Try as we might...

So, as I write, I am watching my first ever episode of Entourage. I am watching this because I was watching "Without a Trace" and when it ended, I realized I left the remote by the TV and I couldn't be bothered to get up to change the channel. Perhaps A & H are right; I am a passive automaton!

But, no! I will not go placidly into the realm of the drone! I am reading this text critically, and amid the references to women as meat and to the wimpy member of the group as the "bitch" of the crew, who should waltz onto the scene but a female body builder. Apparently the guy with the creepy (and in my opinion, ill-advised) mustache is "banging" her. She makes her exit and "the crew" proceeds to berate their friend for his clear homosexual-esque behaviour; I mean, she's practically a man!

Fen Coles proposes that female body builders represent a double drag. Muscles, gendered masculine and understood as belonging only and appropriately to men, are taken on by women. In so doing, the female body builder exits the realm of gendered intelligibility. But, the gender bending does not end here! In order to redeem herself, and regain the position of subject, the female body builder must subject herself to the ideological practices that constitute femininity, only she must do so in an extreme and exaggerated manner – she must be excessive in her performance of femininity (i.e. breast implants, skimpy bikinis, bleach blonde hair, over-the-top make-up).

The female body builder is a walking contradiction. She presents an excessive representation of femininity in conjunction with an excessive representation of masculinity. Her existence, her appearance, is shocking and tactile, but perhaps ineffective with regards to the exposure of norms, as she is largely passed off, as in Entourage, as a freak, a lesbian, or a hermaphrodite. The audience at large appears to lack the “heightened presence of mind” necessary to lead to any productive or critical reading. This seems true of many of the hyperbolized normative representations we have examined in class (i.e. 50 cent). How productive are hyperbole, excess, and shock effect if the vast majority of audience members simply either reinsert the subversive text back into a dominant narrative, or interpret it within a dominant framework which passes it off as “weird” and therefore not worth further scrutiny?

Coles, Fen. (1999) Feminine Charms and Outrageous Arms. Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. New York: Routledge. 445-453.