THE DISCOURSE OF EMPOWERMENT: Foucault, Marcuse, and Women's Fitness Texts

Through the methodology of textual analysis, this study discusses how women's fitness magazine texts equate physical health with beauty and how this equation is achieved. Michel Foucault's ideas on power and discipline and Herbert Marcuse's ideas on co-optation are employed to inform the research. The study discusses how texts often use empowerment, or feminist, ideology to convey to readers that exercise and fitness pursuits, when used to achieve physical change that improve a reader's physical attractiveness, are ways to empower themselves in all aspects of life. By co-opting feminist ideals, fitness texts encourage readers to concentrate on their physical selves, specifically physical beauty, not health, at the expense of achieving true physical health and gains in the social arena.