Not for girls: Muscles and contact sports

This essay is Part Five of the Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies series. The introduction that follows below is the same for all five essays.

One of my great academic mentors, who would almost certainly prefer to remain unnamed in this article, had a fundamental belief in common with me: that sports matter. But while we certainly cycled along the same roads, both metaphorically and literally, it became clear that we were approaching a similar topic from slightly different directions. Over five weeks in 2016, we explored these directions, with research conducted at Tufts and MIT.

Here follows a series of brief essays, hastily written in conversation with Dr ——–‘s own examination of sport as a cultural phenomenon. These five essays are unedited, but organized in a way that, I hope, leads one to find something of a coherent narrative, and a path to how the long-form essay I’ll Climb That Hill In My Own Way came about.

Who Can Play? Race, Gender, and Bodies
Sports, socialization and the construction of gender | Sex differences and sex segregation | Sex and drug testing | Race and sports | Not for girls: Muscles and contact sports

Not for girls: Muscles and contact sports

Within female bodybuilding there is an incomplete divide between compliance and resistance. This incomplete divide complicates attempts to theorize the practice: we cannot read it purely as a challenge to the gender order, nor solely as a site in which gender binaries are reinforced through performance.

The performative nature of the bodybuilding contest is not restricted to displaying the physical body, but is performative in gender terms too. In a curious reflection of the modality described in Young’s Throwing Like a Girl, female bodybuilders in these contests strike feminine poses. Yet, unlike Young’s findings, this feminine body comportment motility is inscribed within the rules of the sport. Female bodybuilders are expected to dress differently, act differently, and, crucially, even look differently: Scott points out that female bodybuilders have special dispensation to undergo breast augmentation, despite this appearing entirely counter to the idea of building a body through action. The body of the female bodybuilder must be surgically altered to retain the “natural” shape expected of women.

Yet it is precisely this performativity that makes bodybuilding such a disruptive practice from a gender perspective. Muscles are usually coded male (despite no dimorphic musculature structure existing) and so the presence of muscles on a female body, as well as the mundane codified acts that female bodybuilders must undertake in order to reassure observes of the athlete’s femininity and physical sex, render visible the fragility of the gender order. Coles argues that, like drag performers the female bodybuilder operates tangentially to the visual register, complicating it through compliance, and thus resisting a normalized position in the gender binary.

Related reading:

Why Beauty Sleeps: The Spells of Home and Hearth (Snortland)
Pumping up the Pomp [PDF] (Scott)
Feminine Charms and Outrageous Arms (Coles)
Running Off-Tackle through the Last Bastion: Women, Resistance, and Professional Football (Packard)