Muscled Movie Mavens: A New Need for the Fernale Form in Pumpinp: Iran II, Tenninator 2, and G.1 Tane

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirernents for the degree of

Masters of Fine Arts

Graduate Programme in Film and Video York University North York, Ontario

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Permission has been granted to the LIBRARY OF YORK UNIVERSITY to tend or seIl copies of this thesis. to the NATIONAL LlBRARY OF CANADA to microfilm this thesis and to fend or seIl copies of the film. and to UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS to publish an abstract of this thesis. The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the thesis nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's written permission. ABSTRACT

The women of cinema are undergohg a makeover. Rouge, base, and lipstick are being augmented by ripped muscles, buffed biceps, and defined deltoids. Across genres, muscled women are appearing everywhere, from the staged documentary Pum~inaIron II: The Women (1984), to Linda Hamilton's defined arms in Terminator 2 (1991), to Demi Moore's multiple star tums showcasing her muscular body, espeually G.I. lane (1997).These images of muscularized women are not only acceptable, they became desirable and in demand, illumhatirg the Literal and figurative explosion of the female form in popdar cinema. Using Michel Foucault's detailing of how knowledge and power bath of and ooer the body function within an "apparatus" in which we live as well as help to create, 1argue that the major function of the apparatus at a certain moment in time is to respond to an "urgent need." 1will argue in this thesis that the "useful body" for the late 1980s into the 1990s has been the strong, muscularized fernale body. This urgent need is manifesting itself in contemporary standards for female star bodies as newly hard, muscled, taut, and defined. This "need" is in response to the crisis in rneaning around the body and especially the female body in contemporary times. At a time of continuing redefinition of gender roles, the power apparatus is calling for a female body which seems to contain both traditionally ferninine and masculine coding. As opposed to prior decades, such as the Victorian era, where the ascribed roles in society were definitively split between male and female, the 1980s through the 1990s iç a tirne where women are working in the public sphere in addition to still being largely responsible for the maintenance of the private sphere of the home. An Enjoli perfume ad from the 1980s symbolizes this split which must be forged/combined: "She can bring home the bacon, and fry it up in a pan, and never never let you forget you're a man, 'cause she's a woman. Enjoli." In a society where everythîng seems to be in flw, something solid is needed to hold onto, laud, and prize. I will argue that it is the hard body, the Arnold body, the rigid and defined body. 1will argue that these forms are ultimately contradictory and ambivalent and serve to continue the dynamic of power relations which create new forms which are then able to resist power's reaches. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The foo! who persists in his folly becomes wise. William Blake

1know many wnters open their introduction with a quote, which 1will also do, but for some reason 1 felt it was equally appropriate to do the same with my adnowledgments. This quote only begins to describe the experience of complefing this thesis; as a kind fnend pointed out to me, it could equally apply to any thesis or dissertation. This of course is true, and 1 do not daim the quote in any unique or exceptional way, for 1am well aware that although my experience was far from the ordinary, it was not one-of-a-kind (though indeed, 1 wish, for other students sakes, it were). Further, 1do not wish for the reader to infer even an ounce of self-deprecation withu-i my reference to myself as a "fool," for without a doubt the first person 1need to acknowledge and thank in these pages is the one and only. For although a fool is (from Webster's) "a person showing lack of wisdom, or of common sense," it is exactly this lack of common sense which enabled me to never give up, and perhaps foolishly, came back for more, even when it felt like a fool's errand. A fool is also a jester, one who jests, often and well, and is kept in a king or nobleman's household, which is indeed true, as my long List of addresses in the past three years indicates. From Arlington Avenue and the Pony Express stop, to Camp, Irving, and Stuart Street, to the oasis that was Tassajara, to the joys of IOth, Cascadilla, Fell, Noe, Magnolia, and Payne Avenues, and always retuming to Raglan, I have been kept and kept well, and for this 1 have many people to thank (to those 1 forget, I will not forget you, 1jest not). Starting with (in vaguely chronological order) Bridget, Peter, Leo, Margaret, Noel, Matthew, Adrienne, Alex, Galia, Alex, Nick, Rebecca, Seth, Ellen, Kira, Carl, Helen, Malcolm, Aaron, Daniel, Patrick, Joan, Jon, Marti, Papa, Bill, Aileen, Victoria, Jean, Dave, Beth, Gretchen, Andy, Sekai, Sabrina, Jonathan and Justus, all of whom provided much appreciated support, whether emotional, hancial, or physical, and more often a combination of two or three, 1offer up a heart-felt th& you that cannot be stated in words. Whether 1was beùig hardy or merely foohardy, 1 know 1could not have made it through these long years without all of you. And lest 1forget, 1 must mention and thank those people in the Film and Video Department at York University who made al1 this possible: Brenda, Janine, John, Lorraine, Grace, Lynn, and George. Since back in the early minutes of January 1998 when 1 was in a fool's paradise, to now, when 1 am much closer to nirvana, 1have leamed much. And although at tirnes 1felt like 1 had been fed fool's parsley, 1never gave up. No matter how ndiculous the situation may have seemed, every time 1 got thrown off the horse, I merely got back on and kept riding. Frorn each ride and each fall, there was a lesson, and if 1 were only a fool 1would never have gained so mu& from them. But instead, 1 have learned much, much more than I ever would have guessed the writing of a master's thesis could teach me, not just about muscled women, but about academia, psychology, personality, politics, office politics, love, responsibility, family, friendship, boyfriends, happiness, sadness, humiliation, joy, samsara, sadomasochism, pedagogy, hard work, insanity, codependency, desire, confidence, insecurity, consistency, inconsistency, reâson, unreason, timing, consideration, loyalty, power, Iris Murdoch, education, GERD (Gastro- Esophageal Reflux Disease), hospitals, death, Ashtanga yoga, meditation, Zen,

INTRODUCING IMAGES OF MUSCULAR WOMEN

The body is not an object to be studied in relation to culture, but is to be considered as the subject of culture, or in other words, as the existentid ground of culture. Thomas Csordas' The urgency of the politics of the body have corne about through the unfolding of a political stniggle. Whether this is a revolutionary struggle, 1 don't know [but] the importance given to the body is one of the important, if not essential questions. Michel ~oucàull

The mainstream cinema of the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the striking emergence of a new physique and a new "subject of culture": the muscularized fernale body. The spectacular display of this physique is centcal to the bodybuilding competition in Pumvin Iron II: The Women (1984), to Linda Hamilton's defined musculature in Terminator 2 (1991), and to the star image of

Demi Moore in GI. Tane (1997). These films' female stars embodied the perfect mix of beauty and brawn, and evidenced the growing desire for the muscularized female form in culture and cinema. By the mid 1990s, a transphenomenal cultural trend that began in isolated action films and niche bodybuilding documentaries moved to the center of media culture. Consider how Madonna built a virtual dynasty by showcasing her well-defined body, first in music videos and later in films like Tmth or Dare. Dick Tracv, and Body of

Evidence; how Tina Turner exhibited defined thighs and scdpted amis in Mad Max, music videos, and advertisements for Hanes pantyhose; or how Oprah

'Thomas J. Csordas, "Embodiment as a Paradigrn for Anthropology," Ethos 18 (1990): 5. 'Michel Foucault, PowerKnowledoe: SeIected Interviews and Other Writings. 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshaii, John Mepharn, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 57. televised her body's battle with the bulge and its ultimate transformation into a hard, happy, marathoner physique. Savvy media moguls, these women stepped off the large and small screens and into the world as superheroes whose buff bodies and cultural power play like a twenty-four hour infomercial for this new form. More recently, these physiques have popped up and out on the infamous syndicated cable show Amencan Gladiators, which pits bodybuilders and athletes against amateur cornpetitors. Such bodies have also inçpired the smd- screen success of Xena: Warrior Princess and La Femme Nikita, hit TV shows loved by men and women, straight and queer alike. The consistent demand for this corporeal ideal provokes a series of salient questions that my study will address: What does the literal, muscular gxowth of the Hollywood female star's body signik? To what extent are these new muscularly toned bodies different from older corporeal ideals? And how does this shift relate to the history of the

muscled female body in Western culture vis n vis gender and sexuality? To interrogate the creation, popularity, and influence of this new image, 1 focus my analysis chronologically through three films: Pum~ingIron Ti, Terminator 2, and G.I. Tane. Purn~inaIron Ii is the fust film to deal exdusively with these bodies, Terminator 2 marks the apogee of the idealized muscular fernale physique, and G.I. Tane registers the attempted containment of this body's ideality? The central question 1will ask of these texts is: How do their visibly muscularized female bodies both perpetuate traditional notions of what it means to be a woman as they sirnultaneously challenge and resist them? To undertake this line of questioning, this study moves from an investigation of the boundaries of femininity in Pum ing Iron II to a contextual analysis of

3Susan Schindette, "Going to Extremes," People, 18 October 1999, 116.

11 spectatorship in Terminator 2 and finally to a reading of the treatment Demi Moore's star image/body receives in G.I. Tane. 1 will dernonstrate how contemporary film presented an increasingly visible spectacle of female strength in muscularized bodies to a burgeoning, broader audience, a strength normally resenred for male action heroes; such a tram-generic phenornenon (moving hom documentary to sci-fi to action) iUuminates how powerful!y and variously this genre-crossing body influenced and was influenced by the image-making apparatus of the tirne. Not coincidentally, then, the trajectory of this analysis moves from a documentary about bodies developed specifically for professional bodybuilding competition to the fictional representation of the bodies of Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 and Demi Moore in G.I. Jane -bodies built specifically for box-office success- While the muscularized fernale body ideal was indeed operative in Canadian culture in recent decades, this corporeal standard is more potently an American product of the tempestuous political years of the 1980s into the 1990s, a period after ferninism (though not yet embroiied in yost-feminism) characterîzed by virulent conservatisrn. While this body can be read as indicative of the gains of the women's movement, in the American context it also manifested the influence of the Reagan-Bush years and a concomitant "body McCarthyism." This era of the body under siege, according to Kroker and Kroker, was part of a "logic of epidemic," rife with proliferating body invasion practices - methods of determining the staatuç of bodies as/not AIDS bodies, drug bodies, deviant bodies? Thus, the societal obsession with an "armored body" was a logical response to such invasive practices.

