The running class animation series as a biopedagogy: a multimodal critical discourse analysis

This article critically examines the Running Class Animation Series, an award-winning national sport science animation series in China. The Running Series takes the form of a cartoon to teach running in a playful and accessible way, aiming to educate the public about health and physical activity. Multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Running Series (a collection of 30 short episodes) reveals how the animation functions as a biopedagogical practice to instruct the public on how they should know and act on their bodies. By incorporating ideas from healthism, neoliberalism and postfeminism into instructions about running, the animation represents running as a technical, transformational and gender specific site. It instructs individuals’ bodies and gendered subjectivities through a rhetoric of health (anti-obesity oriented), personal optimization (neoliberalism-underpinned) and desired gender identity (body-located), while also representing running as self-surveillance work to achieve normative ideals of health and body. Empowered running identities are inscribed in the animation, depicting performing subjectivities as agentive, achieving and self-actualizing, which nevertheless ignore barriers faced by individuals (especially women) in doing physical activity. Overall, the Running Series reproduces pervasive discourses regarding body and health. This article concludes by exploring the implications of the findings for ideas about physical activity and individuals’ wellbeing in the Chinese society.