Life as art, and seeing the promise of big bodies

Abstract

In this article, I illustrate how bodybuilding, a popular U.S. cultural practice concerned with aesthetics and self‐development, productively engages with social and cultural struggles facing late‐modern subjects, including how humans might connect with the world, each other, and ourselves. Ethnographic details are based on discourse analysis of bodybuilding media, interviews with amateur and professional bodybuilders, and participant‐observation in bodybuilding contests and gym training throughout the United States. My arguments and shifting narrative presentations draw on work on critique and postcritique in and beyond academic anthropology and suggest how seeing bodybuilding in a potentially positive light requires perceptual–ethical habits not currently fostered in the discipline.

Vulnerable discipline: Experiences of male competitive bodybuilders

“…An important goal in bodybuilding is to build a 'big body ', combining mass (volume), definition (the degree to which each muscle stands out visually as a separate entity/unit) and form (the overall proportions and symmetry of the body). Ideally, the bodybuilder has 2-3 per cent body fat on the day of competition (Linder, 2007).…”

Skill and masculinity in Olympic weightlifting: Training cues and cultivated craziness in Georgia

“…Though Vlasov's bespectacled appearance and his career as a writer challenged stereotypes about weightlifters as unintelligent brutes, these icons of Soviet sport cemented the association between strength and the large body. More generally, “the big body is almost preinterpreted as strong,” as Fletcher Linder (, 464) puts it, while muscular size is the “ultimate index of manhood,” according to Loïc Wacquant (, 164). But big bodies and muscles do not always index strength.…”

“…Bodybuilding, in which athletes develop muscular physiques for competition that involves a series of poses, grew historically out of the other strength sports (Fair ; LaVelle ; Stokvis ). As Fletcher Linder puts it, “Compared to Olympic lifting, bodybuilding inverts weight‐training logic” (, 454). It does this by focusing on muscular growth rather than by developing the capacity to lift maximal amounts of weight.…”

Swinging within the iron cage: Modernity, creativity, and embodied practice in American postsecondary jazz education

“…The converse is also true—aesthetic bodies might have dominant normative dimensions, as the case of the classical pianist's playing body makes clear. To give another example, bodybuilding in the United States is experienced by its practitioners in aesthetic terms, and yet it is organized around the practice of perfecting the body in accordance with very fixed norms that are definable in fine‐grained, detailed, and clear terms (Linder 2007). A more fruitful distinction, then, would be between different aesthetics that might inform embodied practical mastery.…”