Pictured in two centuries of images, the hypermuscular and physically strong woman is studied here for the first time as a major player in popular culture and contemporary art. Using the bodybuilder as prototype, a rich variety of authors engage with her particular physicality, and how it resonates with social issues such as female pleasure and gender stereotypes. From the sublime to the gritty, this volume presents modern amazons as a culture with a history, a dazzling and transgressive current phenomenon, and avatars of the future. Packed with illustrations, "Picturing the Modern Amazon" investigates the representation of hypermuscular women in a range of visual sources. Historical images and archival materials dating from the late 1700s through the present century illustrate older notions of female strength, providing a solid base of comparison for the modern materials. Contemporary art explores a diversity of issues surrounding the physically strong woman; artists represented include Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Nicole Eisenman, Annie Leibovitz, Alison Saar, Andre Serrano, Cindy Sherman, and Nancy Spero. Comic artists address the amazon through comic strips, comic books, and unique art works that focus on muscular female characters and superheros; artists include Robert Crumb, Diane DiMassa, Roberta Gregory, John Howard, and Turtel Onli. Photographs of some of today's top bodybuilding competitors capture the stunning strength and definition of the hypermuscular woman. Co-edited by Joanna Frueh, Laurie Fierstein, and Judith Stein, the volume's contributors are Michael Cunningham, Nathalie Gassel, Leslie Heywood, Irving Lavin, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Al Thomas, Jan Todd, Steve Wennerstrom, and Carla Williams. Interviews with noted bodybuilders-both the sport's pioneers and today's top competitors-provide a personal perspective.

Pictured in two centuries of images, the hypermuscular and physically strong woman is studied here for the first time as a major player in popular culture and contemporary art. Using the bodybuilder as prototype, a rich variety of authors engage with her particular physicality, and how it resonates with social issues such as female pleasure and gender stereotypes. From the sublime to the gritty, this volume presents modern amazons as a culture with a history, a dazzling and transgressive current phenomenon, and avatars of the future. Packed with illustrations, "Picturing the Modern Amazon" investigates the representation of hypermuscular women in a range of visual sources. Historical images and archival materials dating from the late 1700s through the present century illustrate older notions of female strength, providing a solid base of comparison for the modern materials. Contemporary art explores a diversity of issues surrounding the physically strong woman; artists represented include Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Nicole Eisenman, Annie Leibovitz, Alison Saar, Andre Serrano, Cindy Sherman, and Nancy Spero. Comic artists address the amazon through comic strips, comic books, and unique art works that focus on muscular female characters and superheros; artists include Robert Crumb, Diane DiMassa, Roberta Gregory, John Howard, and Turtel Onli. Photographs of some of today's top bodybuilding competitors capture the stunning strength and definition of the hypermuscular woman. Co-edited by Joanna Frueh, Laurie Fierstein, and Judith Stein, the volume's contributors are Michael Cunningham, Nathalie Gassel, Leslie Heywood, Irving Lavin, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Al Thomas, Jan Todd, Steve Wennerstrom, and Carla Williams. Interviews with noted bodybuilders-both the sport's pioneers and today's top competitors-provide a personal perspective.

Numerous contemporary artists, particularly female artists, have chosen to examine the idealization of the female body. In this crucial book, Emily L. Newman focuses on a number of key themes including obesity, anorexia, bulimia, dieting, self-harm, and female body image. Many artists utilize their own bodies in their work, and in the act of trying to critique the diet industry, they also often become complicit, as they strive to lose weight themselves. Making art and engaging eating disorder communities (in real life and online) often work to perpetuate the illnesses of themselves or others. A core group of artists has worked to show bodies that are outside the norm, paralleling the rise of fat activism in the 1990s and 2000s. Interwoven throughout this inclusive study are related interdisciplinary concerns including sociology, popular culture, and feminism.

Out is a fashion, style, celebrity and opinion magazine for the modern gay man.

In this second edition of the remarkable, and now classic, cultural history of black women’s beauty, Venus in the Dark, Janell Hobson explores the enduring figure of the "Hottentot Venus" and the history of critical and artistic responses to her by black women in contemporary photography, film, literature, music, and dance. In 1810, Sara Baartman was taken from South Africa to Europe, where she was put on display at circuses, salons, museums, and universities as the "Hottentot Venus." The subsequent legacy of representations of black women’s sexuality—from Josephine Baker to Serena Williams to hip-hop and dancehall videos—refer back to her iconic image. Via a new preface, Hobson argues for the continuing influence of Baartman’s legacy, as her image still reverberates through the contemporary marketization of black women’s bodies, from popular music and pornography to advertising. A brand new chapter explores how historical echoes from previous eras map onto highly visible bodies in the twenty-first century. It analyzes fetishistic spectacles of the black "booty," with particular emphasis on the role of Beyoncé Knowles in the popularization of the "bootylicious" body, and the counter-aesthetic the singer has gone on to advance for black women’s bodies and beauty politics. By studying the imagery of the "Hottentot Venus," from the nineteenth century to now, readers are invited to confront the racial and sexual objectification and embodied resistance that make up a significant part of black women’s experience.

