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\"In recent years the body has become one of the most popular areas of study in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Bodybuilding, in particular, continues to be of interest to scholars of gender, media, film, cultural studies and sociology. However, there is surprisingly little scholarship available on contemporary bodybuilding. Critical Readings in Bodybuilding is the first collection to address the contemporary practice of bodybuilding, especially the way in which the activity has become increasingly more extreme and to consider much neglected debates of gender, eroticism, and sexuality related to the activity. Featuring the leading scholars of bodybuilding and the body as well as emerging voices, this volume will be a key addition to the fields of Sociology, Sport Studies, and Cultural Studies\"--Provided by publisher.

In recent years the 'body' has become one of the most popular areas of study in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Bodybuilding, in particular, continues to be of interest to scholars of gender, media, film, cultural studies and sociology. However, there is surprisingly little scholarship available on contemporary bodybuilding. Critical Readings in Bodybuilding is the first collection to address the contemporary practice of bodybuilding, especially the way in which the activity has become increasingly more extreme and to consider much neglected debates of gender, eroticism, and sexuality related to the activity. Featuring the leading scholars of bodybuilding and the body as well as emerging voices, this volume will be a key addition to the fields of Sociology, Sport Studies, and Cultural Studies.

In recent years the body has become one of the most popular areas of study in the arts, humanities and social sciences. There are presently many undergraduate and postgraduate university modules in film, cultural studies, gender studies, visual culture, sociology, and sports science devoted to the study of the body in representation and cultural practice. As can only be expected, the activity of bodybuilding continues to be of interest to scholars of gender, media, film, cultural studies, and sociology. However, there is surprisingly little scholarship available on contemporary bodybuilding. For example, much of the existing cultural studies literature on bodybuilding addresses the performances of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the gender politics of the Pumping Iron documentaries and therefore addresses the practice of bodybuilding as it was in the 1970s. Yet as many of my students have remarked, Arnold's physique looks 'sylph like' in comparison to the bodies flexing on the current Mr. Olympia stage. Similarly, much of the existing writing on female bodybuilding simply praises the activity as feminist resistance: female bodybuilders are actively challenging traditional feminine iconography. Yet there is little attention paid to the eroticism of the built physique and the recently labeled form of sexual fetish known as 'muscle worship'. Critical Readings in Bodybuilding is intended, therefore, to be the first collection to address the contemporary practice of bodybuilding with specific attention to these issues, especially the way in which the activity has become increasingly more extreme and \"freaky\" and to consider much neglected debates of eroticism and sexuality related to the activity.

This chapter examines the aesthetic implications of extreme (i.e. competitive) bodybuilders. Elsewhere I refer to such bodies as \"Post Classic\" (see Introduction, this volume). By this I refer to a body that remains rooted in the classical style - but a style which has been applied very selectively, creating what I consider to be a new ideal, a hyper-muscular, but essentially fragmented body, in which the sculpting of individual body parts and the display of body poses have come to supplant the whole body. I want to debate whether such an aesthetic can be recuperable, particularly as bodybuilding is palpably transgressive and adheres to certain features of the avant-garde.

This thesis is concerned with the history of professional bodybuilding in America and pays particular attention to the development within its subculture of definitions of the perfect body. This history has involved a shift from a bodybuilding aesthetic which adhered to what was imagined to be a classical archetype, to what, in recent years, has become a more extreme, excessive, ideal. Previous analyses of bodybuilding have primarily offered anthropological and ethnographic methodologies, the result of which has been largely to document the practice of bodybuilding via the opinions of the men (and women) in the field. More often than not, the resultant analyses explored bodybuilding for the exaggerated demonstration of gender relations in the larger culture that it was considered to provide. What has been given much less attention, and which this thesis will remedy, is a detailed focus on the aesthetic of the muscular body itself, and appropriately therefore, this work will examine the representation of the `built body' as a text within this particular subculture. As such, the thesis takes as its subject matter not just the texts of American bodybuilding, for instance as supplied by the extensive magazine literature, but also the text of the body itself, as manifest in the disciplines that manufacture the desired shape, its representation in regulatory criteria, poses, and other performative practices of competition. As such my concern is to chart and question the dramatic changes in the body shape displayed in professional bodybuilding via a narrative of its history, an analysis of its artifacts and practices, existing critical analyses of bodybuilding, insights from art history, and from alternative approaches to the body in Cultural Studies. This thesis opens with the first appearance of bodybuilding in America, which I define not in terms of the possession of a muscular body, but in terms of the possession of the discourse which aestheticised it. In the late nineteenth century this took the form of adherence to an imagined ideal of the classical Greek body as was evidenced in sculpture and painting. Revealingly, the trajectory of bodybuilding ever since has been towards the enlargement and exaggeration of the muscular form, until in very recent years it has achieved a condition which only 25 years ago would have been considered excessive. Indeed the contemporary form presents such an exaggerated definition of the body that many veterans in the bodybuilding community regard it as freakish. However, I argue that to see the contemporary built body as too radical a departure would be mistaken; in fact, this body remains rooted in the classical style - but a style which has been applied very selectively, creating what I consider to be a new ideal, a hyper muscular, but essentially fragmented body, in which the sculpting of individual body parts and the display of body poses have come to supplant the whole body. For this reason, my thesis also examines female bodybuilding, and considers it as a vital defining boundary for this new male aesthetic. Likewise, challenging the concept of the contemporary bodybuilder as a freak is central; as other recent discourses on the body and its modification have made clear, freak can have positive connotations, not least within a society in which identity tends increasingly towards the subcultural.

Millennium celebrations may stil be a couple of weeks away, but the American Century hi Panama symbolically...