Strong and Hard Women

by Tanya Bunsell

  150 Competitions

  the competition itself) does provide a consecration of identity; she now feels that she ‘belongs’, is accepted and is ‘one of them’. Although competitors will have to repeat the ritual, for the successful competitive bodybuilder who places well, there is also some evidence that might be read as a change and elevation of status.

  As a winner, she is more likely to have access to media space in bodybuilding magazines, such as having photos and articles written about her (although this exposure is usually very limited), and there are also possibilities for partial product endorsement sponsorships. Moreover, she will gain notoriety, respect and even a kind of ‘celebrity’ status within the subculture. Her new-found status usually lends itself to new responsibilities such as mentoring aspiring female bodybuilders. As a representative of the sport, the successful female bodybuilder may be asked to do ‘guest posing’ at shows, further validating her identity in her new-found role.

  Likewise, she may develop a greater fanbase that is supportive, appreciative and encouraging of her endeavours (often expressed via emails/website posts, etc.).

  Here, it seems useful to suggest that these women seem to be developing personalities of the Weberian ‘heroic’ type. They have chosen a body regime which involves all of their effort, which serves to organize and evaluate their life, including their relationships and other goals, on the basis of coherent and singular criteria. For these women, who cannot abide by the gender restrictions of the interaction order, heroism is the only alternative (Chesler 1994). They have chosen their path and taken responsibility for their life, their body and their decisions. As Michelle stands on the stage alone, proud, defiant and victorious, her whole persona cries out: ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’. 4

  Sarah’s story: part II

  The future

  (Sarah is being interviewed during her pre-competition diet which is the most emotional and difficult time in the bodybuilder’s calendar. Refer to Chapter 9.)

  I wouldn’t want to go back to how I looked before, but if I could do it without the drugs… I don’t think anybody would do them – male or female (even the guys have hang-ups about what they are doing)… and I just think – am I going to get eight years down the line (or however long) – am I going to get to a point where I’m no longer in control?

  Sometimes I just want to be left to get on with it, but every single day I have to go to work and deal with people who think I’m a guy. Talk to me as if I’m a guy.

  I go to the supermarket and get spoken to as if I’m a guy. I go to the toilet and get questioned. I can never ever get away with it and sometimes I think, what is the fucking point? Why? I want to do this and I’m not going to stop doing it. I have two choices. I either carry on doing it or I opt out – and that’s when I get to the lowest point. I’m never going to fit into normal society ever again but I get sick of people’s judgements and comments and looks and the way they are.

  I think that’s why I don’t worry so much about my health. I remember back when I was younger and took recreational drugs, I used to think taking pills – and they make you feel amazing, and I used to think, well at least if I die, I’ll die happy

  – believing that was ‘happy’ – when it obviously wasn’t. I think that’s why, when I hear you, [my partner] and my doctor worrying about my health that I think there’s a part of me that doesn’t worry about it because it makes that choice for me. I don’t have to worry about it. If it happens, it happens, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, but it takes it out of my hands… The last fortnight has just been the lowest.

  This can be the loneliest sport in the world. You are trapped in this body, which you have created, and you want, but no one else will accept – to be able to just walk in anywhere and not have to think about and not have to worry about it…

  •

  Where do you see your future in bodybuilding going?

  I would love to be in Iris Kyle’s position to be the top of the game, and a couple of years ago I thought it was achievable but I’ve come to realize… I just want to be at the top of the game for me – I know this sounds cheesy – but I want to be the

  152 Sarah’s story: part II

  best that I can be, but to stop worrying about pushing everything to the limits all the times. I will always do that, but I want to do it so that it’s right for me. Not so that I’m trying to push my body somewhere it’s not ready to go yet. I’ve got my goals… to come in better condition each time.

  I have more of a plan now for the future, I have more realism. I want to go to the Brits. My personal goal is to get in the top five this year, top three next year, win it and then defend the title a couple of years before drawing a line under it.

  But having said that you don’t know what doors will get opened. I don’t know if I would ever get to the Worlds. It’s my goal, because nobody ever does that – defend their title every year. You never know what will happen.

  •

  What would it mean to you to achieve your goals?

  To just walk around and know you’re the best female bodybuilder in the country.

  Though to be honest it’s great just to be on stage (at the Brits) and know that you are part of the elite few… it’s about my personal battle.

  There’s still a part of me that doesn’t feel it’s possible for me (winning it).

  There’s a part of me – partly because of the politics, particularly because of my genetic limitation and aesthetic limitations – with my abs and stuff. And that’s why I want to max my size and condition.

  •

  Will there ever be a point when you stop bodybuilding?

  No, I don’t think I can. I don’t think that I could handle my natural hormone profile now. Particularly when I think of what I’ve already been through. When I was training under [another bodybuilder] heavy course, off, heavy course, off, and I look back now and I can see how destructive that was for mental state and my physical state. I didn’t realize at the time about how it affected me emotionally.

