Fitspiration or Fitsploitation? Postfeminism, Digital Media and Authenticity in Women’s Fitness Culture

Abstract

Women’s fitness culture calls for women to take responsibility for their physical fitness in a way that contests but also actively draws from well-established models of femininity. This thesis asks how and to what extent women’s fitness represents itself as empowering at the same time as it reinforces gender roles. Women’s fitness conveys a postfeminist sensibility characterised by a neoliberal emphasis on transforming the self while presenting this project as a mode of feminist liberation.