Female bodybuilders exist outside of traditional notions of femininity, with some positioning it as a queer and feminist act. But it’s a bit more nuanced than that
When Love Lies Bleeding comes out in May, it will shine a spotlight on a version of femininity and the female body that we don’t often get to see in mainstream media. The erotic thriller, starring Kristen Stewart and Katy M O’Brien, centres around a queer relationship between bodybuilder Jackie and Lou, a gym manager, and follows as the two get tangled up with Lou’s criminal family.
With her ripped, muscular body, sculpted six-pack and beefy arms, Katy – like many female athletes – is antithetical to the traits often considered “feminine” under the patriarchy: being soft, gentle, petite, submissive, vulnerable or even weak. As a queer woman, this outsider position is only compounded for Katy. In different, if overlapping, ways, female bodybuilders and queer women both exist outside of a heteronormative framework of what it means to be a woman.
Because of how muscular women challenge ideas of what is considered “feminine”, bodybuilding as a sport has historically been viewed as an inherent form of feminist activism when performed by women. And if we theoretically define queerness as a non-normative relationship to gender and sexuality, it could also be argued that the sport is queer at heart. As Love Lies Bleeding enters the mainstream, will it present a new generation of young people with a queer, feminist revolutionary act to embrace themselves? Well, it’s complicated.
Dr Niall Richardson is a lecturer in Gender and Media at the University of Sussex. A former amateur bodybuilder himself, he has written papers on how the bodies of these athletes subvert and destabilise the performative boundaries of masculine and feminine, and thus escape the cultural confines of the gender binary. How we measure the transgressive nature of female bodybuilders, however, changes as what we consider “hypermuscularity” in women has evolved in the last few decades, he says. “If you look at the Robert Mapplethorpe photographs that Lisa Lyon was doing in the 1960s, they were deemed to be so shocking [because] people have never seen such excess of muscularity,” he tells Dazed. “[Now] we’d just describe it as having less muscle tone than singers or performers.”
Traditionally, Dr Richardson says, bodybuilding was considered “a direct challenge to traditional feminine iconography”, with academics such as Leslie Heywood or BC Shea viewing those who participated in the sport as “engaging in a form of feminist activism”. This stance, however, he now considers “very overdetermined” and says academics are moving away from this interpretation. Claudia Schippert, professor of cultural studies at the University of Florida, for example, writes that the subversive potential of female muscle is dependant on the “specific networking of gender, race, and sexuality,” while researchers Leena St Martin and Nicola Gavey have pointed out that male bodybuilders are equally “perceived to be unnatural, or even grotesque or repulsive by some”.
Bodybuilding legend Bev Francis first got into the sport because of her love of muscles. Described as one of the most important individuals to ever compete in women’s bodybuilding, she changed the face (and body) of the sport during its Golden Era of the 80s and 90s. Before Francis, women who participated in bodybuilding competitions had a much leaner physique, and were even judged negatively if they had more muscles than deemed “ladylike”. Francis, on the other hand, had the impressively brawny build of a powerlifter – something which infamously prevented her from competition success.
“When I walked into it, bodybuilding was already a multi-million dollar business, and I was just not sellable,” she tells Dazed. “The majority of people did not want to look like me. I wasn’t saying that people should want to look like me, I just liked muscle.” At professional levels, female bodybuilding has often been aimed towards the male, capitalist gaze. There’s serious money involved in the sport, and it’s delicately tied to its ability to titillate. “They didn’t want to have people throw the magazine back, they wanted people to buy it. They had to have sex appeal, and I had none,” explains Francis.
The commodification of women’s bodies in the sport is so significant that Francis claims it’s one of the reasons she has never won the prestigious Ms Olympia title. In 1991, Francis suffered a historic loss. She had already won the symmetry and muscularity rounds, and with only the free-pose round to go, it was a sign of a sure win. At that point, Francis had a whopping 160 pounds of muscle, achieving a figure previously unheard of in women’s bodybuilding. But mysteriously, Francis lost, prompting her to retire from the sport.
“I didn’t come to win anyway – I just came in to mess everybody’s heads up,” she tells Dazed. “And I absolutely did, because after that year, the muscular women came back and got big again. So I felt like I really gave it to them.” And it’s true: despite judges’ attempts in 1992 to “feminise” the sport and penalise what they deemed excessive muscularity, Francis proved female bodybuilding was better with muscle, and paved the way for burly figures like Iris Kyle and Lenda Murray to succeed.
Gender policing within bodybuilding spaces can also come from queer people themselves, says bodybuilder Janae Marie Kroc. Kroc, who identifies as transgender, genderfluid and non-binary, came out publicly in 2015, documenting her transition in Transformer. She’s also involved in the International Association of Trans Bodybuilders and Power Lifters. Whilst Kroc agrees that the stigma against muscular women in younger generations “is a lot less” and that there’s currently “a lot more tolerance” in the gay community, she says that there are still some queer people “who think that women aren’t supposed to be big and strong”.
“I’ve definitely had other trans girls come at me: ‘Well, you’re not really trans,’ or, ‘You wouldn’t want to be muscular if you’re really a woman,’” she tells Dazed. “I still have a female identity, but I’m still passionate about strength training. This is still a big part of who I am.” Comments and behaviour like this is “rampant”, Kroc says. “They’re adopting these patriarchal rules of what a woman is supposed to be, and it’s like a competition to conform to that. It’s surprising and disappointing and sad at times, but I can understand why that happens – it’s easier to be accepted into society if you express yourself in a traditionally feminine way.”
Extreme bodybuilding is transgressive. Francis says that it’s a “sport for freaks”, warning that “you do have to look different to be a bodybuilder, and you have to be prepared to take whatever comes with looking different”. Although it may not be inherently a queer feminist act, the existence of female bodybuilders seems to push societal pressure points that Love Lies Bleeding is happy to press. Ultimately, representing these subcultures on screen is a step towards loosening the boundaries of what we believe women should look like. Or, as Kroc puts it: “It’s easy to hate something you don’t understand it. When you’re face-to-face, it’s a lot harder.”