“I need to be looking fit to exercise”: teleoaffective misalignment through body evaluation and body projection practices for mothers

ABSTRACT This qualitative study extends our understanding of the body in practice theoretic consumption research by illuminating its roles in the pre-performative practices that mothers routinely perform when considering the possibility of exercise; namely body evaluation and projection practices. These practices construct the ‘mothering body’ as a failing body because it does not exercise, which is set against the ‘exercising body’ which connotes an effortless, thin and fit idealised body entrenched in the teleoaffective structures of exercise practice. We conceptualise that ‘teleoaffective misalignment’ ensues, which we define as misalignment between the beliefs and understandings in pre-performative practices and the teleoaffective structure of a practice. This process locks affective displeasure into mothers’ relationships with exercise and leading mothers to exit the field. We contribute to practice-theoretic consumption research through our conceptualisation of ‘teleoaffective misalignment’ and by extending understanding and nomenclature of pre-performative practices and how these interconnect unsuccessful practice performances.


Introduction
The practice turn in consumption research has informed a stream of research concerned with the way everyday practices are socially organised (Keller and Halkier 2014;Phipps and Ozanne 2017;Valtonen and Narvanen 2016;Woermann and Rokka 2015), rigorously avoiding presumptions about the "primacy of individual choice or action" in consumer culture (Warde 2005, 136) and foregrounding habituated action.Practices provide a blueprint for routinised activities, to which consumers unavoidably accommodate themselves, but which are also negotiated and adapted through every performance.Crucially, practices require bodies for their enactment and bodies are carriers and crossing points of multiple practices (Reckwitz 2002).
Furthermore, bodies mediate the way practices are disclosed or made available to practitioners (Gherardi 2019), operating at the intersection of experiences and the social environment (Warde 2014).Bodies are repositories of skill, understanding and practice memories (Maller and Strengers 2013).They are shaped through "training", in the form of practice performances, in different ways over time (Maller 2019;Wallenborn and Wilhite 2014).At a collective level, the body comes to house patterns of practices that replicate intergenerationally (Blue, Shove, and Kelly 2021;Martinez et al. 2020).Practices inscribed in bodies therefore recursively open up practice possibilities, as skills and expertise are brought to different fields.
Bodies also shape the way consumers come to know the world around them (Crossley 2001;Gallagher 2005;Kuuru 2022), because configurations of practices and cultural discourses become ingrained in bodies (Valtonen 2013;Warde 2014) and are embodied as dispositions that shape how people engage with future practices and practice possibilities (Bourdieu 1984).Particularly, body discourses become embodied by consumers and shape their engagement in "body management" practices (Warde 2014, 293) including exercise (Thompson and Hirschman 1995;Viotto et al. 2021).Moreover, bodies are an important site of experience (Goulding et al. 2009)particularly when consumption is unsettling (Woermann and Rokka 2015), painful (Scott et al., 2017), sensory (Maciel and Wallendorf 2017), intimate (Valtonen and Narvanen 2016) or disrupted (Phipps and Ozanne 2017).In these ways, bodies constitute "the medium in which life and mind/action are present in the world" (Schatzki, 1996, 41).This highlights the importance of affect in considerations of bodies and consumption practices.
Yet, where such dynamics of bodies are highlighted across practice and consumption research, there is a tendency to focus on successful, habituated practice performances.That is, practice performances that are successfully routinised; guided by practical consciousness, tacit knowledge and tradition (Warde 2005).For example, Maciel and Wallendorf (2017) emphasise sensory corporeality in processes of evaluation and mastery as beer afficionados progress through their practice careers in relation to the discourses of institutional and cultural authorities.Molander (2017) emphasises that the body is important "when engaging with the world" (133), as people experience unity with their bodies when learning to act competently according to the demands of a practice.Valtonen and Narvanen (2016) focus on processes of (successfully) falling sleep, being asleep and waking, accomplished through routinised "transitions."However, further research is required to theorise the role of bodies in inhibiting practices, and in shaping unsuccessful practice outcomes.In eliding focus on bodies in unsuccessful practice performance, consumption research characterises a wider tendency in practice-theoretic research to focus on the successful performance of practices and successful recruitment of practitioners to practices (Denegri-Knott, Nixon, and Abraham 2018;Walker 2013).Yet performances can and do fail as practitioners reject, change or abandon practice templates (Keller and Halkier 2014;Molander and Hartmann 2018;Shove and Pantzar 2007), or when practices are made unavailable (Valtonen 2013).
In this paper, we aim to explore this underexamined nexus of unsuccessful practice performance, bodies and affectparticularly in relation to body management consumption practices that, when not performed successfully, are collectively understood to represent failure.In such instances, the body plays a crucial role; in the collective conventions of normativity entrenched in practices, in the envisioned bodies of successful practice performers, in the (attempted) performance of the practice, and in the failure of performances.We focus specifically on the mothering body and the practices of exercise, understood as leisure time physical activity performed for fitness.
