Evils of banality in barbell-based group fitness classes: A creative writing-based inquiry through autoethnography and discourse analysis

Abstract

This article approaches group fitness as a textual practice and site for creative writing research analysis. Through autoethnography and discourse analysis of cues from instructor DVDs, I demonstrate how choreographed barbell fitness classes appeal to people uprooted by personal and/or socio-economic upheavals. My treatment of uprootedness connects Hannah Arendt’s writings on twentieth-century totalitarianism with Simone Weil’s account of “the need for roots”. These I read in the context of moral philosopher Elizabeth Minnich’s call to revive Arendtian theory via attention to “the evils of banality”. The resulting reflections position group fitness as a practice that reflects and reinstates cultural attitudes. I also consider how analysis of group fitness can inform understanding of human responses to uprooting situations including 2020’s COVID-19 outbreaks and global financial challenges of the early twenty-first century. Observing that group fitness operates together with popular music, team sports, and fashion, I conclude by emphasising the need for ongoing critique of fitness alongside these and other ordinary-seeming aspects of our always-already unprecedented, never-normal lives.