IGNITE
UBC Women’s and Gender Studies
Undergraduate Journal
Marginalized Muscle: Transgression and the Female
Bodybuilder (Article)
Victoria Felkar
Ignite, Vol 4, Number 1, Spring 2012 pp. 40-49
© the Contributors
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Marginalized Muscle: Transgression and the Female Bodybuilder
Victoria Felkar
I am an androgynous creature, a monster with a “disease” (Fussell 19). People
reacted to my body with a “silent, raging, scream of dissent” (Heywood, “Building
Otherwise” 165). I am a radical risk taker who has blatantly disregarded the dominant
understanding of what is aesthetically, kinaesthetically and phenomenologically
acceptable for women (Shilling and Bunsell 141) In doing so, I have become a gender
outlaw to whom popular culture has thrown to the margins of society for transgressing
the rigid hierarchical binaries of femininity/masculinity, nature/culture, body/mind and
sex/gender (Johnson 336). Stigmatization, marginalization, sexism, racism and
homophobia are my punishment for breaking and blurring the boundaries of society’s
traditional understanding of the female body. I am a biological female embodying a
hypermuscular physique that I have intentionally achieved by sculpting my muscles
through rigorous training. I am a female bodybuilder.
Feminist sport sociologist Jennifer Hargreaves poses the question “femininity or
muscularity?” (146). Hargreaves forces a deep critical inquiry into normative gender
ideologies that has prompted this academic inquiry. Guided by academic literature and
my lived experiences, I will work to deconstruct the ways in which hypermuscular
embodiment transgresses gender norms and challenges Western ideals of what it
means to be female. A historical analysis provides insight into discovering the perpetual
marginalization endured by women who deliberately possess abnormal amounts of
muscle mass. In identifying feminist reactions towards the hypermuscular body and
intersectionally examining the consequences of hypermuscular embodiment, I will work
to understand ways in which the female bodybuilder apologizes for gender norm
transgression.
A female bodybuilder is defined as any woman who intentionally builds her body
through rigorous diet and training to gain significant amounts of muscle mass. At first,
the hypermuscular body of a female bodybuilder does not seem applicable to the
general population; however, her body represents the epitomic athletic female.
Understanding the ideologies that surround the hypermuscular female body in relation
40 to gender and hegemonic femininities is crucial in asking larger empirical questions
regarding gender transgression, femininity and muscularity. By studying the
embodiment of femininity and gender role behaviours, heterosexism and subordination
of the athletic woman can potentially be reduced. I believe that understanding how
social constructs of gender interact with bodybuilding and sport in general is important
to provide women with opportunities to break away from the rigid cultural constructions
of gender.
Through examining embodiment, social situations can be understood as
constructions that are defined by the meanings in which female bodybuilders give to
unfolding social interactions (Roussel et al. 108). The meanings given by female
bodybuilders are vis-à-vis the reflections of social experiences and negotiations of
cultural norms. I have not consulted directly with other female bodybuilders to create
dialogue about their embodied interpretations of femininity and practices. The goal of
this paper is not to capture the experiences of the female bodybuilder through intuition
and disembodying her. Rather, I want to recognize my own lived experience as a
female bodybuilder. My positionality as an academic has helped to construct my
understandings of the hypermuscular female body but I do realize that my embodiment
and interpretations of femininity are still unique to me.
History of Women and Muscle
Leslie Fisher declares that female bodybuilders create a body that is full of
“contradictions, compromises, and tensions that are exuded between mainstream and
marginalized femininities” (135), which have been exemplified throughout the evolution
of the hypermuscular body of a woman. While the sport of female bodybuilding’s
conception was only a mere 34 years ago, the muscular female body has been
documented since around 1783 (Chapman & Vertinsky 46). At the end of the 19th
century to the beginning of the 20th century, strong women appeared on the fete,
carnival and circus scene. These women were viewed as the “other”, displayed in exotic
and sometimes frightening ways; yet they were still a form of entertainment sought after
by men. By the 1920’s a new model of the “able-bodied woman” became embraced
(Schofield). Ideals changed during the periods of war, and a lightly muscled body was
41 acceptable as women had to participate in physical work. A digression occurred post
World War II when women were sent back into the home to be proper housewives and
to accept the “traditional gender role” (Mitchell 94).
Throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s, the feminist movement created a forum for
women to crusade against both cultural and political inequalities reflected by a sexist
structure of power. The American Legislation of Title IX of the Educational Amendments
Act of 1972 created legal action against unequal opportunities in institutions surrounding
gender inequality (Heywood, Bodymakers 9, 13). Such examples laid the foundations
for the de-marginalization of muscular women. Established by Henry McGhee in 1977,
the first competitive female bodybuilding contest saw women with soft, small muscles.
As noted by Leslie Haywood, such bodies did not challenge the accepted notions of
masculinity and femininity (Bodymakers 28). Women were not allowed to flex their
muscles in fear of appearing too masculine. Although larger female bodybuilders began
to appear in the limelight, the most profound was that of Australian power lifter Bev
Francis in 1983 (Bodymakers, 28). Francis along with other muscular women created a
social reaction of moral panic. Throughout the late 1980s and into the present, female
bodybuilders have continuously grown bigger muscles, decreased their body fat
percentages to new lows and blurred the boundaries of what we have traditionally
understood the female body to be (Johnson 336).
Transgressing Gender: Muscle and Femininity
Patriarchal myths embedded in Western culture have legitimated structural sex
and gender inequality in all sectors of society, including sport and athletics (Messner
198). These constructed ideologies exaggerate and naturalize, sex and gender as
binaries which has restrained women’s opportunities to embody muscle without abject.
A hypermuscular female body displays the idealized contemporary male body, a
“sporting body” which is strong, aggressive and muscular, all traditional views or signs
of corporeal masculinity (Hargreaves 145). However, apart from the muscles associated
with sex organs, muscles themselves are neutral in biology (Ian). It has only been
through socialization that muscles have become gendered as male and thus created
cultural beliefs that the more muscle a woman has the more masculine she is (Ian;
42 Hargreaves 145). According to Sawicki, the hypermuscular body of a woman blurs the
dominant understanding of the body, which destabilizes feminine bodily identity and
confuses gender (64). In doing so, the female bodybuilder provides a new space for
thinking about the body and produces a new image of what woman can achieve
physically (Johnson 327).
Schulze suggests that female bodybuilding is “redefining the whole idea of
femininity,” by asking “how far” a female bodybuilder can go and still remain “a woman”
(9). Ambiguity of gender traits and behaviours to what the bodies of hypermuscular
women represent a challenge to the normative categorical ways of thinking about the
female body and femininity. In violating the normative characteristics of what it means to
look and be feminine, the female bodybuilder transgresses the hegemonic ideals of
femininity and becomes a “deviant” (Shilling and Bunsell 143). Due to this
transgression, the muscular female body is referred to in terms of natural and unnatural.
The transgressor of the female bodybuilder creates a different set of ideologies
surrounding the body. Schulze views a muscular female as being so ambiguous that her
body offers different meanings to audiences, which create opposite orientations (12).
Feminist reactions to female bodybuilding vary from scepticism to celebration
(Leppihalme 132). Pamela Moore asserts that the female bodybuilder can be viewed in
three ways (74). First, she emulates male standards through copying masculine
aesthetic to gain power. Second, Moore describes that some scholars believe that, like
an anorexic, the female bodybuilder is exploiting her body through self-discipline to
meet the approval of the male dominated fitness industry. The third view asserts that
female bodybuilding is a celebration of the female body, that women have the right to
manipulate their bodies “however they choose” (Moore 75). This view argues that
bodybuilding is able to rejuvenate the female and break away from the overbearing
patriarchal reign. Within this definition, the female bodybuilder emulates post-modernist
activism, and by acknowledging the dominant male/female binary, the female
bodybuilder casts herself in the role of the other.