'Arthur and Maiilouise Kroker, "Panic Sex in Amenca," in Bodv Invaders: Panic Sex in Amenca, ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 10- 19; quoted in Cheryl L. Cole, Foucault to Bordo to Film Theory While Kroker and Kroker offer one credible explanation of the emergence of the muscdar female body, the work of Michel Foucault and Susan Bordo provides a more complex lens for understanding this new corporeal ideal. Foucault encourages us to examine what the appropriate body is for a contemporary cultural moment. Farnously arguing that knowledge and power both of and ouer the body function within an apparatus in which we live, as well as help to create, Foucault daims that the major function of the apparatus at any time is to respond to an "urgent need." This need appears to have manifested itself in recent standards for female bodies as hard and defined? Such an image of the female body was one appropriate response to what Our culture needed its women to be at that moment (another primary and interconnected need was and still is for "thin" bodies). Thus, a toned and muscled body ultirnately serves as one of the disciplined, normalized, corporeal forms within contemporary socieiy. However, as my analysis will demonstrate, this form's massive popular circulation is freighted with complex and often contradictory implications, simultaneously perpetuating and challenging traditional notions of femininity while serving, both literally and figuratively, as a battleground of meaning and power. Where and how is such power manifested? Foucault locates it not in the soul, consciousness, or ideality. Rather, he argues that the exercise of power is more significantly material, physical, and corporal:

"Resisting the Canon: Feminist Cultural Studies, Sport, and TechnoIogies of the Body," in Women. Sport, and Culture, ed. Susan Birrell and Cheryl L. Cole (Champaig, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1994), 18-19. 5Christine HolmIund, "Visible Difference and Fiex Appeal: The Body, Sex, SexuaIity, and Race in the Purnpino Iron Films," Cinema Journal 28, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 39- From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century 1 think it was believed that the investment of the body by power had to be heavy, ponderous, metidous, and constant. Hence those formidable disciplinary regimes in the schools, hospitals, barracks, factories, aties, lodgings, families. It began to be realized that such a cumbersome form of power was no longer as indispensable as had been thought and that the industrial societies could content themselves with a much looser form of power over the body. Then it was discovered that control of sexuality could be attenuated and given new forms. One needs to study what kind of body the curent society needsS6

In her Foucauldian analysis of Western body culture, Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo explains the "needed" bodily form of the Victorian era: the rounded figure, emphasizing breasts and hips against a wasp waist. Representing a domestic, sexualized ideal of femininity, this figure was a product of a particular feminine praxis that included shaitla&g, minimal eating, and reduced mobility. Since this praxis rendered the female body unfit to perform activities outside its designated sphere, the body played out symbolically the division of socio-econornic life into clearly defined male and female spheres. In contrast, one of the useful bodies for the 1980s and 1990s has been the muscularize.', female body. At a time of continuing redefinition of gender roles, this body seemed to contain both traditionally feminine and masculine codings. Unlike the Victorian era, in which the prescribed societal roles were more definitively split between male and female, this epoch included women working in the public sphere, in addition to being largely responsible for maintainhg the private space of the home. Sculpted biceps and defined deltoids, then, were symbok representations of this conflicted embodiment The "needed" praxis that created a stronger female body better prepared it for these tiring dual roles in the male dominated public workplace and the equally fatiguing realm of "private" (read: woman's) responsibilities. . The meticulous production of this female body today, whereby discipline merges into self-discipline and "care of the self," is reminiçcent of Foucault's account of ancient Greek and Roman growing self-invesûnent. For Foucault, this sense of self is a product of the "intensity of the relations to the self, that is, of the forms in which one is called upon to take oneself as art object of knowledge and a field of action, so as to transform, correct, and pureoneself-"' This idea of the relation of oneself to oneself also operates intensely within the muscularizing of the female fom (and in the realm of female bodybuilding espeually) where "care" manifests itself in the practices one undertakes to provide for, preserve, and enhance the self. Indeed, many of the descriptions which Foucault offers of ancient Greeks' ritual attendance to their bodies also function as apt descriptions of contemporary bodybuilders, eliie athletes, or health conscious individuals:

What stands out in the texts of the first centuries . . - is the insistence on the attention that should be brought to bear on oneself; it is the modality, scope, constancy, and exactitude of the required vigilance; it is the anxiety conceming al1 the disturbances of the body and the mind, which must be prevented by means of an austere regimen?

Such an obsession with the state of the body, mind, and soul, cmtake on both health-enhancing as well as maniacal, self-destructive dimensions. The new response to the revolt of the body is a mode of investment no longer defined by control by repression, but control by stimulation. "Get undressed -but be slim, good-looking, [toned] and taru~ed."~The tightly managed body - whether

7Michel Foucault, Historv of Sexuality. Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 42. 'Foucault, The Care of the Self, 4 1. %oucault, Power/Knowledgg, 57. demowtrated through sleek, minùnalist lines or firmly developed muscles -has been overdetennined as a contemporary ideal of specifically female

Moreover, the praxis which created the muscularized female body, work that sigrufied that one "cared" about oneself and how one appeared to others, suggested willpower, energy, control over infantile impulse, and the abiliiy to "shape your life."" As such, this praxis replays the specta tonal relations of the Foucauldian Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's architectural design that facilitated the body's surveillance in a state of conscious and permanent visibility, ensuring the automatic functioning of power:

So to arrange ihings that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of pswer should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a madune for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates [or any sweyed body] should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.12 Today, the notion that women in western soueiy Iive in a virtual panopticon still retains its cultural purchase. Consider the space of the health club or gym, where bodies both survey themselves and are surveyed from without, scrutinized by others. The environment in which these muscularized female bodies are produced replicates the design of the Panopticon in both literal and figurative ways. Through the extensive use of reflective surfaces, such as windows and mirrors lining entire walls, the central tower has been multiplied and diffused so that the watchers are everywhere. These surfaces enable both

"Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weioht: Feminism. Western Culture. and the Bodv (Berkeley: University of California Press, 19931, 2 1 1. "Ibid., 195. "Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 20 1. the gaze of the self at the self as well as the gaze at others. Indeed, guards are no longer necessary as individuals have taken up the policing themselves. This self- watching encourages self-discipline, care of the self, and nomalization, also inviting narussistic pleasures, espeùally for those who best approximate the ideal, Further, the tower and its modem mirrored incarnation are, as Foucault argued, effectively transferred into the psyches of individuals and carried far beyond the space of the gym. Regardless of whether reflective surfaces are available (shop windows, glass doors, rearview mirrors, etc.), the self- surveillance, self-disup line, and "self-care" continues, as does the wa tching of others. However wettling the expanded function of Panoptical power may be, its goals, as Foucault makes clear, are never completely achieved. As power operates unabated, so do those shiggles against it: "One has to recognize the îndefiniteness of the struggle -though this is not to Say it won't some day end."I3

As the power struggle around social definitions of gender and desirability rages, a contradictory and ambivalent contemporary corporeal form arises. The needs of the apparatus generate new forms like the muscled female body, which once embodied, are then able to struggle against power. Thus, the central contradiction that this thesis must explore is how the toned form of the strong woman was both in the grips of societal power structures at the same time that its new strength could serve to empower women to break free of culture's hold. For, despite the oppressive cdt of the body beautiful, many women saw this new oppominity for a stronger and more agile body as elementai to their emerging interest (partially inspired by feminist gains) for stronger bodies

13Foucault,Powerffiowledoe, 57. paired with new stronger selves. As Bordo remarks, this experience created an avenue for women's Iiberation from the very hold that inspired their interest:

The woman who goes into a rigorous weight-training program in order to achieve the currently stylish look may discover that her new muscles give her the self-confidence that enables her to assert herself more forcefully at work. Modem power relations are thus unstable; resistance is perpetual and hegemony precarî~us.~' In fact, throughout his analysis of penal, familial, and educational systems, Foucault himself presciently stresses the ambivalent dynamic of institutional power, which forcibly encourages certain forms of discipline and, specifically, self-discipline that never fully adiieve their desired effect:

As always with relations of power, one is faced with complex phenornena which don't obey the Hegelian form of the dialectic. Mastery and awareness of one's own body cm be acquired only through the effect of an investment of power in the body: gymnastics, exercises, muscle- building, nudism, glorification of the body beautiful. Al1 of this belongs to the pathway leading to the desire of one's own body, by way of the insistent, persistent, meticulous work of power on the bodies of children or soIdiers, the healthy bodies. But once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one's body against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral noms of sexuality, marriage, and decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counter-attack in that same body.I5 This power dynamic can be visualized as an endless circle: lrinçtit&onal power.u- resist fi ower

care of the self

- - -- - "Bordo, 28. 15Foucault, Power/Knowledae, 56. However, Foucault warns that the impression that power weakens and vacillates is in fact mistaken: "Power cm retreat here, re-organize its forces, invest itself elsewhere . . .and so the battle continue^."'^ The paradoxical element of power's cycle is a prïmary tenet of this investigation. During the last two decades of the 20th century, images of the female muscular body occupied both sides of the divide; they were both "disciplined" as spectacle as well as empowered by their exhibitionism. The most influential theoretical investigation of power's localized and spectacular "discipline" of woman through the cinematic apparatus remains Laura Mulvey's 1975 article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." For Mulvey, Hollywood cinema/mainstream illusionist narrative film was based upon a system of looks dominated by a male gaze at the figure of woman, whose threatening image (representing sexual difference and the castration cornplex) had to be conholled. Fetishization of the female image, Mulvey maintained, was one important tedinology of control in Hollywood film; it relied on a heterosexist binary equating masculinity with activity and femininity with passivity. Within the limits of Mulvey's classic formulation, then, the muscled female body, like all female bodies, can only ever signify a spectacle for the heterosexual male (white) spectator to conho1 and consume.

While the 1990s female body on film, muscular or not, is still crafted specifically to-be-looked-at, my investigation will bear out how the muscled female body also seriously challenges Mulvey's framework. For the musded women's star personae foreground their lack of passivity and fiheir potential for activity. Paradoxically, then, the cinematic apparatus that made power strong (through the scopophilic containment of the female form on screen and in Me) had ako created a new ideal, which by its empowered embodiment might resist the forces of power. That is, the power dynamic that places woman as passive object, and the politics of looking that are based on that illusion, are potentially subverted by the force of these embodied presences. The power of such corporeal spectacles alters the disequilïbrium between the looker and the looked ai, between the subject and object of the gaze, or the very notion of these dualities. This body, as it is a self-willed production/aeation, can be, these films suggest, the demonstration of a subjective agency rather than a merely passive object. If the hard female form ihelf underscores the limitation of Mulvey's model, so too does its cornplex spectatorial consumption. Mulvey's theorking left little room for women as active contributors to, or consumers of, cinematic pleasures. FoUowing her stiU influentid arguments, more recent scholarship has explored the potentials of the female spectator's pleasure, power, and ability to perform oppositional readings of texts. Feminist analyses17of films from the 1940s, melodrarnas and "women's pichires" speufically, reved that male power was neither as omnipotent nor as solid as had been believed. Furtherrnore, the politics of looking in mainstream cinema, once largely characterized in tems of male conhol, are now often regarded as dynamic and contradictory. Identification is currently understood as much more auid, enabling both female sadistic pleasure around masculine punishment and defeat and female masodiistic pleasure around certain images of women. There are always a

"Mary Ann Doane, The(IndianapoFilms: indiana University Press, 1987), and Femme Fatales: Feminisrn. Film Theory. Psvchoanalvsis (New York: Routledge, 199 1). variety of possible identificatory positions for spectators, many created by spectators themselves, as seen in the "queered" reception of sorne texts showcasing the musded female body.

