Women's Physical Activity as Becoming: Lines of Flight from the Fitness Assemblage

Abstract

Building upon and extending a growing strand of research engaging feminist new materialisms to understand women's moving bodies as more-than-human phenomena, this paper considers the pandemic as an event that initiated new expressions and contents for the fitness assemblage. Engaging a feminist reading of Deleuze and Guattari's writings on becoming, we examine women's physical activity practices during the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing upon object interviews with 38 women living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we ask: How do women's pandemic relations with spaces (home, neighborhood), others (family, pets) and matter (objects of fitness) prompt new ways of knowing their own moving bodies and the importance of physical activity in their lives? Through our affective, material, and embodied analysis, we explain how the pandemic event surfaced new lines of flight away from the dominant gendered fitness assemblage. Women's affective relations and movement encounters prompted the emergence of new forms of bodily autonomy and fitness for pleasure and connection, offering glimpses of alternative ways of knowing, feeling, and sensing physical activity as becoming.