Visible Difference and Flex Appeal

The Body, Sex, Sexuality, and Race in the "Pumping Iron" Films

Bibliographic Data

ID8905133
AuthorsCamilla Holmlund (corresponding author), Christine Anne Holmlund
Year1989
Volume28
Issue4
Pages38-38
Publication date1989-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCinema Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0009-7101 • E-ISSN: 1527-2087
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1225394
OpenAlexW1999978527
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited1

Pumping Iron (George Butler and Robert Flore: 1977) and Pumping Iron II: The Women (George Butler: 1984), two documentaries about bodybuilding contests, provide an ideal opportunity to look at the relationships operating between body, desire, and power in the United States today. Taken as a pair, these films are a veritable melting pot of sex, sexuality, race, and sales. Intentionally and unintentionally, they reveal how the visible differences of sex (to have or have not) and race (to be or not to be) mesh with ideology and economy in contemporary American society, and within film fictions. In both films sexuality is adroitly linked with sex and race at the expense of any reference to history or class. The body is marketed as a commodity in its own right, not just as the silent support for the sale of other commodities. An analysis of the way popular film reflects and shapes the categories of body, sex, sexuality, and race remains an urgent project for film theory. Despite the incorporation of critiques made by the women's, black, and gay movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s indeed, in some ways because of these critiques we continue to see and speak about the body as the last bastion of nature. While the sexual and civil rights movements make it clear that inequalities predicated on sex, race or sexual preference are socially established and maintained, the strategies they employ are nonetheless often based on an idea of the body as unified and unique.' Difference is either flaunted (black power and cultural feminism, black and women's separatism) or elided (the we're just like you policy of the National Gay Task Force since 1973), but the body remains the support of and rationale for political praxis. Even within theoretical discourses the biological status of the body lingers on, masking and motivating a series of power relations. (One has only to think of the multitude of feminist critiques of Lacan's penis/phallus confusion.) Everyone has difficulty acknowledging the extent to which the body is a social construction and an ideological support because, to invoke Freud, the body (our own and the Other's) is the object and the origin of our earliest fears and desires. The associations established between the body and power are particularly hard to acknowledge when, as is often the case, several kinds of visible difference or its correlates are intermingled: when sex is added to race, or when gender is

Appeal · Business · Commodity · Human sexuality · Ideal (ethics · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Race (biology · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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