Muscular Otherness:

Performing the Muscular Freak and Monster

John Paul Staszel

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

August 2009

Committee:

Dr. Scott Magelssen, Advisor

Dr. Lesa Lockford

Dr. Eileen Cherry-Chandler

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Abstract

The historic “freak show” presented human difference as a popular form of entertainment, which

both fascinated and repulsed. While voyeuristically consumed to look at on stage, freak show

performers were often alienated from the rest of society, stared at, and called “freaks” and

“monsters”—terms connoting repugnance and physical disorder. Today, the muscular body is a

newly emergent form of physical bodily difference inviting our stares, and the gaze at its

difference is still very much informed by the historical mode of staring at the freak and monster.

However, these terms, when applied to muscular identities in popular discourse, no longer only

have negative connotations associated with disgust and disgrace. The muscular bodies and

public personas of famous bodybuilders, and their performances as war heroes, crime fighters

and sports stars, have had a tremendous impact—inspiring millions, including myself, to take up

a bodybuilding lifestyle for health and aesthetic reasons. The inspiration we get from these

muscular identities, however, lies in more than their standardized performances as hero or

athlete. These performers have also modeled positive, empowering images of the “muscular

freak” and “muscular monster,” new character types that invite idolization and admiration. In

this manner, images and performances featuring the muscular body have altered our social

understanding of terms normally associated with the classification of the deformed and

ostracized human body into terms of honor, veneration and praise. The muscular body has had a

transformative power over the terms freak and monster, and it is in this power that I place its

foundation. To articulate the particulars of this transformation, I look to pivotal historic events

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and recent case studies in film, television, and

magazines, as well as my own participant and scholarly findings of bodybuilding expositions.

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Dedication

For Mom, Dad and Joe who have supported me from afar, and for all of those friends who

have stood by me during my disappearance.

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Acknowledgements

Writing a master’s thesis is very much like building a fit muscular body; neither is a

requirement for individual success in life—they are life choices. In most circumstances, it is an

individual’s choice to enter a training facility and build a muscular body. The same type of

choice compels individuals to continue their higher education. Whereas the health and fitness

industry provides an established network of gyms, nutritional supplement companies, fitness

literature, and experts to guide an individual on their fitness quest, a university provides the same

type of network, ensuring access to the tools necessarily for academic success. It is important for

me to acknowledge the health and fitness industry for the subsidiary assistance it has provided in

this project. It is, however, more important for me to thank the friends, family, peers, mentors,

departments and professors that have stood by and aided in my academic journey.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my parents, Donald and Emma Staszel, and my

much younger brother Joe. They have provided me with unconditional support in the

unorthodox journey that has been my life, never second-guessing my final decisions. Dr.

Michael Slavin, Dr. Michele Pagen, my undergraduate theatre professors at California University

of Pennsylvania both earned PhDs from the theatre department from Bowling Green State

University. They are responsible for igniting the flame and adding fuel to my academic fire.

Without their early and consistent guidance, and the support from many within the theatre

department at California University of Pennsylvania, I would not proudly be pursuing my

master’s and eventually a PhD from such a great school as Bowling Green State University.

It is the outstanding individuals from Bowling Green State University whom I would like

to thank the most. Dr. Scott Magelssen gave me exactly the type of direction I needed with this

project. His remarkable patience has truly been a gift, while his desire and enthusiasm toward

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my subject has motivated and challenged me more than I could have imagined. His guidance

over the past two years has continued to drive personal excellence in my academic pursuits and

he has guided this project to its fruition. As I continue my academic quest for excellence, Dr.

Magelssen’s direction has been a leading force in fostering my academic growth as a writer and

scholar. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Lesa Lockford and Dr. Eileen

Cherry-Chandler, for their work on this project, as well as the role they have played in my

overall progress as a theatre scholar. Dr. Jonathan Chambers and Esther Iverson have also

cultivated my growth as a scholar over the past two years. All of the people mentioned above

have played a pivotal role in my master’s education and I hope they would see this thesis as a

synthesis of my lessons learned in my time here at BGSU.

I would also like to thank my fellow students for the support and friendships that have

been forged. Stephen Harrick, Andie Markijohn, Matt Lamb, Hephzibah Nicky Dutt, Scott

Boston and Rob Connick have not only provided outstanding academic sounding boards to vent

and bounce ideas off of, they have also become friends that I hold near to my heart. I wish them

the best of luck in their academic careers and all other directions life has in store for them.

Finally, I would like to conclude by thanking my close friends Jim Overly, Dr. Mark Vaitkus,

Dr. Ed Duling, Earl Tucker and Donnie C. Stepp Jr., all of whom have been enormous

inspirations in my scholarly pursuits. I would like to thank each one of them individually for the

unique roles they have played in my life. They have helped me to persevere through times of

personal defeat and have played key roles in many of my successes.

Without the help, guidance, support and friendship from those mentioned above and

many others, I would not be where and who I am today. Thank you again—more than you will

ever know. God bless you all, as He has already blessed me with your presence.

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Preface

Visible body difference has always been a fascination of mine but I did not really know

or understand why as I was growing up. Looking back, I realize that I was constantly

surrounded by human difference. My maternal grandmother, one of the most important figures

in my life, was stricken with polio at a young age. As she grew older, the disease hampered her

mobility, which eventually led to substantial weight gain. My paternal grandfather was born

with an extra finger. I assume my great-grandparents did not have it medically removed, either

because they did not have the money or did not want to draw unwanted attention to the

deformity. His physical condition and appearance also changed with age due to diabetes and

poor circulation. By the time I was ten, both of his legs had been amputated at the knee. Then

there was my Great Aunt Rosie: while she was always just Aunt Rosie to me and my family, to

most everyone else she was known as “Jim.” As I grew older, I slowly began to understand that

Aunt Rosie looked, sounded, dressed and acted more like a male (Jim) than a female (Rosie). I

do not think I fully realized until I was a teenager how and why she was different.

Today, I look back and recognize that all three of these important individuals in my

childhood could be classified under an unattractive category. To me, they were just family.

They were not physically different or deformed. They were simply Gram, Pap and Aunt Rosie.

Yet the memories of the looks, the stares, and the glares that I can vaguely recall while with them

in public all make more sense now. I cannot really blame anyone who might have stared,

because, as a young man, I often wondered about their differences. It has taken until this point in

my life to realize that many of those stares were directed in way similar to the stares that would

have been directed towards the “fat lady,” “the legless wonder,” and “the hermaphrodite/ half

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man- half woman” characters popular under the banner of “freak show.” Indeed, they could

have easily been oddities of interest to the paying audience of the freak show days of old.

As a child, possessing a physical difference was always a fear of my own. For this

reason, growing up, I was always fascinated by the muscle and fitness subculture. Bodybuilding

offered an escape from my fears and I began to develop a deep personal appreciation for health,

fitness and the muscular body. Over the past fifteen years I have developed and molded myself

into a muscled, six-foot one-inch, two hundred and twenty-five pound body in an attempt to

resemble the muscular images in the popular media. However, in my youth, my body started at a

very different level. Along with growing up with human difference constantly in plain sight, I

possessed my own personal difference.

Growing up as the only child on the family farm, I considered myself fat. Saying I was

overweight, plump, or pudgy would be an understatement. I can still remember feeling

uncomfortable looking at myself in the mirror at age ten. Looking down and seeing roll after roll

on my stomach and a pair of fatty “man-boobs” already developing at such a young age kept me

depressed and socially secluded. For instance, I loved the summer and swimming, but never

enjoyed the fact that going swimming meant I had to take my shirt off, or be the dreaded “fat

boy” swimming with his shirt on. As we all know, being teased is a terrible feeling. I always

felt alienated and out of place because of my poor body image. Social gatherings made me feel

immediately insecure and out of place. To my mind, I was at these gatherings only because it

was polite for everyone in my grade school class to be invited, not because the host wanted to

invite me in the first place. All I could imagine was, as I walked into the room, “The fat boy has

arrived!” was running through everyone’s mind.

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My physical image became very important to me because of my constant feeling of not

fitting in. I knew I was different and began to sense unwanted stares at times, just like those I

noticed when I was with Gram, Pap or Aunt Rosie. I hated it and was determined to do whatever

it took to keep it from happening. As a young man, then, redefining my body became a priority.

In fact it became an obsession and was the only thing that mattered to me. I started training in

sixth grade, although I had no idea what I was doing. I watched shows like The Incredible Hulk,

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and, of course professional wrestling, and searched

movies and magazines for muscular bodies to emulate. After years of studying and idolizing the

amazingly muscular bodies of these magazine stars and television and movie characters, along

with the most up-to-date publications of Joe Weider’s muscle magazines, physical self-

education, and a lot of trial and error, I finally saw results.

I can hardly remember my first workout, though I still have my first set of five-pound

dumbbell hand weights and the old, worn-out pair of ankle weights I used as an adolescent. As I

think back on my early workout routines (consisting of push-ups and sit-ups on my bedroom

floor), however, the connection between muscle and human difference becomes apparent. My

goal was to escape the unwanted glares due to being overweight. As my body transformed,

different looks became apparent. I realized the stares no longer fixed on a “fat boy,” but rather

the image of a “buff man.” As I reflected on these moments, I began to understand the historical

gaze in relation to visible human difference.

A study of the performance and reception of human difference throughout history reveals

the fundamental component of people staring. Indeed, the enterprise of studying human

difference has also always been a kind of stare. Throughout history, the interesting subjects on

the other end of these studious stares have, for the most part, been classified as “freaks” and

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“monsters.” Today, however, one of the most widespread forms of physical bodily difference

commonly stared at is that of the self-made, fit muscular body. What I hope to demonstrate,

though, is that while muscular bodies are a newly emergent subject, the gaze at their difference is

still very much informed by the historical mode of staring at the freak. However, this is not

necessarily always a bad thing. Let me explain.

The historic “freak show” presented human difference as a popular form of

entertainment, but it was often a marginal or stigmatized form in relation to other entertainments,

by virtue of its performers’ grotesque images, which both fascinated and repulsed. While they

were a voyeuristic fascination when on stage, these performers were often alienated from the rest

of society, subject to darting stares (which I’m sure were far worse than those in my personal

accounts above). They were called freaks and even monsters due to their appearance, terms

connoting repugnance and physical disorder. Ironically, because of these derisions in larger

society, some of the performers with physical differences were only able to feel a sense of

belonging among fellow performers on the freak show stage. This was the only place where they

lived up to society’s expectations. Today, however, the terms “freak” and “monster” no longer

only have the negative meanings associated with disgust, disgrace, and physical dishonor.

In popular discourse about the muscular body, these terms have taken on much more

positive connotations, which inspire honor and imitation rather than repulsion. The muscular

body presents an ideal that has had a transformative power over these terms and it is in this

power that the following study places its foundation. The muscular bodies that I idolized are the

same bodies millions of others growing up over the past thirty years have used as inspiration.

Television and movie actors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, Sylvester Stallone, and

professional wrestler Hulk Hogan are just a few. Images of these men have set a muscular

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precedent for body size, shape, and muscularity. Their performances and public personas have

ignited the desires of millions to build muscle for more than just aesthetic appeal. While for a

large part of the twentieth century, the muscular form was yet another abnormal body to be

regarded with revulsion and misunderstanding, key events from the 50s through the 80s triggered

a shift in society’s stare to one of admiration. Certain muscular images began to stand for new

bodies of the hero and star athlete. With a reconfiguration of the stare, society quickly followed

suit with a desire to mimic training and diet techniques, striving to resemble these new body

images.

The performances and portrayals of these muscular identities as war heroes, crime

fighters and sports stars have had a tremendous impact on cultural identification ever since.

They allowed young people like me, an only child, fat, alienated and growing up miles away

from any friends, an escape from reality that allowed the imagination to run wild and free. With

others, I often found my inspiration in these muscular identities, but not just in their standardized

performance as hero or athlete. These men also modeled positive, empowering images in the

altered realities they represented in the movies as the monster, the freak and even the alien.

Throughout this study, I will focus on these altered character representations and

performances. I will argue that compelling and attractive muscular identities, created by the

ever-evolving cultural preoccupation with and the craving for muscle over the past one hundred

years, are not always portrayed through positive character types we associate with “hero.” As a

matter of fact, the terms “freak” and “monster,” which, as discussed above, have normally been

associated with negative characteristics, are now “character types” that invite idolization and

admiration when portrayed via their muscular identities. In this manner, images and

performances featuring the muscular body have demonstrated a power and ability to alter our

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social understanding of terms normally associated with the classification of the deformed and

ostracized human body into terms of honor, veneration and praise. Muscle represents strength,

power and force, but it is now time to acknowledge a different kind of muscular power, one that

is recognized less often, but visible everyday, nonetheless. Muscles have transformed standard

terms of human difference (freak and monster) into terms that now imply appreciation,

admiration, and respect when directed toward muscular bodies.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………… 1 CHAPTER ONE: Origins of the Muscular Freak and Monster……………………………….. 20 Muscular “Freaks” and “Monsters”……………………………………………………. 21

Modern Hercules: The First Muscular Freak…………………………………………... 28 It’s Alive: The Creation of the Muscular Monster……………………………………... 36 CHAPTER TWO: The Muscular Freak and Monster: Beyond the Originals…………………. 50 Junior: The Muscular Hermaphrodite…………………………………………………. 53 Pumping Iron’s Post-Monstrous Muscle………………………………………………. 61 CHAPTER THREE: The Muscular “Freak Show”……………………………………………. 77 Step Right Up: The Modern Muscular Bally…………………………………………... 79 Rage in the Cage: Muscles on Display………………………………………………… 97 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………….. 106 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………… 116

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Introduction

“My father, or my grandfather never worried about whether they had a six pack of

abdominals or what percentage body fat they had, so why is it now, in the 21st

century that there is this huge preoccupation with body image that just didn’t exist

before?”

-Dr. Harrison Pope- Harvard Psychiatrist

Bigger, Stronger, Faster

Most of us will recognize the saying, “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” from the

Wizard of Oz, but what would come to mind after hearing a saying like, “freaks and monsters,

and mutants, hooray!”? These latter terms can bring scary images to mind just like lions, tigers,

and bears, but, just as Bert Lahr’s character challenged and eventually recast the fearsome,

menacing image of the lion into a positive and memorable figure, muscular bodies have been

appropriating and redefining the terms freak, monster, and mutant over the past few decades into

something very different from before.

Today we live in an age generally referred to as “the fitness phenomenon,” a period that,

according to journalist Laurie Shultze, indicates “a shift in the definition of the ideal body (for

both women and men) towards the more muscular body” (Schulze 10). Since the turn of the

twentieth century, and even more so since the 1950s, body image ideals have been continuously

shifting. This is especially true for the muscular body image. The ideal muscular body has

evolved over the past one hundred years through images, ideas, presentations and

characterizations by often-recognizable individuals. Eugene Sandow, arguably the first

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recognizable muscular individual, sparked muscular development at the end of the nineteenth

century. Since Sandow, the muscular body has continued to develop into an extreme subculture

evident today in bodybuilding competitions such as the Mr. Olympia and the Arnold Classic—

the world’s two premier bodybuilding competitions and muscular tradeshow exhibitions. Thus,

while Dr. Pope’s question in the epigraph above frames society’s preoccupation with body image

as something new, perhaps this current manifestation is so recognizable because mainstream

entertainment has been fed by images of muscle and muscular bodies for over a century.

The historic trajectory of the muscular body with its glorified personifications,

characterizations, and “Othered” classifications has been continuously evolving, and has always

fed into shifting cultural desires in regard to body identity. However, since iconic muscular

identities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, and Sylvester Stallone hit the movie and

TV screens in the late 1970s, there has been a major shift in the cultural desire to build, sculpt

and construct a more fit, healthy–and what many see as a perfect–body. Since that time, both

men and women with lean, healthy, muscular bodies have continuously been on display as Dr.

Pope observes, “on TV, in the movies, in cartoons, on magazines at the checkout counter in the

department store” (Bigger, Stronger, Faster), as actors, sports stars, war heroes, crime fighters

and other positive figures increasing society’s desire for muscular bodies. It would seem that,

the majority of the time in the performances of muscular models, actors, and bodybuilders

society equates positive character identities with the muscular body and vice-versa.

By society, I refer to the vast numbers of consumers of fitness and popular culture that

did not exist before the 1970s and the 1977 film, Pumping Iron. Before this time, working out,

“pumping iron,” and building muscle were marginalized activities for “muscle maniacs.”

Bodybuilding was “weird.” Athletes were warned against getting “muscle-bound” because it

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would make them bulky and slow, while those past middle age were led to believe lifting

anything heavy could cause a heart attack. Today, however, image after image and study after

study refute these former claims. Magazine ads sell tight, muscular bodies just as much as they

sell company products, while rock icons and movie stars urge adoring fans to get “rock hard.”

Medical studies also prove that “strength training can improve cardiovascular fitness, strengthen

bones, increase flexibility and balance, and even fight diabetes, arthritis, and depression” (Iron

and beyond, Pumping Iron DVD extra). While it seems, then, that I may be over-generalizing

when I refer to “society’s” preoccupation with muscle throughout this thesis, I use the term

deliberately. Certainly, though not all men, women and children admire and seek to emulate

bodybuilders, it is a common sight to see men and women of all ages in today’s fitness locations.

Children are also often with their parents in fitness facilities that provide childcare. At the very

least, we can take it as a given that men, women and children of all ages encounter images and

performances of muscular bodies that give the message that a healthy muscular body equals a

positive character identity.

However, there is another side to the portrayal of positive muscular “role model”

character types. This study will investigate alternative images and ideas associated with muscle.

I focus on portrayals of what I’m calling the “muscular freak” and the “muscular monster” and

how these historically negative terms, when paired with muscularity, mean something positive

and socially desired. The muscular image and performances of muscular bodies have altered the

power of certain words. “Freak,” “monster” and even “mutant” and “alien” are most often

associated with real or fictional physical human “Otherness” and often synonymous with

“grotesque” and “repulsive,” but are now terms that, when associated with the muscular body,

also bring affirmation and glorification.

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Today, ideas of the muscular freak and monster provide another explanation for Dr.

Pope’s assertion above, i.e., that society today has, “this huge preoccupation with body image

that just didn’t exist before.” Images and character portrayals of the muscular freak and monster

are a common sight in muscle magazines, movies, TV shows, and even company names.

Professional bodybuilders such as “Team MuscleTech Superfreak” Gustavo Badell and Leo

“The FREAK” Ingram are honored with the term “freak” within the pages of the muscle

magazines. Muscular freakishness and monstrousness have for years been subjects of popular

film. The recent X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, and Hellboy Hollywood movie franchises,

themselves based on successful comic books, have been smash hits at the box office and promise

multiple sequels. Then there are the companies like “Monster Milk” and “Train Like A Freak”

that provide muscle building products as well as fashionable apparel. While these are just a few

current examples, the idea of “freaky” or “monstrous” muscle has been developing for quite

some time. Ever since the early days of strongman performances, muscular bodies have taken on

or have been associated with abnormal/anomalous portrayals suggesting freak or monster and

have continuously attracted attention and admiration.

This project, then, seeks to establish the historic trajectory between the relationship of

muscle and the terms “freak” and “monster.” I begin by charting the initial moments when

certain muscular bodies blurred the reception of these terms and attempt to discern and

historicize the pivotal moments when the muscular freak and muscular monster can be

recognized through an examination of important archival performances and other documentation.

“Archival memory,” as Diana Taylor explains, consists of “all those items supposedly resistant

to change” (videos, films, literary text) (Taylor 19). For Taylor, archival memory works across

time and space allowing a reexamination of knowledge. As Taylor explains, “What changes

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over time is the value, relevance, or meaning of the archive, how the items it contains get

interpreted, even embodied” (19). Through selecting and re-examining certain individuals,

images, and performances in the muscular archives, I attempt to reinterpret and position them as

the initial moments when a muscular body became a muscular freak and muscular monster.

In addition to isolating the specific nature and contexts of these initial moments and the

ways they have been echoed in ensuing decades (the muscular archive), I also look to current

examples of the relationship between muscles, freaks and monsters (the muscular repertoire).

For more than fifteen years I have engaged as a participant observer in a number of muscular

exhibition and competitions. My recent experiences at the two biggest bodybuilding exhibitions

in the United States, “The Olympia” and “The Arnold Classic” have given me the opportunity to

examine how monster and freak characteristics are currently used in the muscular repertoire.

The repertoire, as Taylor explains it “requires presence: people participate in the production and

reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being part of the transmission” (20). Here the

actions, as opposed to “supposedly” stable objects in the archive, do not remain the same. The

scope of this research involves not only being there as a participant and spectator, but also makes

me a fundamental part of the production and transmission of ideas and representations of the

contemporary muscular “freak show,” the muscular freak and the muscular monster. The

academic analysis also includes nearly twenty years of personal muscular magazine readership.

Connecting muscle with the terms “freak” and “monster” necessitates the incorporation of recent

publications and fieldwork. In live muscle exhibits, examples of “freak show,” freak, and

monster imagery often promote not only the muscular body, but also the companies and products

whose sole purpose is to enhance the production of individual muscle.

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Delimitations

In this study I investigate the visual understanding of muscularity through images and

performances of muscle bodies. I have attempted to limit the focus to representations and

performances of muscle that can be read within association with the terms “freak” and “monster”

resulting in a positive reception (versus some type of scary, grotesque, repulsive unattractive

figure). I have chosen a handful of case studies that I have determined to be most helpful in

articulating my arguments. My rationale for choosing primarily male subjects for my inquiry is

not intended to be exclusionary. While there are a few examples of the muscular female’s body

taking on a positive connection with the terms “freak” or “monster,” there is normally a negative

connotation. This is an avenue for further research, to be sure, but will not be treated within the

scope of this thesis. While at times identity markers like “masculine” will be an explicit part of

my analysis this is not intended to be a formal study of gender, sexuality, race, or class, vis-à-vis

the muscular body (again, compelling subjects for entire projects in themselves).

This is not intended to be a study solely on or about Arnold Schwarzenegger, but for the

scope of this project, certain images and performances of his cannot be ignored due simply to his

seminal and prominent role in the industry. Arnold will often be addressed but the primary focus

will be on archival images of certain muscular male bodies as “freak” and “monster” and how

these ideas are currently used in the repertoire of muscular performances. The overall purpose is

to establish how a definite positive correlation can be perceived between muscle and the terms

“freak” and “monster.”

A Brief History of the Muscular Body in the Past Century

As Pope indicates, the health, fitness and muscle craze has not always been what it is

today. In the early days of the strongman, the craze was often marginalized or relegated to freak

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show entertainment, as opposed to being recognized as a legitimate regimen for quality of life or

aesthetic purposes, and remained that way for most of the twentieth century. Except for a few

notable figures, important muscular identities were hardly identifiable. Although the art and

science of bodybuilding continued to advance, public reaction to muscular bodies was generally

less than positive and often informed by misconceptions. It was not until the 1980s that more

and more men and women began to develop what became seen as excessively muscular bodies.

These extreme bodies seemed unnatural or even incomprehensible to members outside of the

culture. English professor and former power lifter Leslie Heywood reports that many people

began to see gyms as “covens” and dark places where men and a handful of women could weave,

“alchemistic magic to turn ordinary flesh into bulging rivers of steel” (Heywood 165).

Over the past thirty years, there has been a definite shift in accepting, desiring and

seeking knowledge about muscular bodies. Today, muscles are in the mainstream more than

ever. As popular culture professor Chris Holmlund says in “Visible Difference and Flex

Appeal,” “The reliance of Western society on images of the body to sell products and promote

fictions compounds our confusion. Mass media and advertising see to it that we consume visible

difference daily” (88). Although some may still find the promotion of excessive muscular bodies

confusing, repulsive or grotesque, the health, fitness and muscle craze has, for the most part,

been accepted worldwide. While to many, the world of competitive bodybuilding remains an

extreme subculture, the non-competitive practice of working out and building a better, healthier

body undeniably spans all age groups, physical levels, and social classes. Heywood points this

last fact out as well, declaring, “ the non-competitive practice of “working out” and “getting a

six-pack” spans the range of social subjects from the lawyer to the junior high school teacher to

the data processor” (165). Bodybuilding’s movement from the margins to the center of societal

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acceptance has thus marked a crucial turning point of our contemporary idea of the muscular

body image. While we continuously “consume visible physical difference daily,” images of the

muscular variety of physical difference are now second nature.

