key: cord-0059635-8m4qc7ja
authors: Walsh, Shannon L.
title: Conclusion: Community Fitness for Social Change?
date: 2020-11-17
journal: Eugenics and Physical Culture Performance in the Progressive Era
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-58764-2_7
sha: b092868a71bb4646039b425bd1c6557e3c0542ba
doc_id: 59635
cord_uid: 8m4qc7ja

The conclusion asks: Can the white supremacist roots of physical culture be challenged and changed? What might a physical fitness practice that concerns itself with social issues and systematic oppression look like and feel like? How might we unperform the eugenic legacies of US physical culture? In this conclusion, I want to suggest that out of the ashes of CrossFit—a hyper-masculinized training regimen developed by former soldiers, police officers, and EMTs—might be a practice that holds the potential to challenge the history and practice of physical culture and education in the US. On the one hand, CrossFit echoes much of the eugenic-laced rhetoric of late nineteenth-century physical culture for women. It has been accused of being an economically and racially elite practice, accessible to only rich white men and women. On the other hand, CrossFit has been embraced by a variety of both white and Black feminist fitness practitioners as a practice of freedom. I ask how CrossFit’s position as a practice focused primarily on doing the activities themselves rather than on the product of the activities affect its relationship to the historiography of women’s physical culture in the US.

presented throughout most of this book. I began with a white supremacist gym in Nashville, a gym that is now part of a growing network of white alt right-based gyms across the country. The second chapter certainly promised the possibility of social change through European fitness systems like the Swedish school which sought to uplift and transform even the poorest members of the culture, to Jahn's German school which promised a community that worked out together in the Turnplatz in order to go out and change the political climate of the country. The Americanization of these systems, however, shifted away from community building toward a strict individualism and swapped leftist political alignments for white nationalist nostalgia. Chapter 3 demonstrated how the lower-class association with strength and athleticism became co-opted by elite higher education institutions to remake manual labor mimetically into white upper-class leisure. Chapter 4 stressed the way women's physical culture provided a healthy mixture of feminist empowerment and mobility with a domestic duty to the race to recreate young white business women as social mothers to the race. Chapter 5 looked at how the promise of the popularization of physical culture became redirected into a populist fantasia of sex positive, white supremacist, hyper commercial fervor of empty promises. Chapter 6 explained how, even when physical culture was deployed for indigenous women and girls, it failed as a tool of colonization, in part because it was built to inculcate and solidify whiteness. As such, physical culture by, for, about, and near communities of color almost always acted (and still acts) as resistance to whiteness.

Can the white supremacist roots of physical culture be challenged and changed? What might a physical fitness practice that concerns itself with, as Akinwale suggests, social issues and systematic oppression look like and feel like? How might we unperform the eugenic legacies of US physical culture? In this conclusion, I want to suggest that community fitness program, that have recently jettisoned from CrossFit the brand, might be a practice that holds the potential to challenge the history and practice of physical culture and education in the US. Here's a hyper-masculinized training regimen developed by former soldiers, police officers, and EMTs that promotes co-ed classes and is resoundingly endorsed by women. In addition, it emphasizes not necessarily external change in your body over time (though some practitioners certainly do that), but instead what your body is capable of in the moment and how continued practice changes the way your body works. It is uninstitutionalized. As a result, individual owners can make it what they want. That independence was in part CrossFit's undoing. Finally, it's a practice that celebrates the last person to finish. It relies on and touts its capacity to create bonds in the box (jargon for CrossFit gym) when the real world prevents connection. At this time, in our history, I find this promise perhaps the most compelling. It is a practice of radical presence.

Why end with high intensity interval training (HIIT)? As I considered the many contemporary correlates to the exercise regimes laid out in previous chapters, I discarded many possibly more fitting modern fitness trends. Yoga seemed the most likely candidate. It bears a resemblance to both Delsarte, in its embrace of honing the body in order to achieve a higher, more enlightened perspective. It is also a highly gendered practice, popular for its tendency to create trim, lithe, flowy feminine bodies. Also, while yoga does require an amazing amount of strength and flexibility and sometimes sweat, the control of body and breath are paramount. It has links to whiteness and cultural appropriation. However, yoga doesn't really exist in a performance form. Instead, I chose HIIT and CrossFit primarily because it privileges performance, both in private practice and as public spectacle. It also privileges performance over appearance, in sharp contrast to many women's fitness regimes over the past century.

