Professor Anne Bolin in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology has had an article published in Flex: Critical Readings in Bodybuilding.
“Buff Bodies & the Beast: Emphasized Femininity, Labor and Power Relations among Fitness, Figure and Women Bodybuilding Competitors examines how the women’s movement of the 1960’s, Title IX and the subsequent fitness revolution gave impetus to alternative ideals of feminine beauty whose scope was widened to include an athletic aesthetic of toned and taut muscles.
Additional information from the abstract:
The inauguration of the sport of women’s bodybuilding in 1975 reconfigured this aesthetic even further as women bodybuilders began to push the perimeters on femininity with their unruly bodies; challenging the hegemonic gender order. My research suggests that by the new millennium, a bodily backlash in feminine ideals of beauty had begun to perforate this trend of transgressive embodiment and is registered in the relative eclipsing of women’s bodybuilding through the increasing popularity of fitness contests and the recent introduction of figure competitions. This research focuses on four watersheds in women’s bodybuilding as well as analyzes the nexus of relations of power (implicit and explicit modes of social control) and labor (stratification of paid and unpaid work) among fitness, figure and bodybuilding competitors from 1989 to the present.