bodies_in_motion

This is a comm for exploring the experiences and meanings of movement practices, whether a practice is labeled as “sports”, “art”, “exercise” or something else completely, whether it’s Olympic lifting or Zumba or rock climbing or ballroom dancing or tai chi or Pokemon Go or a walk around the block. Let’s compare notes and geek out.

What I originally wrote when floating the idea of the comm (minor edits):

I’d want it to be a place where people can share and compare experiences (and books and films and random thoughts) across disciplines. I want to know how my experiences with climbing relate to other people's experience with ballet, or yoga, or Brazilian ju-jitsu. Or long walks. I want to hear from people who don't do a particular movement practice any more because of reasons. Or why a particular practice connects for a particular person. I want a place to discuss how mental illnesses affect/are affected by our movement practices, or how we juggle movement practices with mobility impairment or chronic pain, and what all of that means for ideas of "fitness" or “health”, and how we do these things in bodies which aren't "ideal" or don't fit conventional standards for "sportiness". I want to talk about gender, obviously. And what it means when we have sports injuries, do activities involving risk, or other things which are not considered "healthy" in pursuit of our movement practices. And whether ballet pointe shoes are or aren't like climbing shoes, and how one learns to fall in all the different activities that involve falling, and all the possible cross-activity forms of geekery, as concrete or theoretical as we can manage.

ALL THE THINGS.

Just to add to that: the comm is open to anyone who’s interested, whether you currently have a movement practice(s) of some kind or not. If you don’t, or you don’t ever want to, but are still interested in reading about them — you are as just as welcome.

Also, given how loaded and complicated the topic of bodies can be, I’d like to pre-emptively ask people to watch out for (and avoid) ableism and fat-shaming in particular, and also to refrain from giving unsolicited advice. If weight or food/nutrition feature in a post, please put it behind a cut.