Talking Bodies: Female Bodybuilders Colonize a Male Preserve

Le muscle au service de la « beauté ».

“…Alors qu'a priori la démarche culturiste des hommes et des femmes paraît identique, une approche comparative dévoile des différences notoires. Ainsi, par l'entremise de cette confrontation entre le féminin et le masculin, les auteures et les auteurs (Bolin 1992 ;Guthrie et Castelnuovo 1992 ;Miller et Penz 1991 ;Low 1998) singularisent la démarche des femmes culturistes et resituent ainsi la place de la femme dans le monde de la musculation. À travers ces publications, on se rend compte par exemple que, si des femmes pratiquent un sport déjà investi par des hommes, pour autant elles ne recopient pas leurs attitudes en salle et ne cherchent pas à développer les mêmes groupes musculaires qu'eux.…”

The Poverty of Truth-Seeking

“…. they will lift the absolute most weight they can, regardless of technique') and uncommitted to health ('after, they run out to McDonald's for burgers and chips') (interview data, Miller & Penz, 1991). Here, too, it seems clear that such unity-claims ('Men are from Mars; women are from Venus') are the discursive ground of overtly political activity.…”

“…Reading it this way constructs a linkage between Joanne's encounter at the treehouse and larger emancipatory themes in the feminist literature. Thus, I might note that Joanne's strategy shares something (tactically) with other girls'/women's efforts to establish their presence in masculine domains-with women bodybuilders' claim that bodybuilding is 'really a sport of appearance' rather than of strength (Miller & Penz, 1991); with the claims of funeral directors' widows who attempted to enter the male-dominated profession of undertaking in the early 20th century by arguing that (feminine) qualities of sympathy and nurturance were at the heart of the work (Rundblad, 1993); and with women in the Marine Corps, who argued that life in the marines, with its emphasis on deference and discipline, was 'just like' life in the Catholic girls' school they had known as teenagers (Williams, cited in Schultz, 1992, p. 313). My reading thus makes Joanne's strategy part of a larger one in which women colonize a masculine activity by discursively reconstructing it as feminine terrain.…”

“…The women bodybuilders studied by Miller and Penz (1991) constituted themselves as part of a seamless entity when justifying their (contentious) inroads into this masculine sport: they routinely asserted that 'women' were committed to working systematically at bodybuilding ('women start with the proper weight and form and work up'), 'women' were willing to learn from others, 'women' were healthconscious, and so on, while men were depicted as self-obsessed, vain ('they sit and stare at themselves flexing in the mirror'), impatient ('when guys come into the gym . .…”

Expanding the Agenda for Research on the Physically Active Aging Body

“…The relationship between storytelling and the body has been noted by a number of narrative scholars. For example, Miller and Penz (1991) propose that "the body, despite its apparent immediacy, is never knowable in direct, unmediated ways. Instead, we know it through its discourses, the many meanings and senses that have accrued with it" (p. 48).…”