Session 4b: Health, Wellness and Enjoyment

Gwen Bingle - Under the Sign of the Body: Making Sense of Wellness in Germany
Munich Centre for the History of Science and Technology, Germany

Experience society (Schulze), risk society (Beck) or well-being society (Opaschowski)? In Germany, the last two decades have witnessed a flourishing of analyses focused on subjective and reflexive perceptions of social organisation. If the first two phenomena have received considerable critical attention, wellness, despite an increasing media presence, remains shrouded in the hype and ideological claims of a transient fashion.

My paper aims to move beyond and analyse how wellness is defined and how these meaning/s influence its mediation and appropriation. Wellness is used to describe a novel way of interacting with a body construed as holistic (merging physical, emotional, mental and spiritual dimensions). Emphasising personal preventive action and pleasure, it promotes longevity, performance, harmony and relaxation linked to technologies of health, sport, fitness nutrition and cosmetics -hence practices which are drawn from extant fields and can be historically traced back. But the novelty of wellness resides in claiming to provide its consumers with a new aesthetics, whereby they freely design themselves through the use of wellness processes. However, conversely, users are constructed and designed by the internal constraints and meanings inscribed in these processes. Moreover, wellness is mediated by a wide range of heterogeneous actors (e.g. nutritionists, fitness clubs, alternative medical practitioners...) using a combination of channels (e.g. hybrid therapeutic spaces). These actors promote multifunctional appliances, creolised networks of products and processes, experiential packages (e.g. wellness holidays) and wellness lifestyles, culminating in the elaboration of an aesthetics of everyday life. The appropriation of wellness then rests upon the negotiation of meanings embedded in this complex nebula, which in turn structure the identity of both users and producers. Based on historical and contemporary sources, including artefacts, I will highlight meaning and identity construction, using insights from history of technology, semiotics and object-oriented analyses.

Norma Daykin - Creativity, Work and Health; the Experiences of Musicians in Self-Regulated Employment
Reader in Health, Community and Policy Studies, Faculty of Health and Social Care, UWE, Bristol, Glenside Campus, BS16 1DD

This paper explores the links between creativity, health and the body by examining the experiences of people involved in creative employment. In particular, it analyses the experiences of musicians, drawing on sociological and cultural theories and exploring a number of paradoxes including: healing and risk, creativity and constraint, agency and structure.

The paper explores the tensions between the healing power of music and the challenges of maintaining health and well-being in relatively unregulated employment. The paper draws on data from work in progress: qualitative interviews with self employed musicians who share common employment experiences including that of generating and managing one's own creative work. Perceptions and experiences of identity, gender, the body and health in the context of physical, intellectual and emotional labour are discussed.

The project on which this paper is based relates to wider concerns surrounding the nature of work and employment. For example, the rise of 'flexible' employment and the growth of self and small business employment may have intensified risk and uncertainty for many. The ability to cope with uncertainty and exercise personal responsibility and creativity may be increasingly important prerequisites for success, if not survival in the workplace.

For some, these changes represent a diminishing of traditional mechanisms of protection and regulation in employment. Yet they may also represent part of a wider cultural shift away from the dependency of modernism towards enhanced opportunities for enhanced agency and creativity. People in autonomous, self regulated employment can be constructed both as victims and exemplars of new ways of working. The paper explores the ways in which musicians manage risk and uncertainty, balancing these against agency and expression. It is argued that these experiences represent an important arena in which the tensions between modernism and postmodernism are played out. The wider implications for the experience of work, risk and creativity are explored.

Tatiana Ryba & Karen Appleby - ‘Keep the Feeling as Long as it'll Last' or ‘Cartwheels on Ice'; Phenomenology of Skating Enjoyment
Cultural Studies Program, University of Tennessee

This paper discusses a project aimed at exploring the processes by which 8-to 10-year-old competitive figure skaters construct the notion of enjoyment in the contemporary world of sport. Eschewing the existing line of research that imposes the adult model of enjoyment on youth athletes (albeit the fact that there is no consensus on the definition of enjoyment among researchers), we attempted to capture the richness and diversity of youth coparticipants' experiences within a skating context/subculture as well as to understand the multiple ways in which they make sense of such experiences. For this project, eight female and male competitive figure skaters from three different ice skating clubs in the South-East of United States were engaged into a phenomenological dialogue in which they were given the freedom to take Tatiana to the "terra incognita" to unravel various meanings of enjoyment in their own words. The interview transcripts were then inductively analyzed, allowing meaningful clusters and themes to emerge from the quotes. The final thematic structure suggests that youth athletes ultimately enjoy their time in figure skating when they are "getting better," "showing everyone what [they] can do," and living the body through various means such as feeling "weightless" and/or "in pain." Like Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962), who theorized the body as a fundamental category of human existence and that all human experiences are corporally mediated, the youth figure skaters' awareness of the body as a focal point of skating experience is an exciting new step towards understanding their "being-in-the-world."