Along with the consumption of these images come both truths and misconceptions,

particularly in regard to steroids, muscle building supplements, and other performance-enhancing

substances. These substances are a part of bodybuilding, especially in some of the more

excessive muscular bodies. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger openly admits to using steroids during

his competitive days, explaining they were a legal substance at that time and continued to be so

until the early 1990s (Iron Insight, Pumping Iron DVD Extra). For a thorough investigation of

the medical facts and cultural misconception of performance enhancing substances, I refer the

reader to the 2008 documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster. Steroids are one of many performance

enhancers that the film covers. Steroid use is one of the avenues detailing the lengths

bodybuilders will go to in their instilled obsession to be the biggest, strongest and fastest in

achieving the status of “being number one.” Steroids are at one end of the continuum of

performance enhancers used by bodybuilders while nutritional supplements are at the other end

of the continuum. While there are perceptions of steroids as unhealthy and immoral, these

perceptions need not disproportionately color our understanding of bodybuilding as

fundamentally associated with a healthy lifestyle, or of steroids as a required substance for

producing freakish or monstrous muscle. In some cases steroids are indeed used, but not in all.

In this study I will leave general moral considerations regarding performance enhancing

substances up to the reader, for this subject has been debated ever since muscle began to regain

popular appeal, and it is not within the purview of my thesis to take on these debates.

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It was the 1977 release of the Pumping Iron, starring then five-time Mr. Olympia

champion bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger that marked the beginning of what has

commonly been considered the “Golden Age” of bodybuilding. The movie, based on the book

with the same name published in 1974, documents the Southern California bodybuilding

lifestyle, both in and out of the gym, including the pursuit of Schwarzenegger’s sixth consecutive

Mr. Olympia title. Pumping Iron also marks the critical juncture of bodybuilding’s infiltration

into the mainstream as it introduced both Schwarzenegger and the sport of bodybuilding to the

world. The six-feet two-inch, two-hundred-and-thirty-five pound Schwarzenegger, nicknamed

the “Austrian Oak,” appeared on stage in a number of scenes throughout the movie, surrounded

by hundreds of screaming fans enamored by his muscle and chanting, “Arnold, Arnold, Arnold!”

From that point on, the world began to know Schwarzenegger simply as Arnold. Arnold hit pose

after muscular pose with his massive and perfectly proportionate muscular body throughout the

documentary, thus concretizing the new idea of muscular identity, and bringing the sport of

bodybuilding from “bigger than life” to “real life.”

Pumping Iron has become a cultural marker for muscle. Before the movie, bodybuilding

was rarely taken seriously. Part of its dismissal as trivial can be attributed to the fact that

recognizable bodybuilding advertisements, such as those of Charles Atlas, were found on the

back of comic books. In fact, in the twenty-fifth anniversary release of the movie, film star

Sylvester Stallone reminds us that before Pumping Iron, bodybuilding “had a stigma attached to

it. That it was guys who were insecure, or people trying to overcome inferiority complexes in

dark dungeons” (Stallone, Pumping Iron DVD extra). It was not until the release of Pumping

Iron that the stigma slowly started to fade.

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Ironically, while the film marked the commencement of a burgeoning cultural acceptance

of bodybuilding and fashionable muscle, it also marked Schwarzenegger’s departure from the

sport. After his sixth consecutive Olympia win and the success of the film, Arnold retired from

competitive bodybuilding and set off to find out how to fit the muscular body into the Hollywood

mode. Serendipitously, at the same time, director John Milius was trying to figure out exactly

how he could bring Robert E. Howard’s massively muscular comic book character, Conan, to

life. His answer was to cast as Conan the now six-time Mr. Olympia champion, Arnold

Schwarzenegger, arguably the greatest bodybuilder in history. After playing the leading role in

Conan the Barbarian in 1982, Arnold not only further cemented the cultural desire for muscle,

he forever changed the identity of the Hollywood action hero.

Stallone commented that, in the earlier days of television and film before Arnold, “the

audience knew the hero was big and strong because the script said so,” remarking that actors in

50s and 60s “could get away with murder” in terms of their body and character identity, and that

“Superman had muscles sewed on” (Stallone, Pumping Iron DVD extra). Actor/director Clint

Eastwood even affirms that when he first started acting in the mid 1950s, “not many actors

worked out at all” (Eastwood, Pumping Iron DVD extra). Before Arnold, as Stallone and

Eastwood imply, actors portrayed their masculinity and dominance by they way they walked or

moved, the way they jumped on and rode a horse, or the way they held a gun. Since Arnold,

audiences have grown to expect their action heroes to be bigger-than-life action stars. Arnold

solidified a trend, which now called for action stars to hit the gym in order to characterize their

masculinity and their sheer physical dominance suggested by their size and muscularity. Shortly

after Arnold emerged on the big screen, a number of other muscular male identities including

Lou Ferrigno, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Segal, Dolph

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Lundgren and Terry Bollea (better known as pro wrestler Hulk Hogan) took their muscularity to

Hollywood. Doing so further injected muscular body images into the mainstream culture.

In the thirty years since these developments, the art of building a muscular body has

continued to evolve. The term “bodybuilder” has moved beyond the sport and the competition

stage to encompass a vast and varied field of individuals that seek to enhance their health and

physical appearance. What was once a sport located on the margins is now a way of life. This

lifestyle allows some individuals to construct a healthy, muscular, toned physical appearance,

while allowing others to build even more excessive, extreme, massive muscular bodies that seem

to defy the limits of natural human possibilities.

To be sure, these excessively muscular bodies are still points of controversy, often

viewed by some today as grotesque and repulsive (see Schultze 18, Lindsay 362, Scott-Dixon).

Many others, though, valorize their size and muscularity with honorific terms such as “phenom,”

“prodigy,” and as I argue, the terms, “freak” and “monster.” These honorific terms are often

found, for instance, in bodybuilding supplement ads glorifying top bodybuilders with nicknames

such as Trey “The Phenom” Brewer and Brandon “The Prodigy” Curry (BSN). Although the

terminology and perceptions differ, it is undeniable that with the major shift in images of the

muscular body in film and television, there came a noticeable shift in everyday individual health

and fitness practices. Thus, performances of the muscular body changed the realities and rules

concerning the perception of the ideal body. If it were not for bodybuilders like Arnold, and the

martial artists and professional wrestlers who hit the gym and then the film studio, health, fitness

and building a muscular body may not have evolved into the cultural phenomena they are today.

The impact that Arnold and other action stars in the 80s and 90s had on society may be

obvious. What I find most interesting, however, are the various roles that have become most

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popular for some of these actors—alien-fighters, hit-men, killer cyborgs, pregnant men, and the

results of biological mishaps from test-tube fertilizations gone awry to radioactive mutation, to

name a few. Just as “freak” and “monster” have often been used to praise current, larger-than-

life bodybuilders, these terms have also been used throughout the history of muscular bodies to

stimulate public appeal.

Review of Literature

My research for this project has been influenced greatly by existing scholarship on

bodybuilding and physical difference. In particular, I am indebted to the anthologies, Building

Bodies (Ed. Pamela L. Moore) and Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (Ed.

Rosemarie Garland Thomson). A particular essay in the latter collection, Cecile Lindsay’s

“Bodybuilding: A Postmodern Freak Show” has been significantly helpful. Lindsay asserts that

the definition of a true freak, as defined by Leslie Fiedler in Freaks: Myth and Image of the

Secret Self, in many ways describes the contemporary bodybuilder. This classification is very

interesting and compelling because it provides a fruitful entry point into a further investigation of

freakery in the performance of muscular bodies. For Lindsay, Fielder’s definition of true freak

has uncanny parallels with today’s bodybuilder. While the bodybuilder is born the “human child

of human parents,” and is genetically predisposed to success or failure in building his or her

body, it is through personal choice and action that he or she becomes a “freak.” Lindsay feels

that in this erosion of the category of “true” or “produced” freak, contemporary bodybuilding

provides a postmodern context for the continued interrogation of the freak as cultural “Other,” as

well as the body as a site of contestation over essential versus constructed attributes (Lindsay

357). The difference that must be addressed is that the bodybuilder is an identity created through

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personal choice, “a produced freak,” unlike the “true freak,” who is born into a life of otherness

with physical human differences.

Differing from true freaks, bodybuilders have the ability to create their identity by

constructing their muscular bodies in the same way they can change their shape back into a more

normalized/average body by reducing the amount of physical training. Bodybuilders strive to

construct a perfectly symmetrical body by building bigger arms or legs or striving to have the

biggest, most defined chest or back, whereas true freaks such as “dwarfs,” conjoined twins, or

microcephalics (“pinheads” as referred to in Tod Browning’s 1932 movie, Freaks), are born into

their body and identity. Because of extreme self-muscular construction, Lindsey classifies the

contemporary bodybuilder as a verifiable addition to the classification of “produced freak.” I

can agree with Lindsay’s analysis and classification of the competitive bodybuilder as a modern

freak. However, Lindsay’s sole positioning of the competitive bodybuilder-as-freak limits our

understanding of the power that the muscular body has to transform such a word into a form of

valorization, as I argue in my thesis. Furthermore, to fulfill its discursive potential, the idea of

muscle as “freak” and “monster” must go beyond the competitive bodybuilding.

Lindsay consistently uses the term “contemporary bodybuilder” in a manner that implies

the individual’s involvement in competitive bodybuilding. In her assertion, she never

specifically addresses whether she is solely discussing professional or amateur competitive

bodybuilders, or both. For Lindsay, it seems that contemporary bodybuilders are specifically

those individuals who work out, diet for a competition, put on a posing outfit, a spray tan and

some oil, and present themselves for evaluation before judges and an audience. The concept of

competing bodybuilder-as-freak limits the broader understanding of monstrous and freak

muscular characterizations, in that it excludes anyone who does not vie on the stage for a title.

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Here the idea of contemporary bodybuilder eliminates the millions and millions of people that

spend hours upon hours each week and each month in the gym to build a better body, not only

for aesthetic purposes but also for individual health and fitness. It eliminates me, an individual

who has spent more than fifteen years of his life working out to build and sculpt a personally

desired muscular body, and it eliminates all of those bodybuilders who may once have competed,

but no longer do so, such as Arnold after his competition days (i.e., in his subsequent career in

movies after his premiere in Pumping Iron).

For this reason it is necessary to readdress the definition and associations with the term

bodybuilder so that it may be broadened to include a variety of muscular bodies. Although it is a

common practice to see “competitive bodybuilders” classified as “freak” or a “monster” type of

identity throughout popular muscle magazines and publications, they are not the only muscular

bodies that can fit into these models of otherness. Individuals build their bodies for reasons other

than competition.

In general, a bodybuilder is an individual who engages in the process of maximizing

muscular development through the combination of weight training, exercise and diet regulation

to develop a specific, self-desired body musculature. Writer Anne Bolin has combined Joe

Weider’s definition with her own to define bodybuilding simply as, “working out with weights to

reshape the body, not just to tone” (Bolin 188). Heywood, too, argues for a more scholarly and

nuanced understanding, emphasizing that bodybuilding is a material inscription of “sacrifice.”

Bodybuilding, Heywood argues, is “a mode of compensation for a void” and “scripts a paradox

that is peculiarly postmodern: in bodybuilding that which has been represented as lack”

(Heywood 166). The idea of bodybuilding and its muscular participants continues to prompt a

variety of understandings. For more specific and inclusive definitions of the terms

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“bodybuilder” and “freak” that reconcile some of the problematic aspects of Lindsay’s, I have

looked to social scientist Robert Bogdan’s definition of “freak” as a guide. For Bogdan the

“freak” takes on a social identity becoming a frame of mind, a set of practices, a way of thinking

about and presenting people. It is not a person but the enactment of a tradition, the performance

of a stylized presentation (Bogdan, 1996, 35).

I believe the definition of bodybuilder should follow Bogdan’s socially open definition.

The working definition I will be using in this thesis, then, is as follows: “Bodybuilders”

encompass more than individuals who train and compete for recognition and a title.

Bodybuilding, to echo Bogdan, is a frame of mind, a set of practices and life choices geared

toward a physical, healthy and fit lifestyle and the reconstruction, through many forms of

training, of the “natural” body. Bodybuilding is a way of thinking about and presenting people

and a culture. Building and constructing a muscular body is a lifestyle with its own cultural

genealogy consisting of muscular iconography and historical individuals, as well as a multitude

of contemporary media, competitions and exhibitions. Bodybuilding is the enactment of a self-

instituted tradition of trained practices, and the category of bodybuilder encompasses individuals

beyond those muscular built bodies that compete for recognition. It is the performance of both a

stylized presentation of self and a set of learned cultural customs and norms. Those individuals

that choose the bodybuilding/muscular body lifestyle come in all different shapes and sizes. The

bodybuilder includes those excessive freakish muscular bodies that seek cultural

acknowledgement as the muscular elite in attempting to have muscle explode out of their skin.

However, the bodybuilder also includes more “normalized” bodies that seek to build and

construct a more “natural” athletic, fit, healthy and muscular identity. Ultimately, “bodybuilder”

is a term that must be culturally inclusive of any individuals who incorporate physical activities

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that build, shape or tone the body seeking a healthy, fit, physical lifestyle. This includes all

individuals that choose a set of practices in order to build, construct, form, mold, shape, fashion,

chisel and sculpt a desired muscular body and identity.

Using this redefinition of the term “bodybuilder,” I will investigate the way the muscular

body has been presented, portrayed and understood from the late nineteenth century to today, and

show the ways in which the muscular freak and monster have been disseminated beyond the

bodybuilding stage into other contemporary representational modes. This will permit a reading

of a variety of muscled bodies as muscular freak and monster, in order to demonstrate how and

why society honors the “Muscular Other.” The study will ultimately explain how the ideas of

muscular freak and monster have been appropriated in performance and discourse and how the

portrayals of these character identities have continued to re-emerge over the decades.

Methodology

This examination uses a triangular approach in order to identify and discuss images and

performances of freak and monster portrayals by muscular identities. The methodology consists

of 1) an critical investigation using my personal experience as a member of the muscle and

fitness subculture, including field research of how the body was exhibited at the 2008 Mr.

Olympia bodybuilding and fitness exhibition; 2) a historiographic reading of strongmen,

bodybuilding and freak discourse; and 3) a close reading of muscular bodies that have been

presented as freak and monster in various forms of media.

Much of this material is grounded in the investigative fieldwork I conducted at the 2008

Joe Weider Mr. Olympia exhibit and follow-up observations at the 2009 Arnold Schwarzenegger

Classic. The Mr. Olympia exhibit is the most prestigious muscular body exhibition in the

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industry today, and its main event crowns the new Mr. Olympia, recognizing him as the best

professional bodybuilder in the world. This three-day health, fitness and muscle extravaganza,

better known as the “Olympia,” or “Mr. Olympia” for the title given to the professional male

bodybuilder, is held annually in Las Vegas. More than 20,000 health and fitness enthusiasts

make the pilgrimage each year to be part of this muscular frenzy. The expo hosts more than

thirty national and international companies, and exhibits a number of open contests free to

spectators navigating their way around a muscular mecca of entrepreneurs encompassing more

than 400,000 square feet. Among the carnivalesque insanity of the events and vendors, the

weekend presents the five biggest professional muscular physique competitions in the world: The

Figure Olympia, Fitness Olympia, Ms. Olympia, the 202 Olympia, and finally, the grand finale,

the aforementioned Mr. Olympia.

The Arnold Classic is a complementary exhibition to the Olympia. It features the same

structure and format but is located in Columbus, Ohio. The Arnold Classic, simply known as

“The Arnold,” also has its own set of competitions and rewards for bodybuilder and fitness

competitors, but the overall focus is on health, fitness and sports. The Arnold exhibition is also a

three-day event but, unlike the Olympia, which targets primarily adult spectators and

participants, a majority of its competition events are geared toward youth as well. The Arnold

attracts an estimated 165,000 sports enthusiast and competitors with over 650 fitness, nutrition,

and sports entertainment exhibit booths, making The Arnold Classic the largest sports

entertainment and fitness expo in the world, topping even the Olympia. While the Arnold is

larger in size, however, my main focus will be on the Olympia, because of its cultural cache in

crowning the best bodybuilder in the world. I incorporate secondary analysis of the Arnold as a

corroborating lens for my observations and conclusions at the Olympia.

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Throughout this thesis, in tandem with my experiences at the Olympia as well as the

research into strongmen, bodybuilding and freak shows, I will analyze archival performances of

select muscular identities in historic studies, film, and magazine print over the past one hundred

years. The thrust of my thesis is to pair moments and experiences at a live event with events and

representations from the archive in a way that allows those events to inform one another. The

purpose for pairing mass media and cultural phenomena with aspects of the 2008 Mr. Olympia is

to explicitly link the idea that muscular discourse produced by performance in film and television

is inextricably linked to the tradeshow style gatherings where everyday individuals perform and

display their own constructed bodily identities.

Chapter one focuses on the emergence of the muscular freak and monster. I address

definitions of muscular “freak” and muscular “monster” in relation in other historical

understandings of the terms “freak” and “monster,” and investigate the first documented

muscular identities that are associated with these terms. I examine two pivotal figures. The first

examination considers Eugene Sandow’s classification as the first muscular freak and how

certain procedures of documentation categorized Sandow’s image in and amongst concomitant

examples of the grotesque, thereby inviting and harnessing society’s attraction and desire for

these images in a way that allowed Sandow’s image to stand out and be overtaken by society’s

desire. I follow with an investigation of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the first muscular monster

and identify his body and performance within the film Pumping Iron as the moments that

initially mark when muscle became glorified as “monstrous.”

Chapter two analyzes specific images, performances and writings of muscular individuals

as markers of society’s continuing desire for the muscular freak and monster. The first section

identifies current representations of muscular freak through an analysis of freak characteristics of

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Arnold’s performance in the movie, Junior. The examination then turns to the literary

documentation of both Arnold and Lou Ferrigno to suggest how their stories have led to the

muscular construction and performances of other muscular monsters. Finally, chapter three

investigates ideas and images of muscular freak and monster positioned at the Olympia. These

conventions enhance the marketability of muscle and further exhibit how the suggestion of freak

and monster can cater to and enhance popular desires.

The conclusion assesses how the various performances and portrayals of muscular

bodies as freak and monster have presented a positive understanding of these terms, adding fuel

to the fire of the cultural desire for muscle. I close with offering an invitation to chart a newly

emergent realm of muscular performance circulating around difference, spectacle and comedy,

establishing the idea of what I’m calling “Funny Muscles.” I argue that “Funny Muscles,”

developed in film and other media at the end of twentieth century, is the current manifestation of

shifting responses of the muscular body in popular culture. Not only, therefore, is the muscular

body now celebrated for its strength, power, might, force, dynamism and vigor, it is celebrated

for its spectacle, humor, comedy, and abnormal “otherness.” It is not hard to see the similarities

between the “muscular freak” and the freaks of freak show days (in at least form and structure).

In many portrayals, the muscular body is arguably the only surviving aspect of the “freaks of

human Otherness” that is acceptably publicly consumed, celebrated and honored worldwide in

such a grand scale. The muscular body, though, has moved beyond these similarities. The

muscular body can be freak or monster and still call for social acceptance and entertainment

desire.

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Chapter One:

Origins of the Muscular Freak and Monster

“[T]he extraordinary body is fundamental to the narratives by which we make

sense of ourselves and our world. By its very presence, the exceptional body

seems to compel explanation, inspire representation, and incite regulation.”

Rosemarie Garland Thomson

In Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s anthology, Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary

Body, the “extraordinary body” is a combination of various body types that are recognized and

positioned as physically different from the “normal” body. They are bodies that were once

popularly classified as “freaks” and “monsters.” I will also consider these “freaks” and

“monsters,” but for the purpose of this study the extraordinary body on which I focus is the

muscular body. The muscular-built body is indeed an extraordinary and exceptional form. It has

a very affirming power; it provokes astonishment and often defies the understanding of those

who do not participate in the health and fitness culture. As history bears witness, “people who

are visually different have always provoked the imagination of their fellow human beings”

(Thomson 1). Society’s astonishment with the muscular body is a case in point: as a physically

different body it continuously provokes the imagination. Muscle has the power to translate terms

and ideas of difference that have historically been negatively charged into compelling and

attractive meanings that generate profound societal interest. Muscular bodies are often

associated with characters like the hero or star athlete. However, they have also taken on

character traits and identities historically associated with marginalized otherness as positive

attributes. This chapter examines the foundational aspects of muscular freakery and

monstrousness that emerged in the nineteenth century, and considers additional ways muscular

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identities have been portrayed and presented ever since. I begin by addressing how the concepts

of muscular freak and monster are currently circulating and understood today. I then turn to

various conventional nineteenth century muscular bodies and how they fit into “freak show”

identities because of their alignment with other physically different anomalies and curiosities.

By acknowledging the late nineteenth century idea of physical otherness as physical anomaly,

the chapter posits the origins of the muscular freak in the classification it once held with the

strongman, Eugene Sandow, and then traces this notion as it re-emerges through a reading of

Arnold Schwarzenegger as the first muscular monster.

Muscular Versions of “Freaks” and “Monsters”

Extreme and excessively built muscular bodies are extraordinary. Some of these bodies

are extraordinary for their size, some for the strength they possess and can exhibit, some for the

amount of muscle they contain, some for their near-perfect symmetry and proportion, and some

for all of these characteristics—making them extra-extraordinary. This type of muscular excess

is often acknowledged with terms that have historically been reserved for extreme bodily

difference, like “freak” and “monster,” but these terms connote positive qualities. As political

theorist Saul Alinsky says in Rules For Radicals, “[i]f you push a negative hard and deep enough

it will break through into its counter side” (Alinsky 129). The power of muscle has been able to

do exactly that—break through the other side of the literal meanings. The terms “freak” and

“monster” no longer contain only a negative “Othered” understanding.

Cultural studies scholar Leslie Fielder notes that since the 1960s the term “freak” has

become an honorific term for groups like socially dissident young people (otherwise known as

“hippies,” “longhairs,” and “heads”) while at the same time “freak” has become increasingly

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inappropriate when referring to the groups it had traditionally designated (the physically different

or handicapped) (Fielder 1978, 14). At present, as recreational bodybuilder and cultural studies

scholar Cecile Lindsay acknowledges, “bodybuilders complement each other with the term

‘Freak’; it is an expression of awe and respect for those who push their physical development

beyond current limits. ‘Freakiness’ is what is to be achieved, what the ‘pros’ possess […]”

(Lindsay 360). Today the muscular freak is a body that exists beyond the normal state of

muscularity. A muscular body may be freakish for its size, strength, the amount of muscle it

contains and even for its extreme definition. The muscular freak represents excessive and

extreme muscular development like the “pros” along with other intense individuals that push

their muscular development beyond the normal “current limits.”

The term “monster,” as well, has become a word used to honor and glorify the muscular

body. Both of these concepts of muscle, the “muscular freak” and the “muscular monster” have

fed into the cultural preoccupation with muscle. The muscular body has been able to transform

the term “monster” from a term normally associated with fear, horror, terror and anxiety into a

term that calls for emulation. Statements such as “He’s a monster,” or “Monster in the gym”

suggest muscular bodies filled with determination, aggression, power, control, authority,

supremacy, domination and even the potential for unyielding rage. Rather than only instilling

fear, then, this “monster” identity drives the desire to both watch and acquire muscle. Through

aggression, force, size or animal power, the idea of “muscular monster” instills a sense of

strength, honor, inspiration and a glorified desire for muscle, size and power.

