Using and Resisting the Logics of Fitness Apps in China

The second presenter in this session at IAMCR 2023 is Runxuan Tua, and her focus is on gender and body metaphors in digital fitness platforms in China. Such platforms have become immensely popular in China in recent times, but also contribute to the disciplining of beauty standards and the commodification of fitness. This can be read through a Foucauldian paradigm of discipline.

This process is also gendered, with mass media promoting different body ideals for men and women. Online digital fitness platforms become a means for individuals to engage with and negotiate these body ideals, as well as receive social validation for their training progress. The present study examines how this plays out on the fitness platform Keep.

The researchers gathered data from August 2022 to April 2023, using participant observation to analyse the internal mechanisms of Keep, and conducting interviews with some 30 Keep users. This showed up stereotypical representations of male and female beauty ideals as embedded in the app and the naming of its training regimes; a misunderstanding of fitness self-discipline as a form of freedom (which is counter to Chinese ideals of controlling the body through exercise); the quantification of the self through constant data gathering, also using smart electronic products, that creates a panoptic data prison; and the interactions between fitness behaviours and consumer practices, especially through Keep’s marketplace for smart devices and other fitness products.

Some users resist such tendencies, however: they used Keep simply to motivate their fitness activities, and chose not to renew app membership in resistance to the commercialisation of fitness regimes through the app, and to its limiting gender stereotypes. This also seeks to escape the contradiction between fitness as freedom and the digital panoptic prison. This represents an oppositional appropriation of the app’s functionalities.