Trans-corporeal bodybuilding: an exploration of the trans-corporeal relations between South African competitive male bodybuilders and their more-than-human world(s)

Martin, Jarred H

Trans-corporeal bodybuilding: an exploration of the trans-corporeal relations between South African competitive male bodybuilders and their more-than-human world(s)

Doctoral Thesis

2019

Abstract

The unique community of men’s organised competitive bodybuilding has long displayed a peculiar humanocentrism his/torically ingrained by a subcultural reliance on patriarchal, Cartesian, and Western tropes which discursively encode competitive male bodybuilders as the prototypical Hu/Man(ist) subject: disembodied and disembedded from the materiality of their bodies and their more-than-human world(s). This humanocentric bias has itself been reproduced in the taken-for-granted ways academic work on competitive male bodybuilders often reinscribes exclusionary and hierarchal relations between male bodybuilders’ subjectivities and their material bodies, as well as the more-than-human material agencies that are a necessity in the competitive building and gendered shaping of their muscle. In addressing this gap, this study adopted a feminist-inflected posthumanist approach to explore how the material agencies of South African competitive male bodybuilders’ muscle as well as their more-than-human world(s) co-participate in building their muscle, for the competitive stage. In doing so, the study drew on Stacy Alaimo’s trans-corporeality: a radically relational (re)figuration of Hu/Man(ist) subjectivity and embodiment which (re)imagines the corporeal substance of “the human” as be(com)ing co-constituted through/with/across the material relations and forces of the more-than-human world. In this regard, the methodological work of this study demanded an ontoepistemological shift towards a posthumanist and post-qualitative research-assemblage which set in motion a series of exploratory (re)search(ing) practices, as part of which 30 male bodybuilders from South Africa generated autophotographs about how they competitively build their muscle. From photo-encounter sessions a relational and multi-sensory mode of thinking↔sensing↔working with the participating bodybuilders and their autophotographic material (e)merged in ways which performatively co-produced a far more capacious analytic through/with/across which a multitude of human and more-than-human agencies could be seen to intra-actively co-participate in the material↔discursive↔affective building and gendering of competitive male bodybuilders’ muscle. Ultimately, the study develops a new trans-corporeal mode of theorising competitive male bodybuilders, their muscle, and their muscle-building↔gendering practices which endeavours to more fully understand the more-than↔human relations which are always already at work in building and gendering the men and muscle at the gravitational centre of this peculiar subculture. In the world of men’s competitive bodybuilding, the matter of muscle is never simply human.

Keywords

Psychology

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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