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H.I.I.T.: High-Intensity Identity Training: Strategies of self-awareness in a world fit for consumption

Penelope Morout

2018-2020

H.I.I.T. | High-Intensity Identity Training: Strategies of Self-awareness in a World Fit for Consumption is an autoethnographical artistic research project which comments on the way identity can be commodified and delimited, when intertwined with the image of the body, particularly as projected through the lens of gym and fitness industry within Western contemporary society. More specifically, it draws attention to how the human body is constantly put to work in the service of branding and marketing strategies, as the quotation above clearly indicates. Treated thus as a consumer item, the body becomes a means of constructing an identity which is impelled to comply to the social, political and cultural needs of the time (Borgerson and Schroeder, 2018, 104-106). With this thesis and overall body of work, I intend to suggest the possibility of multiple selves inhabiting one body, as a way to underscore human subjectivity’s multifarious potentiality of expression, a fundamental quality in the probable occurrence of unpredictable, often traumatic events in the course of life.

Supervisor: Dr. João da Silva

External Mentor: Dr. Konstantina Georgelou

Keywords: autoethnography, identity, fitness industry

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