Before I get to my analysis of specific examples of these muscular portrayals, it is

necessary to unpack the notions of “freak” and muscular freak. As I articulated in my

introduction, Cecile Lindsay believes that the definition of the true freak, as understood by

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Fiedler, in many ways describes the competitive bodybuilder—hence the muscular freak

(Lindsay 356). In Fiedler’s conception the true freak is “one of us, the human child of human

parents, however altered by forces we do not quite understand into something mythic and

mysterious” (Fiedler 1978, 24). Fiedler’s true freak also challenges many conventional

boundaries, which provide the foundation for Lindsay who believes bodybuilders and their

practices seek to maximize the visible muscularity of their physiques (Lindsay 356). These

practices—which include the combination of progressive weight training, a diet and aerobic

exercise regime aimed at minimizing subcutaneous body fat, and a physical presentation that

displays the extreme degree of muscular definition and vascularity achieved by this regimen—

are what produce the muscular freak.

Lindsay suggests that, through these practices, bodybuilders defy normative assumptions

about human bodies and the categories that delimit and define them: male versus female, natural

versus unnatural, normal verses abnormal. Like Fiedler’s freaks, the bodybuilder confounds

illusion and reality where the “impression of monstrous scale is most often the result of extreme

muscular definition highlighted by oil and muscles flexed to a maximal degree” (Lindsay 356).

She suggests that fact and myth are often blurred in popular reactions to bodybuilders and the

visible difference, especially when on display, “arouse[s] both fascination and repulsion—both

terror and sympathy—in observers and spectators” (356-57). Lindsay’s assertion and

understanding of the competitive bodybuilder is only one type of muscular freak that is popular

today. As I argued in the introduction, the practices she suggests ought not be subjected to only

those muscular bodies that compete in bodybuilding contests. Freaky ideas associated with

muscle can exist in a number of variations and not just in excessive muscular bodies poised and

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prepped for competition. In other words, the muscular freak exists beyond the competitive stage

as well as on it.

Just like the contemporary idea of the term “freak,” the muscular freak demands

specificity in its definition: both terms possess many connotations and meanings that have

evolved through the ages. The general definition of “freak” relates to human difference. Such

bodies have been historically exhibited in freak shows (e.g., dwarfs, fat ladies, giants, bearded

ladies, the dog-faced boy). In her anthology, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary

Body Thomson provides a cultural idea of “freak” beyond the identities once exhibited in “freak

shows.” She suggests the freak is “a historical figure ritually fabricated from the raw material of

bodily variations and appropriated in the service of shifting social ideologies.” In short, she

claims, “we show the freak of nature to be a freak of culture” (xviii). Thomson’s idea of freak as

a cultural concept echoes that of Bogdan’s as I discussed in the introduction, which takes on a

social identity that becomes a frame of mind and a way of thinking about and presenting people.

Like Thomson and Bogdan’s cultural understanding of freak, I believe the muscular freak has

also becomes a cultural concept. The muscular body has historically provided narratives that

offer a way of thinking and presenting people while making sense of the world and ourselves.

Throughout history, muscular figures ritually fabricated through myth, story, and performance

have led to a cultural preoccupation with body image and the way particular bodies have been

associated with cultural values of heroism, bravery, and honor. It also includes prowess, self-

made success, rigor, and power not necessarily associated with culturally constructed paradigms

of heroism and honor.

The relationship between the understanding of the term freak and the muscular freak does

not stop here. In its most familiar form, “freak” has been, as Bogdan insists, the term used to

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describe the physically anomalous bodies that were exhibited for entertainment and profit in the

days of the freak show. As the term “freak” became common, it evolved into similar expressions

including monstrosity, prodigy, curiosity, anomaly, human oddity, and even extraordinary/extra-

ordinary bodies. While the freak show no longer exists per se, the common practice of

exhibiting physically anomalous bodies for entertainment and profit continues to thrive. This

practice is exhibited in professional wrestling, boxing, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC),

mixed martial arts or any other combat bout. The practice is exhibited in any professional sports

contest, as well as in beauty pageants, fitness pageants, drag pageants or fitness and

bodybuilding competitions. In one way, shape or form, all of these events exhibit some type of

“Othered” material body that the general public desires to pay for and gaze upon as live

entertainment. The muscular freak appears as a figure in many of these examples, varying in

form depending on the conventions of the entertainment.

As I have already suggested, per Fiedler and Lindsay, “freak” has been reclaimed as an

honorific term, as opposed to a term of derision. This dramatically changes both the concept of

freak and the perception of the individuals so named. Understanding “freak” as honorific,

combined with the idea of “muscular freak” as a person who pushes his or her physical

development beyond current limits, equips us with a lens for examining other professional sports

athletes as well. Athletes who have excelled through physical training and body development in

order to smash records may fit into this category. There are, likewise, many professional fighters

who have, time after time, defied the odds in order to train and regain a title multiple times over.

The recent home run onslaughts in baseball, where the seemingly unbreakable single season

home run record—untouched for forty plus years—was broken by three different athletes suggest

a “freaky” accomplishment. Although today they are surrounded with allegations of steroid use,

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the muscular bodies constructed by Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds enabled

them to exceed historic expectation at that time, while electrifying crowds with a home-run

fascination.

Indeed, the muscular freak is a category that continues to be applicable to “Othered”

muscular bodies beyond the bodybuilding stage. For bodybuilders specifically, however,

Lindsay suggests, “Freakiness as an affirmation of physiological dissidence stirs both fascination

and repulsion, both emulation and rejection in non-bodybuilders and even within bodybuilding

culture and identity (360).” Competitive bodybuilder or not, all “muscular freaks” train,

develop, and build their bodies to points that continually stir more cultural fascination (and

emulation) than a feeling of repulsion or rejection.

Undoubtedly, the most convenient venue to find freak used as an honorific expression of

awe and respect toward the muscular body would be the pages of any current muscle magazine,

such as Joe Weider’s Flex or Muscle and Fitness. The covers of these magazines alone have

continuously exhibited some of the most recognizable muscular bodies throughout history

including Arnold, Lou, Sylvester, the legendary martial artist Bruce Lee, movie star Dwayne

“The Rock” Johnson, as well as famous professional wrestlers, boxers, and other well-known

muscular figures. There have even been special issues honoring the muscular military men who,

while defending our country, dedicate their free time to building amazing bodies reminiscent of

classical Greek statues (Velazquez 144). Of course, many issues also feature some of the

biggest, most extremely developed bodybuilders in the world. Like the term “freak,” the idea of

“muscular freak” has evolved into various other anomalous titles used as nicknames (Leo “The

Freak” Ingram, Brandon “Prodigy” Curry or Trey “Phenom” Brewer), plastered throughout

magazine pages and ultimately become part of their muscular identity. It is the assertion of the

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term “freak” as an honorific meaning, and Lindsay’s declaration of competitive bodybuilders as

a valorized muscular freak that permits entry into deeper investigation of the muscular freak and

the various depictions with which it has been associated in the past and present.

Like Carnival, writes Laurie Schultze, bodybuilding is about physical excess, social

inversion and grotesque images. Beyond those that have a fascination with muscular freakiness,

bodybuilders are sometimes described as “repulsive,” “gross,” “grotesque,” or as a “tasteless”

identity. Schulze used the metaphor of the topsy-turviness of Carnival to point out that,

“Bodybuilding […] resists the laws of social control” and, in the case of female bodybuilders, it

“inverts the conventions of the gendered body” (Schulze, 18). Schulze is referring to that fact

some women bodybuilders push their bodies to points where they lose their feminine appearance

and begin acquiring visible traits generally considered more masculine. Male bodybuilders also

invert the masculine conventions. Dieting, as well as tanning, oiling, and lotioning are activities

normally associated with femininity; however, male competitors excessively obsess over these

processes in producing their competition-ready body’s.

Describing bodybuilders as excessive and grotesque also hearkens back to Mikhail

Bakhtin’s concept of “Carnival” and “Grotesque Realism.” It was Bakhtin that used the term

“grotesque style” in describing the exaggerations and excessiveness of the material bodily

changes through eating, drinking, sex, and defecating. For Bakhtin, the grotesque body “is a

body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created

and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself

swallowed by the world […]” (317). Bakhtin’s ideas of the grotesque body “becoming” is

undoubtedly seen reflected in the muscular body. The muscular body is a material body that

over the past century has constantly been changing. Working out in general is all about bodily

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changes, while bodybuilding is all about bodily changes in hopes of becoming the idealized

“perfect body” through a multi-layered form of strict diet and intense exercise regimen, and,

more often than not, an excessive supplement program. A serious competitive bodybuilder’s

work is excessive and is never finished. There is continuous preparation of ratio-specific caloric

meals, training and cardio sessions, tanning or body coloring sessions, and the body is constantly

monitored for size, tightness, and water retention while relentlessly being compared to previous

personal results as well as the results of possible competitors. The process can completely

swallow those who take building the muscular body to extremes. However, as we have seen

throughout history, the muscular body image has been “swallowed by the world” by other types

of muscular bodies, before bodybuilding was ever even a culturally understood term.

Bodybuilding first began to be a culturally accepted idea after Eugene Sandow started

“physiques competitions” at the turn of the twentieth century. The muscular body has been

popularly “swallowed” from that point on.

Modern Hercules: The First Muscular Freak

The world’s first preoccupation with a muscular body was with Eugene Sandow. At the

peak of his career as “the world’s strongest man” and “the Modern Hercules,” Sandow fascinated

audiences the world over. Sandow toured the world exhibiting his amazing feats of strength, but

it was, “the beautiful muscular development of this remarkable man” as Dr. George M. Gould

and Walter L. Pyle reported, and the aesthetic pleasure that the audiences received from his

performances that gave him his popularity and marketability (467). His audiences became

fascinated by the sheer idea of muscles in motion through Sandow’s “muscle posing routines.”

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Although by today’s bodybuilding standards Sandow’s body was not excessive and

freakish, it was Gould and Pyle’s 1896 groundbreaking study Anomalies and Curiosities of

Medicine that recognized Sandow as the first widely documented muscular body. As a part of

Gould and Pyle’s study, Sandow was conspicuously positioned among the pages with other

anomalous freak identities. Even though extraordinary curiosities of the human body were a

documented fascination of society long before this extensive catalogue, Gould and Pyle’s

volume was the first attempt at bringing all types of freakery together between two covers. It is

this attempt that first categorized the muscular body formally as an anomaly and curiosity.

Lindsay, in addressing Eugene Sandow as the greatest exhibitor of the twenty-year “Golden

Age” of professional strong men also cites this monumental study. Lindsay points out, using

Gould and Pyle’s description, that Sandow is “described as a wondrous freak,” and that Sandow

thus marks a transition to muscle displays as an aesthetic and entertainment activity (Lindsay

358). Gould and Pyle’s positioning of Sandow within their vast study of thousands of other

physical human oddities thus consummates the idea of the muscular freak both at the time of its

publication and in subsequent discourse.

While there are a number of other strong men mentioned within Gould and Pyle’s

catalogue of anomalies, Sandow stands out. Sandow’s is the only muscular body recognizable

by name and image, and his feats are some of the only ones described based on a “beautiful”

aesthetic appeal. The revealing photographs accompanying the physicians’ documentation of

Sandow posing in nothing more than a fig leaf illustrate the anomalous condition of his

“extreme” nineteenth century “muscular development,” as well as justification for their

classification of him as a “Modern Hercules.” This combination of text and images situate him

as one of the first, if not the first, important muscular body in documented performance

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presenting plenty of reasons why society became fascinated and completely swallowed with

Sandow, regardless of whether Sandow was popularly perceived as a “freak” before that time.

However, although Sandow was arguably the best known, there were, during this time, plenty of

other strongmen even women making a name and a living off of their performances of strength

and power. As Gould and Pyle, as well as Lindsay recognize, these strength exhibitors drew the

same fin-de-siecle crowds that were also engrossed with the other human body exhibits of

oddities, prodigies, curiosities and freaks.

Before Sandow was “Magnificent,” a “Modern Hercules,” or an “anomaly/freak,”

however, he was Fredrick Mueller, born in Germany in 1867. Struggling early on in his career

as a circus gymnast, Mueller eventually found his niche on the strongman stage, where he

procured his professional name. After building his reputation in England, Sandow made his way

to America in the 1890s, eventually attracting the management of the then relatively unknown

producer Florenz Ziegfeld in 1893. The two men together initiated the first major marketing

campaign proffering the image of the muscular body, beginning with employing uncanny

promotional gimmicks. In their years of partnership, they pushed the limits marketing this new

muscular identity, kicking off the first wave of cultural desire to watch, build, and actually touch

and feel muscle. It was, in point of fact, the serendipitous combination of Ziegfeld’s sly and

cunning promotional techniques and Sandow’s actual performance that popularized the muscular

body in the world of performance and entertainment. Through his uncanny marketing ability,

Ziegfeld created a mass fascination for Sandow, while Sandow himself took the performance of

the strongman to a whole new level. Presenting a type of performance that had not yet been

promoted and performed so cohesively, the two men captured their audiences with a new show

and a new unexpected idea of a human body exhibit. As a team, Sandow and Ziegfeld took the

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idea of a typical strongman performance (lifting heavy objects and performing unthinkable feats

of strength) and revolutionized it into a cultural fetish. Historian Anthony Slide reports that

Ziegfeld’s concept of exploiting Sandow’s body by having him appear in the “briefest of

costumes” (sometimes nothing more then a fig leaf, as exhibited by Gould and Pyle mentioned

above), created a sensation with the ladies, who would actually pay to feel his muscles. In

addition, Slide notes that Sandow was also exploited on-screen. In 1896, the American

Mutoscope and Biography Company produced a study of Sandow flexing his muscles, marking

him as one of the first muscular bodies (indeed one of the first bodies period) ever to be filmed

for popular viewing (Slide 453).

These acknowledgments mark a distinct contrast with the public receptions of what was

then normally considered a human oddity. If the muscular body was a human oddity/anomaly, it

was only in a comparative classification to mark difference. While the popularity of freaks,

oddities, and other extraordinary curiosities exhibited at “freak shows” began to decline as a

form of entertainment, Sandow’s extraordinary muscular body picked up the slack, capturing

many among these dwindling audiences.

There are a number of reasons why Sandow stands alone as the first muscular performer

who, to echo Thomson, “compel explanation, inspire representation, and incite regulation” of

normalized individual self-identity (Thomson 1). Unlike the bodies featured in the existing

strongman performances (often large, bulky, less defined, less muscular and often much less

aesthetically appealing), Sandow was praised and admired for his remarkable feats of strength

and showmanship, his physical agility and gymnastic ability, but most importantly for his beauty

and muscular development. Unlike any other strongman before him, Sandow presented a

perfectly built body, as reported by Gould and Pyle’s epic catalogue.

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Reportedly, Sandow would perform on stage in a brilliant light in order to “demonstrate

his extraordinary power over his muscles, contracting muscles ordinarily involuntary in time

with music” (Gould and Pyle 467). At this time, such a form of exhibition was completely new

and innovative. These “muscle posing routines” would eventually come to be “considered more

remarkable than any exhibition of strength at that time” (467). Although Sandow was

recognized for his showmanship as a great entertainer, it was the aesthetic pleasure of his

“beautiful muscular development” that allowed Ziegfeld to capitalize on his marketable

popularity. Sandow took his muscular identity and started a chain of “Institutes of Physical

Culture” (gyms in modern terms), while producing books on physical culture, a monthly

magazine publication, and a mail-order supplement and bodybuilding equipment company.

These ventures inspired a host of muscular representations, services and products in a society in

which the health and fitness had up to that point been non-existent. But among the ideas

presented above, one of the aspects deserving further attention is the exploitation of the

audience’s desire to touch and feel Sandow’s magnificent muscles.

Historian David L. Chapman provides one of the best, most thorough accounts of the life

and times of Eugene Sandow. Chapman’s biography Sandow the Magnificent provides a first-

rate investigation into the life of Sandow and the history of bodybuilding, adding to the

understanding of physique culture and the muscular body. Chapman’s study explains the

popularity of physical culture in terms of its wider social implications, and how Sandow

encouraged the fitness craze by making exercise fashionable. Chapman insists Sandow achieved

this (as the books dust jacket puts it) by prying “open some surprising cracks in the walls of

Victorian prudery.” Early in his career, after many of his major public events, Sandow was

known for giving private “receptions” wearing little more then a “G-string.” Throughout his

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account, Chapman verifies the pubic obsession of both men and women with both seeing and

feeling the muscular Sandow. Chapman reports:

Ziegfeld and Sandow knew how to tap the inner urgings of the people who

witnessed their performances and to turn it to profit—and they did not hesitate to

use some daring tactics to do so. Sandow had earlier established the feature of

post-performance green room receptions, and they quickly became a regular part

of his routine, but it was not until he got to New York that they really began to

attract attention. Although they were directed at a very different audience, the

receptions were every bit as carefully choreographed as his regular performances.

(74)

These receptions that supposedly began to pry open some surprising cracks in the walls of

Victorian prudery suggest moments of social inversion. What would have been considered the

breaching of taboos with these “unacceptable activities” reflects the Bakhtinian spirit of

Carnival. Bakhtin suggests a temporary reversal of regular life in a “second life” type of

experience. “[W]e find here,” he writes, “a characteristic logic, the particular logic of the ‘ inside

out’ (a l’envers), of the ‘turnabout,’ of a continual shifting from top to bottom […]” (Bakhtin

11). While Ziegfeld and Sandow’s goal was to tap the “inner urgings of the people who

witnessed their performances,” these post-show receptions gave audiences an activity that was

on the borderline of Taboo.

Chapman highlights the fact that, immediately following his bow, Sandow would quickly

return to his dressing room to cool down before donning a pair of scanty briefs and proceeding to

a nearby area for a more personal post show-exhibit. Intimacy was assured with small audiences

of fifteen or less at a time, so that Sandow could position himself beneath a spotlight and proceed

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to lecture on the different muscles of his body. Intimacy also fed into the cultural desire to be

among the select groups that would get such an up-close and personal demonstration. Following

the lecture, Sandow would circulate through the small room to allow individual members of the

small audience to feel how hard his muscles were. Chapman cites an account of a male

spectator’s reaction from the Police Gazette reporting that “expressions of astonishment and

admiration swept over their faces,” and at times women were unable to handle the excitement.

Reportedly, after running her hand across Sandow’s muscles, one woman was only able to utter,

“It’s unbelievable!” before emotion got the better of her. An attendant had to rush forward and

catch the swooning woman, uncork a vial of smelling salts, and wave it beneath her nose for her

to regain her composure (Chapman, 75).

This exact account, or at least a similar recreation, was enacted in the 1936 MGM

biography The Great Ziegfeld, which featured the ups and downs of the career of its famous title

character. Although the movie is based on the great stage promoter, it is one of the earliest, as

well as one of the only surviving, cinematic representations of certain events of Sandow’s career.

The film begins at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with Florenz Ziegfeld and Eugene Sandow,

both down on their luck and not yet famous. Ziegfeld is attempting to find a niche for his

magnificent muscular attraction. The film moves quickly to “Flo’s” realization of exactly how to

promote the size, strength and muscularity of the soon-to-be world-famous strongman. The two

come across a couple enjoying the fair. The woman stops dead in her tracks upon noticing

Sandow’s muscles, remarking on his “huge shoulders,” “big chest,” and his “magnificent

waistline,” telling him that she thinks his muscles “are simply astounding.” Following

Ziegfeld’s suggestion, the woman squeezes Sandows biceps and immediately faints into her

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much smaller and skinner husband’s arms. Ziegfeld quickly grabs Sandow and heads straight for

the newspapers.

The scene exemplifies Ziegfeld’s bet that after reading the newspaper headlines about a

woman fainting at the touch of his muscles, women would be fighting for their own encounter

with Sandow—not to watch him lift weights and bend steel bars, but simply to feel his muscles.

The MGM picture thus imaginatively captures the beginning of their great partnership and the

exploitation of Sandow’s muscular sex appeal. The film goes on to feature a short montage of

scenes depicting “The Modern Hercules” with his miracle of strength exhibits and his muscles

quivering in musical muscular rhythm while women from all over the country swoon around his

dancing muscles.

Chapman comments that the popularity of Sandow’s backstage receptions proves that the

Victorian era was not quite the repressive age that moderns like to imagine. It is not difficult to

conclude that much of Sandow’s extraordinary theatrical success was due to his popularity with

young women. Chapman emphasizes that, “whenever he appeared, Sandow was certain to be

pursued by crowds of women who would send him flowers, sweet-scented letters, and other

tokens of affection” (75). While it may be a stretch to designate Sandow as the first recognizable

male muscular sex symbol, it is necessary, however, to acknowledge the impact that his

muscular sex appeal had on both men and women. Like Bakhtin’s grotesque body in the “act of

becoming,” continually building and creating, Sandow and his muscular body continued to build

and create popularity and fame. With Ziegfeld’s savvy marketing ploys, the two continued to

build and create Sandow’s performance identity, “becoming” the newfound cultural desire for

muscular entertainment that societies completely swallowed up.

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As the Industrial Age continued to transform society, mass communication and the

photograph pushed the marketing and promotion of entertainment to new heights. Along with

the archival photos, newspaper reports and first-hand accounts of his performances, Sandow and

his beautifully developed “anomalous” muscular body is a distinctly visible reason why society

noticeably changed its regard for physical appearance. The popularity of Sandow’s muscular

difference marks the first stirring of the “preoccupation with body image that just didn’t exist

before.” Through later business ventures, as well as writings and teachings, Sandow continued

to influence and change the role health and fitness played in building a muscular body. Whether

he was seen as a beautiful freak or a modern Hercules, Sandow prompted society to swallow the

fitness craze and strive to build a healthier, more muscular body.

It’s Alive: The Creation of the Muscular Monster

“I confess, I loved it when they called me a monster. ‘Look,’ they’d hiss. ‘It’s

Arnold. He’s an animal.’”

Arnold Schwarzenegger

We can also hypothetically consider Sandow the first muscular monster. Considering the

“physical monstrosities” that were included along with Sandow within Gould and Pyle’s study,

this would not be too much of a stretch. However, the conflation of the term “monster” with the

muscular body in popular discourse seems to have occurred quite some time after Sandow. The

idea of the muscular monster is a relatively new and much more common than the term

“muscular freak.” Over the past thirty years, the muscular “monster” body has been recognized

in movies, television programs, and of course, on the covers of magazines. Unlike the general

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understanding of the term “monster” as a scary, horrifying, bloodthirsty creature (such as a

vampire, werewolf, or masked killer) that normally provokes fear, the muscular monster does not

exist to scare or horrify, but rather to attract, excite, and amaze. When boiled down to its

simplest form, the muscular monster is not altogether different than the muscular freak.

“Monster” is also used as an honorific term toward muscular bodies, and the muscular monster

can produce the same simultaneous repulsion and attraction. “Monster” is merely a character

extension that has developed with our cultural desire toward the muscular body. Like the

muscular freaks, portrayals of monsters as muscular bodies have crushed walls—literally and

figuratively—breaking down barriers while providing a path for muscular bodies as an idealized

form.

Certainly the historical idea of “monster” is packed with images and stories that have

remained with us through the ages. Over the centuries, ghosts, monsters and other creatures have

made terrifying entrances and exits on all of the stages of the world. On the Greek and Roman

stage, audiences heard of the beast that killed Hippolytos, while the Cyclops and the Eumendies

actually appeared before them. Theatre scholar Daniel Gerould points out that, from the earliest

times, “the supernatural and abnormal explain much of the popular appeal” (19). Beyond the

surviving plays, Greek mythology provides other monsters. Legendary creatures such as the

centaur, the harpy or the once-beautiful women transformed into the hideous Medusa were all

creatures which possessed a strange and frightening combination of human and animal forms.

As time passed, the monster moved beyond myth, legend and the classical art form into new

literary forms that further provoked fear, horror and terror. Nearly unstoppable antagonists like

vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein’s “monster,” Dr. Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde and more recent

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monsters visible in contemporary horror films have become the normalized monstrous figures

that instill fear from their inhuman wrath, assault, brutality, hostility and destructive force.

It is also worth noting that “monster” was once a term used to classify identities that

possessed structural defects and deformities. Historically, individuals, plants and animals

created or born with defects were considered monstrous and grotesque, eventually leading to the

branch of science called teratology, the study of defects and difference. Thomson recognizes

that it was the emerging idea of teratology in the clinical sense that transitioned the monstrous

body “from the freak show stage into the medical theatre” (2). Extremely abridged though it

may be, this history of the idea of monster, whether in myth, on the stage, on the page, or in the

laboratory, exemplifies how the monster has been included in examples of human difference.

