He is so judgemental with me and my brother, yet look at him. And yet he seems so disappointed. I’m not what he hoped for when I was born and he was 22.
5 The identity, lifestyle and
embodiment of the female
bodybuilder
It is the drive, it is the passion, it is the desire, it is the goal of perfecting your body as much as you can with the genetic limitations and blessings that you were born with. It is the life of dedication, stress, pain, pain, and more pain, and then the joy of reaching even your smallest goal… [Female bodybuilders compete] against themselves and against society. Bodybuilding is a sport and an art and the driving force that propels so many of us to sacrifice ourselves and punish our bodies and minds for goals that, to most others, seem unreasonable or even ridiculous. THAT is a bodybuilder. THAT is the female bodybuilder.
(Sharon, bodybuilder of 12 years, in response to the question:
‘who is the female bodybuilder?’)
The costs and sacrifices involved in being a female bodybuilder are high. Her identity is under assault from many quarters. However, she also has various strategies to try to keep her sense of self unspoilt and sustainable. In this chapter I explore the identity, experiences and daily lifestyle of the female bodybuilder. I begin by outlining sociologically how identities are forged and shaped by the social interactions we have with others and exploring the consequences of not conforming to social norms. Next, I look specifically at female bodybuilders and how both the pursuit and the appearance of muscle make them deviant in society’s eyes. After looking at the stereotypes, stigmatization and marginalization of the female bodybuilder, I examine the motivations and strategies that these women employ to create and preserve their identity against all this adversity.
The interaction order
People’s identities are shaped significantly by the interactions they have with others. Theorists, such as Cooley (1922 [1902]) and Mead (1962 [1934]) argue that a sense of selfhood can only develop through our participation in social relationships. Cooley used the concept of the ‘looking glass self’, for example, to illustrate how the identities of individuals are formed via the ‘gaze of the other’.
These perspectives suggest that humans can only understand themselves in relation to other people, by ‘comparing themselves with others, or seeing themselves
Identity, lifestyle and embodiment 55
through the eyes of others, that is, by taking a statistical and objective view of themselves’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 434). As Brace-Govan (2002: 404) argues: The symbolic meanings conveyed by bodies are very important because people cannot be in the world without bodies. The demeanour, the presentation, the look, the size, and the physicality of bodies is… read like a text at an automatic and deep level of perception.
This ‘feedback loop’ on bodily appearance and self-presentation is a continuous process involving a reciprocal dialogue that spans the entirety of a person’s life.
According to the likes of Mead (1962), furthermore, this dialogue between others and ourselves involves more than a simple exchange of information, as we need positive approval from others in order for our lives and actions to have meaning and purpose. For example, as Crossley (2006a: 97) points out, ‘it is difficult to find yourself beautiful if others do not’. These processes may affect all social actors, but feminists have been quick to point out that women in particular have historically experienced such dialogue as an objectifying, estranging and alienating experience (Simone de Beauvoir 1949; Bartky 1988; Young 2005: 44). Men have been ‘freer’ in the interaction sphere to be more communicative, whilst women have been judged more on their physical appearance, as visual objects (Crossley 2006a: 85). Erving Goffman’s work becomes particularly relevant here.
Influenced by Mead’s theory of self-identity formation through social interaction, Goffman (1989) looks at how we present our bodies in public and the impact that this presentation has on our capacity to sustain a specific self-identity. Goffman (1971: 185) argues that the self is created through the ‘tenuous encounters’ and precarious nature of the ‘social interaction order’: ‘the individual does not go about merely going about his business. He goes about constrained to sustain a viable image of himself’. Interactions are complex and risky affairs that entail the
‘actor’ always being vigilant and self-monitoring in order to allow the encounter to go as smoothly as possible. For Goffman (1979, 1987), ‘impression management’, including the crucial first impression, is paramount in preserving both social and personal identities. Within the interaction order, social expectations, norms, values and roles are constantly being maintained, and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of culturally acceptable notions of gender.
Kessler and McKenna (1978) argue that individuals automatically make a
‘gender attribution’ every time they see a human being, consigning others to the sex of male or female based upon Western assumptions of masculine and feminine. As children, our gender is one of the first things that we learn and is central to developing our sense of self (Oakley 1972). According to Coveney et al.
(1984: 31), furthermore, ‘masculinity and femininity have been and are constructed in relation to one another to create and perpetuate male supremacy’.
This is reinforced by the pressure on women to be inherently sexual in appearance, compared with expectations for men to be sexual in behaviour in terms of dominance and power. Fitting gender norms therefore becomes vital for a person’s bodily presentation to be likely to facilitate social interaction and to be accepted
56 Identity, lifestyle and embodiment
generally by society. These norms of ‘gender interaction’ are not imposed by any brute force or physical control, but are conveyed in a more subtle manner.
