See How She Runs: Feminists Rethink Fitness

This special issue of IJFAB starts from the premise that fitness is a feminist issue, and, more specifically, it is an issue that ought to be of concern to feminists interested in bioethics. While a neglected concept in feminist bioethics, fitness is of key importance to women’s health and well-being. Not only that, it is also an area of women’s lives that invites unwelcome policing and advice from friends, family members, medical practitioners, and even strangers. People have a difficult time prying apart the idea of fitness from that of weight loss. Most women who embark on a fitness routine have weight loss among their primary goals. Since late 2011, we and a host of guest authors have been exploring the connections between women’s bodies, the medicalization of women’s health, and the multimillion dollar fitness industry in our blog Fit Is a Feminist Issue (Brennan and Isaacs n.d.). Feminist engagement with women’s fitness has typically focused on the oppressive dimensions of dieting and the quest for thinness as an ideal of normative femininity (Bordo 2004; Chernin 1994). More recently, feminists have engaged with the rhetoric of fitness as well (Brabazon 2006), taking up a variety of issues that challenge dominant assumptions in the popular and medical notions of physical fitness. For example, while physical activity itself is positively associated with increases in women’s subjective well-being (Ferguson et al. 2012), scholarship and popular and social media