Niall Richardson’s journal article entitled, “Flex-rated! Female bodybuilding: Feminist Resistance or Erotic Spectacle (Journal of Gender Studies 17:4, 2008)” offers two contrasting views on female bodybuilding which are praise and dismissal. Richardson praises female bodybuilders based on their act of feminist resistance towards the traditional ideas of femininity. His view is supported by post structural feminist theory. Besides that, female bodybuilders are challenging traditional female iconography or stable sex/gender continuum. Richardson’s dismissal of female bodybuilding is because of the existence of “muscle-worship erotica”. This idea is associated with the living body sculpture being a strange form of sexual fetishism and erotic …show more content…
This was evident in the first generation of female bodybuilders, who were of “ostensibly fit bodies”, yet emanate youthful feminine looks. Fitness gets the female athlete into shape, whereas excessive work-out distorts her shape and interrupts the life style, complicated by pain, power and financial promises or penalties. Chare quoted Castelnuovo and Guthrie’s conception of two forms of resistance. Both “reverse resistance” and “resistance as freedom” were inspired by Foucault. The former is resistance within power relations, whereas the latter is “breaking out of the discourse” that links sexuality to identity beyond gender stereotypes. Chare wrote that bodies only exist through the functions of power, and, in turn, it is power that enables the bodies to be perceived as either good or …show more content…
The female bodybuilders who engage in this strictly appeal to the muscle fetish, allowing fans to feel their biceps or watch as the bodybuilders flex. Sometimes the women may lift and carry their fans or lightly wrestle with them. These female bodybuilders transform their bodies into “anthropomorphized phalluses” by means of surrendering their natural biological condition for imagined images. These female athletes train so hard not to offer resistance to patriarchal system but to inspire male fetishism and sadomasochism in order to satisfy the sexual desires of their worshippers. They “flex their muscles even harder” to turn the sport into pornography for doubtful benefit, except eroticism. The pleasure of the female bodybuilder is her ability to control every voluntary muscle of her body in the mind-body link. Quoting academicians again, the author maintained that the superior mind represented masculinity whereas the “unruly body” with their menstrual cycles is coded as “bestial” femininity. The stresses of keeping up with the image of sexual goddess eventually break down, as observed in the relationship between worshipper Charles and body goddess, Aurora. Fashion expert theorized about the dialectic of clothes for bodybuilders, best to be clothed in partial rather than full nakedness for seduction. To gain respectability, IFBB (International Federation of
Like a blueprint or instruction manual, the objective of a rhetorical analysis is to dissect a written argument, identify its many parts, and explain how all of them come together to achieve a desired effect. Susan Bordo, a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, wrote “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, published in 2003 in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her essay examines how the media plays a pervasive role in how women view their bodies to the point where we live in an empire of images and there are no protective borders. In “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, Bordo not only effectively incorporates numerous facts and statistics from her own research and the research of others; she also appeals to emotional realities of anxiety and inadequacy felt by women all over the world in regards to their body image. Ultimately, her intent is to critique the influence of the media on self-confidence and body image, and to remind her audience of the overt as well as subconscious messages they are receiving on a daily basis.
We mistrust our bodies and have this constant urge to question whether we are capable of achieving certain tasks. “Typically, the feminine body underuses its real capacity, both as the potentiality of its physical size and strength and as the real skills and coordination that are available to it” (148). We seem to take into practice a certain “ambiguous transcendence”, which simply means that we lack bodily trust. Young uses the example of when men and women hike. A man usually speeds through the trail, not worrying about the many dangers that can come if he steps on the wrong rock or slips on a tree branch. A woman, in contrast, would analyze every aspect of the trail and worrying about whether she is capable of completing the run or not. She displays “discontinuous unity”, in which all this divided attention that is being given to that dangers of the trail are causing her to be taken out of the flow. “Our attention is often divided between the aim to be realized in motion and the body that must accomplish it, while at the same time saving itself from harm” (). When it comes to “inhibited intentionality”, women seem to underestimate their abilities and convince themselves that they are not capable of doing a certain task. There’s this perception that a women “simultaneously reaches toward a projected end with an ‘I can’ and withholds its full bodily to that end in a self-imposed ‘I cannot’.”
Throughout history, certain problems or societal aspects are often associated with one gender or the other. Manual labor was, and still is, often performed by men, while more skillful tasks, such as cooking and sewing, were done by women. By using the ideas put forth by Judith Lorber in Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideology, we can analyze the findings of Matthew Petrocelli, Trish Oberwies, and Joseph Petrocelli’s “Getting Huge, Getting Ripped.” Lorber’s ideas of people having unique experiences, gender being one of society’s inventions, and a power differential between men and women can help us understand why men feel the need to use steroids to become the ideal male.
The movie, "Pumping Iron II" is an example of women doing bodybuilding which is considered a non-traditional sport. Images of muscular women are viewed by some people as threatening and imitating. The benefit of this non-traditional sport is that it forces us to question our thoughts about women and what they are. We must ask, what is a woman? Bodybuildi...
