Page 183 - Sport Culture and the Media

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and purchase’ (Miller 2001: 56), but there are other unorthodox sports images
and their attendant gazes which form part of the changing discourses of
identity that are a major feature of contemporary life (Giddens 1991). In sports
photography, these involve negotiating the values that surround the body and
trying to work through socialized, visceral responses to our own bodies and
those of others (Shilling 1993; Falk 1994). Here the optic nerve meets athletic
muscle to often discomfiting effect.

Variable subject, different gaze

The transformations of modernity and postmodernity have resonated through
the ‘body cultures’ of different societies and epochs (Eichberg 1998). One rela-
tively recent expression of such shifts in the culture of bodies is that we are not
as limited as before to the body handed out at birth. Through appropriately
scientific techniques and technologies, and less constrained by prescribed
models of the body, it is believed possible to engage in ‘building a better body’
(Stratton 1999). Bodybuilding demands more than desultory exercise in pursuit
of lower body weight and admiring comments from others about being ‘in
shape’. It requires working on each component of the body before a real
or imaginary mirror (or lens) to produce the desired visible effect. The result
may appear excessive and even repugnant to those outside the culture of the
gymnasium. Muscularity in men is historically desirable in most body cultures
as long as they do not become ‘musclebound’, but in women it is rather more
culturally problematic. Heightened levels of muscularity among women is
frequently represented as freakish and ‘butch’, and homophobically derided
as a sign of lesbianism (Wright and Clarke 1999; Miller 2001). In the face of
such media-exacerbated hostility, there are often attempts to recuperate the
imaged muscular female body for a conventional binary model of masculine
men and feminine women. For example, Angela Ndalianis has written of the
representational tensions within bodybuilding ‘muscle’ magazines like Flex:

But, as the old saying goes, ‘a picture tells a thousand words’, and in
bodybuilding magazines it tells a story that attempts to bring back into
play a gendered power structure. While, in one way, the written word
serves to break down years of a subculture that was dominated by rigid
boundaries that served to contain and construct gender according to a
system of power negotiated around sexual difference, the image often con-
tradicts the word, aiming covertly to re-establish the status quo and set up
clear gender demarcations.
(Ndalianis 1995: 19)