(image ganked from Stumptuous)
Reflection on feminine comportment and body movement in other physical activities reveals that these are also frequently characterized, much as in the throwing case, by a failure to make use of the body’s spatial and lateral potentialities.
- Iris Marion Young
I don’t want to bury the lede: I’m going to argue that participating in sport, or just plain old fashioned exercise, can be considered a feminist act. Nay, should. I’m going to start with two primal scenes, that lodged a bee in my bonnet about women and the gym. First: when I was an undergrad some friends asked me out to lunch, but I declined as I had a previous date with my gym bros. One of my friends said she was concerned, as I was perfectly thin and didn’t need to use the gym. Second: at a recent powerlifting competition I had a long conversation with a couple, both lifters, about what amount of muscle was ‘appropriate’ for a women. One of the female competitors, a former bodybuilder, was not ‘appropriate.’
I mention these moments for two reasons. First, I had a moment many fat acceptance activists would be familiar with, a sense of deep rage at the expectation that I should curtail my size so as not to exceed the bounds of what is ‘appropriate’ for a woman. Second, I realised just how interwoven gym use is with weight loss and appearance for women. Both are problems that can be addressed, I think, by finding a sport, an exercise, hell, just something that makes you feel strong and alive and fronting up often and with gusto. I’m focusing on strength here because, while I’ve participated in a few sports in my post-high school neo-jock phase (boxing and fencing, mostly), it’s a strength sport that’s turned me into a real physical activity evangelist, and also because strength training, muscle and the concept of strength itself occupy an ambivalent place in many womens’ bodily practices. So here is why I reckon invading the gym, the playing field, the pool, whatever your activity of choice is, is a feminist act.
1. Muscular Women
The Queen of Internet Muscle, Stumptuous, recently posted a link through her twitter to this online symposium on womens’ strength training (registration required), which I’m very disappointed to have missed back in March. Included was this report by Leigh Peele on womens’ perceptions’ of bulkiness. I encounter far too many uninventive ‘[risk group]’s perception of [issue]’ studies, so my eyes normally glaze over at such reports, but this one really caught my attention, as I’d never really considered what it is that women mean when they use the word ‘bulky.’
Truth be told I have little patience for such concerns, that strength training or weights might develop unwanted bulk, which is unfair for two reasons. First, at 160cm and 54kg, my size and ‘bulkiness’ has never been an issue for me, socially or personally. I’ve never had the experience of a body that takes up more space than its supposed to. Second, its counterproductive to make a rigid distinction between good, politically reflexive bodily practices and bad ‘unenlightened’ ones. I would love to draw a line in the sand and say training for the pure, ecstatic pleasure of it, for the new bodily capacities and possibilities it can open up is good and training to change the body’s appearance is bad, but this is just counterproductive, and also diminishes the efforts of those for whom weight loss or appearance are a major motivation. Still, Leigh Peele’s entry is unsettling, inasmuch as it reveals just how low the threshold for ‘bulk’ is if women like Jessica Biel are deemed ‘too bulky.’
Muscular women occupy an ambivalent place in feminine representational regimes, a place where the 80s hardbody stands alongside action heroines like Linda Hamilton and Demi More in ‘GI Jane,’ lesbian serial killers (for instance, the prison guards and girlfriend in the video for ‘Telephone’) and fetishized freaks, such as Kim Chizevsky in ‘The Cell’ (warning: clip not necessarily NSFW, but definitely on the weird side). The muscular woman is also an object of suspicion. I vividly remember, for instance, the camera suspiciously following female Chinese swimmers competing in a summer olympics during the 90s, their broad shoulders apparently evidence of drug use. And lets not forget the cruel case of Caster Semenya, who was ‘found out’ as another unreal non-woman, and how her magnificently muscled sprinters’ body was used as evidence of her guilt. In each case the muscular woman is an exception, a worked-upon aberration. Even such a sensitive feminist scholar as Susan Bordo cannot see the muscular woman, in this case the bodybuilder, as anything other than an overgrown anorectic, enfolding the muscular woman’s bodily practice into the familiar narrative of the eating disordered woman. ‘As for the anorectic,’ Bordo argues, ‘who literally cannot see her body as anything other than her inner reality dictates… so for the body-builder a purely mental conception comes to have dominance over her life… Dictation to nature of one’s own design for the body is the central goal for the body-builder, as it is for the anorectic.’ (152, if you’re interested).
