Emotional Reflexivity and Lifelong Leisure Time Physical Activity: Managing 'Successful Womanhood' for Busy Middle-Class Women

This article examines leisure time physical activity (LTPA) for middle-class women as relational, intricately linked with societal understandings of personal responsibility to work, to family and to health and entangled with the emotion management of 'successful' middle-class womanhood. We focus on middle-class Danish women who engage in routinised participation in LTPA. We illuminate through our qualitative study how emotional reflexivity involves dispersed practices that are entangled with this lifelong physical activity and how these entangled, mutually evolving practices enable women to dutifully enact 'successful' womanhood, in line with contemporary ideals. First, emotional reflexivity during LTPA represents a habituated way to handle the routine pressures of everyday working and caring, enacted through practices of switching off and working through. Second, women are better able to manage their emotions during challenging everyday situations because of their routinised LTPA that both still emotions and enables engagement with them. Particularly, exercising in nature strengthens the women's capacity for emotion management. Emotional reflexivity practices become part of the LTPA practice template. Lifelong LTPA enables busy middle-class women to succeed at, and sustain, overwhelming and unrealistic caring and working practice performances that meet neoliberal ideals.