The monster in many of these instances has often been what was or could have been human, but

never was completely.

Thomson also offers a more general etymology of the word. For her, the word “monster”

is perhaps the earliest and most enduring name for the singular body. It is derived from the Latin

monstra, meaning “to warn, show, or sign,” which has given us the modern verb “to

demonstrate” (Thomson 1). Fiedler concurs with this notion, emphasizing that whether the root

means “to warn” or “to show forth,” the implication is the same. Regardless of how an

anomalous individual may be classified, Fiedler asserts, be it monster or freak, “human

anomalies are the products not of a whim of nature but of the design of Providence” (Fiedler

1978, 20). Fiedler’s selection of the powerful word “Providence” suggests divine guidance, or

human destiny. While an interesting choice, it may not be the best word to use when looking at

the relationship between muscle and monster. The nouns “fate,” “chance,” or “luck” may be

better substitutes. There is a clear relationship between “monster” and “muscular body” in the

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former’s definition of “to show” or “to demonstrate,” and the understanding comes into sharper

focus when we suggest that muscular bodies can achieve monstrous status by determination and

chance rather than a design of Providence. There have, however, been certain muscular

individuals who possess histories that suggest their development was part of their human destiny.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a prime example. He is well known for remarking that he

loved it when he was referred to as a “monster” and “animal” (Schwarzenegger 76). These

comments and his often-publicized life story suggest that Schwarzenegger, the original muscular

monster, was delivered to the world as part of his destiny. Looking back upon the story of

Schwarzenegger, outlined in the book and subsequent movie, Pumping Iron, it would seem that

it was his destiny to become this larger-than-life figure that defied human expectations. His

destiny has become one of the main catalysts changing the relationship among health, fitness and

the muscular body.

Lines in Pumping Iron epitomize Schwarzenegger’s drive to fulfill his dream of being

different. He states that he was “always dreaming about very powerful people. Dictators and

things like that.” Schwarzenegger explains how he was “always impressed by people who would

be remembered for hundred of years, or even like Jesus, being for thousands of years

remembered.” In Education of a Bodybuilder, Schwarzenegger writes, “From the very

beginning, I knew bodybuilding was the perfect choice for my career” (31). He would often tell

his father, “Dad, I’m going to be a professional bodybuilder. I’m going to make it my life” (33).

Schwarzenegger not only achieved his childhood dream, but he came to America and achieved

what many would agree to be a very successful realization of the American dream. In the

remainder of this chapter, I will situate Schwarzenegger’s muscular identity as being marked by

his body at the peak of his muscularity, a stage straddling the end of his bodybuilding career and

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early stages of his Hollywood success. This is not to take away from any of the

accomplishments and amazing influences he has had throughout his life, but the scope of this

section focuses on the historic moments when Schwarzenegger’s muscular body first became

globally recognized.

Throughout his career, there have been a variety of images that have been associated with

Arnold Schwarzenegger. While he is perhaps most famous for his half-man, half-machine and

all-muscle Terminator character, Schwarzenegger has been the muscular cop/kindergarten

teacher, the muscular twin brother, and the muscular comic book identity, among of other roles.

In all of his characters, the one thing that has remained constant is his muscularity. While there

have been various sizes of Schwarzenegger’s muscularity, it was his youthful and massive

muscular body in Pumping Iron that I suggest has become a staple image that represents a

marker and sign for the muscular “monster.” Arnold was called a “monster” and “animal” for

one simple reason. At the peak of his bodybuilding career, he defied the aspects of all physical

human expectation and presented a body that had never before been seen. Using the term

“monster” or “animal” to describe Schwarzenegger, as with the term “freak” in the previous

section, was a form of the highest respect.

A great example of this respect was summarized in a humorous comment by movie star

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, reflecting on his childhood memories of watching

Schwarzenegger’s movies. Johnson claims that Arnold was an inspiration because he was this

enormous muscular guy, with a funny accent, “who was kicking ass and taking names” (Johnson

Pumping Iron DVD Extra). As more people became aware of Schwarzenegger, the respect grew,

but it was growing more from the massive amounts of muscle than from just “a funny accent.”

Although his extreme muscular development initiated the majority of praise, the fact that he had

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achieved the American Dream increased the respect. He arrived in America armed only with a

suitcase of clothes and a dream. It was his phenomenal work ethic, both in the gym and in the

business world, which perpetuated his success. With apparently little help or assistance,

Schwarzenegger approached the American dream with animalistic persistence. He attacked the

gym and the competitive bodybuilding stage as his route to success, basically “taking names” of

whomever got in his way.

The theoretical work of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and his discussion of

simulacra and the hyperreal is crucial for making sense of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the original

image for the muscular monster, and indeed of other positive images combining muscle and

monster. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard asserts that, as part of its Post-Modern

nature, our contemporary culture can no longer distinguish images from reality. Society has

replaced reality and meaning with symbols. “[I]t is a question,” he states, “of substituting the

signs of the real for the real” (2). Baudrillard’s “simulacrum,” an image or representation of

something, refers to an image that has replaced the thing it supposedly represents. In the case of

the muscular monster, Arnold Schwarzenegger became the first recognizable image that

symbolizes this ideal. On the other hand, Baudrillard’s concept of “hyperreality” is where the

image becomes reality itself. He gives the example of the Borges fable where the cartographers

of an empire create a map so detailed it covers the territory exactly. Here, the map, the exact

same size as the actual territory (the real space), becomes the hyperreality. “The territory no

longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the

territory […].” Baudrillard dubs this substitution of the image for the real the “precession of

simulacra” (1). Applying Baudrillard’s concepts to trace the original image of the muscular

monster is a helpful way of framing Schwarzenegger as the original muscular monster. Arnold is

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at once the simulacral monster (the image that stands in for the monstrous referent) and the

hyperreal monster (the unreal and extreme muscular body that becomes the new marker of health

and the muscular built body, though it no longer bears any resemblance to the muscular bodies

that had gone on before, just as the map that “precedes the territory” in Baudrillard’s example).

A closer look at the film Pumping Iron is key in understanding how he can function as both.

Pumping Iron documents the pursuits of Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with a number of

other lesser-known muscular identities, and provides the world with images of a subculture that,

at that time, was hardly known. For the millions who were unfamiliar with Schwarzenegger and,

to that point, completely uninterested in the bodybuilding lifestyle, Pumping Iron provided an

intimate understanding of how these muscular bodies looked and trained, what they ate, how

they built their bodies, how they were received, and, more importantly, how they lived beyond

the pursuit of muscle. For these audiences, the movie broke down barriers and stereotypes by

introducing the larger-than-life, muscle-bound lifestyle as a playful, sensational world full of

likable, charismatic characters. The movie presented the California, fun-in-the-sun lifestyle

where these muscle men worked, worked out, and played all day in the sun and the water. There

were crowds of women and emulators surrounding them, with the majority of the emulation

directed toward Schwarzenegger.

Emulation of Schwarzenegger is easily understood because he had set such a precedent.

In the film he was the reigning Mr. Olympia, five years running. No other bodybuilder had

dominated quite like Schwarzenegger. He was making bodybuilding history and each win and

each title set another bodybuilding milestone. Arnold was the most charismatic, fun and playful

of all the film’s personas; the film glorifies his success in making his living from making his

body desirable. He was constantly surrounded by beautiful women, both on the cover of

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magazines and in real life. In the film, all those around him looked up to him, seeking both

advice and inspiration. Schwarzenegger’s determination concretized his authority, supremacy,

and dominance and instilled a sense of inspiration and a glorified desire for muscle, size and

power in all of those who were fortunate to be around him.

In Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages of Arnold Schwarzenegger, film and cultural

studies scholar Jonathan Goldberg seeks to explain Schwarzenegger’s cultural impact. Goldberg

suggests Arnold’s story and Pumping Iron provide sites to test a tautological phallic

identification wherein these stories provided a repetitive case for “The story of a generation of

men, growing up on certain images, and desiring through the image [Goldberg’s emphasis] to be

transformed; or to have the image rather then to be it; or to refuse the system entirely” (216).

Reading into the masculine images, Goldberg suggests that Schwarzenegger’s position within the

film is a remaking of various simulacra of the father. Goldberg asserts that the theme of

paternity is played out in a number of ways and Schwarzenegger “is explicitly in the father’s

position” (218).

Indeed, there are a number of situations in the film where the young twenty-eight-year-

old Arnold actually assumes a “paternal” position. Comparatively speaking, as Goldberg points

out, there is only one bodybuilder in the film, Mike Katz, who is actually presented as a father in

a scene with his children. However, despite Katz’s status as actual father, the film plays up

Arnold’s more authentic “father of muscle” position. Katz is a very large muscular adult male in

his thirties, but is characterized as somewhat of a quiet and shy amateur that looks to the younger

Schwarzenegger for father-like advice on the upcoming competition. A number of other scenes

present Schwarzenegger as the “muscular father” dispensing muscular guidance.

Schwarzenegger gives Lou Ferrigno’s father advice on how to help his son have a better chance

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in the competition. Here, Schwarzenegger, the muscular father, advises an actual father on how

he can help his muscular son attempt to beat him in the competition. And surely one of the most

memorable scenes of the movie is where Arnold comments on his only serious competitor,

Franco Columbu. “Franco is a child,” Arnold boasts in his signature Austrian accent. “He comes

to me for advices” (Pumping Iron- film).

Arnold as “father” provides an exquisite image for the world of bodybuilding; as the

“father of muscle,” he becomes the surrogate parent in Goldberg’s “story of a generation of

men” that grew up on certain images. This metaphor is not to be denied. His position within the

film, however, provides another type of authority figure, which men around the world began to

follow for muscular inspiration. I suggest that it was his status as the muscular elite, not as a

paternal figure, that was worthy of emulation, and that contributed to his monstrousness. The

film’s opening credit sequence demonstrates this in no uncertain terms, offering a montage of the

muscular bodies that came before Arnold. The lyrics to the song “Pumping Iron,” which

accompany the montage, put it very well:

Everybody wants to live forever. / Everybody wants to stick around. / Everybody

wants to be respected. / Everybody wants to be protected. / Everybody wants to be

a hero / Every man wants to be bigger-- to be bigger than dad […] Pumping up-

Pumping Iron / Pumping up- really feels like flying. / Coming up just like a lion

[…] (Small 1977)

The song explains that the cultural fascination is not to be like “dad” or the “father/paternal

figure.” The images of the muscular bodies in the opening credit sequence, rather, acknowledge

and bear witness to the old guard, the elite who have gone before, but as the song plays, the old

guard gives way to images of the new elite, epitomized by Arnold. As the historic images gloss

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by the opening credits, they lead into Schwarzenegger “Coming up just like a lion,” receiving a

standing ovation as he models pose after muscular pose because he was bigger and better than

any muscular body that had come before him—“bigger than dad,” indeed.

The images of Arnold Schwarzenegger from Pumping Iron, both the book and the

movie, have become a sign, a symbol, and an identity that society has built upon.

Schwarzenegger was referred to as a monster and an animal for a reason—and it was not for his

positive encouragement and fatherly advice. He was a monster because he attacked the weights,

his body, the sport, and all competitors with an aggression worthy of the term. Pumping Iron is

our first cultural document of the muscular identity that comprises huge, larger-than-life

muscular images possessing immense force, size and animal power. Saturating the film are

image after image of muscle-bound men picking up hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of

weight with ease. One scene provides images of Arnold and his training partner squatting (an

exercise performed by bending the legs at the knees and hip, lowering the torso between the legs,

and then reversing direction to stand straight up again) multiple times with more than four

hundred pounds supported across their shoulders. The two scream, yell and groan, letting out

monstrous, beastly, predator-like sounds as they complete repetition after repetition.

Another scene shows Arnold cracking a joke in German to Franco Columbu, while the

Italian is bench-pressing over three hundred pounds. Upon hearing the joke, which apparently

only he can understand, Columbu bursts out laughing as the three hundred-plus pounds of weight

stop on his chest. Such a situation could crush the chest and kill a normal man, but is merely

shrugged off as second nature for Columbu. He simply regains his composure after a few

moments, giggles, and continues to lift the weight off his chest multiple times with ease. In

another example, Arnold explains the feeling of the “pump,” while performing a one-arm bicep

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curl. The bicep is in the process of being “pumped up” and its veins protrude like small inner

tubes about to explode through his skin. Arnold describes what is happening:

The greatest feeling you can get in the gym, or the most satisfying feeling you can

get in the gym is the pump. Let’s say you train your biceps, blood is rushing into

your muscles, and that is what we call the pump. Your muscle gets a really tight

feeling like your skin is going to explode any minute. It’s really tight, like

somebody blowing air into your muscle. It just blows up and it just feels

different. It feels fantastic. It is as satisfying to me as coming is, as satisfying as

having sex with a woman and coming. (Pumping Iron- film)

Here, Arnold describes the pump by opposing pleasure and pain in a dichotomous example. He

explains the pump in both a sadistic and masochistic manner, detailing the pleasure he receives

from inflicting this painful process upon himself. As in a scene out of a modern horror film, he

relates the pump to the deadly monstrous act of injecting air into someone’s body until it

explodes. Like the weight on Columbu’s chest in the example above, this seemingly painful,

harmful act is hardly detrimental. It is simply shrugged off and glorified as feeling fantastic and

as “satisfying as having sex with a women and coming.”

These examples illustrate the monstrous appeal that Pumping Iron and the muscular body

offered the unknowing public. Each scene demonstrates huge men with muscular aggression

pushing and pressing massive amounts of weight with animal-like power; all resulting in the

tearing down and building back up of their muscular bodies. These scenes represent both hyperreal and

simulacral images explaining why Schwarzenegger is called such honorific things as “monster”

and “animal.” Baudrillard explains the hyperreal as a simulated model of the real that has

become divorced from any original referent, becoming in itself the new reality, like a map that

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precedes the territory (Baudrillard 1). Arnold’s body exhibited in Pumping Iron was a model

that preceded the known muscular body as an identity. The images displayed in the opening

credits of the film illustrate many identifiable muscular images including, among others, Eugene

Sandow, Charles Atlas, and Steve Reeves. All of these men represented images of a muscular

terrain that that was culturally recognizable throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

However, these images—presented in black and white no less—could hardly compare to the full-

color images that subsequently flooded the screen with Schwarzenegger’s overall size,

development and muscular proportion.

Thus, Schwarzenegger’s body marked new muscular boundaries never before crossed

and would become the model of muscular perfection for all bodybuilders to come. Once

Schwarzenegger was identified as “monster” or “animal,” he became the simulacral muscular

image that replaced these terms in the public’s regard. In this sense, Arnold’s images presented a

muscular map that also provided the directional guidelines for the muscular monster’s trajectory.

Although there were popular muscular identities before him, none could compare physically.

Never had there been a bodybuilder who had accomplished what Schwarzenegger had: he had

won every bodybuilding competition he entered for eight consecutive years. These

achievements of recognized perfection represented what many saw as an unbeatable feat and a

type of “map” that those who would come after would attempt to follow.

Pumping Iron ushered in a new wave of fitness culture in the 1980s. As Stallone reports,

“being strong and muscular was not only okay, it was being celebrated,” marking bodybuilding

and other forms of physicality as the “in” and “hip” thing to do (Pumping Iron DVD extra).

Johnson also remarks that, “even people that didn’t want to be as big as Arnold, not aspiring to

be Mr. Olympia, had aspirations, after seeing him, to get to the gym and get in shape” (Pumping

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Iron DVD extra). While exact emulation of Schwarzenegger’s physique may not have been the

overall cultural goal, his image became the image of health, fitness and physical education. For

some, he was a monster or animal; to others, he was just an image of ideal fitness; overall, he

was undeniably the image that epitomized the act of pumping iron to build muscle.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was the hyperreal muscular body, which simply had not existed

to that point. There had never been a body either as fully developed or as globally recognized as

the epitome of perfection. Although Sandow had an amazing impact, by the time

Schwarzenegger emerged, the memories of Sandow and the early twentieth century muscle men

had been pushed aside. Since Pumping Iron, there have been individuals who have broken

Arnold’s records or have won more titles (e.g., bodybuilders Ronnie Coleman, Dorian Yates and

Lee Haney), but none have achieved his global impact. Even those men who have surpassed

Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding records fall behind Arnold’s ranking as the greatest physique in

the history of Muscle and Fitness. In 2004, Joe Weider, who awards the annual Mr. Olympia

title, a replica of Sandow for the trophy, celebrated his sixty-fifth year of muscle magazine

publications by acknowledging and commemorating the “twenty most incredible physiques the

world has ever seen.” Of those twenty, Weider’s magazine designated none other than Arnold

Schwarzenegger as the “most incredible physique.” Though Arnold vied against a number of

other amazingly built bodies in his career as a competitive body builder, upon retirement, a

career milestone that was unheard of. All total, he won seven Mr. Olympia titles throughout his

competitive careere. The commemorative Weider article explains it best, stating, “Others may

eclipse his number of wins or his level of muscularity, but in the hearts of bodybuilding fans, one

thing remains clear: Arnold will always be No. 1” (Perine 163).

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Pumping Iron mapped out the trail for masses of muscular wanna-bes to navigate.

Schwarzenegger became the original that muscle and fitness followers looked to imitate.

However, Arnold’s muscular “monstrous” body was more than just a map for aspiring

bodybuilders. They wanted to imitate the lifestyle, charisma, and fun that Arnold made appear

synonymous with fitness. The walls of misconception that remained standing following

Pumping Iron continued to crumble as Schwarzenegger assumed leading movie roles and society

entered the gym to attempt to copy Arnold’s muscular body. Baudrillard declares, “to simulate

is to feign to have what one doesn’t have” (3). However, when something is simulated, it

ultimately produces some of the effects of what is absent. This suggests that the hyperreal

“map” that Arnold created produced the lasting effects that are visible in the many culturally

popular muscular bodies that followed his path. Regardless of whether individual bodybuilders

expressly desire to emulate Schwarzenegger’s body in particular, his body is mapped onto every

subsequent muscular body following Pumping Iron. Whether men and women are driven to the

gym to be the best, the strongest, the biggest, most muscular or most developed, or a desire to

produce a muscular monster, there is a little bit of Arnold left in all who have become

preoccupied with muscle.

Sandow and Schwarzenegger provide initial points that mark the original muscular freak

and monster. As this study moves into other representations of muscular freak and monster,

these men and certain images associated with them will continue to play an important role.

Sandow and Schwarzenegger’s initial impacts cannot be forgotten. The following chapter looks

at additional examples of the muscular freak and monster. While I have selected examples of

muscular monsters inhabited by bodies other than by Schwarzenegger, Arnold continues to

epitomize the role of muscular freak in his film roles.

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Chapter Two

The Muscular Freak and Monster: Beyond the Originals

“People who are visually different have always provoked the imagination of their

fellow human beings. Those of us who have been known since antiquity as

“monsters” and more recently as “freaks” defy the ordinary and mock the

predictable, exciting both anxiety and speculation among our more banal brethren.

History bears ample witness to this profound disquiet stirred in the human soul by

bodies that stray from what is typical or predictable.”

Rosemarie Garland Thomson

Leslie Fiedler has written, “that the strangely formed body has represented absolute

Otherness in all time and places since human history (1996, xiii). While some may disagree that

the muscular body is “strangely formed,” a muscular body must be recognized as a form of

physical difference and otherness, since muscle is built and constructed as an addition to a

normal body frame. Furthermore, because muscle is added through the process of working out,

which is “unnatural” in a sense, the muscular body is a particularly modern form of “Otherness.”

The muscular body is “unnatural” because it represents, in David Gilmore’s terms, a “category of

achievement” (4). Gilmore’s cross-cultural study, Manhood in the Making, describes the

“category of achievement” as a central component of masculinity in many cultures. Gilmore

finds a “constantly recurring notion that real manhood […] is not a natural condition that comes

about spontaneously through biological maturation, but rather is a precarious or artificial state

that boys must win against powerful odds” (Gilmore 11). Building muscle is not a spontaneous

natural condition, no matter how concerned one is for health and fitness. Thus, this unnatural

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physical engagement used to produce muscularity—a “muscular achievement”—is one way the

muscular body is “unnatural” and strangely formed.

Susan Bordo is another scholar who has recognized that the ideal of muscular fitness has

changed dramatically. What was considered to be a paragon of masculinity in the thirties is

“soft” (without definition) by today’s standards. Today, the ideal is to have a body that is rock

hard, without looseness or flaccidity anywhere. Bordo argues in Unbearable Weight that

societies use the surface of our bodies to code whether we have superior will power, control over

desire, and the ability to manage and shape our own lives and those of others. In “Reading the

Male Body,” Bordo also acknowledges that muscles once signified the “brutely natural,” the

primitive, and were “usually reserved in culture representation for the bodies of black slaves,

prize-fighters, and manual laborers” (55). Although muscle today, as Bordo points out, has been

“relocated to the ‘civilized’ side of the nature/ cultural duality” (56) and can mark a point of

mind over matter; certain muscular bodies developed to a point at which the body appears to

overtake mind completely. The massive bulk of competitive bodybuilders is a case in point.

Our contemporary desire for muscle often seems obsessive and muscles are a definite

fascination in popular entertainment. However, Robert Bogdan, in the late 1980s, pointed to a

similar fascination at the end of the nineteenth century. Bogdan questioned how the fin-de-siecle

crowds and the institution of popular entertainment in the later half of the nineteenth century

came to organize formal exhibitions of freaks/anomalous persons for the purpose of amusement

and profit. He investigated the reasons as to why society, at that time, had become so fascinated

with human difference, particularly the visible, physical differences that became the staple of

freak shows. His considerations are important when charting the evolution of muscular identities

and exact moments when certain muscular identities have been “swallowed up” by cultural

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fascination. While the “freak show” was a popular form of entertainment at the turn of the

twentieth century, the fascination with human difference has since shifted toward popular

television shows, movies, and exhibits featuring muscular bodies. This chapter recognizes other

moments when images and performances of strangely formed bodies—muscular bodies in this

case—have been swallowed up by popular entertainment. I move beyond the initial emergence

of the popular and positive representations of the “muscular freak” and “muscular monster,” as

outlined in chapter one, and begin to pinpoint additional citations and documentations that build

upon the foundations established with Sandow and Schwarzenegger.

As I have explained in the introduction, this study is not meant to specifically focus on

performances of Arnold; however, he will be featured prominently in this chapter. The chapter

will first address a particular iteration of the idea of muscular freak in Schwarzenegger’s role in

the movie Junior. This performance was not initially a huge success at the box office in

comparison to some of his other roles. The film, however, can be addressed in terms of its

significant cultural impact in the way it plays with the notion of the muscular freak. The chapter

will then address emergent ideas of the muscular monster by addressing writings by two of the

original muscular monsters, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno, and the impact their

writings and performances have had on the cultural understanding and construction of muscle.

Many ideas of the muscular monster are common today, especially in Hollywood movies, but I

situate their origins in Schwarzenegger’s and Ferrigno’s original writings and films. Finally, I

address the ways these texts and films are read as resources for building monstrous muscle by

those who look to these monsters’ knowledge for teaching and guidance.

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Junior: The Muscular Hermaphrodite

Freaks traverse the very boundaries that secure the “normal” subject in its given

identity and sexuality.

Elizabeth Grosz

Ideas of the muscular freak can be traced to ancient mythology. There has always been a

fascination with heroes, gods and other mythological tales of adventure and triumph. The

Greeks had Hercules and other titans and gods, while the Romans followed suit—adapting

stories from the Greeks and other conquered cultures. Often we find these historical

representations formed in images of muscular bodies in art works and sculptures. As Elizabeth

Grosz points out, “Greek mythology abounds in representations of monsters, combinations of

human and animals, centaurs and minotaurs, giants, and hermaphrodites.” She explains,

“Empedocles, Democritus, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, and Pliny all describe in considerable

detail various human and animal deformities” (Grosz 56). Today, it is a very common practice,

almost a tradition, in most forms of media to conflate muscular bodies and mythological

identities.

