Abstract

The subjectivist and secular tune of late modernity have, along with economic shifts that accompanied them, increased the body's centrality to self-identity. Physical embodiment and experience not only act as a type of capital, exchangeable for other forms of currency, but are also - because of the popularization of spirituality - seen as intrinsically valuable and potentially liberatory. In consumer culture, the body-cum-physical capital has become a commodity, and a new relationship based on aesthetics and consumption between the body and the self has developed (in which the body is a "project" of the self). This is a relationship that contemporary spiritualities have been accused of profiting from, but from whose oppressions they promise an escape, in the form of self-transcendence. Running, which will be introduced as one type of "body project," seems to have the potential to liberate the runner from the experience of the mundane. This thesis offers a short genealogy of ascetic practices associated with religion, linking them to those prescribed by the aesthetic regimes of Tate modernity, and then performs a semantic content analysis of the articles in Runner's World magazine, focusing on the intent of the communicator only. The conclusions drawn are that this publication's message is underscored by a contradictory discourse of consumption and asceticism, which is merely one of the contradictions already inherent in the ideology of the capitalist framework within which the magazine operates.