Hur representeras kroppspositivismen hos ett av världens ledande träningsklädes-företag? : En semiotisk bildanalys om företaget Gymshark och dess representation av kroppspositivism

Sammanfattning: For decades we have been surrounded with societal norms concerning our bodies. This has increased with the popularity of the social media platform Instagram. Pictures are posted everyday of people with the perfect and physically fit body. The active wear clothing brand Gymshark grew to become one of the largest companies in fitness thanks to Instagram. Currently Gymshark has one of the largest fitness related accounts on Instagram with a total of 5.9 million followers as of 30th December 2022. Therefore, Gymshark can be looked at as having a big impact on its audience and thus has a responsibility to represent different body types to support the body positivity movement. Further the body positive movement has mainly surrounded women and their fight, however much less focus has been paid on men. There are very few research papers surrounding the male perspective of the body positive movement.  The research questions the study aimed to answer were:  - Does Gymshark represent different body types to support the body positive movement? - Is there a difference between the male and female representation? The study will analyze a total of 16 photos from Gymshark’s Instagram page through Roland Barthes (1964) picture analysis. The connotative level of the analysis will be combined with Judith Butler’s theory doing gender and help to analyze themes found in the denotative level. The results show that there is a lack of representation of different bodies on Gymshark’s Instagram. A few of the women from the analyzed photos did not fall into societal norms due to them either being more muscular or a larger size than what the ideal prefers. However, in the mens case there was nothing that could be perceived as norm breaking. All men were muscular and physically fit.