Motherhood is described as "an experience of the body" (Han 2013) because a range of mothering practices shape the physiology of the mothering body (Warde 2014).Furthermore, motherhood is a time when consumption practices such as exercise are promoted heavily by public health marketing to stave off population patterns of weight gain at this lifestage (Macrae 2020).Although pregnancy provides some reprieve from body image pressures (Raspovic et al. 2020), after pregnancy is over there is a felt pressure on new mothers to "bounce back".This pressure is carried in media and marketing messages that promote feminine body ideals through bodily labourpredominantly through health and wellness discourses (Dworkin and Wachs 2004;Gurrieri, Previte, and Brace-Govan 2013).Yet mothering practices are dominated by caring, which competes with active leisure (Spotswood, Nobles, and Armstrong 2021); so much so that mothers of young children report consistently lower consumption of exercise than other women (Bellows-Riecken and Rhodes 2008;Raspovic et al. 2020).Notably, body image research connects "entrenched negative body image" and "heightened body dissatisfaction" in motherhood with lower exercise levels in new mothers (Raspovic et al. 2020, 42).Through this context, we aim to interrogate how the body-affect nexus comes to guide understandings of how the practice template of exercise should be performedand its role in unsuccessful practice performance.
The paper is organised as follows.First, we draw on Schatzki's (1996) concept of "teleoaffective structures" to theorise the way practitioners engage with the shared affective and teleological orientations that form an important topography of the practices (Molander and Hartmann 2018).This lens enables us to consider how the body intersects both the purpose and affective aspects of a practiceas well as how these influence how the practice "should" be performed to be successful.We then present our findings from an in-depth qualitative study with mothers of young children during the height of UK "lockdowns" during the COVID-19 pandemic.Our analysis then illuminates how bodies are prominent in the tacit understandings held about how exercise practices should be carried out (Schatzki 1996), and that mothers routinely enact body evaluation and body projection practices as part of the habituated flow of dispersed practices sensitised towards exercise, which we term "pre-performative" practices.We illuminate how these practices construct the mothering body as failing and shameful, fuel and are fuelled by "teleoaffective misalignment," and precede unsuccessful exercise practice performance.We conclude by outlining our contributions to practice theory and consumption research, namely our conceptualisation of teleoaffective misalignment, how we extend understanding and nomenclature of pre-performative practices and how these interconnect unsuccessful practice performances.Finally, we consider the implications for marketing and marketing policy from our study.

Practice normativity and teleoaffective structures
Consumption research has highlighted how commercial and social marketing and media discourses provide normativity to the practice template (Welch 2020), shaping the collective conventions governing practices.For example, brand values (Schau, Muñiz, and Arnould 2009), mediated institutional discourses (Halkier 2014), social media interactions and influencers (Halkier 2020;Viotto et al. 2021), advertising (Brace-Govan 2010;Martens and Scott 2005), web-mediated marketing (Fuentes and Brembeck 2017) social marketing (Sutinen and Närvänen 2021), public health marketing (Thompson and Hirschman 1995), political marketing (Sanghvi and Hodges 2015) and influential blogs (Arsel and Bean 2013) have all been found to orchestrate the collectively understood, tacit norms of practices that "regulate … acts of consumption" (Arsel and Bean 2013, 902).A relevant example is the public health marketing that provides a "moralising public discourse" about obesity that, in conjunction with advancements in self-monitoring technologies, has normalised the self-tracking of body weight in private homes (Warde, Welch, and Paddock 2017).Another is the social marketing of obesity that has contributed to understandings of how women's bodies ought to look (Gurrieri, Previte, and Brace-Govan 2013).A third is the "ritualized visibility of men's sport" and the lack of media coverage of women's sport that indicates aspirational ideals and the range of "socially desirable possibilities" associated with active leisure (Brace Govan 2010, 389).
However, practice theory emphasises the recursiveness of practice templates that house their normativity.To this end, Schatzki's concept of teleoaffective structures is pivotal.It includes a range of acceptable or correct ends, acceptable or correct tasks to carry out for these ends, acceptable or correct beliefs (etc.)given which specific tasks are carried out for the sake of these ends, and even acceptable or correct emotions out of which to do so.(Schatzki 2002, 53) Teleology relates to ends, projects, and tasks appropriate to the practice, whereas affectivity relates to the intensities surrounding these.Along with explicit rules in some cases, the teleoaffective structure governs the tacit conventions for how practices are properly performed (Halkier 2020) and practitioners' role within it (Denegri-Knott, Nixon, and Abraham 2018).Furthermore, teleoaffective structures become "unevenly incorporated into different participants ' minds and actions" (2002, 80) and shape the way practices come to matter, are expected to feel and be experienced as well as signifying what is appropriate to do.In this sense they set out the motivations that can animate practitioners and draw them in (Schatzki 2017).
Teleoaffective structures are integrated with other elements during performance (Molander and Hartmann 2018) but also guide engagement with practices pre-performatively; that is, prior and in relation to enactment.For example, practitioners can plan to enact practices through their understanding of practice normativity (Arsel and Bean 2013), and attune their performances to fit within the acceptable limits of a practice (Denegri-Knott, Nixon, and Abraham 2018).In relation to the affective and outcome orientations of the practice, practitioners can envision or anticipate future performances and how these might feel or mean (Molander and Hartmann 2018;Sörum and Fuentes 2022).Pre-performative practices are particularly important for understanding how unsuccessful performances are judged in relation to teleoaffective structures.Through pre-performative practices, practitioners understand "what the practice should be and how it should work" (Thomas and Epp 2019, 577).Teleoaffective structures provide the sense of oughtness and rightness guiding a practice (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and von Savigny 2001), which means that tensions can arise as practitioners navigate cultural ideals (Thompson 1996), such as when enactments depart from what was envisioned, or when practices are deemed inaccessible.
