Non-Traditional Sports: Social Barriers :: Bodybuilding Synchronized Swimming Essays

Non-Traditional Sports Social BarriersGender barriers have always existed in the field of sports. I will be focusing specifically on women in the field of eubstancebuilding and men who enter synchronized swimming in order to illustrate the social and cultural costs and benefits of these individuals enter their given sports.Breaking BarriersThe gym is the world of gods and heroes, goddesses larger than life, a place of incantations where our bodies inflate and we shuffle off our out-of-gym bodies like discarded skins and walk about transformed. . . . Here, in this space, we begin to grow, to change. The transformation has begun, and our flawed humanity is falling off fast. We are picking up our shoulders, elevating our chins, shaking ugliness from our shoulders with a series of strokes, the gearshot dumbbells, listening to our bloods rush. Our pasty misshapen bodies are developing clean lines. Our days tribute of trials and heartaches is fading, for here, in this gym space, we becom e kings and queens. Larger, invincible, gods in ourselves. (Introduction, Bodymakers A Cultural Anatomy of Womens Body Building) Women in bodybuilding is a recent phenomenon. It is an example of the cultural transformation and revolution that has been in the process for many years now. Leslie Heywood, the author of the quote above, is an assistant prof of English at the State University of New York, Binghamton. As stated by a critic of her recent book, Bodymakers, Heywood looks at the sport and image of pistillate body building as a metaphor for how women fare in our current political and cultural climate. Drawing on contemporary feminist and cultural theory as well as her own involvement in the sport, she argues that the movement in womens bodybuilding from small, delicate bodies to large powerful ones and back again is today connected to progress and backlash within the abortion debate, the ongoing struggle for race and gender equality, and the struggle to define feminism in th e context of the nineties. She discusses female bodybuilding as activism, as an often effective response to abuse, race and masculinity in body building, and the contradictory ways that photographers treat female bodybuilders. It is unadorned from this brief yet descriptive narration of her book that Heywood believes both cultural costs and benefits of women in the sport of bodybuilding exist, as well as in any other field in which women push the restraints of social acceptance.