Jo Malin 
My Life at the Gym [EPUB ebook] 
Feminist Perspectives on Community through the Body

‘Very often, my workouts are the best part of my day, ‘ notes feminist writer Jo Malin. My Life at the Gym celebrates women’s experiences of exercise and the found spaces for this activity as places of community with other women. Neither elite athletes nor dancers, the contributors to this volume are well aware of the negative cultural messages about women’s bodies that may influence body work. Yet, like many women, they have found comfortable and healthful spaces that allow them to enjoy exercise and take care of the physical needs of their bodies. Through diverse essays, personal accounts, and poems, contributors portray everyday lives in which meaning comes from movement and from the companions they move with in a variety of activities from running, walking, swimming, and skiing to boxing, Morris dancing, and yoga, among others. A unique, positive, and largely unremarked view of exercise and its place in women’s lives, this book will resonate with and inspire many readers.

Cuprins

List of Figures

Acknowledgments



Introduction


Jo Malin




PART 1 THE DANCE



1. An Elegy for Dancing


Christina Pugh



2. Kaleidoscope Dances


Anne Mamary



3. From Ballet to Boxing: The Evolution of a Female Athlete


Susan Young



4. The Women’s Dance


Virginia Corrie-Cozart




PART 2 THE GYM, WEIGHT ROOM, STUDIO, AND POOL



5. You Spin Me Right Round, Baby: Resistance, Potential, and Feminist Pedagogy in Indoor Cycling


Kristine Newhall



6. Beyond the Lone Images of the Superhuman Strongwoman and Well-Built Bombshell toward a New Communal Vision of Muscular Women


Jacqueline Brady



7. Enduring Images


Catherine Houser



8. The Gymnastics Group


Marcia Woodard



9. Gym Interrupted


Myrl Coulter



10. Naked Truth


Lynn Z. Bloom



11. Women’s Yoga: A Multigenre Meditation on Language and the Body


Victoria Boynton




PART 3 ON THE ROAD, THE SLOPES, AND THE LAKE



12. “Messing about in Boats”: Rowing as l’Écriture Féminine


Shannon Smith



13. Women Who Ski with Dogs


Grace D’Alo



14. If These Roads Could Talk: Life as a Woman on the Run


Wendy Walter-Bailey



15. Walking Is an Exercise in Friendship


Marlene Jensen



16. Marathon


Beth Widmaier Capo



List of Contributors

Index

Despre autor

Jo Malin is a Project Director and Grants Specialist in the School of Education and Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York. She is the author of
The Voice of the Mother: Embedded Maternal Narratives in Twentieth-Century Women’s Autobiographies and the coeditor (with Victoria Boynton) of
Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography and
Herspace: Women, Writing, and Solitude.