In August 2010, the sixty-four-year-old Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone premiered his latest project The Expendables, an action-adventure film starring a pantheon of ''tough guys'' from both past and present: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Bruce Willis. To understand the resurrection of this vintage Hollywood cast, we take up the title theme of ''expendability'' within the climate of the economic recession of 2008 and map its representation of masculinity, physical labor, and ageing. We do this by looking at The Expendables as essentially a labor text. In doing so, we find a smorgasbord of working bodies and types of physical labor that reveal multiple intersections among discourses of masculinity, class, ageing, and race that simultaneously reflect the divisions of (physical) labor in the industries in which the stars work-Hollywood film and professional sports.
In the past decade, sedentary behaviour has emerged as a distinct health concern, 1 yet health promotion researchers, policy makers and practitioners have only begun to pay attention to it quite recently. Importantly, sedentary behaviour is distinct from both physical activity and physical inactivity. Whereas physical inactivity is a broad category that can be used to characterize groups of people whose level of activity falls below a given threshold, sedentary behaviours are specific practices characterized by little physical movement and low energy expenditure such as sitting and watching television, using a computer, reading, occupational sitting and using motorized transportation.2 A review of promising interventions in sedentary behaviour conducted by the British Columbia Centre of Excellence for Women's Health in 2012/2013 suggests that there are currently few health promotion interventions targeting sedentary behaviour; in fact, the majority of interventions in the field focus on increasing physical activity, not reducing sedentary time or sedentary behaviours per se.In 2011, the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology (CSEP), in collaboration with ParticipACTION and with support from the Public Health Agency of Canada, undertook a literature review on sedentary behaviour that informed the world's first evidence-based sedentary behaviour guidelines.3 Designed for children and youth aged 0-17 years, the guidelines suggest that children and youth should spend no more than 1-2 hours per day on recreational screen time (depending on age) and that time spent on sedentary transportation and extended sitting should be limited throughout the day.3 Although guidelines on sedentary behaviour are encouraging, we note that the CSEP guidelines do not consider adults, despite data suggesting that the majority of adults spend a considerable amount of time being sedentary each day, nor sex and gender, despite compelling evidence for the integration of a sex-and gender-based approach to research and policy on sedentary behaviour. We argue that the current guidelines need to be expanded to consider the impact of sex and gender in sedentary behaviour and that guidelines for adults should be developed in order to increase the efficacy of research, policy and practice in reducing sedentary behaviours and their negative health outcomes. We also argue that there is a need to consider women's and men's diversity as well as to address their differential access to resources, opportunities and power as these factors may shape sedentary behaviour. "One-sizefits-all" approaches that do not understand and address unfair differences may not only lead to ineffective interventions but also to policies and practices that deepen health disparities and inequities. Sex and gender considerations in sedentary behaviourAccelerometer results from the Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS) [2007][2008][2009] suggest that women and men are equally sedentary: men spend on average 9.6 hours per day sedentary and women spend 9.8 hours.4 Girls and bo...
This article examines Arnold Schwarzenegger's ability to cross the wide divide between bodybuilding subculture, 'an oddball sport' shunned for its homoerotic imagery, and mainstream culture where he has become a popular icon of muscular masculinity. Where no other bodybuilder before or following him has been so successful, I show that it was Schwarzenegger's ability to mould himself to popular discourses that was the secret to his success. It is revealed that he developed a hyperheterosexual persona and peddled an image of himself as a self-made man that fitted with broader cultural notions about American manhood. It is further revealed that whiteness plays a role in his ability to market himself, where whiteness underpins notions of masculine physical perfection within bodybuilding as well as in broader cultural notions about the kinds of bodies that are fit for American citizenship.
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