‘Postmodern’ Muscle: The Embodied Pleasures of Vibrant Physicality

This chapter challenges discrediting myths where bodybuilding is viewed as symptomatic of an inadequate personality or problematic masculinity that must be diagnosed, targeted and treated. The pathology discourse is congruent with medical sociologists’ long-standing concern with illness, disease or potential disease rather than positive health, wellbeing and vibrant physicality. It considers aspects of bodybuilders’ shared worldview and constructive practices. It also chapter avoids lazy assumptions and complacent alliances with stigma theories that position bodybuilders as ‘dangerous individuals’ or ‘cultural victims’. The chapter contributes health policy and practice by challenging myths that could unintentionally undermine harm minimization interventions directed at bodybuilders who take anabolic steroids and other physique enhancing drugs. It aims to understand bodybuilders’ ‘discursive practices’ or ‘the communicative means by which the self is constructed’. The chapter presents the partiality of constructivist analyses, which accord central significance to the external, representational, socially inscribed masculine body.