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Abstract

This article is based on the author's experience taking a hip-hop aerobics class at an Irvine, California, fitness center. It explores the engagement of a specific bodily practice across racial lines that is mediated by mass communication and live performance. This combination of a representational domain (the imaginary) and a practical means of enactment (the performative) is what is meant by the concept composite body. Contrary to the notion of stable and separate racial identities attached to discrete national ideals, a notion of multiculturalism is developed based on a field in which identities are in tension yet interdependent. The largely White and Asian American class of aerobicizers' incorporation of movement and bodily ideals drawn from what is taken as an African American cultural practice complicates certain views of race, nation, multiculturalism, and society. In this, the aerobics class is contrasted with the racialized landscape presented on the evening news.

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THE COMPOSITE BODY: HIP-HOP AEROBICS AND THE MULTICULTURAL NATION

Abstract

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