Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Publication Title

Communication Studies

Keywords

impossible ideal body worker, embodied labor, body work, fat studies, feminist autoethnography

Abstract

This autoethnographic manuscript examines how ideal worker norms operate through embodied discipline within commercial fitness culture by tracing my experiences as a plus-size barre instructor. Drawing on feminist autoethnography and organizational communication scholarship, I introduce the concept of the impossible ideal body worker to describe how instructors are simultaneously required as labor yet persistently misaligned with aspirational aesthetics. I analyze how fitness labor demands not only physical competence but aesthetic compliance, emotional regulation, and continual bodily self-surveillance. Structured to mirror the arc of a barre class – from Warmup to Cool Down – the manuscript reveals how organizational power circulates through training protocols, choreographic scripts, and appearance-based legitimacy, shaping who is recognized as professional. Instructors learn to pre-correct their bodies, manage sensory presence, and internalize responsibility for organizational comfort. Moments of injury, exclusion, and bodily refusal illuminate how the impossible ideal body worker is produced through norms of discipline, endurance, and bodily legibility, rendering some bodies perpetually “almost” professional. Rather than framing bodily limitation as failure, the manuscript theorizes refusal, modification, and listening as forms of embodied resistance. By centering lived bodily experience as analytic knowledge, this autoethnography extends ideal worker discourse into wellness contexts, demonstrating how fitness culture organizes and polices bodies and how alternative pedagogies of care may emerge when bodies are permitted to exist without correction.

Funding Source

This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Taylor & Francis.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.1080/10510974.2026.2710740

Comments

First published in Communication Studies (2026): https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2026.2710740

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