Personally, I believe that embodying hypermuscularity enables me to transgress
the narrow notions of gender and the body. Bodybuilding has been viewed as one of the
“queerest activities within postmodern culture” for its ability to self-create the body and
43 transcend normative notions of sex, gender and sexuality (Richardson 297). I am
troubled with representations of the female bodybuilder in popular culture, as later
discussed; I see embodying hypermuscularity and the act of building the body as a
prospective site of liberation – one in which women can fight against gender hegemony.
Consequences of Hypermuscularity
By transgressing the normative definition of what it means to look and be a
feminine woman, the female bodybuilder faces consequences (Rousell et al. 104).
Primarily, the act of being muscular creates stigmatising feedback that makes it hard for
a hypermuscular female to create a positive self-identity (Shilling and Bunsell 142). In
Irving Goffman’s writings on social stigma, he notes that transgressors become
excluded from the order of normative social interactions as they are deemed
undesirable. Therefore, as a consequence of being transgressors, female bodybuilders
are generally unaccepted within popular culture. Schulze describes how those who find
female bodybuilding deplorable usually comment that these women are “trying to look
like men” (13). The more muscle that a woman has, the more public backlash she
creates.
In an investigative study on female bodybuilders and femininity, Boyle discovered
that contrary to stereotypes about muscular women, to be a female bodybuilder requires
the challenging negotiation of sexist, racist and homophobic ideologies (“Flexing
Tensions” 135). Rigorous negotiations of a female bodybuilder occur based on her
muscular body and other facets of identity. Collins, states that intersectionality is
created through cultural patterns of oppression that are not only interrelated but are
“bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society” (42). Thinking
critically about my embodiment, I have come to be aware of the ways in which my sex,
gender and sexuality intersect to form how society negotiates my body. As a
heterosexual able-bodied white female of privilege I am adhering to most of the ideals of
hegemonic femininity (Schippers 88). However, my deviant body requires the
challenging negotiation of sexist and homophobic ideologies (Boyle, “Flexing Tensions”
135). To examine my hypermuscular female body therefore cannot occur only on the
44 basis of hypermuscularity but along the various socially and culturally constructed
categories of identity that create further marginalization.
Schulze found that one implication that a female bodybuilder must negotiate is
the assumption that she is “masculine” and therefore a lesbian (11). The link between
female bodybuilders and lesbians are made through the belief that both disrupt
patriarchy and heterosexualism (Schulze 11, 21). In embodying hypermuscularity as a
woman, the body becomes excessively “unnatural” and dangerous to society, exhibiting
both high levels of muscularity and reduced body fat that accentuate a non-normative
female physique. Without the usual levels of body fat, diminished breast size
(sometimes eliminated altogether) and ceased menstruation, the female bodybuilder no
longer adheres to the biomedical markers of a cis-gendered woman. The absence of
the physiological characteristics paired with the un-feminine attributes of a female
bodybuilder (want to grow muscles, desire to lift weights, etc.) facilitates a larger sense
of gender ambiguity. In turn, a “homophobic patriarchal ideology is generated which
states that men who find the female bodybuilder attractive must be gay and women that
find her attractive cannot be lesbians” (Holmlund 92). Boyle proclaims that the “unnaturalness” of female bodybuilding transgression of gender is confused with the binary
of heterosexuality and homosexuality that threatens the sport and recreationally
muscular woman (“Flexing Tensions”, 140). The female bodybuilder’s body further
inflames society through threatening male dominance. By entering into the traditional
male domain of sport and bodybuilding, the female bodybuilder’s body becomes
‘contested terrain’ (Messner 198). Heywood suggests that because of the ways in which
hypermuscular women challenge traditional ideas of weakness, incompetence,
femininity and softness, the cultural impact of female bodybuilding is limited to a very
small subculture of women willing to be seen as deviant because of embodying
hypermuscularity (Bodymakers 5).