For instance, Goffman argues that ‘men often treat women as faulted actors with respect to “normal” capacity for various forms of physical exertion’ (1974: 196–
7). Bartky (1988: 68) extends this analogy by arguing that ‘a man may literally steer a woman everywhere she goes’. The man’s movement ‘is not necessarily heavy or pushy or physical in an ugly way; it is light and gentle but firm in the way of the most confident equestrians with the best trained horses’. In this way, Goffman (1979: 9) believes that gender inequality within the ritual order of everyday encounters is ‘carried via the positioning of the body even into the gentlest, most loving moments without apparently causing strain’.
Against this background, it is not surprising to learn that there are high costs for those who transgress and do not fit the norms, appearances, behaviours and actions deemed appropriate for their sex. These ‘costs’ can involve violence.
More usually, however, they relate back to the need for validation of self through the social approval of others. If an actor’s body betrays him or herself during the public ritual, that individual risks ‘losing face’ and subsequent ostracization and stigmatization. In his landmark book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963), Goffman describes stigma as ‘an attribute that is deeply discrediting within a particular social interaction’ (ibid.: 3). The person with the attribute becomes ‘reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one’. They are judged and found morally culpable.
Exclusion from the interaction order makes it incredibly hard for deviant individuals to develop and maintain a positive identity. Actors are not, however, passive entities, and do have some agency: they can, albeit with difficulty, disregard negative feedback by focusing on only the views of the people they deem to be important and, even within this feedback circuit, carefully select and interpret the information that they decide to take on board (Cooley 1902; Franks and Gecas 1992). Stigmatized people can also try to protect their identities by surrounding themselves with other similarly marginalized people and
‘sympathetic others’, away from the ‘normals’. Subcultures can therefore provide marginalized groups with at least some pos
itive reinforcement, although ultimately, as Crossley (2006a: 95–6) points out, it ‘is difficult not to be affected or bothered by the views of significant others’.
Female bodybuilders, like other stigmatized groups, are marginalized and condemned by their ‘deviant aesthetic’ and because they are subverting ‘the stylistic certainty and aesthetic precision’ related to the smooth functioning associated with social control (Ferrell and Sanders 1995: 5, 11, 15). However, the fact that the appearances, actions and desires of female bodybuilders may threaten not only institutional norms, but the gendered foundations of social interaction itself, separates them from many other deviant groups within society (Downes and Rock 2007). In a culture where the ‘appearance and (re) presentations of women’s bodies are key determinants of feminine identity and cultural acceptability’ (Brace-Govan 2002: 404) and ‘muscles are the sign of masculinity’ (Glassner 1989: 311), female bodybuilders deviate forcefully from
Identity, lifestyle and embodiment 57
gendered interaction norms. The transgressive nature of female bodybuilders lies not just in the shape and size of their muscular bodies, moreover, but in their choice to pursue this transgression. This choice poses a considerable challenge in relation to the task of sustaining a viable sense of self-identity. It also raises questions about what identity-affirming resources, or vocabularies of motive (Mills 1940), are made available to these women during their time as female bodybuilders.
The stereotypes, stigma and marginalization of the female
bodybuilder
The troublesome and disturbing body of the hypermuscular woman is deemed so outrageously deviant by society that it provokes and evokes harsh attributions and acts of discursive violence (Reid-Bowen 2008), as typified by and encapsulated in the following quote:
It is disgusting! These are NOT WOMEN anymore. They are beyond the point of no return. Whoever would do that is SICK! YOU HAVE TO BE SICK TO
DO THIS TO YOURSELF! THERE IS NO NEED TO LOOK LIKE THAT!
IT IS DISGUSTING! MALE BODYBUILDERS WHO OVERDO IT LOOK
HORRIBLE TOO BUT SEEING A WOMAN MUTILATE THEIR BODY
IN THIS WAY IS SICK! UGLY UGLY UGLY! [emphasis in original].1
Furthermore, Fierstein (2000: 15) argues that these ‘monsters’ are considered to be
‘grotesque, manlike, androgynous, virile, freakish, dumb, narcissistic, obsessive, excessive, unhealthy, pornographic, offensive, and scary; she is a steroid user, a bulldyke, a dominatrix and an exhibitionist’, amongst other derogatory terms.
Perhaps less aggressive, albeit still negative, stereotypes were found in Forbes et al.’s (2004: 487) research, which discovered that female bodybuilders are perceived as less likely to be good mothers, less intelligent and less socially popular and attractive than average women. Literature by Lowe (1998), Shea (2001) and Steinem (1994) argues that men find muscular women who challenge traditional notions of male supremacy threatening and repulsive. As Forbes et al. (2004) point out, ordinary women also see female bodybuilders as violating gender norms and rebelling against ‘nature’. The female bodybuilder’s body ‘presents a clear and present danger… to what a woman is and ought to be, but also to the constitution of maleness’ (Fierstein 2000: 17; also see Chapter 4).
In the context of these highly negative cultural views, it has been suggested that the hypermuscular woman’s body must be ‘constantly policed, a nightmarish fantasy-body that is forever under the sign of prohibition’ (Aoki 1996: 66). In this regard the media acts as a powerful enforcer, portraying these women as ‘scary monsters’ who are ‘at war’ with society and with their own bodies, looking and sounding like men and rejecting what is culturally normal, acceptable and even tolerable (Theroux 2000; The Independent 2008; Maume 2005).
