Since the mid-1980s, efforts have been increasing in the social sciences and humanities to make the human body more tangible in its socio-material dimensions. Different approaches have questioned the way the human body has been conceived of (and enacted in) the modern sciences as either a semiotic or an experiential phenomenon. Rather, it has been suggested, human bodies should be treated as contingent entanglements of social and material phenomena. Following this line I will investigate the relations between corporeal, scientific, and technologic practices and phenomena involved in the shaping of anticipations of fit bodies as essential to individual health. I identify a physical activity discourse in which new modes of knowing, experiencing and doing bodies involve new types of health technologies in which bodies must be connected to mechanical and electronic appliances, inscribed with biomedical discourses.
The growing significance of obesity has meant that scientific measurements of physical activity and fitness are ubiquitous in the Western world. Health promotion campaigns persuade the population to meet expectations of normality by encouraging participation in a certain number of minutes of physical exercise every day. These practices serve to maintain a particular way of understanding the body and how it can (or should) be enacted. Focusing on the role of physical activity and fitness in health promotion, I explore how physical exercise as a social-material technology, through which the body learns to be sensitive to differences, shape individuals’ bodily experiences. I will discuss how the Foucauldian concept of ‘technologies of the self’ and Latour’s idea bodies are ´learning to be affected’ can be helpful to understand this process. Latour suggests that the concept of ‘articulation’ – how the body become more articulated through knowledge and practices - can help direct our focus to “take on board the artificial and material components allowing one to progressively have a body” (1), and according to Foucault, technologies of the self “permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality (2). Despite that Foucault and Latour are seen as representing two incompatible ontologies, I will argue that by merging their insights, we will be able to better conceptualize ‘the doing’ of bodies .