Apparently, even going to the gym can become a political controversy in today’s woke academic world.
A University of Michigan gender studies professor is drawing attention after suggesting during an NPR podcast that physical fitness can be weaponized to advance fascist ideology, arguing that judgments about body weight, self-discipline, and even obesity are tied to racial discrimination.
Dr. Ava Purkiss, an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Michigan, made the remarks during an October 16 episode of NPR’s Code Switch podcast titled “Why Fascists Love ‘Fitness.’”
A clip of the episode was reuploaded on Thursday with the description asking: “Right-wing ideology has crept into gyms across the country. Is this a new phenomenon, or is the very idea of ‘fitness’ ripe for politicization? Is our idea of fitness inherently fascist?” Guests included Purkiss (author of Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women’s Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America), political commentator Hasan Piker, and historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela.
Purkiss, who holds a courtesy appointment in Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan, framed fitness through a lens of eugenics, racial hierarchy, and state power.
“The whole project of eugenics is about who is fit, who is unfit. And when anyone who is a member of the state, who has some sort of large influence or power, is using fitness, we have to think about how fitness can be a shorthand or a subtext to dehumanize people, debase people, divide them,” Purkiss said.
She continued with examples she described as “racialized”:
- Fitness used to determine “who is hardworking and who is lazy.”
- Distinctions between “who has self-restraint and who is greedy and insatiable.”
- Who has a “normal BMI, body mass index, and who is deviant with a, quote unquote, morbidly obese BMI.”
- Who is “a burden on the state with their disability” versus “an asset to the state with their ability.”
Purkiss concluded that using fitness “as a proxy to do that sort of separation… can be a tool of soft fascism, maybe even actual fascism.” University of Michigan’s Women’s and Gender Studies department later promoted her appearance.
