Making your Body your Signature: Weight-Training and Transgressive Femininities

Abstract

The body is capable of being fashioned to become a representation of the self, a signifier of personal identity. The specific body which is of interest here is that which has been inscribed by women with ‘the masculine’ through the rigorous diet and exercise regime of weight-training for muscular gain. Using Black and white women’s narratives as data, I look at the power of the women I researched to redefine ‘the feminine’ and ‘the erotic’. I focus on how women construct transgressive femininities by subverting stigma (Goffman, 1984), redefining physical capital (Bourdieu, 1978) and negating the beauty model (Tseelon, 1995), through building their bodies to their own design. This design is based on a ‘latent’ inner image which allows the women to become their own significant others, to challenge the gaze of others and to ‘be for themselves’. Their bodies, therefore, become sites of empowerment.

In a consumer culture obsessed with appearance, the status of the body has been transformed from a fixed natural given to a malleable cultural product.

(Tseelon, 1995: 4).