The Image of Femininity
Embodying hypermuscularity requires a private struggle; working both to comply
with one’s personal standards while embodying the hegemonic ideals of femininity.
Hargreaves notes that, the female bodybuilder must negotiate her “two-selves” (168), a
45 biologically sexed female body that is expected to be embody femininity, and a
muscular body that is regarded as masculine and associated with the male sex.
Negotiating between embodying both hypermuscularity and femininity strains the female
bodybuilder’s sense of self, and are thought to have negative psychological effects such
as feelings of disloyalty, lowered self concept, and alienation from athletic and personal
identities (Davis-Delano et al.133). The female bodybuilder becomes strategic in the
ways to embody femininity. A woman cannot simply display a muscular physique. She
must pair it with conventionally feminine styled hair, make-up and wardrobe to create an
image acceptable for the viewer (Schulze 25). While “radical” in her transgression of the
gender binary, the female bodybuilder must oblige herself to rigorous cultural notions of
femininity.
Primarily, hypermuscular female bodybuilder must ‘apologize’ for transgressing
gender norms (Davis-Delano et al. 133). Apologetic behaviour is a compensatory act for
identity creation and stigma management and allows “stereotypes and sexist
assumptions to continue . . . rather than insisting that there [is] nothing wrong with
[female athletes]” (Festle 256). In emphasizing hegemonic femininities through hypersexualized, heteronormative representations, the female bodybuilder attempts to lessen
marginalization and reduce homosexual feelings within Western society (Holmlund 93).
Thus, the hypermuscular woman erotically constructs her appearance through the
feedback produced by patriarchal society’s objectifying “gaze” (Johnson 335). Many
female bodybuilders have chosen to employ over the top displays of Western femininity
in the form of excessively large breast implants, fake nails and unusually high amounts
of make-up. Regardless of the shape and size of the women’s muscular body, she is
often if not always portrayed in an illusionary manner in order to disguise her physique
(Heywood, Bodymakers 94). Rather than celebrating the gains that female bodybuilders
have achieved, women must apologize for their muscular physiques and calm the public
outcry through posing in stiletto heels, lingerie and even fetish wear. Sexualized
representations of female muscle in popular culture contribute to notions of “selling sex”,
which legitimizes identity and creates appeal for the female bodybuilder (Boyle, “Politics
of Muscle” 94).
46 Conclusion
The female bodybuilder offers a unique glimpse at how muscle, although not
gendered in biology, becomes so heavily associated with the male. Throughout the past
century, the physically strong and muscular woman has been the object of ridicule,
fascination, and erotic desire (Schofield). Female bodybuilders challenge the dualistic
ideals of sex/gender, male/female and have faced dire consequences in doing so.
Stigmatization, marginalization, sexism, racism and homophobia all contribute to the
resistance of the female bodybuilder in Western society. The answer to Hargreaves
question is not one of deciding whether to embody femininity or muscularity but rather
the question becomes an intriguing exploration of the female bodybuilder’s deployment
of emphasized hegemonic femininity as a countervailing mechanism to
hypermuscularity (145). Can embodying these two extremes balance each other out
and create legitimacy for female bodybuilders? From my own lived experiences I would
argue no, as misconceptions, stereotypes, and judgements of hypermuscular women
are far from eradicated within the present Western world. Emerging in popular culture
media is a new fit body ideal that have suggested as a possible shift in the conception
of femininity and attractiveness (George 323). The current ideal physique for women
celebrates muscle in moderation but embodying too much muscle is still heavily
“contested ideological terrain” (Messner 198). Rather than celebrating the gains that
female bodybuilders have achieved in the male-dominated arena of sports, women
continue to apologize through displaying emphasized and often hypersexualized
femininity. By deconstructing the extremes of hypermuscularity and apology-influenced
femininity as dual embodiments unveils a dangerous negative covert and overt
message with regards to what it truly means be a woman with a muscular physique.
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