Building the Self: CrossFit Women Negotiate Instrumental and Aesthetic Goals and Expectations

• In Event: 4154 - Gender Relations in Contemporary Sport

Abstract

This research uses focus group interviews with 47 women who participate in CrossFit to explore how these female athletes build concepts of self through social interactions. The women celebrated their own increased strength and fitness, but they shared stories of family members and friends who disapproved of their involvement in this sporting activity. Cooley’s “Looking Glass Self” (1902) maintains that we see ourselves through the mirror of how we perceive that others see us. Even as women’s sport participation becomes more common and accepted, women’s muscularity remains problematic (Boyle, 2005). Yet new research suggests that female athletes are able to negotiate this contradiction and successfully manage their own goals of increased physical performance as well as others’ expectations that they maintain traditional norms of the feminine aesthetic (Krane, 2001; Roth & Basow, 2004; Sassatelli 1999). In this study, even as the participants expressed high levels of self-confidence and personal growth, which they attributed to their involvement with CrossFit, their discussions of what other people think of their non-traditional fitness activities were often fraught with anxiety, revealing that the looking-glass self continues to shape our self-perceptions, but that female athletes can selectively choose which images are reflected in the mirror.

Authors

• Nancy L. Malcom, Georgia Southern University

• Shaun Edmonds, University of Maryland

• Christina Gipson, Georgia Southern University

• Caitlyn Hauff, University of South Alabama

• Hannah Bennett, Augusta University