8 research outputs found
"Yay, Another Lady Starting a Log!": Women's Fitness Doping and the Gendered Space of an Online Doping Forum
This study aims to investigate and dissect the meanings attached to womenâs use of performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs), how fitness doping can be understood in terms of gender and spatiality, and what implications this has for womenâs communicative engagement with one another within an online forum. The study is based on a netnographic and qualitative methodology. Theoretically, it considers a womenâs online forum for PIEDs and analyzes it as a community of practice (CofP) and a spatiality in which gender, bodies, and side effects are discussed and negotiated. The results show that although the womenâs forum provides a space for women to share their own unique experiences, there is a limit to the extent to which the discussions mirror the experiences and experimentations of women. Instead, discussions are often dominated by menâs voices/experiences. This has two main implications. Firstly, the prevalence of menâs voices can block the development of a womenâs CofP. Symbolically, men engage in a sort of cultural manspreading by encroaching on the womenâs forum space. Secondly, it has implications for womenâs PIED use and use practices. Women seeking out advice or the experiences of other women must navigate through and around menâs contributions