‘You can all succeed!’: the reconciliatory logic of therapeutic active leisure *

Broad cultural trends such as spectacularization and individualization as induced by consumer culture are transforming the global scene of sport practice with effects that may appear as socially reconciliatory. Commercialization has worked in two directions: while competitive, professional sport is becoming a global media phenomenon, with increasingly global and yet fragmented audiences, ordinary sport practice is being individualized in the Global North and shaped by the individualizing and totalizing logic of therapeutic active leisure. In this paper the notion of therapeutic active leisure is proposed and explored with particular reference to the development of the fitness field. As I shall show it sits between sport and gymnastics and expresses the socio-economic need to control the health of the population through individualized commercialized formations, by working through consumers’ pleasures rather than citizens’ duties