The theoretical framework underpinning our research is grounded in an understanding of the way practice performances are guided by the teleoaffective structure, both during ongoing performance but also pre-performatively.In the context of consumption fields where the body has particular prominence (Zanette and Scaraboto 2019), we extend this by foregrounding the body as integral to the way practitioners engage with teleoaffective structures, and also to the orientations of the teleoaffective structure itself.We specifically draw on Schatzki's version of practice theory that emphasises that people take up and carry on the same practices differently, indeed "locally", in the context of what they mean (Schatzki 1996;2002).Following this, we take inspiration from recent practice theoretic work that has called for theoretical tools that account for bodily differences in practices (Maller 2019), and for social inequality, particularly in relation to persistent patterns of health inequality (Holm and Halkier 2021;Spotswood and Gurrieri 2023;Walker 2013).That is, individuals and groups affectively and cognitively attune differently to practice demands and adjust and adapt to shared social expectations (Katan and Gram-Hanssen 2021).From this we ask, "How do bodies suffuse teleoaffective structures and guide (un)successful practice performance?"

Methodology
We recruited 26 mothers of young children for the research.The sample diversity was maximised to attend to differences in work, ethnicity and family structure (Huberman and Miles 1994).As well as white British women, there were women with Polish, Pakistani, Somali and Sudanese family backgrounds.Eleven were married, 4 lived with male partners, and 10 were single mothers.All had at least one pre-school child, and children's ages ranged from 3 months to 17 years.Fourteen of the women had two children, but one had four, and four had a single child.In line with national patterns (ukactive 2021), the majority of participants self-reported low or no regular exercise since becoming mothers, which was reinforced through the disruption of the pandemic.Only seven had been engaging with exercise of any kind since becoming parents, and three described their exercise level as "low".However, many had routinely exercised prior to motherhood in a range of leisure fields, including gym classes, dancing, running and cycling.Three described themselves as not exercising before becoming a mother; however, all articulated a desire to exercise.This speaks to how exercise carries a moralised body management imperative (Baudrillard 2005;Spratt 2023), particularly for women where discourses of health and beauty are conflated.Accordingly, exercise practices are commonly "publicly questioned, debated and campaigned about" (Keller and Halkier 2014, 36).
The research involved semi-structured, in-depth qualitative interviews.Online interviews were conducted between March and December 2020, at the height of UK's COVID-19 social distancing measures, or "lockdowns."During this time, social marketing campaigns from the UK's National Health Service were particularly strident in encouraging British adults to use the lockdowns as "time for a reset, restart, kickstart"; to get active and lose weight to better resist the ill-effects of COVID-19.1 Yet mothers' exercise levels remained lower than other groups (ukactive 2021).This provided a natural opportunity to explore the way mothers engaged with possible future enactments of exercise practices.As such, topics discussed included past experiences of exercise and mothering, feelings towards their bodies, and exercise plans and desires for the future, as well as challenges they faced or perceived.An important topic was also perceptions about active people, particularly active women.
Beyond compliance with social distancing rules, online interviews offered maximum convenience for mothers with caring responsibilities and provided an opportunity to discuss exercise experiences in a relaxed way.They also avoided inevitable and unavoidable comparison between interviewee and interviewer because laptop screens could be tilted so that only researcher headshots were visible.Interviews lasted between 40 and 80 min, were recorded, transcribed and analysed using NVIVO12.Following guidance on reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) (Braun and Clarke 2019;Terry and Hayfield 2020), data familiarisation preceded coding.Initial codes were reviewed and collaborative decisions about useful theorisation of data were made through authors' "reflective and thoughtful engagement" (Braun and Clarke 2019, 594) with the data, literature and analytical process.As such, both inductive and "broad" deductive coding were adopted (Braun and Clarke 2019).Authors moved back and forth through coding stages to eventually identify the theorisation of bodies in pre-performative practices and teleoaffective structures.
Findings: Teleoaffective misalignment, pre-performative practices and unsuccessful practice performance I always feel that I'm going to go into a place where everyone else is a lot healthier, they can do it.They'll look at me and think, "oh, God, what's she doing here?"Our analysis identifies tensions between "mothering body" and "exercising body" normativities, cultural ideals and situated experiences.These multiple, morally-laden, emotionally-evocative "bodies" are central to the teleoaffective structure of exercise practices and are reconstituted through the enactment of pre-performative practices of body evaluation and projection.Through the enactment of these pre-performative practices, these body ideals are reconstituted and pitted against each other.This fuels what we term "teleoaffective misalignment," which is misalignment between the beliefs and understandings in pre-performative practices and the teleoaffective structure of a practice.Teleoaffective misalignment in practitioners' pre-performative engagement with exercise brings and heightens negative intensities and also conditions unsuccessful performance, which reconstitutes the mothering body as a failing, shameful body because it does not exercise.Teleoaffective misalignment therefore fuels a cycle of more body evaluation and projection.This process is captured in Figure 1, which illustrates the recursive relationships between teleoaffective misalignment and body projection and evaluation practices that characterise mothers' unsuccessful performance of exercise.We next describe this recursive process through our analysis, highlighting particularly how teleoaffective misalignment arises through the pre-performative practices that lock it in place.

