Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular by Niall Richardson

By Niall Richardson

Lately the “body” has turn into the most well known parts of research within the arts, social sciences and arts. Transgressive our bodies deals an exam of various non-normative our bodies and the way they're represented in movie, media and pop culture.

Examining the non-normative physique in a cultural experiences context, this publication reconsiders the concept that of the “transgressive body”, constructing its prestige as a culturally mutable time period, arguing that renowned cultural representations create the transgressive or “freak” physique after which continue to both “contain” its hazard or (s)exploit it. via stories of maximum bodybuilding, weight problems, incapacity and transsexed our bodies, it examines the results of such transgressive our bodies for gender politics and sexuality.

Transgressive our bodies engages with modern cultural debates, continually referring to those to concrete reports of media and cultural representations. This publication will as a result entice students throughout a number disciplines, together with media and movie reviews, cultural reviews, gender experiences, sociology, activities reviews and cultural idea.

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Extra resources for Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture

Sample text

The extreme bodybuilder’s physique can be read as adopting what is deemed ideal in contemporary culture and caricaturing it to a cartoonish if not even grotesque extreme. The extreme bodybuilder is making an ironic comment on physical attributes now deemed ideal in contemporary culture. If broad, muscular shoulders are deemed attractive, then the bodybuilder asks how attractive it is when he blows up the deltoids and traps to such an extent that he appears to have no neck. If pumped biceps are sexy then how attractive is it when the arms becomes so big that they don’t even seem to sit comfortably by the side of the body?

While images of muscular men engaging in homosexual activities had previously been the stuff of fantasy drawings, such as those produced by Tom of Finland, now these could be watched on the home videotape. Of the gay pornography studios, Falcon Studies became synonymous with the bodybuilder/beefcake look and often featured hard-up, amateur bodybuilders having sex with other bodybuilders. Of course, these bodybuilders had more in common with the type of physique predating Arnold than with the mass monster or “freak” of the 1980s competition world.

Firstly, it conflated bodybuilding with homosexuality. After the publicity of this magazine, many people read bodybuilding as a covert gay activity. Men who engaged in the activity were gay and, if they were not gay to begin with, the activity would probably “turn” them gay. Secondly, it clouded the concept of bodybuilding for many people. Given that so many of the Physique Pictorial models had so little muscular development or, most importantly, such imbalanced muscularity, it conveyed an inaccurate impression of what the activity aimed to do – the holistic development of all the voluntary muscles to attain the classical ideal.

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