“The Giant” has been a popular ring pseudonym for many professional wrestlers ever

since Andre “The Giant” in the 1970s. The 1981 film Clash of the Titans, a Hollywood retelling

of the ancient Greek Perseus story, provided audiences with the horned and hairy muscular

villain, Calibos, played by the muscular Neil McCarthy. These are just two examples of

contemporary muscular “Otherness” based on ancient mythology. Society often looks to classic

Greek models in art and literature for an appreciation of the “ideal human form” and its

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relationship to muscle. Even Sandow’s early classification as an anomaly, as addressed in

chapter one, came under the taxonomy of “Modern Hercules.”

No other figure, muscular or not, is as immediately identifiable with legendary,

mythological and anomalous characteristics as Arnold Schwarzenegger. From his earliest days

as a professional bodybuilder, he was classified as being built like a “Greek God.” Ironically,

Arnold’s first movie role was the demi-god Hercules in Hercules in New York. The echoes

between this bodybuilder playing a god and Sandow’s classification as the “Modern Hercules”

are immediately evident. Schwarzenegger’s characters since have included the legendary Conan

and a futuristic alien cyborg, plus a number of more realist characters, including war heroes,

special agents, detectives and, of course, a gynecological scientist in Junior. It is

Schwarzenegger’s Junior that is worthy of acknowledgment in this chapter. His character in the

film, Dr. Alex Hesse, combined with his own muscular identity, allowed for the premise of the

main character of the film: a “self-induced” muscular intersexual hermaphrodite/freak. The plot

of Junior imagines the first human male pregnancy, where Arnold’s character during pregnancy

embodies the dichotomy of male/female character traits.

As this section moves forward, I will be dealing with the popular conceptions of the

hermaphrodite in conjunction with Schwarzenegger’s muscular body and how his muscular body

has again made a “freak” identity appealing to watch. An in-depth history of

androgynous/hermaphroditic uniqueness is too vast for the purpose of this study; however, a

basic understanding can provide insight into its significance relative to Schwarzenegger’s

character. Hermaphroditism is recognized as a medical disorder usually attributed to one or

more causes which lead to a variety of different types of intersexuality, including Turner’s

syndrome, Klienfelter’s syndrome, chromosomal mosaics, testicular feminization, gonadal

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dysgenesis, and “True” hermaphroditism (Grosz 59). Grosz points out that, “In addition to these

quite distinct types of hermaphroditism, there are also various gradations of intersexuality […]

leading to a number of variations from “normal” sexual identity” (60). While it is important to

provide a brief set of definitions of hermaphroditism, the public fascination with the concept is

usually not anchored in actual medical discourse. The fascination with this androgynous identity

is popular misconception verses actual medical descriptions of intersexed individuals.

Fiedler asserts that the first historic depiction of a bearded woman is as an attendant to

the god Hermaphroditus in a Pompeiian wall painting, while also noting that the ancient

Aphrodite of Cyprus was portrayed as “bald and bewhiskered” and “endowed with the genitals

of both sexes” (Fiedler 1978, 178). Robert Bogdan’s recognition of the hermaphrodite profile

includes the more modern interest in the “bearded ladies.” These so-called freak show identities

were once often exhibited “in dime museums, amusement parks, and circuses in every state in

the union and in many countries around the world” (Bogdan 1988, 229) as a simple attraction

among many other freak identities.

The hermaphrodite, as Grosz pointed out, was an ancient fascination. In Intolerable

Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit, Grosz explains that in about 60 B.C., Didorus spoke of

Hermaphroditus “who was born of Hermes (the god of invention, athletics, secret or occult

philosophy) and Aphrodite (the goddess of love), and received the name that was a combination

of his parents” (58). Being the child of gods implied that Hermaphroditus was a god as well.

This connection seems fitting considering Junior’s plot revolves around a muscular, athletic

Schwarzenegger, participating in an inventive medical experiment that creates a character

arguably with the characteristics of the mythological Hermaphroditus. For this particular

character, Schwarzenegger’s muscular body is quite fitting. His “godly-muscular body” layers

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popular conceptions of the heroes of ancient mythology with the muscular identity that

flourished during the peak of the “freak show.” Though at the time of filming Junior Arnold had

been retired from competitive bodybuilding for nearly twenty years, this once-competitive

muscular freak/monster easily becomes an adapted Hollywood version of an intersexual/

hermaphrodite freak in the film.

Playing into Fiedler’s definition, Arnold’s character blurs almost all of the conventional

boundaries crossed by a “true freak.” As discussed in chapter one, Fiedler’s true freak:

challenges the conventional boundaries between male and female, sexed and

sexless, animal and human, large and small, between self and other, and

consequently between reality and illusion, experience and fantasy, fact and myth.

(1978, 24)

While Arnold’s movie characters have blurred a number of boundaries throughout his film

career, Junior is the first time one of his character’s identities is grounded not only in a

mythological and medical history, but also in a controversial popular fascination. While the film

never implies that Schwarzenegger’s character even remotely personifies a hermaphrodite, the

character’s situation permits an intersexual/ hermaphrodite freak reading through Fiedler’s

understanding of “freak,” as well as Bogdan’s understanding of “freak” as a personal choice and

a simple form of entertainment.

Once impregnated, to echo Fiedler, Dr. Hesse blurs the boundaries between male and

female, sexed and sexless, animal and human, large and small, self and other, as well as reality

and illusion, and experience and fantasy. Schwarzenegger’s portrayal of a self-induced

androgynous character is valuable in this investigation for two reasons. Not only does Junior

give a modern audience access to an adapted version of a contemporary muscular freak identity,

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but the movie also provides further evidence that a preoccupation with a muscular body allows

for a connection between an “Othered” identity (that of a bodybuilder and freak) and a

contemporary family audience that invites discussion of important social issues between children

and young adults and their parents.

In simple terms, Arnold’s character in Junior blurs characteristics between male and

female. When impregnated, his character assumes an identity that closely mirrors that of an

androgynous hermaphrodite “freak.” By taking on the biological role historically reserved

exclusively for females, his character literally becomes part man/part woman. Elizabeth Grosz

believes that the “freak illustrates our so-called normal pleasures and fascinations with our

mirror-images, a fascination with the limits of our own identities as they are witnessed from the

outside” (Grosz 65). The premise ought to be outrageous and even disturbing. Our cultural

fascination with Arnold and his muscle, however, “softens the blow,” so to speak, which allows

the viewing of his self-induced androgynous performance as a hermaphrodite “freak” as funny

and palatable.

Although this examination investigates the inscribed intersexual/ hermaphroditism type

of characteristics Schwarzenegger’s character, Dr. Hesse, possesses (for our purposes, it is

necessary to recognize the hermaphrodite as a medicalized scenario on the most basic of terms –

simply an individual possessing attributes of both male and female), the main plot and humor of

Junior is based on the physical and emotional changes Hesse undergoes during pregnancy. The

plot begins with Schwarzenegger as Dr. Hesse and Dr. Larry Arbogast (played by Danny

DeVito) working on a new drug that will reduce the chances of a woman’s body rejecting an

embryo and causing a miscarriage. When their research funding is withdrawn and human

experimentation is denied, they decide to test the drug secretly. They decide to briefly

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impregnate Hesse, inserting a fertilized embryo into his body, in order to get the needed research

data that will allow them to seek alternative funding sources. Hesse, however, becomes attached

to his unborn baby; the self-induced intersexual characteristics evolve into the comedic situation

of a feminized and impregnated muscular man.

Recognizing Schwarzenegger’s character as a self-made freak permits a comparative

investigation with Fiedler’s understanding of freak vis-à-vis the relationship between the

intersexual/hermaphrodite characteristics Dr. Hesse possesses and that of Schwarzenegger’s

actual muscular body. Once impregnated, Dr. Hesse blurs the boundaries between male and

female, breaking the laws of Mother Nature and suggesting it is possible for a man to carry a

child to term. Hesse’s characteristics are always firmly rooted in the recognizable conventions

of male and female gender. He is never asexual, as in other connotations of hermaphrodite, but

neither is he always explicitly sexual, as the processes of fertilization and impregnation occur

without the act of sexual intercourse. In the medical process of Hesse’s impregnation, there is a

fictional location “discovered” that allows Hesse to carry the embryo until enough data is

recorded to verify the experiment.

Traditional conventions of sexuality and sexual attraction are overturned as well. Much

of the comedy within the film comes from the sexual attraction and tension between Hesse and

the fertile egg donor, Dr. Diana Reddin (played by Emma Thompson). The comedy stems from

the sexual attraction the two develop for each other as the movie progresses, which the audiences

know is being caused by internal forces (Hesse is impregnated with Reddin’s egg, and thus they

have a sort of blood attraction), but to which the protagonists are oblivious. Actual sexual

intercourse between the respective mother and father only happens near the end of the nine-

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month pregnancy, once Reddin finds out all of the facts and she realizes her sexual attraction is

not only physical and mental, but is also a result of these internal forces.

The Hesse character also blurs the boundaries between animal and human, large and

small, and self and other with his move away from testing animal subjects into the unknown,

with the first male test subject. Throughout the pregnancy, Hesse begins to experience the

bodily and psychological changes which the pregnancy and hormone therapy produce. Hesse

transforms from his known self as a fit, well-known professional scientist, into an altered

“Other” that is pregnant, large, and eventually removed from society altogether to escape

detection. The boundaries between large and small are blurred on two levels. The “larger-than-

life” muscular Hesse now carries a tiny baby growing inside himself, but the film also plays on

the dichotomous differences of big and small between Arnold and his male co-star, Danny

DeVito. Schwarzenegger is more than six feet tall and a muscular two hundred and thirty plus

pounds, while DeVito is purported to be five feet tall or slightly shorter.

It bears mentioning that this last feature, the comically disparate sizes of DeVito and

Schwarzenegger, was a tried and true convention of freak shows at their height, where the giant

and dwarf, as well as the “fat man/fat lady” and human skeleton attractions, would often appear

together to enhance and accentuate the individuals’ extreme features. Not only did the

filmmakers draw upon the same appeal when combining differences in the stars’ size for Junior,

they recognized that the size difference was a undeniable factor in the previous success of the

1988 Schwarzenegger/DeVito vehicle Twins.

Finally, the entire movie blurs the boundaries between reality and illusion and experience

and fantasy. The subject matter falls totally within the realm of science fiction, as the movie

never attempts to explain exactly how it is possible to impregnate a man without a womb. Film

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critic Roger Ebert points out that, “hard science is not the strong point here” (Ebert 1994). The

entire premise of the movie and the Dr. Hesse character borders on what was at that time an

illusion and merely a fantasy of a reality that could only happen in Hollywood.

While Junior is not ostensibly a movie about an intersexual/ hermaphrodite or a freak

identity, it is not hard to recognize the hermaphrodite/freak characteristics Schwarzenegger’s

character possesses. There are definite connections between Schwarzenegger’s Hesse and

hermaphrodite/freak, as well as in the physical relationship between Schwarzenegger and his co-

star, Danny DeVito, and its freak show predecessors. Although Junior received only fair

reviews and generated low, non-typical Schwarzenegger box office results when compared to his

action movies, the very idea that Junior’s premise was considered as a big budget Hollywood

film confirms that in the 1990s, there was a continued cultural desire to see the anomalous figure.

The movie also offers another cultural significance: as Ebert points out, “In a unexpected way,

Junior is a good family movie for parents and adolescents to see together, and then to discuss

terms of male and female roles and responsibilities” (Ebert 1994).

While we can certainly take Ebert at his word, Junior’s significance and usefulness rises

to a whole new level with the first officially documented man becoming pregnant and having a

child in July 2008. With the birth of his first child, daughter Susan Juliette, Thomas Beatie, the

female-to-male transgender, has blurred boundaries that were formerly crossed only in science

fiction. Nearly fifteen years after its release, Junior now provides a potential educational lead-in

to a discussion with youth on gender, sexuality, and personal choice, as well as ethical medical

practices.

Despite poor box office returns, this portrayal of muscle promises a possible entree into

discussions that could inform society for years to come. Junior conflates the “otherness” of

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hermaphroditic sexual identity and the otherness of the muscular body while bringing other

questions of human difference and important medical and ethical issues to the table. The

comedy works because we already perceive Schwarzenegger as an “Other” due to his body and

his past roles (which are intricately related). It is in this role, vis-à-vis the epigraph at the

beginning of this section, that Schwarzenegger as a Hollywood “freak” crosses the very

boundaries that secure his “normal” role in terms of identity and sexuality. While the original

concept of Junior may have basically been a comedic family movie about a pregnant Arnold

Schwarzenegger, today we are unexpectedly left with a significant muscular archive that

includes multiple issues and forms of human “Otherness.”

Pumping Iron’s Post-Monstrous Muscle.

Monsters involve all kinds of doubling of the human form, a duplication of the

body or some of its parts.

Elizabeth Grosz

Shortly after Pumping Iron, the idea of the muscular monster took on a new “hulking”

identity. If Schwarzenegger was the first muscular monster, Lou Ferrigno followed as a close

second with his monstrous character, the Hulk. Since Ferrigno’s breakthrough television role in

the late 1970s, character portrayals of the muscular monster have continued to rear their heads in

a number of different forms played by muscular male and female performers.

In the late 1980s, Schwarzenegger himself reprised his role with an alternative muscular

monster in the Hollywood hit, Twins. In Twins, Schwarzenegger’s character takes on a comedic,

playful, and gentle variation of Frankenstein’s monster, a creature resulting from modern

processes. Instead of being assembled from parts of dead bodies, Schwarzenegger’s character

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was created through a medical experiment where a fertile sperm cocktail was concocted from the

best physical and intellectual subjects and implanted into the female carrier. The result produced

the “perfect child,” Arnold—with one small side effect: his less-than-perfect twin brother, played

by Danny DeVito.

Other muscular monsters have continued to be portrayed in the movies. Ferrigno’s The

Incredible Hulk was seen in a number of television movies throughout the 80s and 90s. In the

early 90s film Universal Soldier, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren were a secret

project for the Army, as their dead bodies become reanimated to fight terror and, eventually,

battle each other. More recently, some of the most popular muscular monsters have been

portrayed in the X-men movies and other movies based on popular comic books, such as Hellboy.

In the X-men series, non-muscular actors like Kelsey Grammer don a muscle suit or are adapted

by CGI technology to become mutant characters like The Beast/Dr. Henry McCoy, while other

actors like Hugh Jackman actually pack on pounds of muscle in order to portray characters like

Wolverine. Female actresses have also hit the gym to build and shape their bodies to become

monstrous characters for the series. Rebecca Romijn’s quick, sleek and agile portrayal of

Mystique is just one example.

These portrayals of the muscular monster provide a sampling of the vast number of

popular characters that have been featured in Hollywood entertainment. These bodies at one

time lived only on the pages of comic books and in the imaginative fantasies of the readers.

Now, through the creation and performance of their muscular bodies, these monstrous characters

have come to filmic life. Undoubtedly, the examples above, among many others, suggest that, as

English literature professor Jeffery Jerome Cohen puts it, “The monster is difference made flesh,

come to dwell among us” (Cohen 7). Cohen provides an understanding of the literal “Monster

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Culture” as he presents seven theses to explain our cultural fascination with the monster. As

Cohen argues, the monster attracts through difference and that “the same creatures who terrify

and interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies” (17). In keeping with Cohen’s theses, the

portrayals of muscular monsters seen on the screen also evoke the imagination and escapist

fantasies for their viewers. However, I also believe the subsequent bodybuilding literature from

the first muscular monsters following the release of Pumping Iron provided initial sources to the

muscular “road map” and the escapist fantasies that muscle could provide.

Before taking the world by storm with their opposing muscular portrayals of monsters on

film, both Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno placed their first-hand accounts of their muscular

journeys in writing. Both men published their stories of muscle, which gradually seeped into the

mainstream. These accounts provided the step-by-step muscular directions to their monstrous

muscular results for society to read and implement in their own training.

Both publications, Schwarzenegger’s The Education of a Bodybuilder, and Ferrigno’s

The Incredible Lou Ferrigno, with all the glitz and glamour that Hollywood could pack behind

them, provided an entry into the world unlike any that had come before. There had been muscle

routines and literature available before these publications. Sandow, in fact, was one of the first

to publish information on building a bigger, stronger body, as did Bernarr MacFadden. Charles

Atlas was another important muscular identity who influenced an early cultural desire for muscle

and Jack LaLanne had his television workout program promoting heath, fitness and a muscular

body. However, the one thing that these men lacked was the physically monstrous size that both

Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno possessed. At his peak, Schwarzenegger stood an estimated six

feet, two inches and two hundred and thirty-five pounds, while Ferrigno was estimated at six

feet, five inches and over two hundred and seventy-five pounds. Both men’s bodies were pure

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muscle (Perine 158, 163). Their size alone, along with their charisma, completely exploded from

the screen in Pumping Iron. Audiences not only wanted to see it again and again, but they

wanted to know all about it and how to build replicas.

Both publications are very similar in their simple format, with each book being split into

two sections. The first section documents each man’s journey up through Pumping Iron, with

Ferrigno’s extending slightly further. The second section provides step-by-step examples,

directions and suggestions on beginning a bodybuilding regimen and includes the ultimate steps

that each used to create their unprecedented muscular size and development. Schwarzenegger’s

publication is unique in that it visually presents a evolutionary process beginning with muscular

photographs of his muscular physique as early as age sixteen, and spanning his career and an

unprecedented six straight Mr. Olympia titles at the time the book went to print.

Ferrigno’s muscular documentary is unique for its different trajectory. “Arguably the

second most recognizable name in the sport’s history,” as writer Shawn Perine explains, “Lou

has done what so few before him had: parlay a successful bodybuilding career into an equally

successful one as an actor” (Perine158). Ferrigno’s physique manual came a few years after

Schwarzenegger had first published his. By this time, Ferrigno had established himself beyond

the bodybuilding stage and was already known for his role as The Incredible Hulk. For that

reason, he began his story with his “hulking” achievement for immediate pop culture

recognition.

Regardless of the entrance point into his muscular development, each man provided a

muscular road map. Apropos of his acquired connections to ancient Greece, Schwarzenegger’s

muscular map relates body development to Plato, explaining that, “Plato wrote that man should

strive for a balance between mind and body. There should be a harmony between the two.

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Without the well-conditioned body, Plato felt, the mind would certainly suffer” (Schwarzenegger

256). Schwarzenegger explains that he has created this balance and knows that building your

body does “make your mind reach out.” He concludes by advocating, “Strength and confidence,

plus a first-hand knowledge of the rewards of hard work and persistence, can help you attain a

new and better life” (256).

Ferrigno explains the importance of developing a muscular body in a similar yet slightly

different manner. Ferrigno, unlike Schwarzenegger, suffered as a child with hearing loss and has

continued to deal with hearing complications as an adult. For Lou, bodybuilding was a way to

overcome his disability and its resulting hardships. He echoes Schwarzenegger in explaining

that bodybuilding was his destiny, evoking the kind of “design of Providence” Fiedler suggests.

Lou, like Arnold, was a believer that bodybuilding could help an individual attain a better life.

Lou explains:

I believe we each have a destiny. Within certain people is a desire to rise up, no

matter what the opposition, and find a way to the top. We must only find our

methods and tools. For me, those were bodybuilding. Training brought out in me

everything that was good: desire and ambition, as well as a sense of the strong

person I could become. It provided a constant challenge and educated me about

goal setting and positive thinking. In the gym I learned to love hard work and its

rewards both physically and mentally. I taught myself to be a winner and to

realize that, above all else, strength is my business. (79)

Both men provide justification for building muscle and living a healthy active lifestyle as a way

to a better life. Both Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno echo Cohen, who suggests that monsters

attract through difference and evoke escapist fantasies. The escapist fantasies in this case are

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through the development of muscle produced by following the muscular road maps exhibited by

the monstrously muscular Arnold and the incredibly hulking Lou.

Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno provide an image and a muscular road map for those who

wish to acquire muscle as a way to escape. Ethnographic writer Samuel Wilson Fussell provides

a fantastic example of a muscular escapist fantasy in his intensely personal muscular memoir,

Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. The catalyst for Fussell to escape an unwanted

lifestyle was none other than Arnold’s The Education of a Bodybuilder. Fussell, a six foot, four

inch, one hundred and eighty pound twenty-four year old college graduate living in New York

City, explains his intense fear of living in an unsafe city due to what he considered his physical

inadequacies. “The rapes, the muggings, the assaults and the murders,” were what caused his

days to be spent “running wide-eyed in fear down city streets,” and his nights “passed in closeted

toilet-bound terror,” with the door triple locked, windows nailed shut and the curtains drawn

(1991, 22). Fussell’s answer to escape the fear and possible danger that lurked around every

corner unexpectedly came one afternoon as he escaped a probable threat by ducking into a

bookstore for safety. Fussell explains:

Here it was I came across Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold

Schwarzenegger. A glimpse of the cover told me all that I needed to know.

There he stood on a mountain top in Southern California, every muscle bulging to

the world as he flexed and smiled and posed. Just the expression on his face

indicated that nothing could disturb this man. A victim? Not bloody likely. (1991,

24)

The fright of the lurking dangers forced Fussell to seek refuge and protection by escaping the

impending threats and fears in a way that seemed immediately logical—to build muscle. Fussell

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explains that Schwarzenegger’s body offered “protection, and loads of it.” Schwarzenegger

represented, “A human fortress—a perfect defense to keep the enemy host at bay.” Just looking

at Schwarzenegger’s monstrous physique required Fussell to ask, “What fool would dare storm

those foundations?” (1991, 24). For Fussell, the best line of defense was to make himself into “a

walking billboard of invulnerability like Arnold.” As a tall, skinny, weak and lanky scaredy cat,

he saw muscle as his insurance policy to deter violence. As opposed to a self-defense style of

training where “one had to actually engage in street combat to use it,” (1991, 25) a large

muscular body would be his immunity to conflict. The beauty in the whole idea was the fact that

he may never be called upon to actually use the muscle in defense.

A closer look at Cohen’s conceptions of the monster offers a deeper understanding of

Fussell—as well as our general cultural fascination with the muscular monster. Cohen argues

that the monster is “best understood as an embodiment of difference, a breaker of category, and a

resistant “Other” known only through process and movement” (x). For Cohen:

The monstrous body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety and fantasy

(ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The

monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists

only to be read […]. Like a letter on a page, the monster signifies something other

then itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between the time

of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born

again. (4)

Fussell’s account of fear, desire, anxiety and fantasy explains alternative reasons that the

muscular body is a pure cultural form. Fussell reads Schwarzenegger’s monstrous muscle as a

marker of protection, which in his case can lead to independence. For Fussell, Schwarzenegger’s

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muscular body signifies something more than the ideal form of muscular male perfection. It

becomes a weapon against fear and violence.

The assumption is that a muscular structure equals a form of protection because it

signifies dominance, strength, and aggression. Like a monster, a muscular body can potentially

induce fear in a possible conflict. In Fussell’s case, he, like many others, found a model in

Arnold. Schwarzenegger’s body represents a moment of displacement inhabiting the gap

between his introduction to the world in Pumping Iron, and the moment that his body image was

perceived as a prototype by another—in this case when Fussell found Schwarzenegger on the

book shelf. If “monsters involve all kinds of doubling of the human form, a duplication of the

body or some of its parts” (64) as Grosz suggests, Fussell provides a great example of an escapist

desire to mimic the monstrous.

Moreover, an extremely muscular body can very much resemble a Jekyll/Hyde or a

David Banner/Incredible Hulk type of oppositional binary identity. Fussell’s example

emphasizes this and suggests that, in the binary model, muscle functions as a sign of protection

and a sort of self constructed-hero. However, unlike the Hyde/Hulk identities that represent the

strong/dominant side to their alter egos of Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Banner, the outside muscular shell

of breastplate-like armor of a muscular body can be simply nothing more then a visual deterrent.

The muscular armor could be masking a “coward” and “no one would ever know!” (Fussell

1991, 25). In his attempt to mirror a muscular armor like Arnold’s, Fussell’s hope was to

produce a visual defense and become his own protection.