Badc to the Body The trajectory of the musded female body from the cultural margins into mas circulation began with the 1970s exercise impulse, which sparked the growth of a subculture of women bodybuilders; in gyms from California to Texas to Florida, wornen started getting serious about pumping iron. Yet this emergence of women bodybuilders was considered freakiçh and subcultural. Slowly, standards of beauty began to change and in Auguçt of 1982, the musded female form splashed across the cover of Time, with the accompanying tag he, "Coming On Strong, the New Ideal of Beauty."18This cover signaled a new era, one more offiually inaugurated with the first Miss Olympia contest for women bodybuilders, the sport's most important title, in 1980: "Therewere twenty-one girls entered, all but five of whom had won titles previously during the short

two- or three-year period in which there have been titles to win in female b~dybuilding."'~As the sport and the look began to move beyond their subcultural status, Charles Gaines, author / filmmaker of the Pum~ingIron senes assessed the cultural moment: Women's bodybuilding has arrived - it is part of a new terrain. It may, as some people are saying, corne to be the dominant featuxe of that terrain; that will depend on how well it cmbe marketed to the general public - on how many women can be made to want to look like Auby Paulick or Rachel McLish, and, to a lesser degree, on how many men cmbe made to want to sleep with them. That marketing rnight be accomplished immediately - a lot of smart people are betting it will be. It could, like the

"~ichardCorliss, "Corning On Strong, the New Ideal of Beauty," Time, August 1982, 75-76. '%id- selling of male bodybuilding, take a long time. And it might never happedo The cultural establishment of women's bodybuilding did indeed happen, and both this sport and the desire for musded female bodies became central to one of the latest definitions of female beauty in the 1990s. Promoting and capitalizinp on this new desire, Charles Gaines and George Butler produced a documentary of the 1983 Caesar's World Cup for Women, Pum~ineIron II: The Women (1984), with which 1begin my study. The film is a staged documentary that tells the personal stones of the women cornpetitors' and chronides their efforts to win bodybuilding's most lucrative purse to that date: a grand prize of $25,000. Chapter 1will analyze this pivotal filmic text, the first moment in feature filmmaking where the muscularized female fom constitutes the focus of the text A case study to examine the limits of femininity through the character of Bev Francis, this chapter argues that the crafting of Francis' body as abject is central to the text's conscious demarcation of an appropriate or desired fenuninity. The film bears out Judith Butler's daim that the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection that produces a constitutive outside to the subject (an abjected outside) which is actually "inside" the subject as its own founding repudiation?' Yet the construction of outside and inside does not appear to be fixed or static, and the dynamic movement of these boundaries serves to constmct bodily ideals appropriate to a cultural moment. Bev's form, 1 will argue, works to transcend these shifting gender boundaries through performance, masquerade, and drag. As my analysis of Pum~inp:Iron II demonstrates, musded female bodies like Bev

20CharlesGaines and George Butler, Purnpino Tron Ti: The Un~recedentedWomen (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1984), 220, 224. =~udithButler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. Francis' at times break radically with traditional constructions of the desirable female body, while at others they seern to falI in line with the conventionally dodebody. Thus, Pumping Iron II marks the threshold of the contemporary cultural questioning of the body as the film's contradictory messages and representations of the female body simultaneously constrain and challenge definitions of femininity, gender, and muscularity. Chapter 2 will look at absences around the muscled female body, spellfically addressing issues of spectatorship/ reception, and identification/desire in Terminator 2. James Cameronfsfilm, featuring Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, reflects the mainstreaming of desire for the muscularized female body. Here, 1want to investigate how the split between spectacle and narrative operates in reception and identification practices, especially those of queer readings (and not only those by queer readeis). Hamilton's spectacular body was read by viewers as a sign of her guerrilla warrior abilities. However, such a spectatorial reading contradicts the narrative construction of Linda Hamilton's character as often ineffective. How can Tenninator 2 and its images be daimed by cowervatives, radical feminists, lesbians, Rambo admirers, libertarians, and technophobes aLüie? While the spectator constructs bodies in the act of reading and reception, how much is the spectator's reception of the body pre-determined by the text itself? The paradox 1 want to explore in my examination of Temator 2 is how spectators can be lured, seduced, and unwittingly cornpliut as well as simultaneously resistant, rewriting, and subversively productive. Chapter 3 offers a reading of the brutal treatment of the sexy musded female body as represented by Demi Moore's character in G.I. Tane; yet another text in Moore's fïlmography which focuses on the finenes of her form, the hallmark of her star image. 1want io explore how G.I. Tane's representation of a çtrong female body appears to celebrate it, as it simultaneously and sadistically humiliates and tortues it into submission to "male" ways of being. 1will hypothesize the meaning of these "mixed messages" as the text oscillates ambivalently between a sadomasochistic and torturous treatment of the MFB (muscularized female body). Next, the most famous line of the movie must be addressed: "Suck my dick!" Moore's relationçhip to and appropriation of the phdus/phallic power are examined as they comect to rape, lesbianism (a red herring whidi seemç to corne up in each text), and women's route to power and the military. 1s Moore's victory truly a liberation? Whose standards of success does this muscularized female body speak to? This latest body, 1argue, represents a potential baddash or at the least, an attempted containment of the muscled female body. CR9

BEV FRANCIS AND FEMININITY IN PUMPING IRON 11

A lthough Pum~in~lion II is the first time most spectators witnessed tdyrnuscularly developed women, there is in fact a subcultural history of such bodies. Jack LaLanne opened the first weight-training facility specificaily for women in Oakland, California in 1936. The public was initially shodced, but - LaLanne persisted, and as he comments in a 1980 interview: "We produced such great bodies that those girls caused a sensation on the beach."' Doris Barilleaux, an amateur body builder since the 1950~~told Gloria Steinem in an interview that as late as the 1970s she had wibessed an appalling sideshow variety of women's bodybuilding contests. In response, she soon founded the Superior Physique Organization, which began its own female physique contests.' As the number of competitions proliferated, they lost most of their 'burlesque" element, though showy muscles were still not en~ouraged.~While most of the early women's contests had been minor sideshow attractions staged in between the main male bodybuilding competitions, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of significant all-women's contests emerged, including the World's Best Woman Bodybuilder, the World Women's Championship, and the Women's Bodybuilding Championship. Patsy Chapman, one of the winners from the early 1980s, stated: "My goal is muscle tone, no t muscle mass."' Lisa Lyon, another

'Jack LaLanne, quoted in Dan Levin, "Here She Is, Miss, WelI What?" Sports Illustrated, 17 March 1980, 69. 'Gloria Steinem, "Coming Up: The Unprecedented Wornen," Ms., 14 July 1985, 86, 109. 3~evin,68. 'Ibid., 67. contest winner, was showcased in Robert Mapplethorpe's groundbreaking 1982 book and film, Ladv. Lisa Lvon. Mapplethorpe's photographs captured a body that broached the traditionally separate notions of ferninine and masculine beauty, and in doing so established a "new standard of beauty - a high-tech body."5Rachel McLish was another prominent bodybuilder of the period; she went from winning the first womenrs contest covered by television, the 1980 Women's Bodybuilding Championship, to becoming the first Miss Olympia in August of 1980. Barilleaux, Lyon, and McLish were all forerunners who helped to create the explosion of interest in the muscled female body. McLish, along with Bev Francis, Carla Dunlap, and Lori Bowen, were the featured cornpetitors in George Butler and Charles Gaines' docurnentary of the 1983 Caesar's World Cup for Women, entitled Purnpirig; Iron II: the Women. The film alternates between '%body scenes" in gyrns, posing practice, and the contest, and "comment scenes" in which the filmic spectator witnesses both forma1 judging as well as informal comrnenting on the forms showcased in the alternate "body scenes." The film was intended to, and in fact did, increase the appeal and popularity of female bodybuilding, and more specifically, spark an interest in the mainstream desire for the muscularized female body. In this way, its logic is modeled after the original Purnwine Iron film, and its manipulation/creation of desires for increasingly muscled male bodies. The Purnpina Iron films are not merely documentaries that set out to provide "behind-the-scenes" look at cornpetitive sporting events. Instead, the sequel Pum~in~Iron II: The Women is intent upon deciphering and defining what or who "looks like a woman," and what kind of physique should be seen as

'Lisa Lyon, quoted in Jim Calio, "Shades of Charles Atlas," Peo~le,26 May 1980, 87.

26 the embodiment of a new ferninine ideal. Charles Gaines and George Butler's liberal intentions in this regard are at times undercut by their opportunistic use of the muscularized female body, as well as by their undeniable ambivalence and anxiety around this corporeal fom. The film is preoccupied with visually and verbally debating the question of what constitutes femininity, and as such seems symptomatic of the crisis of meaning revolving around the female body in North American culture during the 1980s. As such I will utilize the film as a case study for gender theory, as its obsession with definùig feminùùty ultirnately becomes the meta-goal of the contest and film, displacing the events of the cornpetition as the central point of interest. While the filrnic spectator regards the muscularized female foms competing in the CaesarfsWorid Cup, he or she is also constantly shown the anxious reactions of those "live" witnesses who are trying to devise their own criteria for what makes the ideal muscled female form. In this process Bev Francis' "ultra-body" - a physique structured well beyond normative fernininity - presents the greatest challenge. After exploring Bev's abjection, 1will tum to the matter of how femininity is literally judged within the discourse of the contest. The contest (and the film) construct an arena for the adjudication of femininity, and here 1will draw upon the theoretical notions of performance, drag, and masquerade, as developed in the works of Judith Butler and Joan Riviere. Bev's bodily construction is repeatedly counter-positioned against the other comparatively "normal" cornpetitors, and as such her body becomes the pivota1 object used to define the limits and boundaries of the categories "woman" and "femininity." Although the other characters have narratives of their om, they al1 rotate around Bev's story, and reaffirm her "otherness" and her arnbiguous position as the point of intersection between the abject and the syrnbolically intefigible, between "masculine" and "ferninine"characteris tics. This examination theorizes that the muscularized female form presents a particularly drarnatic instance of Judith Butler's notions about the constructed nature of gender and sex, and the division based on those illusions. Butler's analysis illuminates how gender and sex as a whole, both masculine and ferninine, are irnagined formations; they are performances that conceal themselves as such by passing themselves off as "natural." Butler articulates how gender performance is a repeated set of acts that allow subjects to become snbjects through their play with the opposite, proscribed gender. 1want to investigate how Bev's performances often seem to deconstruct the notion of gender performance more than enact it. Bev's masquerade appears to be something more akin to drag: she appears to be imitating, more than performing, "woman." These norms which Bev attempts to actualize are of course founded upon the notion that "man/woman," "rnale/female," and "masculine/feminine" are naturally discrete and distinct roles and types. Yet these discrete categories are themselves only styles, fictions, stories:

Consider that a sedimentation of gender norms produces the peculiar phenornenon of a "natural sex" ora "real wom&" or any nurnber of prevalent and compelling social fictions, and that this is a sedimentation . that over time has produced a set of corporeal svles which, in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes existing in a binarv relation to one another. If these styles are enacted, and if they prod;ce the coherent gendered subjects Who pose as their originat&s, what kind of performance might reveal this ostensible "cause" to be an "effe~t"?~ 1want to study Pumpin Iron II, and specifically Bev Francis' role in the text, to see how her performance might reveal the came of "woman/femininity" to be a

-- - 6Judith ButIer, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routiedge, 1990), 140. soually constructed effect. In doing so 1 rnust also continually rehrm to my central theoretical paradox: how does Bev Francis' muscularized body appear to reinforce traditional notions of femininify, at the sarne tirne that it explodes those very notions? Although the Caesar's World Cup for Women is a contest about musdes, by the hale of Purn~inIron n, the spectator has also witnessed a symbolic cornpetition about popular conceptions of femininity and female beauty.

