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Published on November 26, 2024
Sport and leisure management major Roc Rochon ’09 is the co-editor and co-author of the recently released anthology “Deconstructing the Fitness Industrial Complex: How to Resist, Disrupt, and Reclaim What It Means to Be Fit in American Culture.”
This book brings together broad intersectional insights and life experiences within fitness, bodywork, health and wellness spaces in the United States and Canada, reminding readers that the fitness culture operates “within oppressive systems like racism, sexism, transphobia and capitalism.”
Rochon successfully defended their dissertation, titled “Reimagining ‘Bodywork’ in the Wake: A Collection of Black Queer, Transgender and Nonbinary Body Autonomy Oral Testimonies in the southeastern United States” on June 20 at Florida State University in the Department of Sport Management. They recently accepted a postdoctoral research associate position at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Educational Leadership within the Sport Management Program.
Rochon’s research in critical sport studies is interdisciplinary with concentrations in cultural studies and sport media with an emphasis on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and place. In 2016, Roc founded Rooted Resistance, a grassroots bodywork space committed to reimagining bodywork for queer, transgender, nonbinary and intersex people in the southern United States. Rochon is interested in narrative stories and the ways in which Black, queer, trans and nonbinary people create safe bodywork counter spaces that tend to collective Black life.