(the) American (Novel of)

46 Kenneth J. Saltman
and perhaps what is most monstrous to you about the hardcore bodybuilder
is that in the body of the hardcore bodybuilder you see yourself,
a more honest version of yourself: you and your car payment, you and
your mortgage, you and the growth of your stock portfolio, you and the
growth of your prestige among your colleagues and in your field. That
is you, baby. Metastatic, an enfleshed crisis of overproduction. Those
are your values. That is what they look like carved in human flesh. You
see in the pulsing pounds of inflated flesh that it is you who are the
breathing breach of etiquette.
Notes
1. Schwartzenegger, Arnold and Douglas Kent Hall, The Education of a
Bodybuilder (New York: Fireside, 1977), p. 28.
2. As many authors, such as Leslie Haywood, Susan Bordo, Joanna
Frueh, and I have discussed, within bodybuilding struggles over gender and sex
take place. See, for example, my “Men with Breasts” (Journal of the Philosophy
of Sport, Vol. 25, #1, December, 1998, pp. 48–60), in which I reveal the extent
to which gender and sex break down as male bodies transform into female
bodies as the hypermasculine form unravels at its limit. Simultaneously, female
bodies transform into male bodies. As I argue in that article, the phenomenon
of bodybuiding offers glimpses into the extent to which such discursive constructs
as gender and sex are forcibly maintained and yet in their seeming
strongest incarnations offer critical readings of how discourse structures bodies.
Here I intentionally refer to the hardcore bodybuilder as “he” because in the
Weider era of bodybuilding (which we are still in) the hardcore bodybuilder
is male. There have been periods in which female hardcore bodybuilding has
taken center stage, only to get beaten back. Most recently, the Ms. Olympia
contest was delinked from Mr. Olympia, and Mr. Olympia was linked with the
Ms. Fitness, contest which celebrates the sleek model body rather than the
powerfully muscular body. The early battle between feminized and hardcore
female bodies can be seen in the film Pumping Iron II. What has yet to be
adequately explored in the literature is the relationship between the struggles
over gender and sex in bodybuilding and the struggles over labor which play
out on the body. Most literature on gender and sex in bodybuilding celebrates
the “subversive” tendencies of these big bodies for challenging gender norms.
I contend, however, that these alternative body forms quickly become
commodified in niche markets and, like body art, hardly threaten to overturn
power relations. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is that in Las Vegas female
hardcore bodybuilders can be special ordered to hotel rooms with such options