Feminist Figure Girl

Look Hot While You Fight the Patriarchy

Lianne McTavish

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781438454764
  9781438454771
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438454788
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Analyzes the author's transformation from academic to figure competitor.

Feminist Figure Girl chronicles the transformation of art history professor Lianne McTavish, from a university professor into an extraordinarily tanned and crystal-encrusted bikini-wearing "figure girl."Figure competitions seek a softer appearance than traditional forms of bodybuilding but still require rigorous weightlifting, an extreme protein diet, and many hours of posing in high heels. While training for a figure show, McTavish combined autoethnographic methods, participant observation, and feminist theory to find new ways of thinking about physique culture and the female body.

The author, who specializes in critical visual culture and the history of the body, explores such contemporary issues as body image, fat studies, identity politics, and "postfeminism," while rethinking fitness culture, diet regimes, feminist politics, reproductive activism, performance art, and the social function of photography. Written in a lively personal style reminiscent of McTavish's popular blog, she clearly explains the complex ideas stemming from the theoretical work of such writers as Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Iris Marion Young, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The book also includes many photos documenting McTavish's physical transformation.

Notes

Introduction

1.Stacy Holman Jones, “Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political,” in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd ed., eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 766.

2.Lianne McTavish, “The Cultural Production of Pregnancy: Bodies and Embodiment at a New Brunswick Abortion Clinic,” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 20 (Fall 2008): 23–42.

3.See, for example, Douglas Sadao Aoki, “Posing the Subject: Sex, Illumination, and Pumping Iron II: The Women,” Cinema Journal 4 (Summer 1999): 24–44, and Anne Balsamo, “Feminist Bodybuilding,” Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 41–55.

4.Barbara Brook, Feminist Perspectives on the Body (London: Longman, 1999), 118–22, and Chris Holmlund, “Visible Difference and Flex Appeal: The Body, Sex, Sexuality, and Race in the Pumping Iron Films,” in Building Bodies, ed. Pamela L. Moore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 87–102.

5.Pamela L. Moore, “Feminist Bodybuilding, Sex, and the Interruption of Investigative Knowledge,” in Building Bodies, 74–86.

6.Lianne McTavish, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

7.R. Danielle Egan, Katherine Frank, and Merri Lisa Johnson, eds., Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), Carolyn Ellis, The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2004), Paula Saukko, The Anorexic Self: A Personal, Political Analysis of Diagnostic Discourse (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), Lisa M. Tillmann-Healy, “A Secret Life in a Culture of Thinness: Reflections on Body, Food, and Bulimia,” in Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing, eds. C. Ellis and A. P. Bochner (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1996), 76–108, and Lisa M. Tillmann, “Body and Bulimia Revisited: Reflections on ‘A Secret Life’,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 37, 1 (February 2009): 98–112.

8.Tillmann-Healy, “A Secret Life in a Culture of Thinness,” 77.

9.Heewon Chang, Autoethnography as Method (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2008), 9.

10.Ellis, The Ethnographic I, xix.

11.Jacquelyn Allen Collinson and John Hockey, “Autoethnography: Self-indulgence or Rigorous Methodology?” Philosophy and the Sciences of Exercise, Health and Sport: Critical Perspectives on Research Methods (New York: Routledge, 2005), 193.

12.See, for example, Tanya Bunsell, Strong and Hard Women: An Ethnography of Female Bodybuilding (London: Routledge, 2013).

13.See, for example, Samuel Wilson Fussell, Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder (New York: Perennial, 1991).

14.Collinson and Hockey, “Autoethnography: Self-indulgence or Rigorous Methodology?” 187–202.

15.See Andrew C. Sparkes, “Autoethnography,” Telling Tales in Sport and Physical Activity: A Qualitative Journey (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2002), 73–105, and Holman Jones, “Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political,” 783–84.

16.Chang, Autoethnography as Method, 13.

17.My understanding of subjectivity stems primarily from a graduate course I took with Kaja Silverman at the University of Rochester. See Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992). My discussion of experience was inspired by a talk given by Aron Vinegar. See his I am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

18.Cited in Homan Jones, “Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political,” 765.

19.See Ellis, The Ethnographic I. Chang, Autoethnography as Method, 54, warns against an excessive reliance on memory as a data source.

20.Cited in Holman Jones, “Autoethnography: Making the Personal Political,” 7.

21.Niall Richardson, “Flex-rated! Female Bodybuilding: Feminist Resistance or Erotic Spectacle?” Journal of Gender Studies 17, 4 (December 2008): 292.

22.Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999).

23.See, for example, Eugene Y. Wang, “Watching the Steps: Peripatetic Vision in Medieval China,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 116–42, Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), and Lianne McTavish, “Learning to See in New Brunswick, 1862–1929,” Canadian Historical Review 87, 4 (December 2006): 553–81.

24.Cressida J. Heyes, “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers,” Hypatia 21, 2 (Spring 2006): 126–49.

25.Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).

26.Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

27.Fussell, Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. See also Alan M. Klein, Little Big Men: Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender Construction (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 1993).

28.Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 157. See also Pirkko Markula, Foucault, Sport and Exercise: Power, Knowledge and Transforming the Self (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), and Simon Crossley, “In the Gym: Motives, Meaning and Moral Careers,” Body and Society 12 (June 2006), 23–50.

Chapter One. Measuring Up

1.Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Images
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Becoming Feminist Figure Girl
• One Measuring Up: Comparing Bodybuilding, Weight Watchers, and Yoga
• Two Embodiment and the Event of Muscle Failure
• Three Replacing Feminism: Comparing Prochoice Activism with Becoming a Figure Girl
• Four On Stage: Performing Feminist Figure Girl
• Five Aftermath: The Photographs in My Purse
• Afterword
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover