‘Workout’ is a script that has been written collaboratively by Fathia Mohidin and Jenny Richards. It has developed out of conversations around the productive body, and the connections between working out at the gym and working in the workplace. Their collaborative research takes the form of physical work out sessions during which they read texts, analysing the transformations of work and working out to bring a physical form of research and personal bodily understanding into their discussions.  

‘Workout’ explores the entwinement of health and work and the contradictions this raises around agency, resistance and the reproduction of the productive worker. The script format hopes to reflect on the individualisation encouraged within work and working out, inviting a collective and performative reading with others. The script present differing positions and perspectives including quotes and voices from other writers and scholars. By reading aloud different positions it asks readers to inhabit and consider complicated, ambiguous and multiple perspectives.  

In an age where health and work are evermore entwined, how does one examine what it means to work out? Is it an act of self-care to stay healthy and feel good? Or an act of empowerment? Can working out help us resist capitalistic productive structures? And how is the body working out, performing, healthy, able and resilient, coopted within these very same structures itself? 

This script began out of a shared discussion concerning the work of Fathia Mohidin and the research of Jenny Richards that focuses on an intersectional reading of the productive body and its maintenance. The script tries to create a critical collective dialogue around the cultural, political and economic structures that impact our experience of work and working out. Structures that seek to discipline and marginalised certain bodies and experiences. However, at the same time, the act of working holds potential. It demands us to pay close attention to our bodies, and can develop a resistant practice to exploitative structures. The text shares multiple perspectives on these concerns in order to question what kind of workout can work us out from current structures of work, and how might we do this collectively? 

We encourage you to perform this script, inhabiting the different voices yourself, or by reading with others.