Women and Exercise: The Body, Health and Consumerism

Eileen Kennedy is Director of the Centre for Scientific and Cultural Research in Sport in the School of Human and Life Sciences at Roehampton University, London, UK. She has a background in Philosophy (BA, University of Essex) and Women's Studies (MA, University of Kent) and gained her PhD in Sociology of Sport from De Montfort University for her thesis, Gender in Televised Sport. Since then, her research and publications have focused on the intersections of nation, class and race in the discursive construction of masculinities and femininities in the sport and exercise media. Dr. Kennedy is interested in the significance of the body and the senses in the consumption of media sport, and has begun to focus on the mediation of sport through sporting spaces and digital sportscapes. She is co-author, with Laura Hills, of Sport, Media and Society (published by Berg).

Pirkko Markula is a professor of socio-cultural studies of sport and physical activity at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include poststructuralist feminist analysis of dance, exercise and sport, ethnography, autoethnography and performance ethnography. She is the co-author, with Richard Pringle, of Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self (Routledge, 2006), editor of Feminist Sport Studies: Sharing Joy, Sharing Pain (SUNY Press, 2005), co-editor, with Sarah Riley, Maree Burns, Hannah Frith and Sally Wiggins, of Critical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management (Palgrave, 2007) and co-editor, with Jim Denison, of Moving Writing: Crafting Movement in Sport Research (Peter Lang, 2003).