Body evaluation and teleoaffective misalignment
Body evaluation involves a cycle of reflection, comparison and self-assessment in relation to exercising practice teleoaffectivity, in which "exercising body" norms and ideals are foregrounded.Our data illuminates how our participants reflect, with frustration, on the various cultural resources or "authorities" (Arsel and Bean 2013) that attach body ideals, norms and discourses to exercising teleoaffectivity.These normatise thinness and connect legitimate exercise enactment with "already fit" exercising bodies.Cultural resources mentioned by our participants include government and public health communications, social media, and fitness industry marketing.For example, Amma describes her frustration about the way physical activity marketing associates exercising with a "skinny" body shape, although images of class and ethnicity also resonate through her critique: I would not want to see another skinny, blonde woman who looks like she doesn't eat on a billboard.I just find that like, ugh … I want to see like a variety of women.I want to see women who are big.Big women.Body shapes.I want to see different backgrounds.Different cultures.Different skin colours.I want to see women in headscarves working out.(Amma) Amma's frustration is palpable -"ugh," illuminating the affective intensity involved in her reflection and the teleoaffective misalignment fuelled by evaluation of bodies in fitness marketing trends.With similar vehemence, Josie recognises the entrenched discourses that represent women in physical activity marketing who have "unrealistic" bodies: I'll tell you what would encourage me [to exercise]to have people like me on the billboard, notthe big thing with gyms and stuff, they always have someone who's really fit already on the posters and stuff.So, you need a real woman with a real tummy and whatever, in just a baggy t-shirt and her old trainers, with her hair everywhere.
Josie's engagement with exercise involves reflecting on the marketing images that "always" show people who have unrecognisable bodies.Her own body does not match the cultural ideals she sees "on the posters and stuff," creating teleoaffective misalignment and tension and failing to draw her in to exercise.Indeed, participants habitually evaluate their own bodies as fat and failing in the context of teleoaffective misalignment mediated by the cultural dynamics of exercising.Josie despairs, wanting "to know that we're not the only one with a wobbly belly who gets out of breath running up the stairs."Rhoda summarises: It sounds silly, but I think nobody's fat who does physical activitythey look well.They don't look overweight.That's the only way I can think of it, really.Through body evaluation, Rhoda constructs her own body as fat and unwell and in conflict with exercising "others."Other participants make similar comparisons, constructing imagined exercising women as energetic, morally superior, accomplished and happy.Body evaluations of exercise practitioners and mothers remain central.As Alma describes, people who exercise are "skinny and young and jumping around"; not like her view of herself.Similarly, Clara notes when reflecting on the limited draw for her from exercise, that "I think sometimes I can look at people, and look at their bodies and think 'well, my body doesn't look like that' … ." Teleoaffective misalignment and body evaluation practices fuel mothers' body dissatisfaction as it falls short of the teleoaffective normativities that prescribe the exercising body ideal.As Tamsin concisely notes, "Since having my son I hate my body."Kate describes trying to cover her body, ashamed of how it now looks and feels since pregnancy has distorted the shape she feels should be hers: Body evaluation practices mean our participants habitually categorise their bodies as imperfect and unacceptable, and require fixing in order to be meet exercising ideals and make them recruitable.Ruby describes having to fix how her body looks to be able to take part in exercise: "Yes.Well … the first thought is, 'oh I need to be looking fit to be able to do exercise, so I've got to get fit before I do it … like, I need to look like I'm fit before I can do anythingit's warped, but yes.[laughter] … " Ruby laughs ironically; body evaluation tends to evoke negative affective intensity that permeates our participants' engagement with exercise.She describes that the "ballooning" she experienced during all her pregnancies is making her feel depressed.Similarly, Dora describes being overweight as relating to her "feeling bad" about herself.She was happier when she weighed less.Her wellbeing is tied to the size of her body: I felt better when I was pregnant than I do now.I couldn't eat much when I was pregnant because I had bad acid reflux, so I actually weighed less nine months pregnant than I did before I was pregnant.
Josie refers to the cycle of body evaluation, self-loathing and feelings of failure as "self-bullying," and recognises the recursive and collective nature of the body evaluation practices her friends enact: There's this almost a socially collective image of the perfect mother.And I feel like we do it to ourselves as well, which is crazy.Why am I bullying myself like this?But it's so common when I talk to my friends.They all feel the same.So, if there's that image of flat, toned tummy, perfect hair and teeth and make up all the time … It's just so much pressure.And there's a lot of self-doubt in my peer group.There's a lot of, 'I'm doing this wrong.I can't do this.I'm failing'.
Josie's reflection illuminates the habituated teleoaffective misalignment mothers face.In sum, through pre-performative body evaluation practices the "mothering body" and "exercising body" are reconstituted and pitted against one another, fuelling and further intensifying teleoaffective misalignment which brings and heightens negative intensities.

Body projection and teleoaffective misalignment
Teleoaffective misalignment also fuels, and is intensified through, body projection practices.Body projection practices involve the routinised enactment of cycled, intersecting failure projection and surveillance projection into imagined unsuccessful exercising settings.As such they also involve the constitution of the "failing" mothering body, which is set against the idealised "exercising" body that is skilful and thin, fostering teleoaffective misalignment.
Characterising body-oriented failure projection, Rhoda admits that she "likes the sound of" gym classes, but she has not tried anything since becoming a mother, which caused a change in her body shape.Specifically, she explains she would not have the confidence now because she is no longer a size 6: I went to a gym when I was like 16 and I was so confident.I was also like size 6 so that might have helped.I'd like to go to a gym, like a spin class, although I don't know how I'd get on now.
Rhoda projects her now larger body onto an exercising scenario involving imagined failure.Only through being small and slim can she imagine being able to "get on" with exercise.Similarly, Clara describes how she would like to "run in a group of women who are really welcoming and friendly [with] someone at the back, and they've got women of all abilities, so that would make me feel more confident of going there."However, her understandings of group running are that participants "look really fit [and] I don't want to go and do it, because I'll be like the knackered donkey at the back."Her body projection evokes a sense that she will be unable to keep up with the fitter "exercising" bodies who are legitimate participants.These projections of failure habituate teleoaffective misalignment and bring tension to mothers' engagement with the possibilities of exercise.