Introducing an Other: Bev Francis

Carla: 1just came from the gym and 1 found out that Bev Francis is going to compete in the contest in December . . . She's a powerlifter from Australia. She's the most muscular woman I've ever seen. The last pictures of her I saw - whoa - and if she cornes down to a cornpetitive weight, she'll just be outrageous. 1mean she's got rnuscularity most men wish they had and it's just something that the judges up until now have never seen - it's rumored that Rachel is supposed to win this contest but with sorneone like Bev around . . . After the film's opening montage, eadi of the featured competitors is inhoduced. Only Bev Francis' introduction marks her as an "other." While we have met the other competitors without warning, Bev needs an explanation. The first tirne Bev is seen on film, she is also marked as odd as she literdly chbsthe walls of a hallway as a prank. The other competitors are also very muscular, yet right away the film very consciously frames Bev as different - bigger, stronger, and more excessively musded. The baffled response cited in a Newsweek article - "that cnn't be a woman"-sumrnarizes the many "double take" comments heard throughout the film, where Bev is repeatedly referred to as "like a man," "any man," "just like a male bodybuilder." The discourse of the film is caught up in this "trompe l'oeil" effect: if Bev "can't be a woman," then it seems doubtful that she could also win a woman's contest, since s/he would be disqualified. Judith Butler points out that those bodies that do not fit into either gender are by default deemed to fall outside the human, and indeed constihite the domain of the dehurnanized and the abject against which the gendered hurnan itself is constituted.' The fihmakers of Purnping Iron II resort to this cultural logic of "the abject," as understood by Butler, as Bev's story could not be incorporated into a cogent narrative without it. Bev serves as a borderline case of abjection, an absolute Iimit who can still elicit some syrnpathy, all the while reinforcing the spectator's - and the other competitors' - own secure sense of identity as not Bev, not abject. Moving Bev to the "outside," any woman smaller than Bev (i.e., everyone) cmsafely find a place on the normative "inside." As Butler asserts, such notions as "inner" and "outer" or "inside" and "outside" serve to construct a binary distinction that stabilizes and consolidates the coherent subject. The other competitors in the film, as well as the film's spectators, are thus able to daim membership in the acceptable domain of the "human"by casting Bev's embodied "othemess" to the ouhide. Bev also serves as a foil within the film, making the other unusually muscular competitors look smaller and even "lâdylike" in comparison to her brawn. She is presented as a body beyond bodies, absorbing al1 of the spectator's potential anuieties about the lirnit of female muscular development. In so doing, the film manages to leave open the possibility that most muscular female bodies might be considered comparatively "normal," "passable," and even "desirable." In Pum~ineIron II, the judges, contestants, and intemal audience are obsessed with defining Bev Francis in relation to femininity, a category that alrnost always exdudes her. The critical reviews of the film also place an

7ButIer, Gender Trouble, 11 1. exhaordinary emphasis upon her willful disavowal of the female forrn: much is made of her status as an Aushalian world champion powerlifter who had to [ose 35 pounds while adding the pure sculpted muscle needed for bodybuilding. The authors of the Newsweek review describe her physique: "Shot through with the biggest muscles anyone has ever seen on a woman, she cm rnake her biceps bulge and put her veins on view so vividly that observers frequently get grossed out" (emphasis mirie).' This description of Bev as bulging and gmss calls upon the literal meaning of the abject, as it designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered 0th- or as Judith Butler put it, "Shit "9 (Le. excrescence). The film's construction of Bev as abject is tempered by the film's presentation of her as a sympathetic figure for a spectator's identification. Even as it represents Bev as a specimen of the abject, the film problematizes her body, sliding her back and forth across the unstable border that separates "woman" and "man." 1would further argue, à la Butler, that this construction of the abject shows up the falsity of the supposedly natural duality of male/Çemale, masculine/ferninine, exploding the sense of normal gender roles by exceeding their binary definitions Though culture tries to control the abject by expelling and repudiating it, the abject clings to the outer contours of the system itself, exposing it as such. In fact, the marginal construction of the abject is central to, if not the center of, the inner workïngs of the gendering system. Richard Corliss, the film reviewer for Time, illuminates how Bev Francis figures at both the center and the margins of femininity: "One man's Helen of Troy is another man's sideshow hermaphrodite. . . The body she has created for herself is, to

'~har~esLeerhsen and Parnela Abramson, "The New Flex Apped," Newsweek, 6 May 1985, 82-83. '~utier,Gender Trouble, 133. untutored eyes, too awesome and frightening, a kind of self-imposed freak of nature."io Corliss' comment speaks to the fabrïcated nature of beauty and desire, impressing upon the reader that perhaps to the "tutored eye" Bev Francis might be considered to possess a beauty on the order of a Helen of Troy. Such perception is articulated by Freud. In The Three Essavs on Sexuality, Freud suggests how the exception, the strange (e.g. Bev), gives clues as to how the mundane and taken-for-granted world of sexual meanings is cons tituted. Hence, the incoherent, that which falls "outside," illustrates how the ~zntztrrzr'izedworld of sexual categorization is a constructed one. Butler reads Freud to Say that as this world is constructed, it could thus be constructed differently.11 In Pumpine Iron II, the cornpetitors are seen as radical departures from the normative conception of desirable women, but that potential crisis of representation is alleviated by the truly "strange exception" of Bev. Filmmakers Gaines and Butler are therefore able to shift the center so as to portray female muscularity as desirable. The directors' agenda can first be detected in the opening montages, which feature the bodies of the star competitors accompanied by the Song "1 Am the Future." Its lyrics are shouted over the images of near naked bodies, flexed muscles, and bare buttocks, and together image and Song solicit the spectator's curiosity with an invitation to desire. This film immediately presents itself as a cultural intervention, as it attempts to alter the boundaries of what it means to be a "woman," and further, an "ideal woman." This shuffling of definitions ihelf points up the constructed nature of ideality and normalcy. As Judith Butler delineates, "dissonant adjectives work retroactively to

l0IXichard Corliss, "Real People in a ReeI Peephole,"Time, 6 May 1985, 86. ll~igmundFreud, Three Essa~son the Theorv of Sexualitv, trans. and revised by James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1973, and Judith Butler's reading of the essays in, Gender Trouble, 1 10. redefine the substantive identities they are said to modify," and these adjectives "expand the substantive categories of gender to indude possibilities they previously exduded."12But if a performative act such as Bev's reveals that (to paraphrase Butler) these substances are merely the coherences contingently created through the refutation of attributes, then the ontology of substances would be exposed as not only an. artifiual effect, but as essentially superfluous. The standards for the desirable female body continue to change, in culture and in the bodybuilding world. Yet though such a shift seems to reveal that the "ontology of substances" is certainly an "artifiual effect," they still do not appear to become superfluous. In fact, Gloria Steinem detailed how Bev was "subject to chromosome tests and other humiiiating suppositions that she might not be a genetic female," tests whidi, according to George Butler, "she has passed with flyùig col or^."^^ Further, the U.S. Genetic Research lab is thanked in the film credits and it would not be much of a supposition to think that the filmmakers undertook the project themselves in anticipation of their audience's questioning of the validity of Bev's %iological gender." Although suc.a "successful" result of a scientific test would appear to secure Bev's eligibility in a "women's" bodybuilding contest, the task of distinguishing sex from gender becomes all the more difficult once one understands that the hypothesis and the reasoning of those biomedical inquiries is framed by gendered meanings to begin with." The reliance upon a biological essentialism, with its delimitations of "XY=male" and "XX=female," serves a limited purpose, since it does little to assure the bodybuilding officiais that Bev is

"Ibid., 24. '3Steinern, 107. 14Butler, Gender Trouble, 1 10. a "woman." Indeed, if chromosome and other biological testing were able to provide a suffiCient answer to the questions about sex and gender, the film would not go on to dwell so obsessively upon Bev's ambiguous gender status, and its attendant cultural crisis. It is preùsely the inadequacies of such rigid definitions of gender that propel the pnirient voyeurism of bodies, and the attempts to categorize and contain them in a culturally intelligible manner. After the competitors and filmic spectators are introduced to the cornpetition's setting, Las Vegas, the International Federation of Bodybuilding VBB) holds its first meeting for the judges where the officials attempt to "clear up the definite meaning . . . of the word feminlliity." Pum~ineIron II's filmmakers play out their fantasies and fears regarding the fluctuating nature of gender constructions, as they fixate on bracketing the competitors either within or without the framework of normative femininity. As Gloria Steinem notes, the judges are obsessed "with the crisis of standards that Bev Francis is forcing them to face."15 This crisis emerges during the initial meeting between the IFBB officials and the judges, where the film's spectators are invited in to learn exactly "what they [the IFBB] are looking for." The IFBB officials are the bodybuilding establishment - they are all old, white, men who guide the sport, set and enforce its standards, and organize its events. The identiw of the judges is more arnbiguous, including former competitors, wives of former competitors, trainers and other unidentified individuals; their power is dearly subordinate to the IFBB officials, who appear to Literally direct the judges in their appraisals of the contestants. To open this first "judging"discussion, an IFBB official offers a simple but obtuse definition of femininity for the judges to use in their evaluation of these bodies:

IFBB official: Let me clear up the definite meaning, analysis of the word femininity and tell you what you have to look for. This is an official IFBB analysis of the meaning of that word . . . what we're lookùig for is right down the middle, a womm with a certain arnount of aesthetic femîninity but yet has that muscle tone to show she's an athlete . . . I6

Charles Gaines/Judge #1: 1object to being told that there is a certain point beyond which women can't go in this sport. When you Say that they should look athletic, but not too masculine, what does that mean exactIy? It's as though the ski federation told the women skiers they could only ski so fast. . . Gaines' objection is loaded; his powerfully simple, but ultimately short-sighted analogy overlooks the crucial locus of power that women's bodies, and the judging of those bodies, occupy within the apparatuses of our culture. Judging female bodybuilding entails viewing and evaluating the barely-clad female body, and the volatility that surrounds this scene of voyeurism is enhanced when Lori Bowen's posing routine is choreographed to the Song, "Dangerous," with its lead he: "Don't mess with me 'cause I'm dangerous." This judging of the

'%e official is intempted by one of the judges who wants to voice an objection. To this spectator's surprise, this judge is astute enough to cnticize the subjective evaluatory standards which the IFBB judges are trying to establish. Unbeknownst to most of the spectators, this critical judge is actually Charles Gaines, author and filmmaker of both Pumping ïron books and films. This objection was noted in vinually a11 of the analyses 1 read of the film, yet none of them noted that the person making the objection is one of the filmmakers. For me, this brings to the surface cmcial issues about the perspective of the filmmaker and his cohorts. Gaines' objection is read differently by a spectator who knows who he is (me) as opposed to a spectator who sees him as a faceless judge- 1s his objection genuine or is he playing devil's advocate in order to create additional conflict around Bev? Perhaps for the sake of the film? This whole contest was constructed to force this question, COcreate exactiy this conflict. Gaines and Butler, by convincing Bev Francis to switch sports and train to be a bodybuilder for this contest (she soon retumed to powerlifting, though she has competed in bodybuilding since then), was bringing this debate to a head in a somewhat artificial manner, Instead of dlowing the sport to evolve and face these questions when one of its own cornpetitors decided to grow, the filmmakers constructed this conflict, at least in part to make their rnovie interesting and salable. This is not to Say that the debate itself was false; no, the debate was happening, had always been happening, and stilI is happening in women's bodybuiIding. But, as Chris Holmlund articulated, in their desire to promote and sel1 women's bodybuilding, Gaines and Butler orchesuated the cornpetition, as well as the events leading up to it. They booked Caesar's Palace. They convinced Bev Francis to participate. Gaines and Butler beiieved that Las Vegas was the threshold, and they wanted Bev to cross it while their camera was rolling. muscularized female form is espeaally complex as such a body intrinsically strains the bounds of traditionally held notions of woman. Thus, while the original Pumpine: Iron, a virtual biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger, must address the subtleties and complexities of the definition of what it means to be world's best "man," it does not threaten to invert that definition, as the sequel does for "woman." (This is not to Say that male bodybuilding is natural, normal, or central. It is without a doubt as much a performance as female bodybuilding.17) Gaines' further questioning of the WBlogic - "We're in the 1980s, who are we to Say what looks like a woman and what doesn't and that women should only go so far?"- speaks directly to this epistemological disturbance. Susan Bordo argues that during periods of disruption and change in established gender-relations and the position of women, nightrnare images of the "consuming woman" theme proliferate in art and literature. These images represent female desire unleashed, and although Bev is not a sexual character, her body signihes the massive consumption of calories required to produce her incredible body.18 Bev is just sudi a nightrnare, as she will soon challenge another judge's assumption that "we have a pretty good idea of what a woman looks like." The provocation her body presents appears to be too much of a threat to the IFBB officiais:

IFBB #1: We want what's best for Our sport and best for Our girls. We don? want to tum people on, uh, I mean off, we want to tum them on. . .