Bodybuilding ethnographer Alan Klein explains this type of activity as a form of “hero

worship.” Klein would categorize Fussell as a case of indirect mirroring. “Indirect mirroring

can occur obliquely. In this instance proximity to something or someone deemed desirable is

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capable of reflecting back an ideal self” (Klein 216). Klein explains that hero worship of

Schwarzenegger in the lives of many bodybuilding fans is a perfect example of indirect

mirroring. This is possible because Arnold “is distant, unapproachable, except in the fans’

emulation of his lifestyle or program” (216). Here Klein’s ideas echo Baudrillard’s

understanding of simulation, “to have what one doesn’t have.” For Fussell, emulation and

simulation of Schwarzenegger’s lifestyle and program is the road map that can produce the

visibly similar muscular effects. The result is the implied visible muscular safety and protection

that young men like Fussell lacked as a tall, skinny, frail individual with weak muscular

composition before beginning his training.

While my thesis has, to this point, equated muscles with health and other positive

attributes, the relationship between muscular monster and hero invites another compelling

interpretive lens, which, on the face of it, may seem antithetical, but is not necessarily so: I refer

to the creation of the muscular body through self-directed violence. Performance studies scholar

Alyda Faber provides an interesting investigation into the performance of ritualistic violent

surgical practices of French performance artist “Saint” Orlan, who inflicts painful procedures

upon herself to create her body of art. Bodybuilding, like Orlan’s self-directed violence as an art

form, contains many self-induced violent actions to produce a desired musculature. This

violence, however, does not only pertain to bodybuilders. Any individual who puts time into

training and working out also induces practices of self-directed violence in creating a fit body.

Faber explains that Orlan’s “practices of self-directed violence create a spectacle that

violates the viewer and establishes her body as a site of public debate” (Faber 108). Violence, in

this case, is defined as, “acts that threaten the body as a sensorium of pain and injury, both

physical and psychic” (108). While muscle building as an art form is an end result of diet,

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training, and physiological endurance, Orlan uses cosmetic surgery as a medium of artistic

expression. Training of any sort, in essence, threatens the body as a sensorium of pain and

injury. Fussell agrees with this statement. This is a direct refutation of the statement of Ben

Weider, the former president of the International Federation of Bodybuilders (IFBB), that

“bodybuilding is not body destruction” (Fussell 1994, 51). I agree with Fussell; despite Weider’s

contention, bodybuilding is indeed body destruction. The process of building muscle requires

tearing the body down (deconstructing the existing muscle) in order for muscle to repair itself,

build itself back up, and grow past its previous level.

Fussell explains, “muscles grow because they are stressed. The rebuilding (the body’s

reaction to the stress) creates a larger muscle” (1994, 51). Stress is such a gentle word when

actually considering the process some individuals put their bodies through to force the desired

results. For a muscle to grow, it actually needs to be pushed to its limit and exceed its previous

plateau. Muscle growth, as well as muscle maintenance, requires a muscle to be fatigued,

exhausted and torn down in order to recover, rebuild and grow. As described earlier, the extreme

process that Arnold and company exhibit in Pumping Iron display examples that could crush or

kill an average man. If placing four hundred plus pounds on someone’s back, or setting more

then three hundred pounds on someone chest doesn’t threaten injury or produce pain, than what

does?

Like Orlan, all builders use self-directed/self-induced violence as a medium of artistic

expression. Arnold explains it best in Pumping Iron, when he provides a vibrant explanation of

bodybuilding as a form of artwork. Bodybuilders look at themselves in mirrors to find areas that

need to be worked on, then attack that area of the body with a number of exercises to tear down

and rebuild that muscle for weeks and months on end. Unlike a sculptor that can easily slap on

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some clay to rework their art, muscle building requires a much more intensified, painstaking, and

often injury-laden process.

Self-inflicted, painful muscle building practices exhibit how bodybuilding is all about

building one’s body, as its name implies. A muscular body is refined by either addition of

muscle by lifting excessively heavy weights as suggested above, or removing excess, as the diet

process does for those that wish to tone down on size and muscle. In comparison to muscle

builders and shapers that continue to tear down in order to reshape their body, Orlan has had a

number of progressive surgical “performance” procedures including liposuction—reduction and

reshaping of her ankles, knees, hips, buttocks, waist, and neck. According to Faber, Orlan’s

seventh, eighth and ninth surgeries, what Orlan called “the formulation of a mutant body”

project, included an implant inserted at each temple, creating two bumps on her head, and the

largest breast implants possible for her anatomy. Faber suggests Orlan’s performance of pain

and her deliberate poses in the cruciform position on the operating table, parodying Christian

martyrdom, have created a “flesh-and-blood saint” (110). For Faber, Orlan is saintly because of

the desire, love, and generosity that she exudes to her audiences through her surgical

performances, and the pain she inflects upon herself. In this case, Schwarzenegger and the other

builders’ performances in Pumping Iron can also suggest the actions of a type of flesh-and-blood

saint.

Schwarzenegger and the other builders in Pumping Iron have an ideal body aesthetic that

they strive to construct in a similar fashion to the ideal body aesthetic that Orlan has constructed

to produce her “saintliness.” Schwarzenegger would often explain how he has always striven to

create the ideal body—his goal being proportional size, definition and symmetry. As with

Orlan’s multiple reconstructive surgeries to create her ideal body, Schwarzenegger and all

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builders use a repetitive process that must be endured to create an ideal muscular body. Arnold

explains in Pumping Iron that if his shoulders are lacking size or shape, he then has to work them

harder, over and over again. Throughout his body formulation and restructuring phase, he must

constantly remain aware and monitor the proportions of his other body parts so everything is

complementary. Each painstaking exercise, each intense movement, tears down existing muscle

in order to destroy current muscular barriers and allow the body to grow, reshape itself and move

closer to its ideal form. Schwarzenegger’s process, like Orlan’s, is done for himself, but is also a

process that receives ovations from his fans and audiences. In Schwarzenegger’s case, the

construction of the monstrous muscle overshadows and perhaps even erases what Faber would

consider the “saintly”—self-inflected muscle-building pain in the perception of the uninitiated.

The painful process of building muscle becomes glorified as he presents a performance of

extreme muscular poses for a cheering audience that want to see more and more muscle.

Fussell also describes the love of the pain he endures in creating his version of a

monstrous and sacred body. In the early stages of his physical metamorphosis, he recounted his

mindset stating, “If this ‘no pain, no gain’ adage were true, then I would learn not to accept pain,

but to embrace it” (1991, 31). As his body developed, the desire for the pain and the results the

pain produced became an addiction. He explains:

On my off days, I grew impatient, yearning to speed up time and start the next

day’s workout. The more I trained, the more desperately I needed to train. My

body ached for the pump. I couldn't live without it, that burning sensation

acquired through bombing a muscle area. At first it feels like someone rubbing

heat balm on the particular muscle you're working, it feels almost numb; then the

analgesic spreads. Within minutes, you feel your whole body glowing, as if

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you're the sole source of illumination in a dark world. You can't help but smile.

And it was the pump that kept me going, endorphins running to the rescue

whenever I called. If Sisyphus gets a pump from his eternal exercise, I assure you

all this time he’s been a happy man. (1991, 80)

Echoes of Arnold ring clear in this description of the pump. The pump, for Fussell, generates

the illuminating effect that almost makes him inhuman. The self-induced pain produces the

results that Fussell desired. The Sisyphean absurdity of moving heaving objects over and over

was creating something hidden inside. Not only was he building a protective covering, he was

transforming himself into some other being.

Fussell explains that he “didn’t need to see passersby doing double takes to be aware of

my own movements, to watch myself—this huge, ungainly creature, suffocated by a world of his

own making” (1991, 194). With Schwarzenegger as a model, Fussell followed a lonely path to

self-fulfillment. He had constructed a monstrous muscular “ungainly creature.” Fussell

transformed from his “normal self,” a talk, skinny, one-hundred-and-eighty-pound bookworm,

into a muscular two hundred and fifty-pound “creature” capable of replicating

Schwarzenegger’s feats in Pumping Iron: squatting more then five hundred pounds and bench-

pressing over four hundred pounds.

In the situations outlined above, the muscular monster begins to become blurred with

discourse of hero and saintly figures via the notion that each are created through a process—a

sort of a repetitive performance—of specific training techniques, and of self-induced, repetitive

violence procedures. Throughout, in the cases of the bodybuilders, the muscular “hero” and

“saint” become marked images of muscular transcendence acquired through the influence of

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Schwarzenegger’s monstrous muscle. The informative writings and training techniques of

Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno provide transcendence for those who follow their instructions.

Fussell, for example, views Schwarzenegger’s monstrous size as a way out of a life

packed with fear. Fussell writes:

It was simple at first—at least, so I thought. By making myself larger than life, I

might make myself a little less frail, a little less assailable when it came down to

it, a little less human. In the beginning I planned to use bodybuilding purely as a

system of self-defense. It wasn’t until later, 80 muscle-crammed pounds later,

that I learned to use it as my principal method of assault. (Fussell, 1991, 25)

Fussell looked to Schwarzenegger as a hero for guidance and suggests Schwarzenegger’s

teachings and training methods have the ability to transform his frail, fear-laden body into a

muscular identity that could produce a shield from danger. Here the monster teaches the student

to transcend his body and become a self-produced hero as well as a muscular creature—a

creature, like a Hyde or Hulk character that existed below the surface, waiting to be released.

At their physical peaks, both Arnold and Lou were monsters in their own right:

Schwarzenegger because he was the first to be described in such a way, and Ferrigno for his

extreme physical size and dominance leading to his monstrous casting in The Incredible Hulk.

Other muscular monsters, suggested earlier, have exceeded an average body composition, either

synthetically, with a costume or CGI technology, or naturally with hard work (along with the use

of various forms of performance enhancers including, for some, steroids), to visually exist in

performances beyond the body’s ordinary range of body achievement. All represent a muscular

“Otherness” beyond the normal. Whether these identities and characters provide starting points

for escapist fantasies for a few hours in the form of audience entertainment or markers for the

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emulation of individuals escaping their current body and lifestyle, they definitely represent

identities that exist at another level. In most cases, the level is produced through self-discipline

and a self-induced training regimen that requires the body to be subjected to rigorous, intense,

and painful exercises. The pain is what indicates the body is responding. The pain is what

produces the results. The pain is what made Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno monstrous. The pain

is the indicator that builders like Fussell use to indicate they are on their way to building a

protective barrier. The pain is what created the muscular bodies that became the monstrous

characters that have populated the movies and television. To echo Ferrigno, it is the self-chosen

process of building a muscular body that allows individuals to rise up and find their way to the

top.

The muscular body as a monstrous figure or character can guide, protect, and entertain,

and it can potentially transform those in the pursuit of physical development. The muscular body

is both a physical frame and a mindset, as Fussell’s account demonstrates. While the muscular

monster may continue to blur categories, produce heroes, or come in various sizes and character

types, it will always be an identity rooted in the specific performance images and teachings of

the originals.

This chapter has only briefly touched on the multiple representations of muscular

freakery and monstrousness. Thus far, I have explored Arnold Schwarzenegger as both muscular

freak and monster, while providing the preliminary brush strokes for further explorations into

these categories of muscular representation. While the images and ideas discussed did not

originally intend to be read as representations of “freak” or “monster,” the previous and existing

cultural fascination with “freak,” “monster,” and muscle cannot be overlooked. Bogdan’s study

of the “freak show” advanced an understanding of a human “freak” or “monster” as more of a

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social invention or construction—the display of such people not being a offense to humanity, but

more or less simple show business. While today the display of human “freak” and “monstrous”

identities in a “freak show” sense is offensive, the muscular freak and monster have become

staples of show business. The “freak show” may no longer exist, but the muscular body has

continued to provide a new way to reinterpret the understanding of “freak” and “monster.”

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Chapter Three

The Muscular “Freak Show”

“The concept of freak show is not dead; there are many modern versions of these

nineteenth-century spectacles, reconfigured for contemporary society. However,

in the new format the position of the born freak has been, for the most part, filled

by the novelty performers and self-made freaks.”

Andrea Stulman Dennett Whereas some scholars are convinced that exhibits of human freakery for entertainment

are a thing of the past, others, such as Rosemarie Garland Thomson, maintain that the human

freaks have held onto their popularity by evolving and taking on a variety of pop culture

identities. Thomson contends, in fact, that the “freak shows” of the past have not dissipated, but

have dispersed and transformed. Andrea Stulman Dennett agrees, suggesting “the most obvious

form of the “freak show” is the television talk show, an environment in which dysfunctional

human beings parade themselves around in front of an audience” (Dennett 320). While this may

be the case for Dennett, there are other forms of the contemporary “freak show.” Popular muscle

tradeshows, which I contend are “muscular freak shows,” are another such example.

The muscular freak shows contain a vast array of muscular identities, including

competitive bodybuilders, but also fitness competitors, fitness models, and any individual who

builds his or her body to an unexpected muscularity. The popularity of bodybuilding and

society’s desire (and obsession in many cases) to build a muscular body has exploded since the

days of Sandow and even more since Schwarzenegger starred in Pumping Iron. The pinnacle of

the contemporary preoccupation with the muscular body is visible at muscle competitions and

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tradeshows at the annual Joe Weider Muscle and Fitness Mr. Olympia and the Arnold

Schwarzenegger Classic bodybuilding exhibition. These are, in essence, “muscular freak

shows.”

Like “freak shows,” bodybuilding is attached to an industry. Whereas “freak shows”

were attached to circuses, carnivals, dime museums, and amusement parks, bodybuilding is

attached to, and depends on, gyms, supplement companies, muscular magazines, competitions

and muscle tradeshows. While discussing “freak show” performers, Bogdan asserts that, “people

who worked in the industry shared a way of life, developing a culture, a world view, an argot,

and a set of practices that set them apart and provided justification for the way they treated

customers” (1988, 69). My project’s introduction, echoing Bogdan, explained just this fact:

those who choose the health and fitness lifestyle of building and sculpting a fit muscular body

share a way of life, a frame of mind, and a set of life practices and choices geared toward a

physical, healthy, fit lifestyle. The health and fitness industry has developed an ever-expanding

cultural and world view. It is evident in the movie Pumping Iron that bodybuilding is a way of

thinking about and presenting a people and a culture. Similar to Bogdan’s description of the

freak culture, it is a culture that has developed its own unique customs, norms, and language,

with its own cultural genealogy of muscular iconography and historical individuals. Precisely

for these reasons, the muscular tradeshow can be understood as the contemporary freak show,

and the muscular freak certainly exists beyond the competitive bodybuilding stage.

This chapter continues the discursive connection between muscular “Otherness” and

anomalous freak and monstrous bodies. To do so, I examine performances and images presented

at the “muscular freak show,” seeking to point out similar practices and social constructions

between contemporary muscular performances at these venues and their historic “freak show”

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predecessors. The first section investigates two performances held at the Weider Olympia trade

show to reveal how the contemporary muscular freak is manifested in contemporary performance

and how a host of similar characteristics also associated with the “freak show” are still with us.

The second section examines images and representations of the muscular monster exhibited in

muscle magazines and at the Olympia, explaining how this idea of extreme muscle is positively

portrayed in live exhibition.

Step Right Up: The Modern Muscular Bally

The original “freak shows” were about spectacle. Dennett explains that the “freak show”

was a place where human deviance was “enhanced, dressed, coiffed and propped up for the

entertainment of a paying audience” (325). The freak shows were also about relationships; us

versus them, the normal versus the freaks. Today, however, Dennett asserts that the

contemporary idea of “freak show:”

is about culture, which determines what is freakish and what is not. It is about the

human body and society’s perceptions of normal and abnormal. It is about

psychology and the deviant behavior. But most importantly, it is about people on

display and the public examination of what are essentially private affairs. (325)

The muscular freak show is no exception. Extreme muscularity is a form of human deviance.

Having bulging muscle which functions purely as an aesthetic purpose is by no means “natural.”

Bulging muscle is self-made. This bulging muscular deviance is propped up as entertainment,

just like “freaks” once were, for paying audiences at bodybuilding competitions and fitness

tradeshows.

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Muscle tradeshows like “The Olympia” and “The Arnold” are gathering places for

members of the “muscular culture.” Events like these are all about the human body and society’s

perceptions, but questions rarely arise in this environment about what is normal and abnormal in

a muscular sense. At these events, extreme muscle is honored and emulated, and rarely subject

to questions of what is deviant and what is not. These muscle tradeshows, like Dennett’s

understanding of “freak shows,” are devoted to putting people on display and exposing their

muscularly developed bodies, thus subjecting to public examination of what would in most other

segments of society be private.

In the late 1980s, Robert Bogdan questioned how the fin-de-siecle institution of popular

entertainment, in the later half of the nineteenth century, came to organize formal exhibitions of

freaks/anomalous persons for the purpose of amusement and profit. Society became fascinated

with visible human difference, which became the staple of “freak shows.” These physical

differences were physically accessible to paying audiences. Today, the fascination with

accessible human difference, in regard to the muscular body, has not changed. “Freak show”

considerations become important when we seek to understand the extreme fascination with

muscular difference and how “live” (being in the presence of) muscular bodies continue to excite

and be swallowed up in our culture’s fascination with muscular entertainment.

Exhibitions like The Olympia and The Arnold function as heterotopias. Michel Focault

explains the heterotopia as a space simultaneously real and mythic like that which exists in a

mirror—“a placeless place” (24). Foucault goes on to explain that all heterotopias in culture are

either heterotopias of crisis or deviation. The muscle tradeshows function as what Foucault

would suggest as the latter. These are spaces “in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in

relation to the required mean or norm are placed” and are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real

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space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (25). These muscular

tradeshow heterotopias function like a theatre in the way they are able to bring “a whole series of

places that are foreign to one another” (25) onto one giant stage. Companies throughout the

tradeshows each provide singular spaces featuring their own identity and establishing their

brand. Each company has their own theme, their own style, and their own deviant muscular

bodies. These are strategically put into place to attract, entice, and entertain the paying crowds

who come in search of muscle-building products and information as well as entertainment from

extreme muscular spectacle. This ultimately makes up a series of spaces that are foreign to one

another, yet, at the same time, these spaces are juxtaposed into a single real space by virtue of the

conventions of the heterotopia of deviation.

In the same manner, one could argue that exhibits such as the Arnold Classic and Joe

Weider’s Olympia Weekend form a double event (a single real space) infiltrated by muscular

bodies, with many of these bodies being muscular freaks. These two annual events host top

fitness, bodybuilding, and individual athletic competitions along with a three-day tradeshow

promoting bodybuilding, the health and fitness industry, companies and products associated with

fitness, and some of the most muscular, well-known individuals today. These muscular freak

shows contain a vast array of muscular identities beyond competitive bodybuilders, fitness

competitors and fitness models. Famous movie stars, wrestlers, and star athletes come to

participate in the festivities, as do thousands of individuals who come seeking entertainment and

knowledge about the latest advances in diet, training and supplementation. Throughout these

tradeshows, companies host events and outrageous exhibits where spectators often spend vast

amounts of time—much of which is spent standing in line for an opportunity to approach their

idols, hoping for a few moments of time with their favorite muscular superstar for a quick photo

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or autograph, handshake or bicep feel if they are lucky. Like those who once had a fascination

with and desire to feel Sandow’s muscles, spectators often wait for hours as they gawk at the

amazingly built bodies on display.

In September 2008, I journeyed to the Weider Olympia weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada to

further investigate the muscular body as freak. This exhibit brings together the biggest and the

best bodybuilders from around the world, including some of the largest, most muscular,

freakishly developed men and women competing for the titles of the next Mr. and Ms. Olympia.

The exhibit also unites under one roof tens of thousands of bodybuilding fans, fitness enthusiasts,

health and fitness practitioners, and nutritional supplement companies. 2008 marked the forty-

third consecutive year of this momentous muscular competition and exhibition.

If Eugene Sandow was the man that put bodybuilding on the cultural map, it was Joe

Weider, breaking into the scene in the 1950s, who fully made the world take notice of the

muscular body. Through his early publications, bodybuilding contests, and fitness supplement

companies, Mr. Weider and the Weider family stand alone as the core founders of the muscular

identity that is recognized around the globe. Weider essentially picked up where Sandow’s

manager Florenz Ziegfeld left off. Wieder has taken Sandow’s initial ideas of “muscle posing

routines” and bodybuilding contests, and has created a worldwide health phenomenon. With the

monthly global distribution of millions of Weider’s Muscle and Fitness and Flex magazines, and

as the sponsor of the most universally-recognized bodybuilding title and event, The Olympia, it

is safe to suggest that Mr. Weider has helped lead the world into our muscular preoccupation.

Throughout the annual Olympia trade show, in the three days leading up to the Olympia

contest, a number of individual companies present exhibits, demonstration booths and displays.

These exhibits are set up in a fashion comparable to past “freak show” attractions, with muscular

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bodies working the display exhibits attempting to attract and persuade the thousands of

spectators roaming the convention. In events like this, Laurie Schultze would point out the

connection with “body maintenance” and “marketability of the self” (Schultze 14). The industry

has taken up the ideology of continual self-improvement and self-maintenance and has

developed new markets around consumer desires connected to the body and the self, centering

on the notions of healthy lifestyle and acquired muscle. While the original “freak show”

attracted audiences to gawk and stare, the muscular freak show attracts audiences to do the same,

but they also entice audiences to emulate those they come to gaze upon. Some are invited to

achieve a healthier life-style. Others are tantalized by the promise of acquiring “freaky,”

“monstrous” muscle.

Ronald E. Ostman’s essay, “Photography and Persuasion,” which reconstructs the

process of “freak show” customer persuasion through Farm Security Administration photographs

of circus and carnival sideshows from 1935-1942, offers helpful tools and terminology for the

similar kinds of customer persuasion found at modern muscular freak shows. Through a variety

of photographs from various locations, Ostman examines “The Talker Troopers,” “The

Ballyhoo” and “Shills and Ticket Sellers,” who all provide parallel depictions to the “step right

up” at the Olympia used to attract potential customers. I encountered two specific examples of

these techniques while at the Olympia, the “muscular bally” and “talker troopers,” which were

used at the Cytogenix Laboratories Xenadrine and the VPX- Vital Pharmaceuticals exhibits,

respectively. Before I go on, a description of the trade show in general, and its links to the freak

show, is in order.

The first notable similarity to the freak show were the number of exhibit mediators that

ran audience-interactive performances. Bogdan observes that the mediator, like the carnival

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talker (a figure of authority required to negotiate the encounter between freak and audience), was

a fixture of the “freak show” (1996, 26). Both Bogdan and Ostman maintain that the talker’s

role, which was key to the promotion of the show, was to stand outside the entrance and “spiel”

to the crowd about the attractions inside. Their job was to get the people to “step right up” and

buy a ticket, often using exaggerations and falsifications of the wonders that awaited the

passersby inside. To help attract the crowd and enhance credibility, the talker often had a

“ballyhoo,” or “bally,” which was a short, free show outside of the actual exhibit prior to ticket

sales (Ostman 125). A scantily-clad woman with a python around her neck, for instance, or

colorfully dressed people with conspicuous physical deformities are basic examples of the bally

that would serve the purpose of attracting audiences to pay for admission to the main attraction

(Bogdan 1996, 27).

Before Sandow gained popularity and notoriety, in fact, Ziegfeld, like P.T. Barnum and

the “freak show” talkers after him, played the role of “talker.” Ziegfeld would have called out

some type of outlandish muscle-related bally, as exemplified in The Great Ziegfeld, asking

potential paying customers to “Step right up for the strongest man in the world,” and barking out

adages describing his strongman who could “juggle pianos,” “play marbles with cannonballs,”

and “lift ten times his own weight with one arm.” While exploring the Mr. Olympia exhibition, I

was amazed by the way the practices of the trade show nostalgically played upon the practices of

the ballyhoo—the scantily-clad bodies and “freak show” talkers foremost among them—to

entice those in attendance.