As in many other fields, in sports too, women were latecomers and considered as the ‘other sex’ – at least until the twenty-first century. When sport developed in its modern forms towards the second half of the nineteenth century, women were (and to a certain degree still are) considered too weak to participate in strenuous physical activities, and were thus excluded from various sports, competitions and events. Although they gradually gained access to all sports, competitive sport was – and is still today – one of the few areas in modern societies with strict gender segregation: in most sports, men do not compete against women and playing sport is always ‘doing gender’. Yet, in many epochs and in many regions of the world, there were female ‘rebels’ who did not comply with the ideals, norms and rules that contributed to women’s marginalization. Who were these women, what were their aims and motivations, which strategies did they apply and how did they fight and win their battles against the gender order of their time? The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Females with large muscles evoke strong reactions from men and women, often involving disgust, discomfort, anger and threat. The controversial nature of female bodybuilding has caused a significant rupture on feminist ground. Whilst proponents claim that female bodybuilding is a way of empowering and liberating women, others see it as a form of corporeal entrapment. This book investigates the controversy. Do women who pump iron resist physical restrictions of imposed femininity, or are they engaged in an ultimately oppressive quest for ‘perfect bodies’? In an original two year ethnographic study based in the South of England, Tanya Bunsell immersed herself into the world of female bodybuilders. By mapping these extraordinary women’s lives, the research illuminates the pivotal spaces and essential lived experiences that make up the female bodybuilder. Whilst the women appear to be embarking on an ‘empowering’ radical body project for themselves, the consequences of their activity remains culturally ambivalent. This research exposes the ‘Janus-faced’ nature of female bodybuilding, exploring the ways in which the women negotiate, accommodate and resist pressures to engage in more orthodox and feminine activities and appearances. This book will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of gender studies, the sociology of sport, the body and research methodology.

The Advocate is a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) monthly newsmagazine. Established in 1967, it is the oldest continuing LGBT publication in the United States.

Crossing disciplinary and chronological boundaries, this volume integrates text and image, essays and object pages to explore the processes inherent in gender representation, rather than resituating women in particular categories or spheres as other scholarly publications and exhibitions have done. Taking its lead from the 'Picturing' Women project on which it reflects and builds, the volume makes a substantial methodological contribution to the analysis of gender discourse and visuality. It offers new and stimulating scholarship that confronts historical patterns of representation that have defined what women were and are seen to be, and presents new contexts for unveiling what art historian Linda Nochlin has called the 'mixed messages' of representations of women.

"This book is as seductive as the phenomenon that it explores. With courage, love, and joy, Frueh crosses into unexplored terrains of beauty and pleasure, where she finds a grotesquely captivating creature: Monster/Beauty. By illuminating her journey with thoughtful insight and engaging prose, she encourages readers to join her in her quest to articulate fresh ways of thinking about the aesthetic and the erotic and of theorizing the flux of lived experience." —John Alan Farmer, senior editor of Art Journal "Monster/Beauty is a daringly provocative experiment in personal and erotic writing and an important book for anyone interested in breaking normative codes of beauty, pedagogy, and authorial methodology. In a richly self-revealing text, Frueh proposes nothing less than a Rabellaisian re-ordering of aesthetic embodiments within social relations." —Mira Schor, author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture "Giving new meaning to "embodied writing," this book goes farther than any other toward getting the body into the text. Joanna Frueh is a performance artist first-she is also an art historian, a singer, a poet, a bodybuilder, a professor, an academic celebrity of modest fame, but her performances collapse these distinctions. Frueh's intensely personal, intensely physical prose brings an aura of presence to the book that rivals the effect she achieves on stage." —Robyn Warhol, co-editor of Feminisms "This book is monstrous--full of gorgeous hypermuscular women, step-mothers, and vampires; full of ravishing muscular sex, classroom erotics, splendid aging. It is a performance in which Frueh explores and celebrates her body, its powers and beauties, and those of her friends and lovers." —Alphonso Lingis, author of Excesses, Abuses, and Dangerous Emotions "A welcome voice in contemporary feminist theory, Frueh's Monster/Beauty reminds us of the pleasures of thinking, teaching and creating in wholly embodied, sensual and passionate acts. Frueh poetically enacts the self as an aesthetic/erotic project, affirming the many different and beautiful selves we can become. It is a joy to read." —Marsha Meskimmon, author of We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism "Joanna Frueh is a hero. I sleep better knowing she's out there writing and thinking." —Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours