Browsing by Author "Raekallio, Eveliina"

This master’s thesis examines the meanings female participants in the sport CrossFit give to their practices. The study focuses on how the female CrossFitters construct their bodies and selves through negotiation of, and taking part in different practices and discourses. The thesis contributes to an ethnographic study on female experiences of sport. The study offers a feminist anthropological perspective on the study of the CrossFit phenomenon. As a theoretical starting point the body is seen as a combination of a lived embodied body, a political disciplined body, and a social symbolic body. The primary methodologies used in the study are participant observation and interviews. Photo elicitation is used to deepen the understanding of discourses related to the visual representations of the feminine sporting body. The fieldwork took place in Portland, Oregon for one month in August, 2014. Additional background information was acquired by the researcher’s own bodily experiences of the exercises through the continued practice of CrossFit after the initial fieldwork period, and through numerous informal conversations with other CrossFit participants and non-participants. The study of sport has been established as an interdisciplinary field and in that vein this thesis draws from sociology of sport and other social sciences in addition to anthropological theory. In traditional anthropological fashion sport is examined as a ritual, and CrossFit is seen, using Victor Turner’s ideas, as a phenomenon that has liminal qualities in that it renews the values and structures of a society through anti-structural performative acts. The study shows how in CrossFit value is attained through taking part in transformational liminal practices where athletic skills and abilities are acquired through gruelling workouts. Victor Turner’s ideas are then extended in combining his concepts of liminal and liminoid phenomena, as a real life experience of the phenomenon is in a continuum where traditional and modern qualities get blended. The aim of the thesis is to emphasize the importance of the lived experiences of the women and listen to the way they talk about their practice. The analysis is based around the three main themes that come forth from the interviews; strength, health, and community. CrossFit is taken up in the name of good health, which reflects the contemporary ideology of health as a super-value. What is shown is that CrossFit practice gives women empowering experiences of embodied strength. CrossFit appears as a subversive space which serves to assist people on redefining their identities, as the selves are constructed in creatively negotiating the experiences to fit each individual’s life situation. The significance of CrossFit practice for its’ female participants is found in the empowerment they feel from the change that happens in their bodies, strength and gender identities, but also in the family-like quality of the CrossFit community and the experiences of flow that give practice meaning in itself, through the ritual doing.