Transgressive Bodies

Representations in Film and Popular Culture

Niall Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317007388
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years the body has become one of the most popular areas of study in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Transgressive Bodies offers an examination of a variety of non-normative bodies and how they are represented in film, media and popular culture. Examining the non-normative body in a cultural studies context, this book reconsiders the concept of the transgressive body, establishing its status as a culturally mutable term, arguing that popular cultural representations create the transgressive or freak body and then proceed to either contain its threat or (s)exploit it. Through studies of extreme bodybuilding, obesity, disability and transsexed bodies, it examines the implications of such transgressive bodies for gender politics and sexuality. Transgressive Bodies engages with contemporary cultural debates, always relating these to concrete studies of media and cultural representations. This book will therefore appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines, including media and film studies, cultural studies, gender studies, sociology, sports studies and cultural theory.

PART I
Hyper-Muscular Bodies

Introduction to Part I
Extreme Bodybuilding

Although there is evidence that, since the Greco-Roman Empire, people have engaged in activities in order to build or shape the muscles of the body, the activity which we label “bodybuilding” is relatively young, having a history of just slightly over 100 years. Its identification as a sport, with professional status, is little more than 40 years old, with the first Mr Olympia competition being held in 1965.

Bodybuilding is, of course, a culturally mutable term. Technically anyone who engages in “building” the body in some way is a bodybuilder. As I always tell my students, we are all bodybuilders in that we “build” our bodies on a daily basis. We all decide how we groom the body, not only the hair on the head but how much hair we want to leave on the body; we often paint/make-up the skin of our body not only in facial make-up but also in tanning the skin through sunbathing, sunbeds or the application of fake-tan make-up and most people are, at some point, involved in the manipulation of the body’s weight either through following a specific diet and exercise regime or through a simple observation of calorie intake after a period of excessive consumption.

However, in Western culture we generally take the label bodybuilding to apply to anyone who engages in the building and shaping of the voluntary muscles of the body through a regime of resistance weight training and dietary manipulation. As such, bodybuilding is a predominantly Western activity with a specific template of goals. It is important to remember that there are other forms of “built” body to be found throughout the world and Japan’s “sumo body” – obviously a body which has also been built through a regime of diet and exercise – is another example of a built body. Similarly, we should also remember that “bodybuilding” is a very wide category and the degree to which someone may engage in the activity, and his/her personal goals, is extremely varied. Like all activities, not every participant may wish to create a Mr Olympia standard physique and some may have very different ambitions in mind. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this argument we can apply the term “bodybuilding” to anyone who engages in a process of dietary manipulation and resistance weight training (and possibly drug enhancement of the body’s hormones) in order to build and/or shape the voluntary muscles of the body.

There have been many histories/critiques of bodybuilding or muscular masculinity (Chapman 1989, Cooper 1995, Dutton 1999, Gillett and White 1992, Locks 1999, Monaghan 1999, Richardson 2004 and Wiegers 1998) and this short introduction cannot claim to cover all the details. I simply want to outline some key moments in the development of the sport before discussing the cultural debates of contemporary “freaky” bodybuilding.

It is generally agreed that the first bodybuilder was Eugen Sandow (1867–1925) (Lucie-Smith 2003). Sandow (whose real name was Friedrich Wilhelm Müller) was Prussian and first sprang to fame as a variation/development of the freak show exhibit usually titled “the strongman”. The strongman would have dazzled audiences by his feats of strength – the standard feat being the military press in which he lifted a very heavy barbell overhead. However, when it became apparent that audiences were equally interested in the appearance of Sandow’s bulging muscles, as much as in the amount of weight he was lifting, his act changed agenda and he became exhibited as the “most perfectly developed man” (Cooper 1995: 92). As such, Sandow is usually identified as the first bodybuilder in that he was exhibited because of how his body looked rather than what his body could do. Sandow became the first muscular male exhibit who did not flaunt his strength through acts of lifting but instead displayed the muscularity of his body.

It should not be forgotten that Sandow was a sideshow “freak”, often exhibited alongside such other bodily curiosities as the bearded lady, primordial dwarves and Siamese (or as we now term them, conjoined) twins. It is important to remember that the origins of bodybuilding are therefore found in the freak show and this is especially interesting when we consider what competitive bodybuilding seems to have returned to now (see below). Yet unlike other bodily curiosities which transgressed traditional ideas of beauty, Sandow was marketed as the most perfectly built/developed man – a body which aspired to the proportions of classical beauty. The pleasure of gazing upon Sandow was how he brought to life the ideal of classical statuary. Indeed, the classical allusion was further emphasised by having Sandow coated in a layer of white powder, making him appear like a marble statue. Another important aspect of Sandow’s popularity was that his career was coterminous with the rise of photography. Spectators would often buy images of Sandow after watching his posing routine. Yet it is also fair to suggest that many fans of Sandow obtained images of the man without ever having watched him perform on the stage. Therefore, even from its earliest days, the bodybuilder’s body can be read as something which, for many people, only existed in representation and obviously what made Sandow’s physique appear so spectacular were the contrivances of re-presentation, especially lighting and make-up.