That said, CrossFit is in the midst of collapse and redefinition thanks to multiple misfires from its founder and former CEO Greg Glassman. On June 6, Glassman tweeted "It's Floyd-19" in response to a health company's suggestion that racism and discrimination were public health crises similar to COVID-19. The tweet also referred to the brutal murder on May 25, 2020, of George Floyd by a police officer who kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes and was caught in video. The incident led to nationwide protests against not only police brutality against Black people, but white supremacist policies, structures, and ideologies. Hours before his tweet, on a call with CrossFit affiliate gym owners in response to a Minneapolis owner's inquiry about why CrossFit had not made a statement about Floyd's murder, Glassman responded, "We're not mourning for George Floyd. I don't think we or any of my staff are. Can you tell me why we should mourn him?" (Duffy 2020). The backlash was swift and fierce. Within days, Reebok cut ties with CrossFit as did several high profile CrossFit Games athletes and at least 200 gyms disaffiliated (Togoh 2020) . The next day Glassman stepped down as CEO and retired. But the damage had already been done.

As I argue elsewhere, CrossFit is full of contradictions (Walsh 2020) . Its origin story narrates Glassman's training of police and former athletes. Multiple journalists and scholars have gone into "boxes" (CrossFit lingo for gym) expecting one environment, and finding something quite different. For example, communication studies scholar Victoria Kerry, who went in to prove the hypermasculinity of a box called "the Cave" in New Zealand, struggles between an "objective" critique of the overly masculine signage in her box and the way she, as a member of that box, actually feels when she engages in the work. Kinesiology scholar Bobbi Knapp comes to a much more ambiguous conclusion for a box in the Midwest as she, like many other scholars, goes into her case study clearly forecasting that she expected to be critical of CrossFit and ended up struggling with what she actually felt as a member of that box which was a strong sense of belonging. Because community is a central principle of CrossFit, many boxes attract niche practitioners. Some boxes cater to Black, LGBTQ, and/or women athletes. Part of the dynamism of CrossFit affiliates is the loose structure involved in branding. Glassman began CrossFit as a challenge to more corporatized gyms. The result was a fairly low bar for affiliation. The bow owner must have a Level 1 Certificate (two days of training) and pay $3000 annually ("How to Affiliate"). The result is many, many affiliates (15,000 worldwide) all focused on specific communities and customized to their needs. If you don't like the vibe at a particular box, there is likely another one within a short distance. For instance, I have more than 17 CrossFit boxes within ten miles of my house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Those ties to community, the way the practice inspires communal engagement, create a loyal group of followers.

The practice itself creates community both within individual boxes and across the brand as a whole. Workouts-of-the-Day (WODs) are done as a group and almost always involve cheering from others as well as from the coach. Each member's numbers (how quickly they completed and/or how many reps the completed) for the WODs are posted on a white board for all to see. CrossFit.com allows members to also share their numbers across their platform. In addition, owners often host weekly meet-ups for all members. These practices aren't necessarily a part of affiliation, but rather part of CrossFit culture. As someone who gets nervous about working out in front of others, I found this environment incredibly comfortable. It felt like theatre to me. Others I know say it feels a bit like church.

These bonds made the events of June and the collapse of CrossFit both painful, and after some time, actually easy. Many affiliates said that CrossFit was nothing more than a brand and that they had long before established their own community-driven fitness practice. Many CrossFit boxes that disaffiliated renamed themselves with the word "community" somewhere in their new title. My own box renamed itself Recalibrated Strength and Conditioning. Others defaulted to "performance" in their title, as another box near me did, changing from Red Stick CrossFit to Red Stick Health + Performance.

