THE NORTH AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT SOCIÉTÉ NORD-AMÉRICAINE DE SOCIOLOGIE DU SPORT LA SOCIEDAD NORTEAMERICANA PARA LA SOCIOLOGÍA DEL DEPORTE SPORTS AT / ON THE TRANSLATIONS, TRANSITIONS, AND TRANSGRESSIONS 2015 Annual Meeting El Dorado Hotel, Santa Fe, New Mexico November 4-7, 2015 2015 Program Committee Members Cheryl Cooky, Chair, Purdue University Elizabeth Cavalier, Georgia Gwinnett College Algerian Hart, Western Illinois University Jason Laurendeau, University of Lethbridge Nicole LaVoi, University of Minnesota Michael A. Messner, University of Southern California Maureen Smith, California State University, Sacramento Local host: John Barnes, University of New Mexico Any errors in content and layout are the responsibility of the conference program committee chair. Mary Louise Adams, Queen's University |
[email protected] iHealth, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and me: Fitness-tracking technologies and changing forms of embodiment This paper is an effort to think about the ways that fitness and health-tracking technologies are changing how people experience their bodies. Over the past few years personal digital health- monitoring technologies have proliferated, with those that track fitness and physical activity – devices like Fitbit or Jawbone, or apps like Map My Fitness and Apple Health – among the most popular. Sociologists writing on the quantified self movement and on health-tracking apps and devices (Sherman 2015; Lupton 2012, 2013) have suggested that the new technologies are contributing to new forms of subjectivity and embodiment. Scholars have argued, for instance, that the apps and devices lead people to develop an intense focus on the body, that they subject users to continual and intimate surveillance, and that they strip meaning and complexity from daily life as they quantify activities and bodily functions.