Teleoaffective misalignment evoked through failure projections bring negative affective intensities that manifest as socially recognised feelings of anxiety and fear.Kate describes an imagined struggle when considering going to a group exercise class: "I always feel that I'm going to go into a place, and I'm going to struggle.I think a lot of it is just self-confidence."Similarly, Diana anticipates feeling overwhelmed and unsupported in the gym environment and simultaneously reflects on past experiences where she has felt out of her depth.She projects failure and it panics her: I think sometimes I just need something that I'm not going to be overwhelmed at and actually people are going to spend time talking about what you're doing and why you're doing it and if you're doing it correctly, because sometimes I'd be at the gym and I'm like 'I don't even know if I'm doing this correct'.
Diana projects failure because she understands her mothering body to be unsuitable; not fit or skilled enough to engage in exercise: I think about it and then it kind of panics me a little bit because I'm not very good in new social situations and some of our local gyms are … you're just a bit wary of being there.
Whether Diana is in fact skilled enough is irrelevant.Her body projections evoke teleoaffective misalignment and negative affective intensities that suffuse the very possibility of exercise.In a similar way, Ruby's past experiences, and situated experience of "massive boobs" makes her feel "sad" and "self-conscious" when she imagines running or walking: I have, sadly, massive boobs, so I can't run because thatno.So I walk but I can't walk too fast because they move and you know, after a while it's just not comfortable or pleasant so there is that kind of, in the back of your mind, you know, that makes me feel sad that Ieven if and when I think, 'oh and I'm going to go and do this' I have that in the back of my mind, you know, I feel self-conscious about my boobs especially, but my boobs and they're moving and everyone else's stay still and mine are jigging everywhere.
Ruby's body looms in the "back of her mind" when she enacts her body projection on an imagined exercising scenario.She notes that she "can't run" and confirms this with a definite "no."Her mothering body is pitted against body ideals of thinness that are bound up in the teleoaffectivity of exercising practice.
Teleoaffective misalignment is also fuelled by body-oriented surveillance projection involving imagined surveillance from exercise practitioners who are imagined as conforming to the body ideals entrenched in the exercise practice teleoaffective structure.For example, for Kate, body projection involves imagined, unpleasant surveillance, with "everybody else" being healthier and more skilled, and judging her as insufficiently healthy or skilled to legitimately participate: I always feel that everybody else … and this is just me -I know it's not truebut I always feel that I'm going to go into a place where everyone else is a lot healthier, they can do it.They'll look at me and think, 'oh, God, what's she doing here?'I think a lot of it is just self-confidence.The thought of having to go somewhere and have people see meit just puts me off.(Kate) Kate's imagines being "called out" by legitimate practitioners, evoking her own body as "failing" and further constituting teleoaffective misalignment.Although she recognises that the surveillance "is not true," her imagined future performance of exercise brings intense affective unease.
Projected body surveillance is common amongst our participants as they anticipate being observed, unsupported and shamed by "legitimate" exercise participants whose bodies meet the "exercising body ideal" of effortless thinness.Rhoda also describes her anxieties in the face of imagined surveillance, infused with memories of past experiences and intersected with shame from her body evaluations of her perceived "flabby," "waddling" mothering body: At the gym, you've got some [people] and they're really muscly and they're a size zero and there's me waddling in with all me flab going.I should be proud with the fact that I have waddled my butt into there to start my journey … but yeah, it's just that sort of, no, because I feel like all the skinny people are gonna stare at me and they're gonna judge me.(Rhoda) Ruby focuses on "muscly" and "skinny" exercise practitioners as she foregrounds the bodies of exercise practitioners and her own body in her projections.She later reflects on earlier attempts at exercise participation; that she would always be nervous about going in the gym and would avoid running because of the way her body looked to others when it moved.She admits that she "tried to make sure I went when I knew it was going to be quiet times and there were few people in there." Like Ruby, other participants also bring their personal histories of exercising, particularly since becoming mothers, into body projection performances.They describe opting for times of day and locations where they know they can avoid being observed.For example, Clara would run in the evening in the dark: I ran when there was no one around.It was dark.I like that.Then it started getting lighter and people were around so I didn't want to do it.
Similarly, Alma had recently started a beginner's running programme, but struggled running when there were people around because she did not like people seeing her: So, I was still doing the 'couch to five k' when lockdown hit and it was alright the first couple of weeks, because it was before the clocks went back so I could go out in the evening, there was no one around, it was dark and the weather by and large was generally quite nice.I liked that.Then it started getting lighter and people were around, I didn't want to do it.
Along the same lines, Winnie (who continued exercising in motherhood) admitted avoiding gyms because she felt she was being watched: "I won't go to a gym where's there's even a couple of people because I'm like, 'don't watch me'."Even during online yoga, according to Suma, "most people turn off the camera because they don't want their bodies to be seen."None of the participants reflected on actual experiences of being unkindly treated during attempted exercise participation.Yet, their engagement with exercising possibilities through pre-performative body surveillance and failure practices is an intensely negative experience, conditioned by habituated teleoaffective misalignment.In sum, as above through pre-performative body projection practices the "mothering body" and "exercising body" are reconstituted and pitted against one another, fuelling and further intensifying teleoaffective misalignment which brings and heightens negative intensities.