Although there were various other representations of bodybuilders throughout the early half of the twentieth century,1 bodybuilding would not receive much mainstream press until after the Second World War with Bob Mizer’s “male-order” Physique Pictorial. Produced by Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild, Physique Pictorial was basically soft porn masquerading under the guise of being a bodybuilding/fitness magazine. The publications featured young toughs – often straight out of prison – whose bodies ranged from having some muscular development to none at all. There is some evidence to suggest that the Athletic Model Guild also functioned as a prostitution stable. The dramatised documentary, Beefcake, revealed that Mizer made small etchings on the photographs of the boys which were mailed to customers/clients. To the uninformed eye these marks simply looked like soils on the negative but they were actually a code for conveying information about the boys’ sexual proclivities, such as whether they were active, passive or versatile or how well endowed they were.

Physique Pictorial left a lasting legacy on the activity of bodybuilding. Firstly, it conflated bodybuilding with homosexuality. After the publicity of this magazine, many people read bodybuilding as a covert gay activity. Men who engaged in the activity were gay and, if they were not gay to begin with, the activity would probably “turn” them gay. Secondly, it clouded the concept of bodybuilding for many people. Given that so many of the Physique Pictorial models had so little muscular development or, most importantly, such imbalanced muscularity, it conveyed an inaccurate impression of what the activity aimed to do – the holistic development of all the voluntary muscles to attain the classical ideal. The impact which Physique Pictorial had on the public perception of bodybuilding should not be underestimated and indeed it was not until the 1970s that the public perception of bodybuilding would be revised.

The 1970s saw a definite challenge to the legacy of Physique Pictorial through the birth of what we now term the Weider empire. Two brothers, Joe and Ben Weider, aimed to give bodybuilding mainstream appeal and make it accepted as a sport. The Weiders are responsible for the formation of the International Federation of Bodybuilders (IFBB) which is still, today, the main organisation offering professional status to bodybuilders. Joe Weider was responsible for the formation of much of the publicity surrounding the activity of bodybuilding and published many of the leading magazines such as Flex and Muscle and Fitness. Ben Weider was involved in the formation of the IFBB competitions and formulated the IFBB criteria and rules for the shows.2 The IFBB is still very strict about its competition guidelines and indeed it is remarkable to note how competitions forbid any use of clothing, prop or accessory in bodybuilders’ free-posing routines as this may suggest eroticism or strip-tease. Rules were exceptionally strict about posing trunks, outlawing the use of thongs or g-strings which had appeared in earlier competitions (see Dutton 1999: 85). This, of course, is partly a reaction against the legacy of Physique Pictorial and a very definite attempt to excise any homoeroticism from the activity. After all, if a bodybuilding competition is literally a display of semi-nude men, whose bodies are paraded for the delight of a predominantly male audience, then the question of eroticism is hard to overlook.

A key element in the Weiders’ forceful heterosexualisation of bodybuilding was the ambassador of the Weider empire, a man whose name would become synonymous with bodybuilding: the one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger became the poster-boy for the Weider empire and the most photographed bodybuilder in all the publications. If we consider the visual codes employed in the representation of Schwarzenegger’s body in a typical magazine photo we can see that specific patterns tended to emerge.

Firstly, Schwarzenegger was often photographed outside the gym context and presumably this was because 1970s gyms were little more than underground, dirty caves which often had very poor lighting. Secondly, Schwarzenegger was usually represented in a natural setting but this was always Sound of Music-style, white nature. Often photographed against a background of snow-capped Austrian mountains (reminding us of how “Caucasian” comes from the Caucasus mountains) Arnold’s white, Aryan/Austrian heritage was always emphasised. A low camera angle heroicised Schwarzenegger’s figure while emphasising the white supremacy of the activity. Most importantly Schwarzenegger’s unquestioned heterosexuality was emphasised throughout his career. In one of the most over-the-top sequences in the documentary Pumping Iron (one of the first documentaries to investigate the activity of bodybuilding in any great depth) Schwarzenegger compares the sensation of the pump (the feeling bodybuilders get when the muscle is pumped full of blood and inflated) to the pleasure of orgasm. In a rather protracted metaphor Schwarzenegger narrates how he is ‘in heaven’ given that he has the feeling of ‘having sex with a woman and cumming’ every time he pumps up in the gym. The point is very obvious – Arnold is not gay. Indeed, in the sequence immediately following Schwarzenegger’s description of “pump-orgasm”, he is represented posing for the inmates of a male prison and is perfectly happy diffusing a homophobic comment with a little humour and banter. Secure in his hetero-sexuality, Schwarzenegger has no need to be homophobic.

