Athletic Intruders: Ethnographic Research on Women, Culture, and Exercise

5. Beauty or the Beast: The Subversive Soma

INTRODUCTION This chapter undertakes a textual analysis of Western women’s bodies that is politically engaged. The body as relation, as reflection, and as reform is articulated through the phenomenon of competitive women’s bodybuilding , which offers insight into the multivocality and contradiction embodied in the muscular soma. The bodybuilders’ contours are contextualized and discussed as a script of gender relations embedded in a struggle between notions of strength and weakness, doing and display, and presented metaphorically as beauty or the beast. Despite cultural frosting with symbols of traditional “feminine frailty” that pervade the public realm of competitive bodybuilding, it is argued here that the women’s muscular physiques are critical, rebellious, and reforming. This chapter locates “the beast” in women’s competitive bodybuilding in spite of the beauty. RE-READINGS OF THE BODY The goal of this research is to contribute to an apparently burgeoning interest by anthropology inspired and fired by the symbolic approach of the C H A P T E R F I V E ‫ﱰﱯ‬ Beauty or the Beast: The Subversive Soma ANNE BOLIN 107 body as metaphor in the work of Douglas (1973) and the bio-political interpretations of Foucault (1985) (cf Armstrong 1983). As a consequence of the efforts of the latter, a new synthesis has arisen between anthropology , history, and literature (cf Armstrong 1983; Gallagher and Laqueur 1987; Turner 1984), leading to the “centrality of the body” as a recent foci in contemporary scientific discourses (Gallagher and Laqueur 1987:vii). Since my purpose is not an encyclopedia of the history of scientific thought on the body, at the risk of glossing, it is perhaps not unreasonable to characterize Western scientific paradigms as encoding intellectual moiety systems that have polarized mind and body. This has been clearly represented in the Durkheimian (1961:29) notion of homo duplex, wherein reason and passion have respectively resided. Polarization , in part, has harkened back to the Christian tradition of spirit and flesh, sacred and secular, as well as Cartesian mind-body dualism (cf Turner 1984). The Christian and Cartesian discourse on the body subsequently became medicalized by the end of the eighteenth century into a full-blown object, and crystallized in the nineteenth century, according to Foucault, as an object of power (Armstrong 1983:xi,2). Twentieth-century social theorizing has witnessed the body as a biological organism in the works of Social Darwinists and Functionalists (such as Parsons), as a system of needs and sites of subjugation according to the Marxists, as desire by the Freudians, and as choreographed in the writings of the symbolic interactionists (Turner 1984:2). Feminist and postmodern perspectives have surpassed the structural and modern view of the body as encoding and transacting binary oppositions such as nature and culture, femininity and masculinity, passivity and power, yet preserve the importance of difference in the face of co-optation as suggested by Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen (1989a and 1989b). These approaches have also transcended theories of a purely “monolithic body,” offering rather a syncretic analysis where power, privilege, and “difference” operate inside and outside postmodern blurring and contradiction (Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen 1989b:31). “. . . [F]eminist thinking conjoined with postmodern[ism] . . . has suggested provocative new paradigms in anthropology from which to encounter the physical self, rendering the body in greater contextuality, complexity and as more reflexive” (Bolin 1992b:379; Bolin 1997:185–86). The body is regarded as encompassing a gender blending of natural and cultural symbolism, as meaning is extrapolated from morphology and social forms reiterate and reflect the physical form. In this regard Douglas (1973:93) suggests that: The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body always modified by the social categories 108 ANNE BOLIN through which it is known sustains a particular view of society. There is a continual exchange of meanings between the two kinds of bodily experiences so that each reinforces the categories of the other. Or in the words of Turner (28), “. . . gender is a social construct that mediates another social construct of biology.” And according to Flax (637), “. . . gender can become a metaphor for biology, just as biology can become a metaphor for gender.” As a discourse on Western gender, the contemporary soma (including that of bodybuilders) reflects and reifies relations of hegemony and hierarchy, of power and privilege, and in keeping with a postmodernist mood, that which lies in-between, in the junctures...