17 pages • 34 minutes read
Mark DotyAt the Gym
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Controlling Desires
“At the Gym” foregrounds desire more than any other emotion. This emphasis is, in part, due to the speaker’s complicated understanding of desire as a drive that needs to be controlled. However, this idea of control itself is complicated, and the poem suggests that desire can be controlled with both negative and positive outcomes.
The negative aspects of controlled desire is perhaps the kind of control typically associated with Christian theology. One of the appeals of exercise, according to the speaker, is to gain “some power / at least over flesh, / which goads with desire” (Lines 16-18). The process of lifting weights is thereby framed an exercise in willpower that trains the weightlifters to ignore their bodily desires. Though it is not clear to what particular desires the speaker refers, the association with “flesh” suggests that the desires are sexual or physical in nature. The desire might be as simple as the desire to stop lifting the heavy weights, and it might be as complicated as the desire to commit adultery. At both extremes, the person experiencing desire needs to control that emotion to the point that their willpower is stronger than the temptation.
The speaker, however, is also aware of this desire’s corollary. While the weightlifters work to mitigate desire in themselves, they aim to use their bodies to induce desire in others. The same willpower that the weightlifters use to continue their exercise and to resist temptation comes up again in their “will to become objects / of desire” (Lines 30-31). These lines suggest that the weightlifters also want positive control over desire, which translates into an ability to generate more desire in others and have it directed at themselves. This goal could be interpreted as a moral weakness, especially considering that this second instance of willpower is called “something more / tender” (Lines 28-29), suggesting an association with the flesh. These two readings do not preclude one another, but show that the weightlifters are vulnerable and human.
Positive Homosocial Spaces
Doty’s gym, or at least the weight bench on which his speaker focuses, is used and populated entirely by men. In contemporary sociological terms, this would make the gym a homosocial space, or a space where same-sex relationships, friendships, and mentorships are cultivated. Homosocial relationships are not romantic or sexual in nature.
The terms homosociality and homosocial space are typically used as a shorthand to describe male-dominated ways society. Houses of government, for instance, have long been homosocial spaces. At their best, however, homosocial spaces can allow people of the same sex to congregate and grow together, bonded by their shared gender identity. Since weightlifting is often coded as a masculine activity, gyms that cater to that activity tend to be homosocial. The same phenomenon is observable in sports teams, particularly those that are segregated by gender.
The lines separating homosociality and homoeroticism blur at times, but there is no evidence of homoeroticism in the poem itself. Doty’s gym is a place where all men are able to “push something / unyielding skyward” (Lines 14-15), regardless of whether that “something” is their weights or their measure of physical strength. Doty’s gym is a place to appreciate the male body’s strength and to learn how to control it, or gain “power / at least over flesh” (Lines 16-17) and its desires. More than anything else, however, it is “here, where / we make ourselves” (Lines 22-23). In this way, the poem should be understood as a positive depiction of a homosocial space, where men, as a collective, are encouraged to better themselves physically and morally.
Communal Creation
Doty’s gym is not only a space of homosocial encouragement and individual personal development. The gym also houses a community focused toward common goals, including physical fitness, celebrating life, and cultivating desire. While many of these goals are related to the group’s homosociality and their reverent attitude toward the male body, the poem suggests that the group’s ritual congregation and cooperation is more important than any of the individuals.
The importance of the gym’s community is most notable in the poem’s speaker’s use of first-person plural pronouns such as “we,” “our,” and us” to refer to actions taken in the gym. These pronouns suggest that all individual weightlifters engage in the same activities and act as a collective. The extent to which the weightlifters’ group identity subsumes each individual is demonstrated by the lines “Who could say who’s / added his heat to the nimbus / of our intent” (Lines 20-22). Here, the speaker rhetorically dismisses individual agency by asking “Who could say who’s,” and foregrounding the group intent.
Though this group is entirely male, their gender is not the only quality that brings them together. The speaker alludes to the weights are “some burden they’ve chosen” (Line 7), asserting that the activity of lifting weights is a conscious choice, whether the individual chooses to do it once or every day. That shared, continued participation in the ritual of weightlifting, according to Doty’s speaker, can create something greater than any individual effort. The sweat stain “marks the place where men / lay down their heads” (Lines 2-3), and this connection between the divine and weightlifting, in other words, relies on a communion of like-minded individuals.