17~orfurther reading on this topci: Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds. Screening the MaIe: Ex~loring: Masculinities in Hollvwood Cinema (New York: Routledge. 1993). John O'Neill. Five Bodies: The Human Shaoe of Modern Societv (Ithaca, N.Y.: Corne11 University Press, 198% and Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Ferninine: Film. Feminism, Psvchoanalvsis (London: Routledge, 1993). %usan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism. Western Culture. and the Bodv (Berkeley: University of California Press, I993), 206- As Bev's constmcted body emerges, it is not surprking that simuktneously, normalized constructions of the female body became more sylphlike, more like that of an adolescent or boy. These images might be called female desire unbom and are evoked by the concomitant rise of the "waif' supermodels, apotheosized by Kate Moss. 1just want to Say that women are women and men are men, and there's a difference, and thank god for that difference. And that's al1 I have to Say. The male subject, as evidenced by the judges of Pum simultaneously recognizes and denies difference. Certain differences (big breasts, stylized haïr, makeup) are considered elemental to heterosexual excitation; therefore Bev's body must be repudiated so as to maintain this "difference" between men and women. Her exclusion and abjection within the film plays out in rnicrocosm the processes of "expulsion" and "repulsion" that fond and

consolidate culturdy hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of * differentiality.19 This exclusion is a form of domination in which stable borders and boundanes are tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation by sanctionhg the subject and compelling its differentiation hom the abjecto Bev's "difference," however, also duplicates the traditionally male bodily inscriptions of power (muscles, strength, and power), and as such threatens to destabilize the haditionally inalienable markers of masculine dominance. She is so "different" that she becomes the "same" - the "same" as men. Holmlund's articulation of this scenario has the male spectator both desiring and dreading the women's visible difference, for it evokes his fears conceming the loss of power.21 Thus, the judges' choice of Carla Dunlap, the only black competitor, as the winner of the Caesar's World Cup, can be seen in Foucauldian terms as a response by the power apparatus to an urgent need in society:

Threatened by the specter of the abolition of visible difference (muscular women), the male judges consciously and unconsciously affirm their need lglris Marion Young, "Abjection and Oppression: Unconscious Dynamics of Racism, Sexism, and Homop hobia," paper presen ted at the Society of Phenornenology and Existential Philosophy Meetings, Nonhwestem University, I 988; quoted in Butler, Cender Trouble, 133. 20~utler,Gender Trouble, 133-134. 21~hnstineHolmlund, "Visible Difference and Flex Appeal: The Body, Sex, Sexuality, and Race in the Pumping Iron Films." Cinema Journal 28, no. 4. (Summer 1989): 42. for visible difference by choosing a woman who still look like a woman (different) and who is black (different). The judges' deusion cmbe seen as a simultaneous recognition and disavowal of racial difference? Thus, Bev is threatening because her (musded) difference becomes too similar, exacerbated by the sarneness of her whiteness. Conversely, Carla's body, although disturbing in its difference, serves to affirm the judges whiteness, their distinct maleness, and ultimately, their centrality. Bev confounds both gender categones as she wants to be accepted as a woman, while working toward a physique that more and more resembles the

traditional iconiuty of the muscled man. She continues to be deeply invested in

sigmfying as a wornnn: "Sometimes people think 1nnz a man, which I understand because of my developed shoulders and shortish hair. But when 1explain that 1 am a woman, and they Say, 'No, you're not,' it really irritates me because I'm an honest person."23 With her show of "irritation," Bev is ideologically compelled (if not physically forced) to justify her appearance, and to insist that it corresponds to the "idea of nature" that has been established for her. Monique Wittig has argued that "men" and "women" are political categories and not natural fa~ts?~ and those who do not align themselves appropriately are regularly punished for failing to adhere to the standards of gender. Indeed, Bev's lack of secondary female sex characteristics tmly marks her downfall in the Caesar's Cup, since in spite of her tremendous musculature, she is relegated to last place among the finalists of the contest. It is her inability to adequately convey the notion "woman" with either corporeal signifier or signification (body language) that makes her too disturbing to compete successfully. Bev's only act that falls in line

22~olrnlund."Visible Difference and Fiex Appeal," 47. *~teinem, 106-107. 24~ut~er,Gender Trouble, 1 15- with traditional notions of woman is her (not fully explicit) relationship with Big Steve. Her history of body enlargement and powerlifting are ultimately not compatible with any narrative that constitutes femuunity. The second time the filmic spectator meets the IFBB is during the '%bikini check," where the viewer is informed of the judges perspective of "their girls," as well as the fïlm.makers' view of the judges. During this meeting, Carla Dunlap, the ultimate winner of the contest, poses a challenge to the judges: "We need to define ferninine as it applies to our sport. . . If we're not accepting passivity as the basis for the definition of femininity, then we've got to put some sort of perimeter around the word." An IFBB official, Oscar State, responds: "The very first sentence in the women's rule book really covers it: 'Judges must remember that they are judging a women's contest, and the competitors must still look like women."'During his lecture, the film cuts from a shot of the judges to a profile of Bev, whose big nose and hollowed visage, sans the makeup or stylized hair of the other competitors, looks decidedly haggard and "unferninine." Carla counters his daim, "But we all have our ideas of fentininity," to which Oscar responds over an unflattering profile shot of Bev: "They go to extremes and start looking like men, that's not what we're looking for in a women's contest . . . Judges are regularly briefed so they don't go to the extrernes." This exchange is followed by a two-shot rack focus of Rachel and Carla as Oscar prcnounces that "the winners of the competition will set the standards of fernininity." Gaines and Butler's intercutting of cornments and images provokes a dialogue beyond the one that actually takes place in that room. That is, the constructed nature of docurnentary film becomes visible as the purposefd editing highlights and critiques the IFBB officiais' statements. The filmmakers' careful weaving of image and audio alludes to how Bev has been effectively "prejudged" before the contest even begins, stirring sympathy in any spectator who disapproves of an unfair contest. What does it take to meet these "standards of feemininity"? What other cultural roles should Bev have perforrned in order to siggmfy "wornan"? The traditional discursive routes indude: being a good mother, a heterosexually desirable object, and a fit worker. In sum, "today's woman" is supposed to signiS a multiplicity of guarantees in response to a varie- of different demands all at once." However, as Butler has indicated, al1 of these manifestations of gender are always already performances, with no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute their reality? These repeated acts form the basis for the gendered subject within our culture, enacting by their very repetition the semblance of stable interior gender. Thus, according to Butler, signification is not a fotinding nct, but rczflzer n regulnted process of ~epetition.'~

Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a styZized repetition ofacts. The effect of gender is produced through the styiization of the body, and hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self? Butler's definition of gender performance seems to be something which Bev is unable to produce externally; instead, Bev's abiding gendered self is show to be structured by repeated (faïled) attempts to approximate anything dose to a grounded identity. According to Butler, it is exactly these occasional discontinuities which reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this "ground." Thus, Bev ernbodies the possibility of gender transformation found precisely in the arbitrary relation between such performative acts. This is particularly acute in those moments of discontinuity and deforrnity when she fails to repeat, or repeats parodicaily, the codes of femininity.'9 Perhaps, then, Bev's attempts to perform the notion of woman speak more to drag, that is, she seems to be more imitnting than sigrdying woman. For example, when she is primped for the final contest, hair done and makeup applied, she looks less like a woman than a man hying to look like a woman. Esther Newton, in her seminal study, Mother Camp: Female lmpersonators in Arnerica, suggests that the structure of drag impersonation reveals one of the key fabricating mechanisms through which the social construction of gender takes place." At its most complex, drag is a double inversion of outside appearance vs. inside essence. In the case of female impersonators, their unadomed appearance is typically coded "male," while their inner feelings are thought to be those of a wornan. Simultaneously, their bodily drag is coded female, while their inner genetic "essence" remains male. With Bev, though, the drag show threatens to become more than a mere show. It is her ncttid body, not merely costume, makeup, voice and posture, that she transforms into the epitome of "maleness." Yet, she also wants to be seen as a woman, despite the fact that her extensively developed intemal musculature must inevitably be read as that of a male bodybuilder. In drag "performances" like Bev's, the traditionally strict linkages of anatomy to gender identity and gender performance corne undone. Whereas the drag performer typically must conceal his or her anatomy, Bev reveals hers to be that of the "other" gender. In imitating gender, drag

391bid., 141. %sther Newton, "Role ModeIs," in Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in Arnenca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 97-1 1 1; quoted in ButIer, Gender Trouble, 136-137. impliutly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself -as well as its contingency. While Butler contends that gender performances such as Bev's are fantasies of a fantasy, as unintentional drag, they are also imitations of an imitation;' both ultimately revealing gender as a false, uninhabitable construction. Butler argues that these gender norms, which Bev and most of the rest of us aspire to, are finally phantasmatic and impossible to embody, not just for Bev but for everybody. No one can Uybe a woman, perform "woman," because there are always moments when the fantasy breaks down. Consider how cracks appear even in the performance of Rachel McLish, who is offered as the apotheosis of a balanced femuiuie and muscled body. Rachel McLish epitomizes one of Butler's conceptions of masquerade: a performative production of a sexual ontology, an "appearing" that makes itself convincing as a %eir~g."~' McLish's performance and masquerade of her body as ultra-girl and ultra- ferninine often verge on parody, threatening to reveal the performance and denaturalize the construction. While her parody is both unintentional and unselfconscious - Rachel literally sees herself as the ideal that al1 women should aspire to - Bev's parody of gender is more complicated. As Bev is desperate to be considered within the borders of the definition of "woman," she also works to develop a body which cdsinto question that very definition. In contrast, Rachel's elaborate stylization of her face, hair, and body in preparation for a workout session is a powerful example not only of adept gender performance, but also of successful female masquerade. She activates a compehg version of what Joan Riviere describes as the strategy of "compensatory femininity":

31Butler,Gender Trouble, 136- 138. "Butler, Gender Trouble, 47. "women who wish for masculinity [in this case, physical strength and power] may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men."33As Riviere further argues, this masqueraded "Çeeminuuty" does not actually have any stable ontological existence; it serves only as a disguise to conceal the woman's de facto appropriation of masculinity?' Rachel can be muscularly developed without punishment or retribution because she convinüngly performs womnn, i.e., she does her gender "right." She proudly self- identifies as a "strong powder puff." In contrast, Bev's unsuccessful masquerade elicits stem repudiation. Her over-accumulation of masculine traits can never be compensated for by a masquerade of femininity; the former consigns the latter to be interpreted as unintentional parody. When Bev tries to perform "ferninine" attributes, they corne across as imitative, momentary failed attempts to override alI of the bodily accoutrements, inevitably signifying only masculinity and maleness. After the "bikini check scene which exposes the biases of the WBofficiais and the perspective enforced on the judges, the filmic spectator wimesses Bev's most powerful deconstruction of the gender norms her body contests. In a fascinating scene of intentionnl parody, Bev enacts a performance of a masquerade of femininity, and then of masculinity as well. With conscious self- reflexivity, a friend with a Super 8 camera films Bev going through a series of poses, as her friends, coaches, and Gaines and Butler's camera watch. Bev theatrically contorts her body in awkward, overtly "ferninine" positions trying to appear coy and demure. The poses are ridiculous; everyone laughs as Bev drops