58 Identity, lifestyle and embodiment
The pursuit of female muscle as deviant
The witch-hunt begins right at the very beginning of the female bodybuilder’s pursuit of muscle, even before there are any visible markings of deviance. The decision and choice of these women to embark on a quest for muscular size and definition immediately ostracizes them and renders them abnormal in relation to gender norms. Friends, families and work colleagues, noticing this initial interest in bodybuilding and progression from light weight training to training for muscle mass, often feel compelled to articulate their concerns, acting as a form of social control. In the case of Lucie (a bodybuilder of eight years), she recalls her mother getting quite angry at her, asking, ‘Why are you doing this? What are you trying to prove?’ Similarly, Sascha (a bodybuilder of three months) remembers her father saying: ‘I’m concerned about you; I’m worried about your health. I don’t understand why you’re doing this to yourself’. These comments illustrate the social unacceptability of a woman wishing to build muscle. She is thought to be psychologically deviant or pathological, or even considered to be deliberately trying to upset other people. The idea that a woman wants to build muscle and yet still retain her identity as a female is incomprehensible when seen in terms of the hegemonic gender norms of society. Indeed, most female bodybuilders, at some point in their lives, have been asked: ‘Why do you want to look like a man?’
The perceived deviance of female bodybuilders stems from cultural assumptions about masculinity and femininity which have historically influenced how women’s and men’s bodies have been perceived. According to these norms, men and women are opposite, and should consequently be, and desire to be, aesthetically disparate.
Differentiation between the sexes is commonly considered to be exaggerated during puberty, when hormones trigger the visual display of secondary sex characteristics. Whilst there are several physical markers which signify the transition towards male adulthood (for example, enlargement of the testes, development of facial and pubic hair and changes to the voice), it is the growth of size and strength which are the principal symbolic badges associated with ‘manliness’. Muscularity is not only a visual marker of masculinity, interpreted ordinarily as a manifestation of naturally higher levels of testosterone, but informs the kinesthetic expectation that men dominate social and cultural spaces (Goffman 1974; Young 2005). The male body, then, is not just a physical entity but a way of orienting the world through embodiment. As Connell (1987: 297) explains:
The physical sense of maleness is not simply a thing. It involves the size and shape, habits of posture and movement, particular skills and lack of others, the image of one’s own body, the way it is presented to others and the ways they respond to it, the way it operates at work and in sexual relations.
In this context, strength and muscles belong to the man’s domain, representing power, authority, force and capability.
Against this background, women who participate in male-dominated sports and activities emphasizing their strength and increasing their muscularity are perceived
Identity, lifestyle and embodiment 59
as a threat to this social order and risk having both their femininity and their sexuality scrutinized and questioned (Nelson 1994: 45; Rich 1980; Hargreaves 1994). Females learn from a young age the importance of looking attractive to men (McRobbie 1991), which in Western society has never included feminine strength, size and muscle (Gorely et al. 2007). If a woman desires these masculine traits, she is perceived as rejecting both her sex and heterosexual relationships.
For instance, one of my interviewees, Pat (a bodybuilder of seven months) recollects her mother saying: ‘What’s wrong with you? Don’t you want a boyfriend?’
Similarly, Deborah (a bodybuilder of six months) recalls her brother telling her: Female bodybuilders look sick and repulsive. They are transsexuals… Why does anyone want to look like that? Who finds female bodybuilders attractive? Gay men? Lesbians? Who?
Thus when a woman displays (or even desires) the aesthetics of muscularity, it impinges on most people’s sense of propriety and normality in relation to gender and sexuality. Not only do female bodybuilders lose out in terms of physical capital (Bourdieu 19
78), placing themselves beyond the borders of conventional notions of beauty; they also risk ‘censure for so deliberately transgressing the normative ideal for the female body’ (St Martin and Gavey 1996: 55). This censure comes not only from the media, but also from the general public, work colleagues, friends, family and lovers.
Paying the price for defying the gendered social interaction
order
As found in many other research studies (Lowe 1998; Brace-Govan 2004; Dobbins 1994: 8; Ian 1995; Fisher 1997; Heywood 1998; Schulze 1990; Frueh et al. 2000: 8), the women in this study regularly had to deal with unsolicited derogatory remarks.
Their bodies, exuding stereotypical notions of masculinity in terms of size and shape, were no longer allowed to be their own but became objects of public property. However, it was not just strangers’ stares and muttered comments that these women had to contend with, but also confrontational remarks and challenges regarding their physique, femininity and sexuality. Whilst none of my interviewees spoke of the violence that other research into this area has highlighted (Ian 1995), many female bodybuilders spoke about the discursive animosity they received for crossing the boundaries of acceptable femininity. Caroline (a bodybuilder of 17 years) reflected upon some of her negative experiences:
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