  But nobody tells you – So I’ve learnt to manage that myself now.

  Although, I’ve had two men ask me to do strongwomen stuff – and I’ve been told that if you have strength then it’s not difficult to learn the technique… I’d love to do it. It would be nice… Something that I can do after bodybuilding.

  •

  What are your thoughts about the future of the sport?

  I don’t think female bodybuilding will ever get back to the days of Lenda Murray and Cory Everson…where Iris Kyle is at her position must be so hard – and to have such little pay-off, that for me is soul destroying. You think you’d love to be one of the pros – but the female side effects – you don’t know what is going on in their bodies. Prize money is crap. Female bodybuilding is not marketable. The women are seen as social outcasts – and it’s the sport that is causing the divide.

  10 Conclusion

  The study started from the feminist perspective that meanings and practices surrounding women’s bodies play a central role in the social reproduction of gender and gendered relationships. Whilst these bodily meanings and practices can become inscribed onto women’s bodies, they can also be potentially resisted through actions and processes that begin to destabilize cultural norms of feminine appearance. Within this context, female bodybuilding has been heralded by some feminists as one such liberating practice; a form of activity that questions, interrogates and even begins to undermine conventional notions of female bodies as frail, limited and governed by their biology. This research has provided a new dimension to this vital debate through its detailed analysis of the lives of UK women involved in this activity. The purpose of the ethnography was to investigate whether female bodybuilding can be seen as an emancipatory and empowering transgression of hegemonic standards of feminine embodiment. In seeking to explore this question, I felt it was necessary to understand what it was like ‘to be’ a female bodybuilder. As such, my study endeavoured to facili
tate a rich portrait of the values, practices, norms and, above all, the lived experiences of female bodybuilders. My research approach sought not only to analyse the wider milieu in which female bodybuilding occurred, but also to explore via ethnography, participant observation and interview the interactions and phenomenological experiences associated with this activity.

  Throughout this work I have strived to present an honest, open, accurate and fair portrayal of events. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the findings presented in this study are my personal interpretations of the subculture and are derived from my own corporeally situated perspective on what I heard, witnessed and experienced during this research. I am ‘responsible for the reconstructing and telling of the field’ (Coffey 1999: 160). As such, it is important to acknowledge that I do not seek to present a universal ‘female bodybuilder’ experience, but rather my own impression that there existed common themes and some shared experiences that drew these women together. Consequently, instead of offering what could be construed as a one-dimensional conclusion here – that makes generalisations as if they applied to all female bodybuilders, at all times and in all places – I seek instead to reveal the contradictory positions and conflicting

  154 Conclusion

  notions of empowerment and oppression in the lives of these women, providing a more nuanced and sensitive understanding of the topic.

  Summary and analysis of my empirical findings

  This research explored the life of female bodybuilders, looking at the most important aspects of their ‘world’ – life outside the gym, life inside the gym and the competition – key themes which were drawn from the interviews and field notes. I will now return to the overriding aim of the research and evaluate each relevant chapter regarding female bodybuilding’s ‘empowering potential’.

  The daily lifestyle and interactions of the female bodybuilder were explored

  in Chapter 5. This chapter demonstrated the difficulties, sacrifices and penalties paid for transgressing the gender interaction order and the different strategies that female bodybuilders employed to sustain a positive sense of self and identity to counteract this adversity. Whilst bodybuilding holds out the promise for women of developing a different relationship with their bodies, selves and surroundings, it is a double-edged sword, as women become ostracised for being socially deviant (Gilroy 1989). The muscular female body is potentially empowering as it defies the ideologies of conventional femininity. By embodying traits of power and strength (as muscles and size are traditionally symbolic of male power), female bodybuilders challenge the myth of female fragility and delicacy and the cultural assumption of being the ‘weaker’ sex. Furthermore, they refute women’s societal role by putting their needs and themselves first, resisting traditional feminine traits of domesticity, nurturance, gentleness and dependence (Nelson 1994). Thus, on the surface, it appears that the women in my study, by rebelling against normative ideals of feminine behaviour and appearance, ‘threaten the system of sexual difference’ and consequently of ‘male dominance’ (Birrell and Theberge 1994).

  However, critics focusing on the textual symbolism of female bodybuilders’

  flesh argue that any liberating potential is undercut by the fact that it is usual for these women to still strive to be physically appealing in terms of the norms of heterosexuality (Heywood 1997; Hargreaves 1994; Mansfield and McGinn 1993; Schulze 1990). Although focusing on the evaluation of Chapter 5 and life outside

  the gym, in order to assess this critique, I need to briefly refer to my findings

  in Chapter 9 on competitions. These findings show that heterosexual hegemonic beauty norms are encouraged in part by the rules surrounding female bodybuilding competitions; sites described as submitting to ‘the femininity project in terms of the almost hyperfeminine ornamentation, posture and demeanour required for competition’ (St Martin and Gavey 1996: 54; see also Guthrie and Castelnuouvo 1992; Daniels 1992). These rules encourage a veneer of femininity to be placed over the project of muscularity: competitions have been viewed as a context in which ‘lipstick and blonde locks are as necessary for the woman bodybuilder as they are for the female impersonator’ (Mansfield and McGinn 1993: 64).

