This study explored women’s subjective experience of Zumba, a new, popular form of group fitness. We interviewed 41 racially/ethnically diverse adult women from the Los Angeles/Inland Empire (California) area who had taken Zumba in the previous year. The women reported taking Zumba for the purpose of exercise and did not challenge the notion that exercise is imperative. However, they reported positive experiences of Zumba, contrasting it with other fitness forms, which they characterized as boring, stressful, painful, lonely, and/or atomistic, and with other dancing, which they characterized as more restrictive. They perceived Zumba to prioritize fun over work and process over outcomes; value individual autonomy and personalization rather than strict conformity; and engage the participant as more than just a body to be shaped. They felt freer to engage in behavior that is considered to violate structural gender norms, but their experience did not translate to an explicit challenge to the gender structure.

Prior literature on Black women’s body image heavily relies on comparative studies to confirm Black women’s greater body satisfaction relative to white women. Collectively, these studies argue that “cultural buffers” exempt Black women from the thin ideal and instead, encourage women to embrace thickness as a mark of racial pride. And while the literature largely establishes Black women’s preference for a curvaceous figure, I take a different approach by examining women who describe failing to embody thickness and how they reconcile this conflict. Thus, this article asks how women negotiate body dissatisfaction when violating racialized bodily ideals. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 31 Black American women of diverse body sizes and shapes, I demonstrate how women rely on discursive frameworks such as healthism and the “strong Black woman” ideology to reconcile their self-image. While these discourses enable women to defend criticisms of violating thickness, they also participate in stigmatizing other forms of embodiment in their attempts to assuage body dissatisfaction. Overall, these findings reveal Black women’s agency to challenge idealized–and essentialized–notions of thickness that weighed heavily on their body image. Lastly, I discuss the broader implications of my findings within the literature of body politics and offer suggestions for future research.

Background: Positive role models have a significant impact on the delivery of education and training by creating a favourable culture for learning. Although assessment and evaluation are key components of medical education, assessment of teacher performance has received scant attention to date.

Prior work documents how instructors can make fitness empowering or disempowering for women; it has not addressed instructors of Zumba, advertised to be distinct from other group fitness and of which women report more positive experiences. Drawing on feminist engagements with Bourdieu, this study assesses how Zumba instructor strategies produce a positive experience and whether they constitute a challenge to the social structure that motivates participation in fitness. We find that the strategies, which deviate substantially from those of traditional group fitness instructors, address the perceived shortcomings of group exercise, making for a more positive experience of the activity and reducing certain leisure constraints. However, the strategies do not prompt participants to critically analyze or challenge dominant ideals or the social imperative to exercise. Future research can explore whether these strategies diffuse to other group fitness and impact on dominant gender, body, and fitness ideals and the fitness industry.

No abstract