?loan Riviere, "Womanliness as a Masquerade," in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), 35. %Riviere, 34. to the floor and kicks her heels in the air, mimicking the image of a carefree girl on the beach. She struggles to get up from the ground, breaking into a toothy grin as she riseç to throw her hugely muscular arms behind her head. As Silvia Bovenschen states in relation to Marlene Dietrich, "We are watching a woman demonstrate the representation of a woman's body."" The film cuts to a reverse shot of Big Steve, Bev's future husband, looking wistfully at this performance; his desires have dearly been stirred by this parodic moment of girlishness, although he knows perfectly well that it is only a masquerade. Amazingly, Bev then quickly tums to deconstruct the notions of maleness and masculinity. Bev pantomimes the male bodybuilder walking around on stage, "throwing an Amold," strivùig to embody an image of what it means to be strong and manly. Bev knows this image intimately, because she no doubt aspires to certain elements of this ideal. But in the act of impersonation, she shows up the poses of Arnold (and all male bodybuilders) for what they are - performances of an imagined unity that is maleness. Barbara Creed reads the muscular male stars of Our times, including Schwarzenegger, as "performing the masculine." These actors often resemble an anthropomorphised phallus, a phallus with muscles, if you like. They are simulacra of an exaggerated masculinity, the original completely lost to sight, a casualty of the failure of a patemal signifier and the current crisis in master narratives?' Similarly, if Bev can "throw an Arnold" and possess "muscularity that most men wish they had," what are the implications for masculinity? If a %iological fernale" is able to

?3ilvia Bovenschen. "1s There a Feminine Aesthetic?" New Geman Critique 10 (Winter 1977): 129; quoted in Mary Ann Doane, Femme Fatales: Feminism. Film Theoy. Psvchoanalvsis (New York: Routledge, 199 1). 26. =Barbara Creed, "From Here to Modernity: Feminisrn and Postmodernisrn," Screen 28, no. 2 (L987): 65; quoted in Yvonne Tasker, "Dumb Movies for Durnb People," in Screenino the Male, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993), 232. perform a body rnost men only wish they could have, then "maleness/masculinityrl itself proves to be every bit as fabricated as feminùiity. Although Riviere equates womanliness with masquerade, Butler's theories illuminate how such an equation is incomplete-37Thus, Bev's double masquerade of femuùnity and masculinity, through its rapid altemation within a single site of bodily origin, effectively answers Butler's query by revealing not only the "cause" "woman/femininify" to be an "effect," but also the construa of "man/masculinity" as well. Sadly, directly after the performative posedown discussed above, the spectator witnesses Bev's prostration to the pressures of docility during the final choreographed routines. She grasps for the privilege of being situated within the ultra-feminine construct of "girl" by smiling, prancing around stage, and shaking her behind during her choreographed posing routine. This performance painfully ïronizes Bev's earlier (and ultimately refused) desire "to look just like a male bodybuilder," exposing how the powers of normalization can be overwhelming, even for the strongest woman in the world. Bev's ability to explode notions of ferninuiity and masculinity is thus bookended by her attempts to achieve recognition within these very domains. This speaks directly to the Foucauldian pcwer paradigm diagrammed in the introduction. WleBev is empowered by her bodybuilding endeavors to look critically at the image(s) she attempts to embody, she is also disciplined by souety's desire, by now well assimilated, to perform some successful version of the construct that is "femininity." Her intemalized desire for "normality" still retains its power, even

37~hnstineHolmlund, "Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade," in Screenin~the Male, ed. Steven Cohan and haRae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993), 213. As Holmlund points out, Jacques Lacan himself has argued that masculinity is a dispiay. as her (perhaps unintended) bodily performances work to deconstruct the very noms that must elude her. Ultimately, Bev's masquerades and performances (both failed and successfd) challenge traditional notions of what it means to be a "woman," even as they paradoxically attempt to repeat them.

The End: A Beginning for the MFB In summary, Pum~inIron II promotes the strong Çemale body, and even goes so far as to solicit the spectator's desire for what must initially be seen as a disturbing new look. The contradictions built into the judging uiteria also provoke tensions within the narrative, as well as between the narrative and its images. Steinem argues in her Ms. article on Pum~ineIron 11 that both filmic spectators and contest audiences are at times largely aligned with the more muscular and articulate women; although one might expect them to identify with the conventionally prettier and sexier Rachel, on the whole they prefer to identify with the more intelligent and likable Bev.38 1 amalso inclined to align with Bev as my only figure of viable identification. It is unavoidable that my reading of the film is colored by this projected spectatorship; perhaps other spectators idenhfy with Lori's Horatio Alger narrative, or Carla's position as eloquent outsider - although she is the winner, she is the featured contestant about whom we leam the least. Throughout the film, it is Bev whom the spectator cornes to know best as outspoken and independent, a good sport and good sportswoman. While the film ends with Bev losing the contest . . .

the film does not encourage spectators to adopt the positions articulated by the white male International Federation of Bodybuilders (IFBB) officiais: on the contrary, they look ridiculous . . . In the final contest scenes the official's cornpetence is thrown into question, for even with the help of a calculator, they are unable to total the women's scores. Moments such as these, where the audience is encouraged to identify with strong women and to reject "dolls" and patriarchs, are certainly victories for fe1ninism.3~

Thus, although Bev is conçtmcted as the "abject," it seems that such a delineation is purely temporary. Gloria Steinem believes that Bev "wins" after au, for ever since her barrier-breaking appearance in Las Vegas, many women bodybuilders have been heavier and more musded, less likely to accept limits on their developrnent. Moreover, from the late 1980s into the first half of the 1990s, the more muscled contestants scored higher, as judges' standards gradually changed3JSo it appears that the abject hctions as a temporary tool in the use of the ever-shifting cultural center, attempting to defend and stabilize its curent preferred readings of gender. Thus, in 1983, Bev was still excluded by the beauty industry, which saw her "look as unprofitable, unsalable, and undesirable to both men and women. As Big Steve states in the film's last lines of dialogue, Bev did not win the contest because of the "sarne old story - picking a pretty girl - what they cal1 pretty." Francis' coach had earlier articulated this same sentiment at her 8th place finish: "Why do they bother calling this sport bodybuilding? What the hell they (sic) looking for, Miss America?" Bev establishes a new ferninine ideal from the first moment she crosses the stage in Purnping Iron II - an ideal that has become more palatable to the culture at large, the strong woman. The film and its characterizations were part of a vanguard that established an entire subculture - from magazines and advertising to gyrns and the diet industry. This vanguard coalesced to engender a desire for a more muscled physique for women.

39~olmlund,"Visible Difference and Flex Appeal," 41. 40~teinem,106. On the culture map, Fumpinp Iron II coerced a slight shift in the compass of allowable desires; such a deliberate culfivation of a new object of ideality ought to be considered a formidable texhial intervention. Pumping Iron II clearly qualifies as an inaugural moment of this intervention, a moment that also brought with it a number of other consequences that the makersrnight not have intended. Most importantly, Bev shows sex to be "a performatively enacted signification (and hence not 'to ber),one that, released from its naturalized interiority and surface, can occasion the parodic proliferation and subversive play of gendered rneaning~.*~~lThus Pumping Iron II illuminates for the spectator the constnicted nature of what is said to be natirrnl: instead of being hed, the definitions of such tems as feminu-iity (and masculinity) are shown to be hansitory, cultivated, and constructed, and the gender binas. ihelf is shown to be inadequate and false. Bev illustrates how the "cause" is an "effect."The consmicted gender boundaries which previously had placed strength, power, and size al1 clearly on the side of maleness are flouted by a woman who is stronger than Arnold Schwarzeriegger and can lift over 500 pounds.

41~utler,Gender Trouble, 33. THE VEXED FLEX: THE SPECTACULAR RECEPTION OF LfNDA HAMILTON'S HARD BODY

IN TERMINATOR 2

When the 1990s corne to an end and the nation's great wnters compose their somber in-decade review articles, I hope they won't forget about one very important work of art. 1 am referring, of course, to the Linda Hamilton picture. You remember. To publicize Terminator 2 - the science fiction movie that was supposed to be al1 about Arnold Schwarzenegger - Hamilton, playïng the lead female role, was photographed in sunglasses and a sleeveless t-shirt, angrily holding a rifle . . . Not exactly what you'd call a glamour shot. The photo, however, captured the imagination of countless Arnerican women in the way old studio stills of Garbo captivated previous generations. Women 1know have tom the Hamilton picture out of magazines and taped it to their refrigerators. At work, they keep it in desk drawers as if it were a sacred object of periodic worship.

Skip Hollandsworth, SeJ, May 1992'

Magazine editor Skip Hollandsworth published "Hard Bodies, Soft Touch as the tide of the "Mesomorphic Gal" (or as I termed hem, muscularized female bodies) crested .2 Like TV Guide critic Ann Oldenburg, Hollandsworth pegged Linda Hamilton, "as the steely Sarah Connor," the "Body of the 90s."~Indeed, Hamilton's body in Terminator 2 captured the cultural imagination and represented a tuming point for "average women," now hailed to indude stellar biceps and "definition" as part of their dynamic beauty ideal. While other corporeal desires and standards circulated in culture at that tirne (e-g.,the standard for thinness had not lessened, it had merely been rnodified

'Skip Hollandsworth, "Hard bodies, Soft Touch," SeIf. May 1992, 90. 'Ibid. 3~nnOldenburg, "This Hamilton Woman," TV Guide, 29 July 1995, 20. indude muscle tone), Hamilton's hard body worked to redirect cultural desires towards an anomalous body type. Since Hamilton's star turn, articles in People,

-Us, Instyle, Vo-me, Mademoiselle, and J&, not to mention those in Shape, Self, and Muscle and Fitness, have regularly featured stories on how celebrities and average women have trimmed their waistlines and built up newly buffed biceps in the hope of "looking like Linda."' Moreover, Hamilton's body inaugurated the shïft towards muscdar females in visual culture: "The trend toward hard-body heroines probably started with the guerrilla warfare of Linda Hamilton in If Pumpin~Iron II rnarked the muscular woman's move away from subcuitural sideshow, then Terminator 2's 1991 premiere signaled the muscled female form's move to center stage. Terminator 2 joined a nurnber of contemporary films that explored shifting standards of womanliness by showcasing powerful, if not buffed women: Silence of the Lambs (1990), Thelma and Louise (1991), La 3 Femme Nikita (1991), V.I. Warshawski (1991), Alien (1992), and Basic Instinct (1992). MThile the most obvious way that film circulates outside of the screening room is through the persona of the star, the distribution, reception, and use of a star image as powerful as Hamilton's is a dynamic and contradictory process, as Miriam Hansen has argued: the visibility of fan magazines, features in womenfs magazines and Mestyle magazines, as well as magazine-style television in the past ten years - al1 of these create a complex net of address which "challenges the notion of a cinematic institution located exclusively in film-specific textual pr~~erties."~Miriam Hansen acutely describes here the lack of continuity

'Oldenburg, 20. 'charles Fleming, "That's Why the Lady is a Champ," Newsweek, 7 June 1993, 66. 6Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: RoutIedge, 1993), 65- between studio publicity, fan magazines, and actual audiences, accountuig for the push and pull among these forces that give rise to vanous formations of reception and identification. These extra filmic, subcultural formations will fiame my andysis of Hamilton's body and its display in Temiinator 2.7 To further challenge this singular notion of the filmic text as the sole source of meaning, I want to investigate the diverse spectators who make meanings by appropriating a text iike "the Linda Hamilton body." These multitudinous constructions and receptions call for a study of Esmost compehg intertext - the culturalfiinction and distribution of Linda Hamilton as a body-icom8 My analysis suggestç that films like Terminator 2 are sites for "a new stage of spectatorship studies, where the mode1 is no longer the passive, manipulated (and inevitably white and heterosexual) spectator, but rather the contradictory, divided, and fragmented s~bject."~First 1will tum to the text, borrowing Judith Mayne's insights on "fractured spectatorship" to analyze the divergence between the narrative construction of Hamilton's character and the spectatorial reception of her image. 1want to question how such a split might enable both narcissistic over-identification with the character and / or voyeuis tic object desire of her corporeality. Such desire anses despite Terminator 2's presentation of Hamilton as asexual or "beyond sex;" indeed, her tough as naiis

