and challenged and, at once, where certain ideas are naturalized with regard to the relationships between children, parents, and exercise.