However, as I’ve argued in an earlier article (Richardson 2004), Schwarzenegger’s “pump-orgasm” description can be read in accordance with a queer trajectory. It hardly takes Eve Sedgwick to point out that there is no woman in evidence when Schwarzenegger is lauding the pleasure of the pump. There is simply Schwarzenegger enjoying the auto-erotic pleasure of his own body. Indeed, it is perfectly valid to read this “orgasm-pump” as the pleasure of masturbation and therefore akin to Eve Sedgwick’s queer category of onanism or auto-eroticism (1993, 1998). Heterosexuality is, after all, the erotic union of male and female bodies and not simply one body enjoying the pleasure of its own flesh.

Nevertheless, Schwarzenegger did a great deal to change the public perception of the activity of bodybuilding. He made it a white “jock” sport which appealed to the middle-class college boy who wanted to be like Schwarzenegger. It is probably fair to say that Schwarzenegger became one of the first male pin-ups that teenage boys could stick to their bedroom walls without their mothers worrying about their son’s sexual identifications. Of course, Schwarzenegger did have, without question, one of the greatest physiques of all time. His billiard ball shoulders and dense slabs of pectoral muscle, tapering into a tiny waist (31″ in competition trim), suggested classical proportions never before seen on living human tissue. Indeed, in comparison to the blocky physiques of the contemporary Olympian stage, where distended abdomens (a look now referred to as the “roidgut” – see Chapter 4) tend to dominate, Schwarzenegger offered a classically proportionate physique which suggested the ideals of Greek statuary.

It is interesting to note that Schwarzenegger’s main rival at the time was Sergio Oliva. Oliva, however, was black and this was a factor not overlooked in publicity material. If Schwarzenegger’s iconic images were the heroic, god-like figure set against white nature, Oliva was often represented in the very opposite fashion. Although none of the publicity material stooped so low as to represent Oliva in the jungle, Oliva’s iconic image became one which might have been a still from a Hollywood blaxploitation movie. Dressed in a tight T-shirt, gangster hat and sporting vulgar “bling” jewellery on his wrist, Oliva was represented in a pool hall, holding a cue and preparing for his next shot. Notwithstanding the fact that this image downplays Oliva’s physique, it codes this body in the underground, working-class world of a pool hall with more than a subtle dollop of black, ghetto politics. Indeed, in one of the Olympia competitions, fans of the sport felt that Oliva should have beaten Schwarzenegger as his condition, on the day, was deemed considerably superior. Joe Weider, however, made the racial politics of the activity very clear when he explained that it was much more profitable for the Weider empire, whose main magazine market was middle-class, white college boys, to have Aryan Arnold as the current Mr Olympia. In an interview, Joe Weider explained ‘I put Sergio on the cover, I sell x magazines. I put Arnold on the cover, I sell 3x magazines’ (quoted in Klein 1993: 99). Arguably, a similar strategy of racial containment still operates in the publicity surrounding contemporary bodybuilding. The former Mr Olympia, holding the title from 1998 to 2005, was Ronnie Coleman – a black man. However, Coleman is also a policeman, a job which, if we ignore recent events in Los Angeles, should connote all that is good and decent about contemporary society. It is remarkable, given that the IFBB guidelines decry the use of costumes or props in the representation of bodybuilders, how Coleman was so often represented in his policeman’s uniform. Indeed, it is almost as if Coleman’s job as a law officer is used to excuse or even apologise for his blackness.