- 'The power 1 accord the spectator as she or he reads and creates this cultural function is not unprecedented. Miriam Hansen's article "EarIy Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere," argues for a connection between preclassicaI and postclassicaI forms of film viewership, noting that "preclassical and postciassical forms of spectatorship give the viewer a greater Ieeway . . . in interacring with the film - a greater awareness of exhibition and culturai intertexts" ( 148). "orne pieces contend that a is more overtly interested in refashioning rnasculinity than femininity, such as Fred PfeiI's, "Home Fires Burning: FarniIy Noir in Blue Velvet and Terminator 2," in Shades of Noir (ed. Joan Copjec, London: Verso, 1993) or Susan Jefford's "Can Masculinity be Terminated?" in Screening; the Male, (ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hack, New York: Routledge, 1993). However cornpelling their arguments, 1 have chosen to focus on the significant (and noticeably queered) popular reception of the Linda Hamilton body and its resultant influence on contemporary bodily ideals. 'Mayne, 100. body becomes highly sexualized and desired, and not just by the traditionally conceived straight white male spectator. From gossip, fan magazines, dianes, journals, even "salons" and "temples" devoted to her on the World Wide Web, I will hypothesize a pattern of subcdtural readings and appropriations of the Linda Hamilton body both by avowedly lesbian subjects, as well as by those whose "queer" readings do not necessarily coinude with their sexual identities.

Framing Reception/Spectatorship While no exhaustive sociological study of the reception of Linda Hamilton's body exists, this pattern of reception is discemible, adumbrated through gossip, shared knowledge, informal interviews, pseudonymous web postings, and other cultural rninutiae. Such diannels of reception have been legitimized by scholars of film spectatorship like Hansen, Mayie, Claire Whatling, B. Ruby Rich, and Rhona Berenstein, who have both challenged the once-cornmon disrnissals of subcultural or otherwise resistant readings as abnormalities and argued for the analysis of extra-textual codes of knowledge." As Angela McRobbie has pointed out, such an endeavor entails a more flexible methodology: "Instead of seeking direct causal links or chahs, the emphasis [should bel placed on establishing loose sets of relations, capillary actions and movement, spilling out among and between different fields: work and leisure,

"Judith Mayne, Cinema and S~ectatorship(London: Routledge, 1993); Claire Whatling, Screen Dreams: Fantasisin~Lesbians in Film (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1997); Rhona Berenstein, "Spectatorship-as-Drag: The -4ct of Viewing and Classic Horror Cinema." in Viewino- Positions: Wavs of Seein~Film, ed. Linda Williams (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1997); and the above- cited Miriam Hansen. On the significance of gossip specifically, see both Mayne (frorn Cinema and Spectatorshi~)who contends that gay and Iesbian spectatorship depends upon gossip as it "highlights a channel of information which may stretch even larger and more expansive definitions of context and intertextuality" (161), and B. Ruby Rich, who clairns that "Gossip provides the unofficial unrecorded history of lesbian participation in film." From Rich's Chick Fiicks: Theories and Mernories of the Feminist Film Movement (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 210. fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, individual and social e~perience."~'However, most studies of film spectatorship since the 1970s have been reluctant to perform such analyses, instead pnvileging two methodologies -Lacanian-ideological approaches, where a subject is inserted into a textual position, and Freudian readings where viewing positions correspond to the behavior and point of view of heroes and heroines, either sadistic or masochistic - over a third, less canonical methodology, which "conceives of multiple viewing positions, with recourse to theoretical frameworks beyond the psychoanalytic pale and with a view to dislodging the field's favori te dualities: male /fernale and he terosexua! / hornosex~al.~~~~ With that dislodging in mind, my anaiysis examines Hamilton's productively "queer" reception by heterosexual and homosexual readers engaged in "looking lesbian," as Claire Whatling has formulated this scopic dynamic.13 In Screen Dreams, Whatling contends that there is no such thing as a "lesbian film;" rather, films are lesbianised by the individual (or in some cases collective) viewer: the cinema "offers women who do not self-name as lesbian, who may actively repudiate such an identification, a space for the realisation of private same-sex fantasies . . . ln this sense the term lesbian is both a necessary and an insufficient category of description, but then again, what's new there?"" Thus, while spectatorship theory has examined how viewing is conditioned by social and sexual categories, it has underemphasized what my analysis - like Whatling's - foregrounds: the possibility that spectators also idenûfy against

"~ngelaMcRobbie, "Dance and Social Fantasy," in Gender and Genention, ed. Angela McRobbie and Mica Niva (London: Macmillan, 1984). 142; quoted in Mayne, 94-95. lZ1bid., 232, 13WhatIing, 6. "Ibid., 6. themselves. As Mayne notes of Unema's "safe zone," where homosexual as well as heterosexual desires cm be fantasized and acted out,"" identification in opposition may be one of Unema's primary pleasures - viewers may relish the abiLity to escape their everyday social, racial, sexual, and economic identities? Mayne concludes that "desire and pleasure in the cinema may weLl function to problematize the categories of heterosexual versus homo~exual."'~This very opportunity for flexible, slippery identities can itself be a source of pleasure; though Freud was hesitant to admit it, sexual excitation may result from the very fact that identities are shifting, a possibility that has significant implications for film spe~tatorship.'~ Similarly germane to expanded theories of spectatorship that allow for multiple cross-identifications, Berenstein aligns viewing processes with performance - with the possibility of adopting multiple and even contradictory identities, induding not only sex/gender disguises, but also new racial, ethnic, economic, and temporal "ma~ks."'~Henry Jenkins' reading of Star Trek fan writing suggestively argues that such performance enables fans to embrace popular texts, clauning films as their own, remaking them in their own image, altering them to respond to their needs and to gratify fheir desires. Thus, consumption sparks production as spectator culfxre becomes participatory culture.20Of course, this study of "imputed spectatorship" can never be a purely theoretical endeavor, but always "an analysis of one's own fascination and lS1bid.. 97, 16Berenstein,250.25 1. "Mayne, 97. ''Berenstein, 242. 191bid., 254. *O~enryJenkins, "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritren: Fan Writing as Texcual Poaching," in Close Encounters: Film. Feminism and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley, EIisabeth Lyon, Lynn SpigeI, and Janet Bergstrom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 199 1). 197. passion."21Admittedly, my own reception of Linda Hamilton in Temator 2 sprung equally from my own fantasies of Linda Harnilton/myself as an invincible, sexy wamor as it did from the literal confines of the text. Yet the intensity of my newfound lust for beautiful biceps and the analogous desires of those around me at fimes blinded me to the specificity of this devotion - to its shared articulation within the subculture 1inhabit, one composed of yomg, urban, predominantly queer, body-conscious individuais. Strikingly though, in this instance, subcultural devotion overlapped with a more widespread cultural fascination - the muscled female body had gone mainstream and a newlv desirable body type had visibly emerged: Linda Hamilton was the "Body of the 90s."~'

Absences: Spectacle vs. Narrative, Passive vs. Active Before moving to interrogate the reception of the Linda Hamilton body, I want to briefly recall for the reader the text in which that body took center stage. Terminator 2 begins with Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor incarcerated in a criminal mental institution, having left her son John Connor (Edward Furlong) in foster care. The action commences when Arnold Schwarzenegger retums to the present as a Terminator from the future, newly reprogrammed to protect John from an even more technologically advanced Terminator, the TlOOO (Robert Patrick) that has been sent to "terminate" John Co~or.Schwarzenegger and Hamilton team up to battle the TlOOO and, ultimately, to deshoy the ongins of the Terminator technology. In the already extensive analyses of the film,

"Mayne, 84; quoted in Berenstein, 233 "Oldenburg, 20. Terminator 2 has been called an annunciation story?' a tale of Rambo in drag:' and a dassic radical sci-fi film employing an impossible time-loop narrative."

Withh this critical panoply, Sarah Connor has been read variously as "the holy vesse1 in guerrilla garb," the mother of us all,t6 a trïumphant superwoman, remarkably transformed from the conventional Hollywood heroine of the original Temator into a androgynous wamorf2' the ideal body trenchantly theorized by Klaus Thewel~eit;~or the corporeal register for post-industrial culture's ambivalent feelings about the technologized body.'' However, while Connorrs/Hamilton's competency as a "killing machine" is noted by virtually all the popdar film critics, few note the tension between her spectacular image and her contradictory narrative constru~tion.~~Although the film represents Hamilton as a tough heroine, the narrative of the film repeatedly places her in need of help - as a drain on the "family" she forms with Schwarzenegger's Terminator and her son. Richard Dyer has argued that the muscles of the male action star are either parodic or dysfunctional, and the same might be said of Hamilton's: like the male pin-up analyzed by Dyer, Linda

=Richard Corliss, "HaIf a Tenïfic Terminator," Time, 8 July 199 1, 55-56- "Richard Corliss, "Why Can't a Wornan Be a Man?" Time, 5 August 199 1, 66-67. 25~oeAbbot, "They Came from Beyond the Center: IdeoIogy and Political Textuality in the Radical Science Fiction Films of James Cameron," Film Literature Ouarteriv 22, no. 1 (1994): 21-27; Constance PenIey, "Time Travel, Prima1 Scene, and the Criticd Dystopia," in Close Encounters: Film. Feminism and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 62-80. '%athy Maio, "Women Who Murder for the Man," a,NovembedDecember 1991.84. 'JElizabeth Hirschman, "Consumer Behavior Meets the Nouvelle Femme: Ferninist Consumption at the Movies," in Advances in Consumer Research 20 (1993): 4 1. ZBDonnLarson, "Machine as Messiah: Cyborgs, Morphs, and the Amencan Body Politic," Cinema Journal 36, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 59, 65. ?T.P. Telotte, "Temùnator, Teminator 2, and the Exposed Body," Journal of Popular Film and Television 20 (Summer 1992): 26-27. MReadingsof Hamilton's character tend to break down dong academic/popular lines, with academics more often painting her as infanulized and popular cntics seeing her as invincible. Some academics rnight view these "resistant readers" as duped by the film, unable to see Esprofoundly conservative rhetoric, but I would quefor a more cornplex understanding of rheir reception. Hamilton "acts passive." Yet this spectade of Hamilton's body resounded strongly with audiences, as the influence of her body type on contemporary beauty standards attests.