At the Gym, written by Mark Doty, dramatizes the conflict within the mind of a bodybuilder and his desire to change who and what he is. The speaker observes the routines of the bodybuilder bench-pressing at a local gym, and attempts to explain the driving force that compels him to change his appearance. The speaker illustrates the physical use of inanimate objects as the tools used for the “desired” transformation: “and hoist nothing that need be lifted” (5,6). However, coupled with “but some burden they’ve chosen this time” (7), the speaker takes the illustration beyond the physical use of the tools of transformation and delves into the bodybuilder’s mental state. The speaker ends by portraying the bodybuilder as an arrogant, muscular being with fragile feelings of insecurity.
The reading assigned titled “The Socially Constructed Body” by Judith Lorber and Yancey Martin dives into the sociology of gender with a specific focus on how the male and female body is compromised by social ideals in the Western culture. She introduces the phenomenon of body ideals pressed on men and women by introducing the shift in cosmetic surgery toward body modifications.
At times I was dangerously thin, and my arms have always been longer than they should be for someone of my height. Nonetheless, my body has never gone under scrutiny and in fact, was common and celebrated among male basketball players. This is one of the many benefits of my male privilege. Female athletes, on the other hand, are subjected to a contradictory ideal that they should maintain a strong athletic body for the sport they play, yet also remain thin and appeal to the sexual ideal men hold them to. Nita Mary McKinley states in, Weighty Issues: Constructing Fatness and Thinness as Social Problems, “The construction of ideal weight parallels the construction of the traditional ideal woman and ideal weight becomes gendered” (99). This is unfair to the female athlete as it creates a conflict between physically exceling in their sport and being sexually discriminated against by men. As a male, there is practically no sexual consequences I suffer from that pertain to the body type I maintain. One of the most publicly scrutinized athletes for her body shape is tennis legend Serena Williams. Male sports writers in their attempts to objectify Williams, have shared their thoughts on how she is too strong and too muscular to sexually appeal to men. Serena has since reclaimed her sexuality by posing in ESPN Magazine’s body issue, along with appearing in Beyonce’s “Formation” music video. American celebrity culture, European fashion culture, and international advertising are all responsible for the development of thin female body types being the most sexually desired among males in America. It is important to apply locational context and recognize that other female body types are celebrated throughout other cultures. For instance Fatema Mernissi confesses, in Size 6: The Western Women’s Harem, “In the Moroccan streets, Men’s flattering comments regarding my particularly generous hips have for decades led me to
Dworkin, Shari L. and Faye L. Wachs. 2009. Body Panic : Gender, Health, and the Selling of Fitness.New York: New York University Press.
Female athletes, unlike males, are not always portrayed exclusively as performance athletes, instead attention is placed on sex appeal usually overshadowing their on-field accomplishments. Unfortunately female sports, like male sports, are directed primarily to a male audience, the media commonly use marketing techniques which involve sexualisation of the female bodies under a male gaze (Bremner, 2002). The idea that “sex sells” is used to generate viewers and followers of female sport.
Krane, V. (2001). We can be athletic and feminine, but do we want to? Challenging hegemonic femininity in women's sport. Quest, 53,115-133.
The Caparo Industries Plc v Dickman was a case that regarding a test for a duty of care. In this case, an organization called Fidelity Plc which is manufacturers of electrical equipment, was the objective of a takeover by Caparo Industries Plc because of Fidelity Plc was not doing well. In May 1984 fidelity’s directors made an announcement in its yearly profits for the year up to March affirming the negative viewpoint, the share price fall. At the point, Caparo Industries had started purchasing up shares in huge numbers. In June 1984 the annual records, which done by the accountant Dickman, were issued to the shareholders which currently included Caparo Industries. Therefore, Caparo Industries who had a majority shares,
M.D. “Body Image: A Clouded Reality”. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self Knowledge 2.2 (2004): 58-65 pg. Web. 18 Nov 2013.
Excerpt from K. Conboy, N. Medina and S. Stanbury, eds. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (401-17). NY: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Exact Beauty: Exploring Women's Body Projects and Problems in the 21st Century. Mandell, Nancy (5th ed.). Feminist Issues: Race, Class, and Sexuality (131-160). Toronto: Pearson Canada, Inc. Schulenberg, Jennifer, L. (2006).
When most people hear the term ‘bodybuilding’ they think of massive, inhuman looking individuals, mostly males, who spend every waking minute in the gym lifting weights and injecting steroids. But that is not entirely true. Bodybuilding is much more complex than that, especially when it comes to nutrition. Bodybuilding is a lifestyle. There are many different factors that come in to play for professional bodybuilders, as well as the regular person who is looking to put on muscle mass or whatever their fitness goals might be. Some of those factors include nutrition, training, recovery, supplementation, as well as the controversial topic of drugs in the bodybuilding scene. Bodybuilding also has a unique history that should be addressed before diving into the topics of bodybuilding.