This book compiles several years of multi-faceted qualitative research on fitness doping to provide a fresh insight into how the growing phenomenon intersects with issues of gender, body and health in contemporary society.

Drawing on biographical interviews, as well as online and offline ethnography, Andreasson and Johansson analyse how, in the context of the global development of gym and fitness culture, particular doping trajectories are formulated, and users come into contact with doping. They also explore users’ internalisation of particular values, practices and communications and analyse how this influences understandings of the self, health, gender and the body, as well as tying this into wider beliefs regarding individual freedom and the law.

This insight into doping goes beyond elite and organised sports, and will be of interest to students and scholars across the sociology of sport, leisure studies, and gender and body politics.

The widespread availability of doping and its growing prevalence among fitness groups has contributed greatly to the realization of an emergent public health issue. Emanating from an ethnographic study in Sweden, the purpose of this study was to describe and analyze the processes involved in becoming and "unbecoming" a fitness doping user. The study employs a cultural and sociological perspective as its theoretical framework and discusses how the participating users gradually develop their knowledge about the drugs and how the process of becoming a user is negotiated in relation to ideas and ideals concerning health, gender, and individual freedom and Swedish law. Regarding exit processes, (re)entering into what is perceived to be an ordinary "normal" life was seldom a straightforward process. To understand the complex and sometimes complicated transition processes involved in becoming respectively unbecoming a fitness doper, the results highlight the limitations of using stage models for understanding exit process as heuristic tools. Furthermore, the article argue for the necessity to investigate the negotiations of fitness doping, taking place in the intersection between subcultural affiliations/spaces, doping legislation, and mainstream perceptions of living a "Normal" life. It is argued that processes of (un)becoming a fitness doper are anything but linear and thus need to be understood in relation to sociocultural belonging and ongoing negotiation of the individual's sense of self.

Internationally, WADA, NADOs, and different public health organizations conduct fairly comprehensive antidoping measures. As a consequence, numerous ‘new’ ways to learn about and access these types of drugs have emerged. Different internet communities, for example, have become part of a new self-help culture in which mostly men, can anonymously approach these substances. But times are changing and women are increasingly engaging in drug using practices. Using a netnographic approach, the aim of this study is to describe and analyse how female users of performance and image enhancing drugs (PIED) approach, understand and negotiate their use, and relate it to existing preventative measures. The study will focus on an online community called Flashback, and adopts a constructionist approach, investigating how particular subject positions (identities) and drug use strategies are created within a specific ‘community of practice’. The results show that there is an increasing amount of knowledge that not only targets but is also developed by and for women concerning PIED use. Female users are gradually becoming more integrated into the online doping community. A changing doping demography and the online offer of PEIDs will be a great challenge in the development of future supranational, and online, prevention strategies and anti-doping campaigns.

Men have increasingly been dedicating time and effort to childcare. Consequently, the idea of the ‘new’ emotionally involved father has been discussed in the literature. This article focuses on narratives of divorced Swedish fathers with joint physical custody of their children. This arrangement, a new model of post-divorce parenting, has become increasingly popular in several Nordic countries. The article aims to analyse the experiences attached to and emanating from this particular form of post-divorce agreement, and how it is understood in relation to the Swedish childcare system. The fathers interviewed had a strong ambition to share things equally, as well as to carry on family practices in gender-equal ways. This desire was, however, balanced with a number of obstacles, such as work requirements, living conditions and conceptions of gender differences. In this way, the fathers’ subjective aspirations and strivings were filtered through structural and cultural conditions in society, with clear connections to Swedish family and gender politics.

This article describes and analyses the historical development of gym and fitness culture in general and doping use in this context in particular. Theoretically, the paper utilises the concept of subculture and explores how a subcultural response can be used analytically in relation to processes of cultural normalisation as well as marginalisation. The focus is on historical and symbolic negotiations that have occurred over time, between perceived expressions of extreme body cultures and sociocultural transformations in society—with a perspective on fitness doping in public discourse. Several distinct phases in the history of fitness doping are identified. First, there is an introductory phase in the mid-1950s, in which there is an optimism connected to modernity and thoughts about scientifically-engineered bodies. Secondly, in the 1960s and 70s, a distinct bodybuilding subculture is developed, cultivating previously unseen muscular male bodies. Thirdly, there is a critical phase in the 1980s and 90s, where drugs gradually become morally objectionable. The fourth phase, the fitness revolution, can be seen as a transformational phase in gym culture. The massive bodybuilding body is replaced with the well-defined and moderately muscular fitness body, but at the same time there are strong commercialised values which contribute to the development of a new doping market. Finally, it is possible to speculate on the development of a fifth phase, in which fitness doping is increasingly being filtered into mainstream gym and fitness culture, influencing the fitness doping demography.

This book investigates extreme sports, defined as sports in which athletes challenge and transgress societal perceptions of what is humanly possible to achieve, in terms of physical training and bodily development/performance. Situated within a growing body of literature analysing the impact of new training trends on an individual’s body, identity, lifestyle and perception of his/her social surroundings, Extreme Sports, Extreme Bodies focuses on the gendered and embodied experiences of bodybuilding, Ironman triathlon, and mixed martial arts.Through their ethnographic analysis, Andreasson and Johansson present a unique and updated account of the increasing phenomenon of extreme sports and extreme bodies in contemporary Western society, grounded in the sociology of sport, body studies and embodiment literature.

Internationally, WADA and different public health organizations conduct fairly comprehensive antidoping measures. As a consequence, numerous ‘new’ ways to learn about and access these types of drugs have emerged. Different internet communities, for example, have become part of a new self-help culture in which mostly men, can anonymously approach these substances, and discuss their experiences of using them. But times are changing and women are increasingly engaging in drug using practices. Using a netnographic approach, the aim of this study is to describe and analyse how female users of performance and image enhancing drugs (PIED) approach, understand and negotiate their use, and relate it to existing preventative measures. The study will focus on an online community called Flashback, and adopts a constructionist approach, investigating how particular subject positions (identities) and drug use strategies are created within a specific ‘community of practice’. The results show that there is an increasing amount of knowledge that not only targets but is also developed by and for women concerning PIED use. Female users are gradually becoming more integrated into the online doping community. A changing doping demography and the online offer of PEIDs will be a great challenge in the development of future supranational, and online, prevention strategies. 

From having been a subcultural, masculinecoded phenomenon in the 1970s, gym culture today has broadened, developing into a global, inclusive, multi-million dollar industry in which different forms of exercise are gathered under the general term of fitness. Despite this cultural transformation and the powerful idealisation of healthy lifestyles that characterises the fitness concept today, research shows, paradoxically, that these health arenas can be linked with doping. This report provides an overview of the state of research on fitness doping and how the routes to doping have been studied. One of its conclusions is that knowledge is limited, particularly regarding doping by women. The expansion and popularisation of fitness culture has led to unclear boundaries between doping in subcultural and often masculine-coded environments and doping as a more widespread and culturally accepted phenomenon in gym and fitness culture. The demographic ‘profile’ of people who dope has been expanded and the report ends with the question of how developments in prevention can tackle these changes.