My first encounter with a muscular “talker” and his bally happened moments after

entering the exhibition. Walking through the archway from the lobby into the 400,000 square-

foot convention center, I was met by ten nearly naked, life-sized cut outs of the best male

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Olympia competitors positioned at the foot of the steps leading down to the exhibit. These cut-

outs resembled hypermuscular Greek gods, positioned as they were in a manner similar to Greek

columns. Their placement welcomed the thousands of visitors as they descended the stairs to the

exhibits. As I entered, I immediately experienced the muscle-related bally coming from the loud

speakers at the Cytogenix Laboratories “Xenadrine” exhibit. A thick English/Austrian accent

echoed:

It’s time to take off your shirt! Who wants a T-shirt? You have to put it on,

otherwise—you know—it has no meaning. You have to wear it. It’s time to take

off the shirt. I’m not going to throw them out to you any more. You have to get

up here on stage and take off you shirt and put this one on! Come on, let’s go at

this—man to man. Who has the guts to get up, here take off your shirt and get a

free Xenadrine shirt? (Kickinger, “Xenadrine” exhibit performance)

The improvised pitch in thick, semi-broken English was being delivered by the built body with a

microphone from the stage of the exhibit. Being taken aback by the muscle mania that had just

unfolded before my eyes, it took a moment to realize that the authoritative muscular body on

stage was an individual I have known and followed ever since I started bodybuilding in my early

teens: the Austrian-born Roland Kickinger, a television and movie actor, fitness model/promoter

and bodybuilder. He resembled the one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger, both in his facial

features, and his muscularity, proportion and size. Kickinger is known for being a

Schwarzenegger look-alike. He played Arnold in the 2005 TV movie See Arnold Run, with

more recent recognition coming from playing the role of the T-800 Terminator character

originated by Schwarzenegger in the 2009 movie Terminator Salvation.

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With respect to freak show moderators, Kickinger assumed a dual responsibility, being

both the talker and the actual “ballyhoo.” On this particular day, the shirtless Roland used his

own body to promote the Xenadrine fat-burning bodybuilding supplement. Instead of asking the

spectators to step right up and purchase a ticket to see some extraordinary sight, Roland’s bally

asked the audience to step right up and participate in a “bally-like” experience where they, too,

would become the “ballyhoo” alongside Roland. Ostman maintains that, in the nineteenth

century, the bally gave the crowd enough of a taste of the real thing to stimulate their appetite for

more, which could be satisfied inside the actual exhibit “for a small price.” He also insists that,

while shouting the bally and delivering a “steady stream of words, modulating his words up and

down the scale,” the talker would refer to the human oddities on the platform, or identities on a

banner behind him, describing their actions and their marvelous physical wonderments that

would be visible inside (126). I do not suggest Kickinger used exaggeration and falsification, as

the nineteenth-century “freak show” talkers described by Bogdan and Ostman would have done.

I do propose, however, that the Xenadrine exhibit and Roland’s bally were intended to stimulate

crowd response in a very similar way. The Cytogenix Laboratories Company anticipated an

audience that would gather to see the famous, shirtless Kickinger, who would stimulate the

consumers’ appetite to purchase the company’s products.

The goal of Kickinger’s bally was to stimulate the audience’s desire to respond and

participate on stage, side by side, with the famous bodybuilder/actor. A number of other fit,

attractive muscular bodies were on the stage with Roland to assist him. The assistants served a

function similar to which the human oddities on the platform, or identities on a banner behind the

“freak show” talker, would have provided. As Kickinger invited willing participants on stage,

the other exhibit workers assisted in the improvised encounters, but also represented the product

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and company that had helped develop their lean, muscular bodies. This experience was geared

toward all potential consumers, fans of Roland, and fans of the sport of bodybuilding.

In the short time that I was able to experience this encounter, a diverse variety of

participants jumped at the chance to share the stage with Roland, including myself. Prior to my

personal moment next to one of my favorite muscular icons, a stocky, thick Hispanic powerlifter

shot through the crowd to expose his large and powerful, yet definition-less tattooed upper body

for a chance to pose next to Roland. I followed immediately after him to stand beside Roland, to

reveal what work, dedication, weight training and my personal use of Xenadrine had created.

Shortly after I finished, an attractive, six-foot-tall woman from Denmark with long blond hair

jumped up on stage wearing a tight white tank top. Within seconds, she ripped off her shirt,

exposing ripped abdominal muscles and a toned body barely covered by her tiny black bikini.

“Blowing away” the crowd as well as Roland by her spontaneity, Amazon-like beauty and toned

body, she quickly smiled, thanked Roland and exited the stage. She then quickly made her way

through the crowd, back to her large, muscular male partner as they continued to maneuver their

baby carriage through the exhibit. I would have many similar experiences throughout the three-

day event. (Video clip of this experience is available at

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1155193246318&comments=#/video/?id=142232

1378)

The improvised stage interaction with Roland and the Cytogenix Laboratories Xenadrine

exhibit demonstrates a true muscular freak in action. The six foot four inch, nearly three hundred

pound Kickinger had an amazing career as a competitive bodybuilder. Nearing the age of forty,

however, the competitive stage seems a distant memory. Roland has found other settings, as did

Schwarzenegger in retirement from the sport, to display his freakish muscularity. Although he is

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no longer competitive in the sport, he is still recognized as an elite bodybuilder. As I argue in

the introduction, “bodybuilder” is a term and category that is wide-ranging; it includes more than

just those muscular bodies exhibited on the competitive stage. If the bodybuilder is a

representation of a contemporary freak, as Lindsay suggests, then this example further

demonstrates that muscular freaks can exist beyond the competitive stage, including those who

may never have competed. With each of the three participant examples recognized above,

Kickinger kindly commented on their built/self-made muscular aspects as they jumped up on

stage and exposed their bodies. Roland recognized the Hispanic man’s body-type as a physically

brawny power lifter; he praised my fully developed chest; and, after a few moments of

speechlessness, he commented on the beautiful Danish woman’s exposed tightly toned body,

admitting that she “made his day!” Each individual became not only a spectator/participant

within the exhibit, but a part of the muscular “ballyhoo” that was promoting the Cytogenix

Laboratories Xenadrine exhibit and, subliminally, the muscular body.

The next example follows a similar trajectory but takes a slightly different path in that it

analyzes the fit female body. Chapter two suggested that representations of fit muscular female

monsters/mutants do exist in such characters as presented in the X-men movies. In the following

pages, I direct my attention to one of the most notable fin-de-siecle female freaks—the so-called

“Circassian Beauty”—as an analog for the contemporary “muscular beauty”.

Nineteenth-century popular perception alleged that Circassian Beauties were the purest

and most beautiful white women in the world. The invention of the Circassian as a category can

be traced back to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German comparative anatomist and the first

physical anthropologist. In 1775, Blumenbach undertook a major revision of human

classification through the examination of skulls. He introduced the term “Caucasian” after

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finding a strong resemblance between a skull from Caucasus (a region of Russia) and the skulls

of Germans. Convinced that all human beings had one common origin, he theorized that all

humans could trace their roots back to the Caucasus region (Bogdan, 1988, 237). With

Blumenbach’s theory as his foundation, P.T. Barnum adopted the idea of the Circassian Beauty

(named for the people of the northern Caucasus), declaring that women from the location of all

human origin were rightly the most beautiful females on earth. Barnum’s goal was to find the

most beautiful Circassians in the world to exhibit them in his American Museum. Once he

realized how hard it was to procure his desired attractions from their native land, however,

Barnum hired ethnic American immigrants to create his own Circassian Beauties (Bogdan, 1988,

238), thus creating the self-made female freak.

It was the Circassian Beauty in the 1860s, as Bogdan reminds us, who introduced and

launched the prototype of P.T. Barnum’s self-made freak. According to Bogdan:

There was nothing very unusual about the women who were exhibited as

Circassians. One of the requirements was that they be physically attractive- by

Victorian Standards. These Circassians were, in fact, indistinguishable from

thousands of other nineteenth-century women, and they existed in unlimited

supply. All there really was was the presentation, a creation that wove the history

of science together with tales of erotic intrigue from Asia Minor, current events,

and a good portion of showman hype. (1988, 237)

In theory, these beauties were something special, but, in practice, the theory rarely, if ever, held

weight.

In examining the history of these beauties, cultural studies scholar Linda Frost has

observed that the surviving photographs of these women emphasize their exoticism and

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eroticism. Usually wearing less, rather than more clothing, Frosts claims that “these women look

more like nineteenth-century pin-ups” and that the beauty was “a sexualized figure intended to

entice” (57). For Frost, the sexualized figure of the Circassian Beauty embodies sensual pleasure

and, more importantly, a tremendous sexual power that is resolutely female.

Female fitness models and fitness competitors play a large role in of the promotion of the

bodybuilding products, supplement companies, and the overall health and fitness industry

throughout the Olympia. Although female “muscular beauties” may not be comparable in form,

their function and representation contain many similarities to the self-made freak/Circassian

Beauty popular in the “freak show.” The ideal model of attraction simply called for the

Circassian Beauty to look beautiful. The contemporary muscular female fitness model or

competitor’s role in performance and exhibition, however, far exceeds just being “beautiful.”

Whereas P.T. Barnum created the Circassian Beauty from his imagination out of a desire for a

new attraction, “muscular beauties” create their body/identity through the personal choice of

fitness. They make the self-sacrifices and have the ability to adopt the physical, psychological

and nutritional lifestyle requirements essential to construct and maintain their lean muscular

appearance. In spite of these differences, however, there are many similarities to be found.

“Muscular beauties” are also known for “wearing less, rather than more” while working or

competing in an exhibition, emphasizing their exoticism and eroticism to promote supplements,

nutritional companies, and themselves. Undeniably, all of the “muscular beauties” at the

Olympia exhibit appeared as if they came right out of a pin-up calendar and were undoubtedly

sexualized as fit, healthy, lean and muscular figures intended to entice.

While navigating through the Olympia and passing the Vital Pharmaceuticals (VPX)

exhibit, a beautiful, brown-eyed, darkly tanned brunette with breasts nearly bursting through her

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shirt approached me. “Hey, do you wanna bang?” the lean muscular beauty asked me. Not

expecting such a direct question out of the blue, I was momentarily stunned and speechless.

Without delay, she quickly smiled and winked, then handed me a bottle of “BANG,” her

company’s new product. Readdressing the question in a slightly less-promiscuous tone, she

asked me once more, “Hey, do you want a Bang?” and proceeded to advise me of this new

break-through product that can increase strength and stamina while enhancing muscle recovery

after an intense training session. Needless to say, I did want a BANG. Captivated by her

knowledge and presentation of the product, and spellbound by her appearance, I couldn’t refuse

her offer to try this new creation.

Resembling Roland in my earlier example, the “muscular beauties” working the

exhibition had a dual function. Like the Circassian Beauty, these women emphasized their

exoticism and eroticism to entice the potential new customer/members of the exhibit to the

particular booths that they were working. And these “muscular beauties” attracted just as many

women as men. But they were more than just sexualized figures. Although many of them wore

very revealing outfits—and sometimes unbelievably provocative clothing—they did so also to

reveal their “artful bodies,” while providing nutritional information about diet and

supplementation, discussing exercise regimens and training techniques, and, in many cases,

running events and directing the exhibits. The muscular VPX beauties were responsible for all

of these functions. As the above-mentioned encounter demonstrates, though, their purpose was

to specifically attract the male attendees, BANG’s target customers, in order to offer a sample of

the new product while providing pertinent nutritional information for both pre-workout stamina

and post-workout recovery. They asked potential customers to enter their contact information

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for future promotional offers on VPX products while simultaneously enticing the men to

participate in the company’s physical challenge in order to win additional products.

Within minutes of accepting the BANG, I was suited with a VPX “BANG” promotional

shirt and coaxed onto the VPX stage to participate in the improvisational

performance/competition. Once a number of males volunteered, the “muscular beauties”

assumed the role of moderator/“talker” and began to run the competition/performance. Placed

among a number of other exhibit spectators, we were quickly suited up for an improvised weight

lifting competition in an attempt to win one hundred dollars’ worth of free VPX products and the

possibility of being photographed for the company’s website. Each participant was handed

another bottle of BANG and was then asked to partner up in order to compete as a team of two.

The rules were explained very simply:

1. Each team member would have the opportunity to perform as many non-stop bicep

curls as they could with an eighty-pound barbell.

2. The team with the most bicep curls would win over one hundred dollars’ worth of

VPX supplements, and

3. Any winner or participant may have his picture taken for future company

promotional use.

A handful of the fit “muscular beauties,” holding thousands of dollars worth of VPX products,

gathered on the stage located near the center of the entire exhibit, while the host began to run the

event over the microphone. Calling out to the attendees, the host asked them to “step right up”

for the next VPX-sponsored event. “Muscular beauties” escorted two teams of two to the stage

as the host introduced them and explained the rules to the gathering crowd. Team after team

competed as the talker called out and the audience continued to gather. After each participant’s

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attempt at the endurance lift, the host congratulated him on his success while reminding the

gathering crowd that they also could participate for the same opportunity to win if they came

back later that afternoon for another restaging of the event.

As “freak show talkers,” these muscular beauties talked up the VPX exhibit, but they

were also, like Roland in my earlier example, part of the “ballyhoo” alongside the willing

participants. This event not only promoted VPX, it provided the willing participants the

opportunity to display their own muscular development and their passion for building a muscular

body. Like the “freak show” moderator, the VPX “muscular beauties” attracted prospective

customers by giving them a taste of the potential endurance and stamina BANG provided. As

the “ballyhoo” itself, they exhibited their beautiful muscular bodies to attract a diverse array of

muscular participant bodies who were then given the opportunity to exhibit their own individual

muscular development and physical ability.

For my own part, experiencing the event and becoming part of the ballyhoo was

remarkable. I was fully engulfed by an excess of muscular female fitness models, muscle

supplements, weights and barbells, not to mention a continually growing audience. Approaching

the lift and staring out at the crowd, an overwhelming surge of adrenaline rushed through me.

Below me stood my six foot, two hundred and ten pound teammate, who was grasping his arms

and grimacing from the pain produced by the intensive lift he had completed moments before.

Realizing the size of the crowd that had gathered, fears of lifting the weight an inadequate

number of times and appearing weak ran through my head. However, within seconds, the host

was announcing, “On your mark. Get set. Lift!” Immediately, the focus took over and I began

the lift. Tuning out the surroundings, I made it to the fiftieth consecutive curl before the fatigue

began to set in. Struggling as I continued, my knees and legs began shaking like a cartoonish

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version of a weak, skinny old man standing outside in the cold in a wet pair of boxers. Whether

from the adrenaline rush or the BANG coursing through my veins, I managed to make it to my

one hundred and twelfth repetition before dropping the barbell and collapsing from exhaustion.

(Video clip of this experience is available at

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1631268&op=1&o=global&view=global&subj=1211

845576&id=699573550#/video/?of=1422321378).

As I gathered myself, my teammate stood below the stage, laughing at the shaken

spectacle he had just witnessed. Ironically, as he congratulated me, sipping from his bottle of

BANG, I could tell that his previous intense arm pain seemed to have subsided, but I

immediately realized the amount of pain that I would soon encounter. The massive amount of

lactic acid that had just built up in my arms would create an intense pump, which

Schwarzenegger had once so gloriously described, making my biceps feel like they would

explode. However, it appeared that my teammate, who had previously been overcome by the

pleasurable pain of the pump, had been alleviated. His relief possibly came with help from his

BANG, providing me with hope that the ensuing pain would only be momentary.

As the muscular freak show demonstrates, the concept of “freak show” is not dead.

Dennett suggests that the new format—muscular in this case—is filled, for the most part, not by

born freaks, but by the novelty performers and self-made freaks. She believes, however, that

contemporary “freak shows” are less effective than the original, “because self-made freaks fail to

amaze the modern spectator.” She also believes that many individuals can be, in some aspect,

considered a self-made freak, and that “normal” individuals and “self-made freaks” interact on a

daily basis without even realizing the social differences. Dennett cites the television talk show as

a visible example, “an environment in which dysfunctional human beings parade themselves in

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front of an audience” (320). She suggests that many audience members are more shocked than

amazed with their potential inner monologue being, “I’m so glad that’s not me!” (20). She

suggests that these self-made freaks on the platform are not very different from the people we see

with multiple tattoos or piercings at the “downtown mall” or “on the subway” because “our

culture has developed a very vocal subculture that believes that the body is a personal canvas to

be redesigned as the owner sees fit” (320). While society has grown accustomed to men and

women developing our bodies as our personal canvases, the “self-made” muscular freak is very

different from the majority of tattooed or pierced people found at malls or on public

transportation on any given occasion. Unlike other forms of “self-made freakery,” muscular

freaks must constantly work at maintaining their “freak” status and they do, indeed, amaze the

modern spectator. Tattoos and piercings are easily maintained and relatively permanent, but

muscular freaks must constantly work out, eat properly, take the right amount of supplements

and get the right amount of sleep to sustain their status.

Dennett believes the self-made freaks of contemporary “freak shows” fail to amaze the

modern spectator. This may be the case in some areas, but not with respect to the “muscular

freak show.” Most of the time, the spectators are completely amazed and many times, are the

most important part of the exhibit, as the two examples above display. Audience members not

only observe, but many willing individuals also participate and become part of the show. While

the participant/observers are not the specific muscular self-made freaks on display, there is a

certain level of awareness that willing participants are part of the spectacle. In my personal

experience in the Roland example, there were definite moments when a feeling of transference of

idolization came over me. Standing and posing beside this enormous “muscular freak” for just a

few seconds offered momentary stares of awe from the gathering spectators. While the majority

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of stares were directed toward Roland and his immense muscular makeup, each participant also

got stares in comparison to the muscular elite with whom they were posing. Although it was rare

for a participant to compare to Kickinger’s elite level of muscularity, it did happen, and, on

those, occasions the muscular participants also received a glorified gaze.

In the second VPX example, however, at least for me, the immediate concerns of the

moment (being “adequate” in strength and endurance) momentarily trumped any type of meta-

awareness. While I cannot speak for the entire group of VPX participants, after the initial

adrenaline rush wore off, I became aware of the role my spectacle played. The goal for the VPX

event was to lift the weight as many times as possible. While the action alone only provided a

limited spectacle, being positioned next to a “muscular beauty” counting over a microphone

intensified the spectacle and the experience. As I hit the fiftieth repetition, my muscles began to

fatigue. As the crowd continued to gather and the cheers grew louder and louder, however, the

intensity grew. I could hear shouts of “ten more” echo from the crowd. I hit the sixtieth

repetition and heard “ten more,” followed by the seventieth repetition and more shouts of “ten

more.” The eightieth and ninetieth repetition produced the same reaction—“ten more!” As the

crowd continued to gather and cheers continued to grow, I realized the significance of their

chants. The audience wanted to see the Big 100! Curling a heavy weight one hundred-plus

times became the amazing muscular spectacle of the moment. To some people, this may even

have been considered an excessive, freaky accomplishment.

Regardless of their role in each example, all of the participants participated in the

muscular ballyhoo. The small role we played added to the overall events each company was

staging to attract more customers. In the Xenadrine event, Roland shared the stage with

participants willing to display their self-made muscle. In the VPX event, the moderator

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facilitated a short, free show that demonstrated the endurance BANG supposedly gave each

participant, as well as how great the product was as a post-workout recovery drink. The old

“step right up” adage was still in full effect for these events and throughout the entire exhibition.

Regardless of the role or specific purpose of each muscular body working throughout the event,

they had one thing in common: their erotic and exotic physical muscular development

sensationalized the entire experience. The Olympia was, for all intents and purposes, a

bodybuilding/health and fitness promotional event. In this event, the muscular bodies, both

working the event and experiencing it as spectators, further concretized the social acceptance of

“muscle in the mainstream.”

Rage in the Cage: Muscles on Display

The muscular monster identity is such a common convention in muscle magazines that it

has spilled into the exhibits at muscular tradeshows. The pages of many current muscle

magazines provide advertisements that promote company products that market the “monstrous”

results offered by their use, and endorsing the potential to “unleash the beast within.” One

instance is found in the September 2008 issue of Muscle and Fitness magazine, where the

company “Maximum Human Performance” (MHP) promotes its product “DREN” with the catch

line, “One pill will transform your body and alter your mind” (DREN). The ad displays a

massively developed bodybuilder holding a glowing green pill with a set of illuminated

fluorescent green eyes staring back at the reader. The green pill suggests a catalyst that will

unlock something monstrous, while the green eyes further hint at a transformation into a

potential monstrous identity, similar to such a monster as the Hulk or Mr. Hyde. Some

companies’ names themselves propose a monstrous transformation. In the same 2008 Muscle

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and Fitness issue, the company Animal simply ran advertisements with silhouettes of massively

muscular men that suggested an animal-type of transcendence that would make users of their

products “Indomitable” (Animal). The April 2009 issue of Flex provides advertisements for the

company Beast Sports Nutrition, as well as the company Monster Milk, whose monstrous names

say it all.

It is also a common trend to find monstrous identities plastered on the covers of many of

these magazines. The cover of the September 2008 issue of Muscle and Fitness promotes six-

foot six-inch, two-hundred-and-ninety pound WWE professional wrestler Batista as “An animal

in the ring, A monster in the gym,” while the April 2009 cover of the same magazine provides a

physically different type of muscular monster. This cover displays the legendary Bruce Lee,

whose famous nickname, the “Dragon,” was monstrous in its own right. Unlike Batista, Lee’s

physical size was not the essence of monstrous designation; it was his physical aggressiveness

that lay hidden beneath the frame of a smaller, physically unimposing individual.

Monthly muscle magazines definitely provide a variety of monstrous types of muscular

classifications used in marketing products and company images. This was no different at the

Olympia trade show—which was merely a live extension of what is common in print and on the

movie screen. Monster exhibits that portrayed the muscular body marked by a “caged” theme or

some type of fence convention was a common site at the Olympia. These exhibits suggest that

what exists within the caged setting was more than just a muscular body, but something

monstrous (i.e., in need of containment for the sake of public safety). Some of these exhibits

reflected the monstrous themes used in magazine advertisements, while other caged exhibits

functioned differently. Regardless of the form or function, the image of the cage in association

with the muscular body utilized monster or beastly identities as a popular marketing strategy.

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The concept of caged muscle is not a new custom, either. One of modern history’s most

notable muscular caged spectacles involved none other than Eugene Sandow. As historian David

L. Chapman reports, however, its inception lies in a botched plan. What had originally been

billed as a “No-Holds-Barred” fight to the finish between an 850-pound California grizzly and a

man-eating lion was soon halted by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to

Animals. Getting wind of the canceled fight, Sandow’s manager, Ziegfeld, reportedly wasted no

time in promoting Sandow as the substitute for the grizzly, since “there was no law against that”

(85). Chapman summarizes by declaring:

Much has been written about the strongman’s lion fight, but very little of it can be

believed, and the trail of falsehoods and exaggeration can be traced directly to

Sandow and Ziegfeld. Naturally, Sandow’s version of the fight shows him to

have been heroic and high-minded, but the newspapers tell a different story. (85)

This is a clear example of caged beastly muscle, despite the consequences of the actual events

and outcome of the bout. What was billed as “The Event of the Century” contributed to the

developmental stages of a model that has been adapted and used repeatedly over the past one

hundred years in promoting muscle and attempting to tap into society’s fascination with it.

The idea of caged muscle, of course, does not begin with Sandow. A basic survey of

early Roman history or a quick review of the Academy Award winning movie, Gladiator,

provides some of the earliest examples of caged muscle. Ancient Roman audiences were

enthralled by gladiator battles. Roman history offers countless stories of slaves that were

chained and caged, then trained as gladiators forced to fight to the death amongst other gladiators

or ferocious wild animals. The custom was brutal and inhumane by today’s standards, and

eventually condemned by the early Christian church; nevertheless, it was once one of the most

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popular forms of entertainment at the peak of Roman civilization. Although the stakes today

have lessened dramatically, the fascination of popularized bouts that place men in rings or cages

and seek to crown the last man standing as the winner is a time-honored tradition.

The Olympia was no exception in presenting “cages” of various forms used for the

marketability of muscle. One in particular was a cage used for full contact extreme fighting.