The "failing" mothering body and unsuccessful practice performances Pre-performative practices fuel, and are fuelled by teleoaffective misalignment, and construct the "failing" mothering body.This recursive cycle routinely evokes a texture of negative affective intensity that conditions, and is conditioned by unsuccessful exercise practice performance.Dora explains that she is put off exercising; "wary" of her local gym "because these people are super fit! … Where are the normal people?"She pits the bodies of imagined exercise practitioners against her own, evoking the exercising body as extraordinary and effortlessly "super fit".Clara and Amma describe in similar terms the women who take part in group exercise as already slim and athletic-looking, compared with their own experiences of exercise that are dominated by hard work and failure.Amma describes what "they" (women who exercise) would say: "I'm skinny.I'm thin and I've always been this way and I'm pretending that I work out." Teleoaffective misalignment and negative affective intensity abound as the images of effortless fitness and exercising body perfection entrenched in the exercise practice teleoaffective structure misalign with our participants' experiences of their own fleshy, sensing, suffering mothering bodies.Tia describes how mothering makes her feel constantly "strained" mentally and physically, exacerbated by lack of sleep: "I mean he still doesn't sleep through the night, so I'm strained every day … " Vanessa also explains how her body lacks strength, is painful and unhealthy since having borne children, which she sees as failing her: "I hate my body.My body lets me down all the time because of these health issues."Laura tearfully admits to pelvic health problems acquired during labour and not being "able to do what I did before, which is sad," and Josie simply describes herself since becoming a mother as feeling "a bit fried.Knackered, kind of thing."The sensing, suffering mothering body is inscribed with experiences of mothering and misaligns with the effortless, "unsensing" exercising bodies.This creates affective intensities manifesting as feelings of shame and loss.Through this teleoaffective misalignment, the mothering body is judged as failing.
The failing mothering body is further suffused with a sense of moral failure as our participants variously note when referring to their assessment of their "overweight" mothering bodies that they have "let themselves go," "become lazy," "need to get control" or need to "sort myself out".The imperative to exercise is embodied and the mothering body represents failure at not meeting a culturally acceptable fit and exercising body that is working to address weight gain during pregnancy.For example, Dora notes "So now I've had [my baby daughter], I have put on weight.I need to lose some weight."Similarly, Rhoda describes her "laziness" as the reason she is not active and has failed to return to her pre-pregnancy weight: It's that laziness, just like 'ugh' so I'd like to get back out there … I'd like to fit into my clothes again.That'd be nice.
Rhoda focuses on her mothering body as failing to fit into her clothes, illuminating the imperative to "get back out there" and exercise.Rhoda's sense of shame at not fitting in her clothes is amplified through the comparisons enacted by our participants in describing people who exercise as "organised," "happy," "disciplined" and "committed," evoking a collective sense of moral hierarchy relating to exercise participation and culturally acceptable bodies and evoking the teleoaffective misalignment characterising mother's pre-performative engagement with exercise.Ruby explains that people who exercise "look after their self, and they're happy," misaligning with how she views herself given her absence of body management practices.
The moralising public discourse about exercise, risk and health, our participants' unsuccessful performance of exercise and their situated experience of the strained mothering body as strained renders their bodies shameful, undisciplined, morally lacking and despised.This triggers emotions including embarrassment and shame.Hence, our participants have an uneasy, emotionally precarious relationship with exercise (Schatzki 2017), fostered through teleoaffective misalignment.This emotional volatility inhibits successful exercise practice performance, and further fuels the negative affective intensities of mothers' pre-performative engagement.For example, Amma describes how her confidence for gym participation has "gone" since becoming a mother: I've stopped going to the gym.I need to cancel my membership.I just don't feel confident going.Yeah.That's definitely gone.(Amma) Engaging with the possibilities of exercise evokes anxiety and apprehension, and Amma's reaction is to exit the field.Similarly, for Ruby, running for leisure is an impossible idea because her body is not appropriate: I remember, I saw a bigger lady, similar to me, jogging down the road and I remember just being amazed … I am not trying to sound mean, but it just took me aback because I just thought, I would never do that.Like, I'd only do that if I was like, you know, a size eight.Then I look like I could be running down the road.No no no.(Ruby) Ruby's amazement at "the bigger lady similar to her" jogging illustrates the centrality of bodies in exercising practice teleoaffectivity and demonstrates how teleoaffective misalignment shapes the construction of the "failing" mothering body and locks affective displeasure into mothers' relationships with exercise.This process fuels unsuccessful practice performance.

Discussion
Practice theoretic consumption research emphasises that bodies can be sites of possibility for women, as they internalise systems of meaning about how their bodies should appear (Viotto et al. 2021) that shapes their capacity to act (Valtonen 2013).Yet, extant research tends to elide a focus on bodies in unsuccessful practice performances.In this paper, we extend existing theorisation of the body in body management consumption by foregrounding the nexus of unsuccessful practice performance, bodies and affect.We focus on mothering and mothers' bodies in relation to exercise because mothering is an experience of the body (Han 2013), and because motherhood is a time when body management practices like exercise are heavily promoted (Raspovic et al. 2020).Our research illuminates the role of the mothering body in mothers' routinised engagement with the possibilities of exercise and in its unsuccessful performance.