After the immense popularity of Arnold in the 1970s, bodybuilding entered a period of “mainstreaming”. Suddenly, gym membership became a fashionable item as the 1980s saw the birth of the luxurious health club gym and multiplex gyms. Gyms were no longer dirty, underground bunkers or something tagged onto boxing or wrestling clubs. Instead gym membership was now offered as a work bonus alongside medical and dental care and people from middle-class, white collar backgrounds were electing to work out in a gym environment rather than engage in traditional exercise pursuits such as jogging. Yet, while gym membership increased, the idea of active participation in bodybuilding became even more the preserve of a particular subculture. Most people at that time (and this is still the case today) prefer to use the phrase “work out” or “lift weights” rather than say they are involved in doing these activities to build and shape the voluntary muscles of the body – in other words body build. Arguably this may stem from shame for the inherent narcissism of the activity, after all, bodybuilding is about people objectifying their own bodies and paying close attention to the appearance of their bodies. More than likely, however, it comes from the canonisation of the type of body Arnold represented. Few people can ever dream of approximating the dimensions of Arnold’s physique, no matter how hard they train or whatever way they supplement or enhance their hormonal make-up. If Arnold became the ambassador of bodybuilding he also set the standard for how a “built” physique should look and many people do not like to say that they engage in the activity of bodybuilding and then watch amazed expressions as someone scrutinises their body parts and remarks that they are not quite of Schwarzenegger proportions.

The Post-Classical Physique

One of the most important things to happen in the 1980s (post Schwarzenegger) would be a definite split in bodybuilding trajectories. One of the main changes was that competitive bodybuilding aspired to ever more “freakish” proportions as the Olympian stage physiques became more distended with ever more billowing, ripped, vascular muscles clanking through robotic posing routines. Adam Locks aptly describes this as the ‘post classical physique’ (Locks 1999: 145). While the classical physique, up to and including Arnold, aspired to the proportions, symmetry and beauty of classical statuary, the post-classical physique revelled in grotesqueness. One of the main differences was bodybuilding enthusiasts now started fetishising specific “freaky” muscles. These were muscles which were enlarged to such an extent that they became disproportionate to the rest of the physique. While the classical physique had aspired to proportions and symmetry, the post-classical physique often exalted the distortion which came from having one muscle group which was so huge that it overshadowed the rest of the body. In many ways, this is comparable to the agenda of the grotesque body which revels in its disproportions and the way they challenge the harmony of the classical ideal. One of the first of the professional bodybuilders to earn the accolade of having “freaky” body parts was Tom Platz. Platz was famous for his extreme leg development, especially his quadriceps (thigh muscles). Indeed, Platz’s leg development was so huge that it overshadowed the rest of his physique and actually made his densely muscled torso look small. Much of the publicity material marketed Platz in relation to his enormous legs and many photographs simply focused on his quads rather than presenting a full body shot. Other bodybuilders that were marketed as having “freaky” and grotesque muscle groups included Mike Matarazzo (famous for his calves); Eddie Robinson (famous for his “guns” – arms) and Dorian Yates (famous for his enormous lats – back). This tradition of fetishising the grotesquely overdeveloped muscle group has not disappeared in bodybuilding (more details in Chapter 1).

The other change which occurred in bodybuilding in the late 1980s to early 1990s was an emphasis on how a bodybuilding competition should not be read as a beauty contest. Bodybuilding was not “pretty” and these men were not hunk pin-ups. One of the most popular bodybuilders of this period – Nasser El Sonbaty – really stressed the point that bodybuilding was not about beautifying the body. The journalist Jon Hotten aptly described Sonbaty as having ‘the head of a professor … and the body of a genuine freak’ (2004: 64). Sonbaty did indeed have the stereotypical head of the professor given that he was balding – yet did not simply shave the head but emulated a style which was not far from being labelled a “comb-over” – and always wore a pair of big, thick spectacles – even on the competition stage. Sonbaty’s specs were not fashion glasses but heavy, unglamorous spectacles. Yet beneath this professorial looking head was a physique which, at a height of 5′ 11″, often weighed an astonishing 300 lbs plus.

Why the Move to Post-Classical Grotesque?

The question this “look” raises is: why the change in bodybuilding iconography? From a sport which had revered the proportions of classical beauty it had become an activity which glorified the grotesque and the freaky. The reason for the change might be attributed to various developments in the sport and fitness industry.

Firstly, the late 1980s saw the growth of a new strand of body type springing into public view. This was a more lithely-muscled, toned, body which came to grace the cover of other alternative health and fitness magazines. Eventually this body type would be canonised as the Men’s Health magazine physique – a body which is distinguished by its sculpted abs, low body fat and most importantly moderate muscular development. It is here that the question of erotic attractiveness comes into particular focus. Many people would remark that, irrespective of how impressive they found a contemporary bodybuilder’s physique to be (the dedication to diet and training is awe inspiring), it is an excessive body and in this respect sexually unappealing. Indeed, as Adam Locks points out (1999: 203), the extreme physique can often simply look like an extremely fat body when dressed in everyday clothes. If we consider the standard representation of a bodybuilder’s p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The “Freak” Body: Nature versus Culture?
• Part I Hyper–muscular Bodies
• Part II Fat Bodies
• Part III Transsexed Bodies
• Part IV Disabled Bodies
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index