I’m not arguing that appearances aren’t important, but I do think we need to find a different way to think about, talk about and, yes, valorize these bodily practices, one that opens up new possibilities for women, and new politics about the body.
2. What can a body do?
People don’t believe me when I say I like powerlifting because it feels good, because it looks like it shouldn’t. Most people haven’t had the experience of lifting heavy, and assume that it must be painful, or frightening, or both. But it’s not like you immediately begin deadlifting 200kg; you start small, and gradually build up, and the rate at which your strength improves, if you’re learning correct form and have support and coaching, is intoxicating. What once felt impossible is now light and easy; you think less; you experience the wonderful clarity of finding your limit. Yes, I said clarity, and I mean it. When you’re lifting something at or near your physical limit, a continually moving point, you can’t think about anything else other than what you’re doing. You are, to use a hackneyed phrase, in the moment, continuous with what you’re doing, totally focused on the movement of the bar and your body. And failure, when you hit that limit, doesn’t hurt, and it isn’t frightening. You should have a spotter to make sure you don’t get hurt, and it simply means that you can’t lift any more. Lifting heavy is a peak physical experience, and it changes the way you see yourself and your body.
That’s just my experience of one sport; there are countless other stories from other gyms and other sports. This is what I want us to talk about when we talk about sport and exercise, these profound, sustaining moments where we uncover capacities we didn’t realise we had, and it’s these experiences that I want to foreground when talking about sport and exercise as feminist practices - as moments of intense, pleasurable peak experience, practices that build communities, and, yes, that create health. I want a feminist ethic that valorizes these moments of experimentation, of asking what can these bodies do.
3. Marginal Muscle
In discussions of health-giving exercise, strength training and other muscular sports barely warrant a mention, particularly in government recommendations for exercise. There could be a number of reasons for this, not least material factors like the need for equipment (though, as Stumputous proves, not as much equipment as you think) and effective coaching, but these could be easily overcome, or it could be because of perceptions that strength training is the domain of bodybuilders, football players and doofy gym bros. Which I mention to introduce another important element of this athletic feminist ethic I’m gesturing to: the difficult question of health.
To crudely caricature a number of very important feminist interventions into health, health is politically contested along two axes and directions. First, health is a continuously contested normative category, a site for the exercise of power, where those who charge themselves with administration (in many senses) of health decide who, and what, is healthy. Secondly, health is an imperative, a hail which we’re called to respond to. I mention this to respond to concerns that the category of ‘health’ does violence to particular excluded groups and people. These are important concerns and important arguments, but I don’t want to abandon this category of ‘health.’ I want to move away from a moral imperative of the maximised body to an ethics of potential and capacity.
This is very personal for me. As I’ve mentioned before, I have chronic, at times disabling arthritis, which I manage with heavy medication and exercise. It’s no exaggeration to say that if I didn’t regularly engage in heavy weights I would be nowhere near as mobile as I am now. I’ve found, through experience, that weights help with pain and mobility even when I’m supposed to (according to my rheumatologist) avoid physical activity, such as during a flare.
Again, I want to acknowledge that it is much easier for me to enter into certain spaces than it is for others. It’s easier for me to talk cavalierly about gaining size when my size is not an issue for me. The point is that <i>all</i> bodies have potential, wonderful potential, exciting possibilities to be explored. I was talking to a friend about this ridiculous, overblown entry, and he said it reminded him of a famous quote from Deleuze, where he says:
The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence a return to this sort of cry of Spinoza’s: what can a body do? We never know in advance what a body can do. We never know how we’re organized and how the modes of existence are enveloped in somebody.
Now if you’ll excuse me it’s time to stop thinking and hit the gym.
