Körperdiskurs und Körperpraxis — Untersuchung der multimodalen 
Interaktionen im CrossFit

Luxi Zhang

The present dissertation, working from a Germanistik perspective, conceptualizes CrossFit as a sociocultural practice through the lenses of interactional linguistics and discourse analysis. CrossFit is, first and foremost, an institutional interaction in the sense of Drew and Heritage (1992: 22–25), in which coaches and athletes, as well as athletes among themselves, engage in specific courses of action in order to accomplish particular social goals while orienting to the norms of a given field of practice. Drawing on fieldwork and active participation in CrossFit by myself, the present research identifies the participants’ “joint focus” on the shared material objects as a distinctive feature of their interaction (Goffman 1961, 1963). Equipment and other artefacts function not only as the target of action, insofar as athletes strive for smoother and more progressed ways of handling them, but also as the medium through which the communication is accomplished and “fitness” can be quantified and achieved. As an essential part of elements of the environment, objects provide affordances in that they are readily available to be referred to and drawn upon through face-to-face interaction (Sacks 1992; Goffman 1963; Kendon 1990; Tomasello 1995; Mondada 2016). CrossFit thus defines itself as an ideal research field in which objects function as shared focus of attention and help constitute a context situated and mutually adjusted interactional space.

Beyond its potential for examining the sequential organization of object-focused interaction, CrossFit also presents itself as a distinctive arena for discourses on body and health. In this dissertation, bodies and objects are understood as mutually constitutive actors, which are shaped both by the environmental context and by broader social discourses (Latour, 2005). From a macro perspective, the dissertation adopts a cultural-anthropological view to investigate how body practices are shaped by dominant health, aesthetic and neoliberal narratives, and how specific complexes of bodies and equipment are established within a particular CrossFit “Box”.

Building on this framework, the dissertation combines micro- and macro-analytic perspectives. The former draws on ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analysis (EMCA) to examine the organisation of institutionalised practices of object handling, specifically how objects become joint foci of attention that structure sequences, spatial arrangements, and embodied conduct (Sacks 1992; Schegloff 2007; Mondada 2018). The later focuses on the interplay of body practices and social discourses, which are analysed through focus group discussions with athletes, examining their own reflections on training, their goals and self-evaluations and self-positioning in this specific CrossFit chain in Innsbruck.