This shift towards the words "community" and "performance" are telling. CrossFit's practice, its doingness is what contributed to its undoing as a cohesive brand. In order to get at the doing I want to get at my own experience with the practice. For the first time in the six months that I've been doing a CrossFit bootcamp, we were assigned a mimetic exercise as part of our WOD. The Farmer's Carry involves carrying two kettle bells for a predetermined distance. In my case, we had to carry the kettle bells around the parking lot, roughly the equivalent of 100 meters. As the instructor explained, "It's like farmers who have to carry buckets of water and grain from the well or the field back to the farm." As I looked at our WOD, which also involved Russian kettle bell swings, burpees, and broad jumps, I thought, "Sweet! The Farmer's Carry will be the easiest part. I just have to walk around the parking lot." It was an AMRAP, which meant we had to do As Many Rounds As Possible in 20 minutes. I breathed a sigh of relief at what appeared to be a relatively okay WOD. Not one that was going to leave me breathless on the floor.

The first time around the parking lot with my heavier kettle bells (25 pounds each) was tough enough that I decided to take the lighter kettle bells (15 pounds each) the next time. Halfway through the second loop, my arms seized up and I had to put the kettlebells down, shake out my arms, and continue on my way, then put them down once again further on. I was really frustrated. I'm literally just holding onto some weights and walking a short distance. How can this be so hard? It's not even like we are imitating wood chopping or hay pitching, we're pretending to carry flipping buckets of water. My frustration subsided a bit as I watched other members of my group, most of whom have been doing this much longer than me, also have to stop and drop their weights halfway through the loop. By the end, even my athlete of a husband who I'm pretty sure started out with the 75-pound kettlebells had down shifted to the 15 pound kettle bells. It was brutal.

This exercise really brought home for me both Diamond's conception of performance as a doing and a thing done, Roach's surrogation, and Bourdieu's habitus. Ultimately, I will never look at that labor the same way again. The exercise produced a profound cognitive dissonance between my assumption about the muscular effort involved in something like carrying heavy loads back and forth, and the reality of that exercise's toll on my body. I walked away feeling humbled and in awe of rural labor, not superior to it. I wondered, because of my research, about all the activities our bodies have forgotten, but that we continue to perpetuate despite our forgetfulness. I thought about all the bodies and practices my body surrogated in that moment. My hope that somehow this mimetic labor might lead to my own bodily transformation. I marveled at the way history, the doneness of performance, the forgotten labor, manifests itself when we least expect it, in a workout, a photograph, a kneeling. Finally, I thrilled again to find that performance, the doing, the carrying, the corporeality of moving around the parking lot, the feel of the soles of my shoes catching on the rough pavement, my inability to wipe the sweat streaming down my face, opened an entirely new landscape of thinking about mimetic exercise that I would not have found otherwise.

It was CrossFit's doingness that led its practitioners to imagine a landscape without that name. Akinwale, a former CrossFitter, had already shifted the focus of her work even though it relies on aspects of CrossFit. Her gym and her fitness system is called 13th Flow Performance System. While the physical location of the gym is in Southside Chicago, she and her partner offer online training as well. In the wake of Floyd's murder and in the middle of a pandemic she took to Instagram, reaffirming that she is "focused on the work I'm doing in my local community and building a space where Black people (and anyone else who wants to) can get excellent training in an environment that supports overall wellbeing" (Akinwale June 2, 2020a). After Glassman's comments and resignation she wrote an open letter to "Black Folks in CrossFit" where she addressed her complicated relationship with the practice. In the end, she concluded, "At a certain point you stop asking for a seat at the table and you build your own…. My choice has been to create the space I needed because I believe others need it too" (Akinwale June 4, 2020b) . That social aspect, which she highlights in the quote that began this conclusion, was stamped out in the Americanization of physical culture systems. The emphasis on individualism enabled that push toward governmentality, governing populations as a group of individuals rather than people who make up a community. What Akinwale, and many others, demonstrate in this moment of rupture in our culture is a way we might unperform the eugenic legacies of US physical culture.

Sanctuary for Our People…

2020b. (eakinwale)

Days Before Resigning, CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman Told Gym Owners He Doesn't Mourn George Floyd

The Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity in the Semiotic Landscape of a CrossFit 'Cave'

Rx'd and Shirtless: An Examination of Gender in a CrossFit Box

Reebok and Athletes Cut Ties with Crossfit Over Founder Greg Glassman's George Floyd Tweet

Fit and Fierce: (En)Countering CrossFit