The cage belonged to the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Champion) association, which is a relatively

new and popular form of contact sport. The name basically explains their premise. In short,

UFC bouts are all-out, full-contact matches where competitors engage in battle using their fists,

hands, feet, knees, elbows and heads to either knockout their opponent or cause them to submit.

The UFC, in fact, may be framed as a contemporary non-lethal (thus far) rendition of a Roman

gladiator fight. No fights were staged at the Olympia, however. The cage was merely used as a

set piece or backdrop for the association’s exhibit. In the cage and the fenced-in exhibit, star

UFC fighters were on hand to meet fans, promote the sport, and provide information about

coming events and fights. Of all the caged exhibits at the tradeshow, the UFC cage exuded the

most physically aggressive, violent, animalistic vibe, promoting and glorifying the physically

violent nature of their sport. Other cages exhibited less violent, less malevolent acts. The

majority were actual supplement companies that were piggy backing off of their popular

magazine product advertisements, positioning the caged theme as an extension of their products

and identities.

In these exhibits, the cage marked a moment, an idea or a reality. Here as well,

Baudrillard’s concepts of representation and phases of images can play an instrumental part in

positioning the image of the cage within an event. Baudrillard suggests, “Representation, stems

from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real” and that there are “successive

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phases of the image.” Baudrillard lists the phases of the image as follows: “it is the reflection of

a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound

reality; and it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (6). The

UFC cage can be understood as the first successive phase of the image, with its representation

stemming from the equivalence of the real thing. The cage was constructed in the exact manner

with the exact dimensions it would have if it were to be used in an actual bout. It reflected the

reality that most people only get to see on television. Baudrillard would most likely suggest that

the UFC cage image, as in the first phase of the image, was a “good appearance.” Its

representation was “of sacramental order” (6).

The remainder of the cage exhibits seemed to meet the criteria of the fourth phase of

Baudrillard’s idea of the image—having no relation to reality whatsoever. One of the best

examples was the cage exhibit by the supplement company MHP. The exhibit was a metaphor

for their product “DREN,” described above. It was, first and foremost, set up to function on two

levels. It was first and foremost a storefront placed among the number of other company

exhibits there to promote their company and new products. Nevertheless, directly behind the

wall that distinguished the storefront was the caged display, also open to spectators. The

division strategically demarcated the boundary between the front and back stage area. Cultural

theorist Dean MacCannell proposes that it is always possible that “what is taken to be entry into

a back region is really entry into a front region that has been totally set up in advance for

touristic visitation” (MacCannell 101). Here, the front and back dichotomy of the MHP exhibit

simply becomes ideal poles of the tradeshow members’ experience. Although both spaces were

set up to function separately, each attracted touristic attention to the other. The backstage,

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however, seemed to be the main draw of the attraction, which then funneled attendees to the

front for further product exploration.

The backstage area was caged on all four sides with a small space left open to enter

behind the storefront. An Olympic bench and barbell were positioned in the middle of the cage

with hundreds of pounds of weights scattered on the floor. A number of MHP representatives

were positioned within the cage to work the exhibit, entice participants, and ensure their safety.

MHP had both male and female reps working the event. The majority of the male

representatives, however, exhibited a slightly different body type than most of the lean muscular

bodies who worked other exhibits. The male MHP reps’ body types were more along the lines of

a power lifter/strongman. They had large amounts of muscle, but, unlike the competitive

bodybuilders who focus on muscular development, symmetry and definition, these bodies

suggested more of a focus on immense size, strength and power, visually appropriate for

denizens of a cage, perhaps, rather than those up on the competitive stage. Although slightly

visibly different, however, their bodies had the same function as those of the competitive

bodybuilders—to promote the company and products while running the exhibit and ensuring the

safety of the participants.

Unlike the previous Xenadrine and VPX examples detailed earlier, the MHP exhibit did

not rely on the freak show convention of the “talker” and “bally.” The caged exhibit did not

feature a well-known spokesperson or attractive fitness models handing out free products or

calling out for participants; it simply had a bench press and state-of-the-art stereo pumping out

intense workout music. MHP let the exhibit speak for itself. The concept was very simple: test

your strength. There were no winners or losers; the exhibit simply posed a few straightforward

questions to those who passed by: How strong are you? Do you want to find out? The rules

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were simple: men would attempt to bench press their bodyweight as many times as possible,

while women were allowed to attempt to bench half of their weight. When the participant was

done, all he or she got was the satisfaction of knowing his or her current level of strength, and

the fact that, for a few moments, they dominated the cage.

At first, one may think that this type of exhibit would be much less appealing than the

exhibits that offered prizes, free supplements and personal contact with fitness stars, but this was

not, in fact, the case. By the time I came across the MHP display, there was a line of participants

waiting along one side of the cage to enter. The remainder of the cage was surrounded by

spectators at least three rows deep, trying to get a glimpse of the action. Despite the difference in

form from the other exhibits and its relative lack of promotional handouts or celebrity

spokespeople, the MHP exhibit had the same appeal in that the participants were permitted a

chance to put themselves on display. The cage also played a major factor. It suggested that there

was something different, an “Otherness” that waited inside. This cage, unlike the one at the UFC

display, bore no relation to an actuality. Baudrillard explains that, in a case like this, “When the

real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of

origin and of signs of reality—a plethora of truth […]. Escalation of the truth, of lived

experience […]” (97). In the case of the MHP exhibit, the cage was no longer what it normally

represents. In general, a cage is a structure used to lock up or detain things of “Otherness” such

as criminals, attack dogs, wild animals or monsters. These identities may be associated with fear

and danger. Here, however, MHP provided the opportunity for the spectator to enter a cage and

let the nostalgia of the exhibit take over, momentarily displaying his or her monstrously

muscular feats of strength.

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The exhibit suggested that an individual could enter the cage and unleash the animal or

monster locked inside. For a few short moments, participants were permitted the opportunity to

display their “Otherness” (their myth of muscular origin of sorts) for themselves and those who

gathered around, before returning to their normal selves and exiting the cage. The cage provided

distance and a location for a lived experience. While it does suggest a “safe distance” for those

who watched from the outside that which existed within, the cage ultimately provided theme,

setting, and character for the exhibition. Without the cage, the exhibit would have simply been a

bench placed in the middle of the floor. The cage provoked questions. As spectators passed by,

they wondered: What was inside? What does it represent? What’s going to happen? Regardless

of the muscularity and body types of those who accepted the challenge, all who entered the cage

automatically came to embody the characteristics of the exhibit. They became an escalation of

their truth in relation to any of the caged “Otherness” normally associated with this reality. In

essence, for a short period they fed into the nostalgia of the cage and they become a monster.

The relationship between monster and muscle is played out in a variety of forms and

today the combined idea of muscle and monster is ubiquitous in society. The most popular and

evident forms are found in Hollywood movies and muscle magazines. Examples like Fussell’s

writings, described in chapter two, prove that muscle can be monstrous in other locations as well.

While the term “monster” will necessarily always maintain some relationship to fear and terror,

possibly along with disgust and repulsion, there is ample evidence for understanding the meaning

of the word in a whole new way. Whether it is an iconic muscular image, the monstrous process

of building and developing muscle, or a representation that suggests some type of “unknown”

character, the term “monster” and some of its synonyms (animal, beast, mutant) is now

recognized as a term that glorifies and honors when associated with muscle. While the

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supernatural monsters will continue to make terrifying entrances and exits on the stages of the

world, the muscular version will also appear, inspiring both respect and emulation.

The previous illustrations suggest only a few examples of the current muscular repertoire,

but it is evident that the muscular freak and monster exist not only in historic photos and films,

as well as current muscle magazines, but in muscular tradeshows as well. The 2009 Arnold

Classic corroborates the existence of these images beyond the Olympia. Only five months after

the September 2008 Olympia, the same companies came out to represent their muscular stakes in

the health and fitness industry. The Arnold Classic also provided a site where the “muscular

bally” and the cage further represented markers for the muscular freak and monster. The

muscular freak and monster has been a staple in the muscle magazines at least since

Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno first burst upon the bodybuilding scene in the 1970s. Ferrigno still

attends “The Olympia” and “The Arnold,” promoting books and posters of his former monstrous

“Hulking” self. I was fortunate t shake his hand at each event. While I cannot speak from first-

hand experience, considering the sweep of the muscular body’s historic trajectory, I can only

assume that the muscular freak and monster ideal has been a part of the live muscular repertoire

for quite some time. Both “The Olympia” and “The Arnold” have been around for over thirty

years, and if, by chance, the muscular freak and monster ideal has not been a part the entire time,

it was in full effect in 2008 and thus far in 2009. In other words, even if the muscular freak and

monster cannot be easily traced through the entire history of the tradeshows, their cultural

significance in the present, as I hope to have demonstrated, is worthy of critical attention.

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Conclusion

This study examines a variety of extraordinary muscular bodies. Just as anomalous

individuals were showcased as “freaky” or “monstrous” characters during the peak of “freak

show” entertainments in the nineteenth century, muscular bodies fascinate audiences with their

own physical human difference. While it is common to see excessively muscular bodybuilders

labeled as “freaks” or “monsters,” I have shown that these terms can refer to a wide range of

muscular body types. Muscular bodies associated with “freak” and “monster” and found at

contemporary adaptations of the “freak show” have been a part of the social narrative for quite

some time. Whether muscular bodies compel a healthy lifestyle, inspire the building and

development of muscle, or motivate personal change through strict regulation of bodily practices,

they undoubtedly stir our imagination as “an affirmation of physiological dissidence.” The

examples in my study demonstrate that “muscular freak” and “monster” performances exist

beyond the competitive bodybuilding stage, and, as such, stoke a public desire for muscle. As I

argue in my introduction, “muscular freaks” and “monsters” can be more than just those select

individuals who build excessively muscular bodies for exhibition in competitions and muscle

magazines. Those may be the prime examples, but any person who dedicates the time and

energy necessary to build a more muscular body is a bodybuilder, and can represent a positively

acceptable form of muscular “freakery” and “monstrousness.”

The viewing of physically different “freaky” and “monstrous” bodies can be traced to

some of the earliest moments in history, but the modern exhibitions of human anomalies were

short-lived, basically vanishing by the 1940s. Due, perhaps, to a growing public distaste for

what it considered exploitational practices and competition from other forms of entertainment,

but also to the medicalization of human difference, “freaks,” “freak shows,” and other exhibits of

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human physical difference fell out of popular acceptance before the mid-twentieth century. The

muscular body, however, has reintroduced the discarded idea of human anomaly exhibitions.

Through medical and nutritional advancements, bodies can be muscularly constructed into

“freakish” and “monstrous” proportions. Muscular body competitions, movies, televisions

programs, and tradeshows constantly bombard society with images that often epitomize

anomalous muscular perfection. While scholars provide various examples of “self-made freaks”

or “freak shows” in contemporary culture, the muscular body stands out as unique.

Representations of muscular bodies have appropriated the terms “freak” and “monster” and

reframed them as positive attributes that voice the cultural desire to be fit, muscular, and

“different.”

Although I’ve shown that the contemporary implications of the terms “freak” and

“monster” may be different than those of the “freak show” days, a striking similarity emerges

across all cases of muscular “Otherness” I have discussed throughout this study: each case

demonstrates a connection to scientific or medical discourse and/or practice. In the nineteenth

century, natural science and “freak shows” were complicit with one another. The display of

human anomalies confirmed the medical and social discourses delimiting expectations of the

normal human body. This is less obvious with muscle exhibitions today, but the connections are

there.

Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, little was known about genetics and the

endocrine system. At best, people with physical, mental and behavioral differences were

classified and displayed as human anomalies. At worst, they were labeled “freaks” and

“monsters” and driven from towns and villages or destroyed. However, by the turn of the

century, the eugenics movement had taken root and the classification of physical human

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difference and anomaly began to change. Bogdan has charted the changes to the social

construction of freaks during this time, pointing out that as people with physical and mental

anomalies came under the control of medical professionals, many were isolated from the public.

Physically and mentally different individuals were alleged to have inferior genes that, if not

controlled, threatened to weaken the breeding stock (Bogdan 34, 1996). Thus, medicalization

transformed the physically anomalous in public consciousness from public attractions as “human

oddities,” “freaks,” or “monsters,” to sick people suffering from some clinically identifiable

syndrome requiring surgery, prosthetics, or sterilization. Once medically identified as a “sick

person,” the former freak was no longer to be exhibited for entertainment and profit in public.

They were now, however, exhibited, studied, and cared for by doctors, interns, and specialists in

hospitals and clinics while being displayed in medical textbooks or labs as a form of medical

theatre.

On the other side of the coin, it was a very common practice for “freak show”

impresarios to ask scientists to authenticate the origin and credibility of a human exhibit.

Scientists’ commentaries would appear in newspapers and publicity pamphlets, and some

exhibits were even presented to scientific societies for discussion and speculation (Bogdan, 1996,

29). Ostman’s essay describes showmen playing up the scientific angle in a photo of a “talker”

dressed in a nurse’s uniform, trying to convince the patrons that she was stating only medical

facts (Ostman 125). In a similar manner, Gould and Pyle’s nine-hundred-page catalog, which

comprised thousands of anomalies and medical curiosities, was derived from exhaustive research

of the medical literature.

The connections between freakery and scientific or medical discourse are still very

present today. As I discussed in chapter two, the movie Junior, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger,

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revolved around science and medicine. Indeed, the premise, plot complications, and humorous

situations were grounded in events specific to the scientific laboratory. As unbelievable as it

might seem, bodybuilding and the health and fitness industry are completely dependent on

science, technology, and new medical supplement breakthroughs.

Bodybuilding is a sport based on the science of nutrition, where bodybuilders rank diet as

“90 to 98 percent” of the pre-contest preparation in terms of importance for competition (Bolin

189). However, there is no exact formula for bodybuilders to follow in order to become the best.

Each builder must undergo a process of personal self-discovery in learning the individual

nutritional requirements necessary to developing and manipulating his or her body. Of course,

there are always nutritional guidelines to be followed, and Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno have

provided some of the best.

Just as freak shows provided medical publicity pamphlets to authenticate an exhibit,

muscle magazines such as Weider’s Muscle and Fitness and Flex consistently feature multiple-

page “Ad Reports” detailing individual case studies and the scientific make-up and potential

results of fitness products. For instance, in the January 2009 issue of Muscle & Fitness, an ad for

Xenadrine, the company discussed in chapter three, suggests that, through its “powerful new

formula,” individuals “can defy the laws of physiology,” keeping their “six-pack abs 365 days of

the year” (Xenadrine). The representatives for each company throughout the Olympia assumed a

scientific role as well, as they promoted company products, provided advice on training and diet

regimen, caloric intake and supplement consumption, and the required amount of rest and

recovery time to develop a healthy, muscular body. Because of this aspect of the tradeshow,

even the product representatives in the exhibits serve as nutritional liaisons.

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This study also begins to chart the fascination of muscular performance centered on

spectacle, comedy and difference. Beginning at the end of the twentieth century, we began to

witness a particularly intriguing manifestation of the muscular body in popular culture. Not only

is the muscular body celebrated for its strength, power, might, force, dynamism and vigor, but, if

viewers look closely enough, they can see muscle is also often displayed and celebrated for its

humor and abnormal “Otherness.” When we consider the sheer onslaught of muscular media, it

becomes clear that this particular presentation of “Otherness” has resolved itself into a successful

sub-genre of the muscular “freak” and “monster,” one that is focused on comedic spectacle and

scenarios. Many of the performances discussed herein are examples of this emergent sub-genre,

which I am calling “Funny Muscles.”

In actuality, each example discussed throughout this document offers aspects of

spectacle, comedy, and of course, muscular difference. Ziegfeld’s outrageous “bally” had a

comedic appeal: could Sandow really juggle pianos or play marbles with cannon balls? Not

likely. It was Ziegfeld’s humorous advertisements that harnessed the public’s attention and

directed it toward Sandow’s spectacle, which was the main draw of the attraction. Through

Ziegfeld’s impressive management, Sandow’s reputation for a supremely muscular and robust

manhood and amazing feats of strength and body control not only preceded him from

performance to performance and town to town, but from country to country and continent to

continent.

While Pumping Iron focused on the emerging underground bodybuilding subculture, it

was the immense spectacles witnessed in the gym and on the stage, as well as the charisma and

comic interaction between those in the film, that also gave the movie a cult following. In point

of fact, the filmmakers, to pull audiences in, generated some of the most sensational and

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outrageous moments in the film. Schwarzenegger explains in Iron Insights (Pumping Iron DVD

extra) that the movie was not a documentary, but a “docu-drama,” and the goal was to add

characterization to the identities in the film in order to make the project more interesting. While

many of the elements of bodybuilding portrayed in the movie were true, such as the training,

diet, and competition, Schwarzenegger states “certain things were created in order to make it

more interesting, because it was very clear to us that the only way we could raise the money for

the movie […] was to make it more dramatic.” The filmmakers and bodybuilders created

moments as they went along to add to the comedy and spectacle in the scenes from bodybuilding

life that took place outside the gym and offstage. As the filming progressed, Schwarzenegger

clarifies, “ I made up a lot of this stuff because I felt that was the way that you got attention.”

One of the best examples is Schwarzenegger’s description of “the pump” and its comparison to

the act of coming during sex, a moment of the film I discussed in chapter one.

In Iron Insights, Schwarzenegger comes clean. With a sheepish grin and an adolescent

chuckle, he explains that there really is no comparison: the two are completely different. He

states, “You better get both—the pump and the coming.” In the DVD extras, Schwarzenegger

goes on to provide insight into a number of additional scenes where the “drama” of the film was

structured to purposefully create comic moments. He believed the more sensationalistic and

outrageous the things he said, the better his chances of being quoted. The more he was quoted in

reviews and newspaper articles, the more attention the sport of bodybuilding would receive.

Writer and personal trainer Bill Phillips puts “funny muscles” into perspective. He explains,

“Before [the film], I think if you had a muscular body, that’s all you were about—the muscle, the

muscle, the muscle. But, after Pumping Iron, you could have character, charisma; you could be

funny” (Pumping Iron DVD extra). Even then, Arnold knew that “funny muscles” would sell.

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote, “Comedy is to do good through laughter; but not

through derision; not just to counteract those faults at which it laughs, nor simply and solely in

those persons who possess these laughable faults” (Lessing 431). Over the years, muscular

performers have broken down a number of stereotypes associated with muscle. Just because an

individual has “muscle, muscle, muscle,” it no longer makes him or her a “dumb jock” or

“musclehead.” These “meathead” characters have often been fraught with excessively laughable

“muscular” faults in comedic sketches, such as those featuring well-known Saturday Night Live

characters “Hans and Franz” with Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon in stuffed muscle suits

promising to “PUMP *clap* YOU UP!”. The comedy of these characters is based on

Schwarzenegger’s thick Austrian accent, as well as his monstrous body, which was displayed as

background cutouts in many of their sketches. However, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Hulk

Hogan, and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson are just a few of the contemporary muscular movie

stars that, upon closer attention, dismantle these stereotypes, proving that having “muscle,

muscle, muscle” doesn’t mean they can’t have character, charisma or humor (for reasons other

than being big, muscular and dumb).

Muscular individuals have provided a variety of comedic moments, especially over the

past thirty-plus years. Muscular bodies may be the only anomalous body types at which we may

acceptably gawk and stare, and, in the instance of “funny muscles,” even giggle and laugh

appropriately. In this regard, the muscular “freak” and “monster” break into territory not

traversed by even the most popular freak performances of the nineteenth century. Bogdan

explains that, although there were some cases in freak shows where humor and spectacle came

into play, it was reserved primarily for “mocking elements”:

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the direct presentation of exhibits in a humorous mode, separate from the exotic

and the aggrandized modes, never fully developed […]. Usually humor took the

form of exaggeration. The fabrication, the appearance of the freak, and the

overall presentation were so outlandish that both the talker and most in the

audience shared a sense of the ridiculous (Bogdan 1996, 32).

Lessing would most likely suggest that this type of comedy did not offer “good” through

laughter because of the physical ridicule it was based on.

It should be said that some muscular identities may still be subject to ridicule or

unwanted glares from those spectators repelled by excessive muscle. However, more palatable,

less excessively muscular bodies usually seem to draw favorable responses even from these

spectators. Lessing wrote, “It is enough for comedy that, if it cannot cure an incurable disease, it

can confirm the healthy in their health” (Lessing 431). This is a very fitting statement to

underscore comedic muscular performers who take pride in their performances, ultimately

resulting in the confirmed healthy laughter of their adoring audiences. Schwarzenegger’s Junior

best illustrates this point. His muscular performance combined the qualities of two notable

anomalous identities, a hermaphrodite and a bodybuilder, which resulted in, echoing Lessing,

comedy doing good through laughter. In Junior, the muscular freak uses “funny muscle” to

ultimately reaffirm positive values for family audiences.

Undoubtedly, this study has only scratched the surface of a number of potential topics for

future research. In this study, I chose primarily male subjects and illustrated how certain

individuals and performances have helped to establish a definite positive correlation between

muscle and the terms “freak” and “monster.” Further investigation, however, of various forms of

female muscularity and how it is portrayed offers the potential for a variety of future topics. An

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in-depth analysis of gender issues and an investigation of the differences between masculinity

and femininity in different performances of muscular bodies also offer additional future research

possibilities. Throughout the course of my research for this examination, I also found an

interesting positive relationship between the term “alien” and its muscular representations.

Following the trajectory of this thesis, an assessment of the positive correlation between muscle

and the term “alien” is another potential topic. There have been a number of “muscular alien”

performances over the past twenty years in film and television, and idea of the “muscular alien”

as a marketing tactic is also often used by supplement companies throughout muscle magazines

and even in exhibits at muscular tradeshows. The idea of the “muscular alien” was also of

definite interest; however, due to the sheer length of this document, this avenue of inquiry will

have to wait for future exploration. Of course, the sub-genre “funny muscles” is definitely topic

open to further research.

First and foremost, this study revisits and rearticulates the cultural understanding of the

term “bodybuilder.” In readdressing the definition, I have provided a term that is culturally

inclusive of any individual who strives to enhance their physical health and body composition

through a variety of forms of exercise. In doing so, I have provided a deeper understanding of

how positive aspects toward the terms “freak” and “monster” have been reclaimed by a variety

of forms of muscular bodies. While the idea of these terms being used in an honorific way is not

new, the vast number of ways the terms “freak” and “monster” have been used in conjunction

with the muscular body over the past thirty years is quite astounding. Not only are ideas of the

“muscular freaks” and “monsters” saturating film and television, these terms have had an

enormous impact in the marketability of muscularity used by a number of health and nutritional

supplement companies. Undoubtedly, excessively built muscular bodies are a form of human

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difference that suggests “freak” and “monster.” However, I have shown that when these terms

are used in relation to a variety of other types of less excessively muscular bodies, there appears

to be just as much of a deep fitness fascination with being categorized by these forms of

“Otherness.” Terms that once were used to negatively classify individuals that thrived on the

freak show stage have been commandeered as terms that honor and venerate a variety of

muscular bodies types. Never in the history of the terms “freak” and “monster” has there been

such a tactical complicity in marketing, resulting in society’s desire to be different.

Regardless of how the term bodybuilder is used in conjunction with “freak” and

“monster,” these representations of muscular bodies will constantly be in the “act of becoming,”

providing the world with multiple types of palatable muscular identities. “Freak” and “monster”

will undoubtedly remain words associated with difference. The muscular body, however, will

just as certainly maintain its transformative power by embracing these terms as affirmative

expressions denoting muscular honor. It is easy to compare the muscular “freaks” and

“monsters” to the anomalous identities of the “freak show” days in at least form and structure,

but the muscular body has moved beyond these similarities. Diana Taylor argues, “Performance

functions as vital acts of transfer, transmitting knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity

through reiterated, or what Richard Schechner has called ‘twice-behaved behavior’” (2-3). The

performance of the muscular body is an act of transfer, transmitting historic ideas into modern

forms of human “Otherness” even as it changes them for contemporary sensibilities. Today,

while the muscular “freak” and “monster” still strive for social acceptance, the muscular body is

arguably the only surviving aspect of the “freaks of human otherness” that is accepted,

celebrated and honored worldwide on such a grand scale.

116

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