SUBVERTING THE IDEAL? CANADIAN FEMALE BODYBUILDERS' RESISTANCE OF IDEALIZED FEMININITY
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it