A Note on Masculinities in Context—Bodybuilders and the Significance of Setting

In my Sociology of Gender course this week, we discussed what it means to talk about gender as subject to variation and why this matters.  I typically go over four kinds of variation to which gender is subject and talk with students about how this helps us begin to understand what it means to talk about gender as “socially constructed.” If it weren’t, then why or how would it be subject to such wild variation?  Gender varies cross-culturally, it varies throughout history, it varies over the course of an individuals’ life, and it also varies contextually.  This last one often requires a bit of explanation.  And I often use my research with bodybuilders as a way to discuss this issue.

I initially started this blog to think more critically about both how social spaces get gendered and sexualized.  But I have also always been interested in tying performances of gender and sexuality to the specific contexts in which those performances emerge.  In graduate school, I studied a group of bodybuilders for about a year.  Much of the existing literature at the time framed male bodybuilders as an insecure population—and indeed, this is how they are culturally portrayed as well.  There’s an excellent ethnography by Alan Klein entitled Little Big Men that helps to bolster this claim.  We like to think of bodybuilders as overcompensating for some other weakness.  And consistent with Klein, I found many bodybuilders insecure—but I became much more interested in where they seemed insecure than with the simple fact that they seemed insecure.

I began my study simply observing them in the gym and gradually began gaining enough confidence to approach them to ask for interviews.  The men are extraordinarily large and many of them emit incredible sounds while working out.  So, it’s easy to get a bit squeamish.  They’re sweaty, they’re enormous, they’re lifting massive objects, grunting and yelling at each other—it’s pretty intense.  So, asking for an interview might seem like an easy task, but it took me a couple weeks to work up to actually approaching one of them.

What Can Testicles tell us about Dads?

 

Cross-posted at Girl W/ Pen

So… I’m going to go ahead and say that this is the wrong question to be asking. This question proceeds from a belief that testicles CAN tell us something about dads. A new study is making the rounds in the news that addresses the relationship between testicle size and parenting behavior among men (well… 70 men… not randomly sampled…). The paper is entitled “Testicular Volume is Inversely Correlated with Nurturing-Related Brain Activity in Human Fathers” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. I can think of more than a few titles that might have been catchier (and clearly, journalists reporting on the research had a similar idea).

In fairness, I don’t have access to the complete study (though I’ve requested it). But the problem is also in how this study gains attention in the media. It’s a great example of how a correlation combined with cultural stereotypes and assumptions can run wild. When correlations combine with popular stereotypes concerning a particular topic (like, say, the relationship between testosterone and any number of socially undesirable behaviors), questions about the science sometimes get lost because it looks like something was “scientifically proven” that we already wanted to believe anyway.

So, here’s the relationship the researchers found: men with smaller testicles tested more positively for nurturance-related responses in their brains when shown pictures of their children. The study reports that men with smaller testicles had roughly three times the level of brain activity in the area of the brain associated with nurturing. These men (with smaller testicles) were also men with lower levels of testosterone—something that has previously been shown to be associated with nurturing behavior among men.*

Steampunk–Hybridity and Fantasy

I attended my first ever Steampunk festival/carnival/fashion show this past weekend.  I’d never heard of the fashion or the sub-culture before attending.  But, like any good subculture, people get really “into” it.  It’s a great example of the fine line between appropriation and innovation.

The movement comes out of a literary sub-genre of science fiction–future (sometimes post-apocalyptic) societies are imagined in which 19th century industrialized Western fashion is combined with America’s “Wild West” fashion ideals (and just a splash of “punk”) all within a world in which steam power is imagined to either have gained mainstream use, or was the primary technology utilized.  One of the key features of Steampunk is the sort of retro-futuristic technologies and inventions associated with the genre.  Many of the people I saw outfitted themselves with aviator goggles, Victorian fashion, and an odd assortment of historical cultural items from either the U.S. or other European nations.  And they were keen to ask each other about their accessories.  Authenticity–particularly among the more heavily costumed participants–seemed to be prized.