Political defeat redirected communal activism into individualized body perfection

Evidence

With dreams of justice dashed, along with collective visions for a good life, it was everyone for themselves—a world of atomized individuals climbing over one another to get an edge in newly deregulated, precarious job markets. It was in this context, she argued, that so many turned their attention toward perfecting the body, with treadmills replacing protest marches and free weights replacing free love. The pressures were far greater for women at the start, but soon enough even heterosexual cis men would face their own unattainable fitness and beauty standards and myths. For Ehrenreich, this was all “part of a larger withdrawal into individual concerns after the briefly thrilling communal uplift some had experienced in the 1960s … If you could not change the world or even chart your own career, you could still control your own body—what goes into it and how muscular energy is expended.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 575

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Ehrenreich elsewhere and to the general pattern of individualizing responses to collective political failure Klein is mapping in Doppelganger. — connects to: Body-commodification freedom is recent and serves market demands, not tradition — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 417; Activists connected every local issue to personal and political significance — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1255; Individualized therapy depoliticized the collective consciousness-raising of 1970s movements. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1949 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Sets up the causal mechanism behind diagonalism’s wellness arm: why fitness/body culture became a site of political withdrawal.