We illuminate that mothers' engagement with exercise is done through their own situated, fleshy, sensing mothering bodies and in relation to culturally idealised "exercising bodies' that are constructed, by various marketing discourses, as central to exercise practices.Mothers routinely, unreflexively enact body evaluation and body projection practices, which are pre-performative dispersed practices that reconstitute mothers' implicit understandings about the practices of exercise (Schatzki 2005).During these pre-performative practices, the mothering body is brought centrestage and reconstituted as falling outside the sense of acceptability housed in the teleoaffective structure of exercise (Everts, Lahr, and Watson 2011).Body evaluation and body projection practices generate, and are fuelled by, teleoaffective misalignment that brings negative affective intensities that for our participants suffuse their engagement with exercise practice possibilities and reconstitutes exercise as unappealing or off the radar.Thus, the performance of exercise is unsuccessful, irrespective of the availability of other practice elements, such as competences and materials.Our study makes a number of theoretical contributions to consumption research, and has implications for marketing practice, as next outlined.
First, we theorise the body through the lens of the teleoaffective structure; the body is implicated in the acceptable or correct end goals, normative tasks needed to meet these ends, normative beliefs about the practice and the emotions evoked by and through practice performance.Specifically, we theorise the gendered, aesthetic body ideal in relation to the collective imperative at the heart of the teleoaffective structure of exercise.That is, consumers "recognise and interpret themselves against a given normative ideal" (Denegri-Knott, Nixon, and Abraham 2018, 558) and attune their performances, for example by avoiding "unwanted acts', in the context of these normative expectations, which for exercise contain the idealised "exercising body" as a central component (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and von Savigny 2001).The "exercising body" is effortlessly thin and strong; an ideal that conditions collective understandings about how and why exercise "should" be done; the tasks required to shape the bodies that are understood as an important part of the end goal of the practice, as well as how the exercising body should feel.
Furthermore, we argue that the mothering body that does not exercise falls outside the sense of "oughtness and rightness" housed in the teleoaffective structure of exercise (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and von Savigny 2001).These gendered body normativities bound up in the teleoaffective structures of exercise are shaped by cultural resources that inform and "provide" (Arsel and Bean 2013) bodily norms and ideals to the practice.That is, we recognise that cultural representation, symbology and cultural repertoires provide and shape practice teleoaffectivities, and are inseparable from the meanings at the heart of practices (Halkier 2020;Welch 2020).Our theorisation of bodies through teleoaffectivity builds on research that conceives bodies as central to the dynamics of how social meanings and practices are embodied and reproduced in everyday lives (Valtonen 2013;Warin et al. 2008) and responds to consumption scholars who call for further exploration of the way the body is represented in practice theoretic accounts of consumption (Maciel and Wallendorf 2017;Warde 2014).Furthermore, it contributes to practice theory scholarship that seeks to account for the "vibrancy" of the body (Maller 2017;2019).Further research is required to continue exploring the ways that bodies, practice templates and practitioners interact and shape and inhibit possibilities for different groups.
Second, from this we conceptualise "teleoaffective misalignment", which refers to a misalignment between the beliefs and understandings in pre-performative practices and the teleoaffective structure of a practice.In our study, teleoaffective misalignment pervades mothers' engagement with exercise practices.Mothers engage with culturally ideal "exercising bodies" through their own; a repository of remembered past experiences (Maller 2017) that are particularly bound up with the body; through carrying, birthing, feeding and caring.Mothering bodies are therefore a unique site of engagement with the world around them (Crossley 2001;Gallagher 2005), and as our research shows, can be a site of strain and exhaustion.Mothers' engagement with exercise is further conditioned by bodily discourses about beauty, responsibility and labour, the imperative to "snap back" after pregnancy, and related discourses of exercise non-participation, failure and laziness.Extant research has problematised a gap between what is performed and the normative expectations in the teleoaffective structure of the practice template (Thomas and Epp 2019).We extend this by introducing teleoaffective misalignment as a feature of pre-performative engagement with the teleoaffective structure.We show that pre-performative practices that fuel, and are fuelled by, teleoaffective misalignment, can foster negative affective relationships with the practice with which it connects.We demonstrate how for mothers, teleoaffective misalignment brings the body into ongoing engagement with the possibility of a practice, fostering emotional volatility and guiding (un)successful practice performance and reconstituting exercise practice normativity.Future research could consider other sources of teleoaffective misalignment that also impede recruitment to practices in relation to socio-cultural normativities and ideals, such as gender, social class or race.
Third, we identify the crucial role played by routinised pre-performative practices that are triggered by, and further fuel, teleoaffective misalignment.These can be described as "dispersed" practices (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and von Savigny 2001;2005), which are "an open spatial-temporal manifold of actions largely organised by understanding alone" (Schatzki 2005, 481) but are often ""sensitised" towards the integrative practice of which they form a part" (Harries and Rettie 2016, 875).Pre-performative dispersed practices can involve engagement with the teleoaffectivity of integrative practices.For example, research has identified that imagining or envisioning (Sörum and Fuentes 2022;Thomas and Epp 2019) are important practices preceding successful practice performance and that engaging pre-performatively with cultural resources that intersect with and "articulate" teleoaffective structures is an important way that consumption is governed (Arsel and Bean 2013).In our study, we identify body projection and body evaluation as key pre-performative practices that mothers routinely perform when engaging with the teleoaffectivity of exercise.These practices create, and are fuelled by, teleoaffective misalignment, and construct mothering bodies not as neutral carriers of experience and past practices (Maller 2019) but as unacceptable and failing.Moreover, mothers and mothering body ideals are (re)made through these practice performances, accruing meanings (for example of failure, inadequacy, fatness, unfitness and laziness) as they are repeatedly reconstituted through every routinised enactment.The routinised enactment of pre-performative practices and reconstitution of the "failing" mothering body through teleoaffective misalignment extends existing conceptualisations of stigma or shame in relation to "failed" gendered bodies.We show how stigma and shame are constituted by the negative affective intensities emerging from the routine enactment of pre-performative practices and can become locked in to mothers' relationship with exercise.Thus, these pre-performative practices play a role in the enduring circulation of collective conventions and dispositions toward practices and embodied "capacities for action" (Valtonen 2013, 201).