  Furthermore, within the subculture of bodybuilding, women are represented in magazines as displaying elements of this contrived femininity, such as bikinis, make-up, painted nails, long hair, breast implants, erotic poses and so on.

  Conclusion 155

  However, despite many female bodybuilders incorporating ‘markers of femininity’ into their body projects, I do not accept that this automatically means that there is a wholesale recuperation of conventional gender ideals. There are several points to make here.

  First, if this ‘recuperation’ had successfully occurred, how could we account for the hostility these women faced time and time again in their daily lives? Second, their appearance could be seen as a ‘postmodern’ contradiction that embraces both femininity and masculinity and highlights the charade of gender (see Newton 1979). Third, whilst the ‘feminine apologetic’ does exist to differing degrees amongst female bodybuilders, these are not necessarily the reflections and motivations of the women themselves. As I have argued in the Chapter 9, these women

  are not cultural dupes, but negotiate and work within the constrictions of a male environment. Indeed, the women in my study had their own individual definitions of femininity. In this way, ‘make-up’ and ‘muscles’ could be seen as a negotiation conducted by individual women as part of their attempt to piece together different elements of self in order to construct a satisfactory sense of identity.

  According to Bordo (1993), as female bodybuilding involves extreme practices of dieting and exercise, it inevitably reproduces normative notions of gender and upholds the dominant patriarchal order. Here, the strict lifestyle regime followed by muscular women is claimed to be far from liberating or empowering, but based instead on oppressive restriction, deprivation and regulation, resulting in self-monitored, subdued, docile bodies (Bordo 1993; Hesse-Biber 1996).

  However, according to my findings in Chapter 5, the regimented lifestyle of the

  female bodybuilder was Janus-faced – it had empowering elements to it as well as being constricting at times. Whilst it did restrict their social interactions and place a strain on relationships, most of the time the women found the structure comforting and a means to achieve their goal. Although the women admitted that manipulation of the body using training and food becomes an all-encompassing and obsessive pursuit of perfection, they claimed that they were doing this for themselves, to create a body-project to their own ideal rather than for the benefit of men or others. In this way, the women make their own decisions and take control of their own lives, rather than being controlled by male standards and institutions.

  For the women involved, strict self-discipline was associated with direction, control and accomplishment, which – even with the negative constrictions of this lifestyle –meant choosing a life in accordance with their beliefs and feelings of uniqueness and pride, rather than ‘lack’ and ‘insufficiency’. Thus, the interpretations of the women in my study challenged the claim by Bordo that women’s bodily discipline acts solely to reassert existing gender configurations (White et al. 1995; Willis 1990).

  However, although I disagree with Bordo (1993: 179) that any disciplinary action involved to create the perfect body is an ‘illusory’ power, there are negative consequences associated with investing too much in the body’s appearance.

  My findings reported many incidences of body dissatisfaction and insecurities, which coincides with Bordo’s theory that women’s bodies are never good enough as they are, and are forever seeking improvement (although I would add here

  156 Conclusion

  that all bodies are unfinished entities). Although there were indulgent moments when women cited the immense pleasures and enjoyment that they took in their muscularity, my findings could be used to support the conclusion that female bodyb
uilding does not generally appear to create high self-esteem through body image.

  Against this backdrop of social stigma and self-criticism, it may seem difficult to comprehend why a woman would choose to become a female bodybuilder. Here

  we must return to the motivations of these women cited in Chapter 5.

  Contemporary mainstream body modification practices by women are arguably conducted to present an attractive appearance for men and others within the

  ‘rules’ set down by what Butler (1990) has referred to as a ‘heterosexual matrix’.

  However, according to my study, female bodybuilders chose to bodybuild as something ‘purely’ for their own benefit. Whilst original motivations to weight train varied – from having sports time for themselves and recovering from a sports injury to more pivotal moments in their lives – none of them directly claimed it was a way to lose weight or to become more attractive to men. Moreover, several of the women insisted that bodybuilding had had a profound and beneficial impact on their lives. A few of these women argued that the lifestyle literally

  ‘saved’ them from alcoholism and eating disorders, giving them positive control over their bodies and lives as a form of therapeutic healing. Others argued that since they started bodybuilding, they had learnt to appreciate their bodies more.

  In this manner, the women’s lives were transformed, at least in part, by their attempts to reclaim their bodies for themselves and their own desires. Following on from this, it is also possible to argue that as this sense of ‘selfhood’ emerges, this will inevitably affect social relations and instigate important changes in society (MacKinnon 1987; Rich 1980; Heywood 1997; Willis 1995). However, in reality, does this actually occur?