SUBVERTING THE IDEAL? CANADIAN FEMALE BODYBUILDERS' RESISTANCE OF IDEALIZED FEMININITY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Women’s bodybuilding challenges the social construction of the female body as frail or limited (Bunsell, 2013). In the context of competitive bodybuilding, however, women’s colonization of the muscular body is policed through judging criteria that require expression of femininity on stage through gestures, posing, make-up and hairstyle (Lowe, 1998). This study examined the experiences of nine female competitors to understand the ways in which they perceive and negotiate the expectations of idealized femininity within current bodybuilding competitions. Qualitative methods (in-depth, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork) were used. The analysis was informed by feminist deconstructions of sex, gender and sexuality in sport (Dworkin & Wachs, 2009) as well as by Foucauldian understandings of discipline/surveillance and technologies of the self (cf., Rabinow & Rose, 2003). The data gathered went beyond this focus to underline the contradictory views that some female bodybuilders hold of female muscularity and femininity. These views pointed to the influence of broader cultural perceptions on alternative versions of femininity constructed by bodybuilders. This influence, in turn, seemed to play a role in the bodybuilders’ acceptance or tolerance of the competition judging criteria. In short, the analysis demonstrated that the participants were able to negotiate the judging criteria, albeit at times reluctantly and with frequent expressions of criticism and disapproval.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".