Fourth, we illuminate that the pre-performative practices we identify, in the form of body evaluation and body projection, routinely lead to unsuccessful practice performance.Consumption research within practice theoretic repertoires tends to emphasise successfully enacted, ongoing practice performing (Denegri-Knott, Nixon, and Abraham 2018; Walker 2013).For example, in the domain of active leisure, research has focused on embodied and sensory experiences (Scott et al. 2017;Woermann and Rokka 2015).Furthermore, where research foregrounds the body as a site of knowledge and learning about practice performance, it has focused on routine enactments of practices such as mundane activities like cooking or sleeping (Valtonen 2013;Warin et al. 2008).
Alternatively it has focused on appearance-related transformative consumption (Thompson and Hirschman 1995;Viotto et al. 2021).Yet, consumption research has also linked pre-performative dispersed practices such as anticipation and planning with the rejection of practice templates, or even to failure (Molander and Hartmann 2018;Thomas and Epp 2019).In line with this, we theorise body evaluation and projection as conditioning unsuccessful practice performance for our cohort of mothers.
Mothers cannot "envision potential relationships among practice elements" of exercise (Thomas and Epp 2019, 565) and leave the field because of the affective disincentives triggered by teleoaffective misalignment.This is recognised as a sense that exercise is not for them (Reckwitz 2017), although it can also manifest as feelings of frustration or anger.Mothers' failure to exercise, then, is not just a matter of failing to be interpellated into the underlying motivational structure of exercise, but also a tacit understanding that exercise is off the radar.As such, we theorise unsuccessful practice performance through the body-affect nexus; we highlight bodies in the routinised processes during which mothers recognise and interpret themselves as failing if they do not exercise, and bodies as repositories of forms of knowledge that reconstitute this tacit recognition, which shapes patterns of future consumption (of exercise) (Wallenborn and Wilhite 2014).In our study, teleoaffective misalignment and the socio-cultural "failing" mothering body reconstituted through pre-performative engagement with exercise create a tangible layer of unique difficulty for mothers' recruitment to exerciseon top of their limited time and energy (Spotswood and Gurrieri 2023;Spotswood, Nobles, and Armstrong 2021).Specifically, the pre-performative practices that trigger and further fuel teleoaffective misalignment bring affective intensity and disincentive to participate in exercise.This conditions mothers' engagement with exercise and its unsuccessful practice performance.
Finally, there are important implications for marketing and marketing policy from our study.We have emphasised that mothering bodies are socio-culturally constructed in relation to situated experiences and body discourses relating to healthiness, risk reduction, and moral responsibility promoted through social marketing and public health campaigns (Gurrieri, Previte, and Brace-Govan 2013), and in relation to body ideals of youthfulness, strength and thinness that are promoted in fitness industry marketing (Hutson 2016).The cultural, discursive context, strongly influenced by marketing, is sometimes indistinguishable from practice teleoaffectivity (Arsel and Bean 2013;Sutinen and Närvänen 2021;Welch 2020).Thus social and commercial marketing has an important role in constructing body discourses, "with or without intention" (Sutinen and Närvänen 2021, 18), and in providing body normativities that are entrenched in exercising practice teleoaffective structures.Marketing can therefore help shape the understanding people have "of what is required by the practice and their role within it" (Warde 2005, 149).
There is currently gender imbalance in the consumption of body management practices.There is market focus on providing beauty products and cosmetic procedures as "solutions" to the constructed body ideals for women (BAAPs 2019; Ceron 2022), whereas men participate in far more exercise than women, with mothers of young children doing the least overall (Mailey and Hsu 2019).Our study highlights that marketing practitioners should pay attention to the way bodies and body normativities are represented, particularly in body management related fields like exercise.Existing codes of conduct for fitness industry marketing, for example, could do more to explicitly focus on the representation of bodies and how bodies are constructed through preperformative practices.Future research should explore how careful social marketing and reformed fitness industry marketing can provide the resources for fuelling and facilitating practice change (Sutinen and Närvänen 2021) and foster less emotionally fraught pre-performative engagement with exercise by mothers.Marketing has a role to play in redressing the role of bodies in the teleoaffective structures of exercise.

Conclusion
In this paper we have contributed to practice-theoretic consumption research through further theorising pre-performative practices and offering the concept of teleoaffective misalignment.We have used these to illuminate and extend our understanding about the role of the body in mothers' engagement with exercise practices.Through routinised body-oriented pre-performative practices of body evaluation and projection, the mothering body is constructed as failing.The "failing" mothering body is pitted against exercising body ideals entrenched in exercise practice teleoaffective structure.Teleoaffective misalignment ensues, further fuelling pre-performative practice enactments centred around the body.These end with the unsuccessful performance of exercise by mothers, and serves to inhibit them building a positive relationship with exercise.
I hate [my body].I'm always in leggingsalways trying to cover my belly because I know that there's a lot of loose skin where I've had the children -I don't like my body at all.