This divergence between the ideological tksust of Zsnarrative and the meanings projected by its images - here, those of Hamilton's body - returns us to Mulvey's 1975 formulation of the relationship between narrative and spectade. For Mulvey, narrative cinema neatly combined spectacle and narrative by placing women in "their traditional exhibitionist role" for the male gaze. In this way women were "simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they cm be said to connote to-be-Zooked-~t-ness-'~~~While Mulvey contended that the spectacle of these females barred narrative development, immobilizing the spectator in voyeuristic or fetishistic gazes, the contradiction between the narrative and spectacular constructions of a's Sarah Comor not only complicates Mulvey's thesis but itself enables individualized and radically divergent spectatorial readings. This is not to Say that the voyeurism encouraged by the film's constant display of Connor's / Hamilton's muscles avoids replaying traditional spectatorial relationships to women's bodies, but that these noms are simultaneously reversed: the display neither foregrounds the image's passivity exclusively nor faditates its consumption by a heterosexual male gaze alone. For Hamilton is both active and posed, confounding the traditional division whereby "femme" signifies passivity (Le. to serve as spectacle for the spectator's pleasure) and to be "male" or '%utch"signifies activity. Constantly posing (passive female) as she flexes her outstretched arms (active male), Connor/Hamilton becomes precisely

3'Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast, Marsha11 Cohen, Leo Braudy, 4th edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 750. the active heroine that Yvonne Tasker studies in her text S~ectacularBodies. Women with "musculinity" (as Tasker terms it) trouble the notion that women either are, or shodd be, represented exclusively through traditional codes of fernininity, an assumption of ten significantly present within ferninist film aitiOsm?* In fact, Mulvey's critique of classic Hollywood narrative cinema is itself dearly hobbled by the very binaries which she is trymg to deconstruct: "Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one fonvarding the story, making thuigs happen . . . [leaving the] woman as specta~le."'~I am not trying to dispute or disprove Mulvëy here (especially as that has already been attempted), merely to extend and complicate her analysis as it relates to the muscularized female body. As this body shows, divisions between passive and active are never that simple, or that solid. f-iamilton/Comor consistently confounds this split; although moments are constructed for the spectator to linger over her sinewy muscles, these images don't simply freeze the fiow of action in moments of erotic contemplation, but also drive the narrative forward and reveal chara~ter.~'Against Mulvey's claim that the female figure is a sort of alien presence which has to be coherently integrated into the narrati~e;'~Hamilton's figure in many ways either becornes the narrative or somehow supersedes it. For, as Tasker notes, the iconography of the original Terrninator film is continued in its sequel, where it is "extended and literally embodied through Hamilton's muscular frame."36It is not merely

3L~vonneTasker, S~ectacuIarBodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993). 139. In fact, the daims of Esmainstrearn cntics, like Time's Richard Corliss, that Hamilton is "really a man" stem from similar assurnptions and represent what Tasker would cal1 "an attempt to secure the logic of a gendered binary in which the terms 'male' and 'mascuiine'. 'fernale' and 'ferninine' are locked together" (139). See Corliss' "Why Can't a Woman be Man?" Time, 5 August 1991,66-67. UMulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 75 1. x~bid.,750. 35~bid. 36Tasker. SpectacuIar Bodies, 138. coinudental that two of my three case studies are sequels. For both cases, the original films focused almost exdusively on the muscularized male body - oddly enough that being the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger in both the documentary Purnpinp. Iron and the sci-fi action film Terminator. The sequels PI2 and a (and even G.I. Tane as it obviously refers to al1 military films before it) significantly diverge from the originals in their representation of women and their bodies. The earlier films depict women as s tereotypically ferninine, as waitresses and girlfriends, passive in pink dresses, bikinis and big haïr. The radical transformation of the focus in the sequels is nothing less than spectacular. Such a focal and bodily shift was indeed the inspiration for this entire project. George Leonard outlines the conflation of spectacle and narrative when he explains how Hamilton needed "not only to look fit, she needed to be fit in every respect - endurance, muscle strength, speed, power - since she planned to perform most of her own ~tunts."~'The role itself, then, demanded such a straddling of boundaries - where *'beingfit" (which demands a corollary "looking fit") is for the sake of stunts, illusions, spectncular nnmtiue events. Throughout the film, Hamilton is caught posing, even, or perhaps especially, when she is being active. A prime example is her frequent posturing with her phallic extension, a weapon. This recurrent image features Hamilton in a tank top with generous arm openings so the viewer can see not only her beautiful biceps, but also her defined deltoids and back. She holds the gun out in front of her, like a cop on a TV show, extending her arms fuJl length, showing off the striations and separations in her arms and shoulders usually only visible on "real" female bodybuilders. These same arms that "started a national personal-training

37~eorgeLeonard, "Body Double." Self. July 1992, 92. cra~e"~~serve as the film's introduction to Hamilton's character. The spectator sees every sinew of Hamilton's arms while she performs dun-ups in an early scene; her muscles are elegantIy outlined in relief by the sunlight streaming in the barricaded window of her cell. With these inaugural pull-ups, Hamilton is literally and figuratively pulling her own weight. The spectator quiddy learns that Hamilton's muscles are not merely for spectacle, as her physical strength facilitates her attacks on her doctor and her eventual escape attempt. Throughout these introductory scenes, Hamilton is insistently defined by a combination of both female and male characteristics that confounds and destabilizes a simple gendered binary. She is watched and sunreyed by the medical authorities, but also resistant, active, and rebellious. Though her body is objectified both by the camera and the doctors, she resists containment by developing and putting to use her body's musculature. She further rebuffs their scopophilic patronization by tuming away from their gaze, and retuming it with her angry, feral eyes.

(Only?)An Image of Strength Although the appeal of her body effectively garnered critical adulation, there are times in the film that the Linda Hamilton body seerns to serve as a hollow image of strength. With the introduction of the Terminator/Amold Schwarzenegger, Hamilton's role as the (mother-of-the) future's savior will become narratively, if not symbolically, challenged. Sarah Connor's escape effort is foiled when Schwarzenegger/ the Terminator appears in the elevator, inducing her to nui down the corridor in terror into the hands of the waiting guards.

38LeslieHeywood, Bodvrnakers: A Culniml Anatom! of Women's Bodvbuilding (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 52. Schwarzenegger follows and saves her by literally picking up the guards and throwing them into a window. A low point-of-view shot aligns us with Sarah sitting on the Boor looking up at Schwarzenegger as the rehabilitated Terminator. The angle both marks him as an immensely imposing figure and infantilizes her as he puts out his hand: 'Tome with me if you want to live." A reverse point-of-view shot from Schwarzenegger's phallic position shows Hamilton crouched and whimpering as she reaches out. Although Sarah Co~or has been active and self-determining until this point (and she will be again when she separates from the Temator and goes off on a solo mercenary mission), during the rernainder of her screen time with Schwarzenegger, she will no longer act independently. While Hamilton is not always silent or passive, she often plays the supporting physical role to Schwarzenegger, who gives the orders, crushes the opponents, and repeatedly saves her. In a dynamic strongly reminiscent of Mulvey's argument that the male unconscious works to stave off castration amiety through the "devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty objectfiGg whenever Connor disobeys the Tenninator (standing and shooting in the elevator as they escape the institution) or contradicts her son's wishes (as when she attacks Dyson), she is either punished or forced into situations from which the Terminator must Save her. Even though the movie announces that Hamilton is powerful and highlights her body's strength, her autonomy, independence, and effectiveness are nanatively tempered by the Terminator's invincibility. These moments of what Mulvey calls "sadistic voyeurism," which punish or endanger "the woman through the agency of an active and powerful male

39M~lvey,"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 753. chara~ter,"'~work in tandem with fetishistic over-valuation of Hamilton's body, which masters the threat of castration by investing the woman's body with an excess of aesthetic perfection? Indeed, Hamilton's first scene in the film contains no dialogue or narrative advancement; it is a lingering montage of Hamilton working out in her cell, her muscles carefully lit for maximal spectatorial pleasure. By tumirig Hamilton and her resounding musculature into a fetish, her form reassures rather than threatens. True to the Mulveyan Çormulation, such fetishisticscopophilia builds up the physical beau ty of the object -here, Hamilton's muscular body - and hansforms it into something satisfyïng in itself? Sarah Connor/Linda Hamilton's solo mission to kU Dyson - the scientist who is developing the Terminator tedinology - is her first truly autonomous act and a key narrative moment. In effect, Sarah momentarily becomes a

Terminator. A brief plot sumrnary will demonstrate how this transpires. We watch Sarah prepare to fire on Dyson, breathing heavily as she caresses the trigger. As she fires, Dyson's son runs his remote-controlled truck into his father's foot. Dyson bends down to retrieve it. Sarah's bullet (tellingly) shatters the compter screen instead of his head; she doadsher ammunition into the techrtology, destroying all visible hardware. Dyson's wife enters the scene, reuniting the nudear family, as Sarah approaches with a handgun. She fires on Dyson, missing twice before finally hitting him in the shoulder. Terrified, Dyson's wife dings to him as their son throws himself on top of his Çather, fomùng a human shield. Dyson throws his son off and begs Sarah, "just let them

- -- %inda Williams, "When the Woman Look~,"Re-Vision: Essavs in Feminist Film Criticisrn, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia MeIlencamp, and Linda Williams (Fredenck, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1984). 88. "fiid. '2Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 753. go." Sarah screams for them to shut up and begins ranting: "It's all your fault motherfudcer, it's all your fault!" as she again takes aim. On the verge of shooting her prey at point blank range, Sarah is overcome with emotion and badcs off, uumpling to the floor in tears. Sarah's termination of Dyson fails, leaving her homfied by what she has nearly done/become13 She loses the opportunity to become the savior of the world; the role instead devolves to John Comor and the Terminator. 'Ihey arrive forthwith. and the boy tells her "It's OK, it's OK. I'll work something out Morn." While Sarah is supposed to be helping and protecting her kin. she instead appears to be a drain on the recently-constituted "family." UnLike Schwarzenegger, she does not always do the right thing or make the best deusions. The film paints her fading as her latent "ferninine" feelings and emotionality, a typically gendered weakness. While feminist spectators may read Sarah's words as subversive, the patriarchal spectator might easily see her as typicdy hysterical: Sarah, arms flexed and chah smoking, chastises Dyson, "Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb . . . you think youtre so creative, you don't know what it's like to really create something, to create a life, to feel it growing inside you. AU you know is how tu create death and destruction." Her statement is simultaneously insightful and discursive. John Connor laments her "outburst,"chiding her to act "constructively." While he does not comment on the Terminator's "unemotional" description of the consequences of Dyson's inventions, he quiddy dismisses his mother's critique. The film's narrative, in

U"She has become a terminator" is noted in the script multipIe times: James Cameron, Terminator 2 screenplay, 158, 166; quoted in Johnathan Goldberg, "Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages of Arnold Schwarzenegger," in Building Bodies, ed. Pamela Moore (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997)- 23 1. contrast to its spectacular dimension, appears to be in consonance with his

Comor later strikingly articulates her own impossible position withu-i the narrative in a voice-over at the film's emotional conclusion. She prizes a machine's (Schwarzenegger's Terminator) ability to "leam the value of human Me," i.e. to feel that humanity is speual and unique. Yet Hamilton herself fails as a Terminator becaztse she has feelings, seeing Dyson not only as the man responsible for the Terminator technology but also a loving husband and father?' Certainly, her failure is somehow her success, saving her hom killing Dyson and sacrificing her own humanity. Yet, in cornparison to the film's celebration of male emotion, such as Schwarzenegger's attempts to understand happiness and sadness, tears and laughter, Hamilton's angry outbursts against "patriarchal technology" are dismissed as unconstructive. Thus, the film schizophrenically suggests that women's feelings are both our weakness and our greatest success. Unfortunately and typically, while men's emergent emotionality is lauded, women's anger is undermined and mocked? In a sense, then, Sarah Comor as "phallic woman" functions as a "male ruse and a . . . 'mascuLuie revenge fantasy' whose 'effect is perversely to reinforce the message that women cannot wir~'''~~ Although such a reading oversimplifies matters a bit, this perspective sheds some light on the final scenes of the film. Here, Hamilton engages with the

*It is wonh noting that Dyson and his "nuclear family" are eifectively saved by the boy child from this "lunatic lesbian." The story could not have been written better by Dan Quayle: "A single mother with a criminai record, Sarah Connor uies to take down the only stable iamily in town." %orne cntics have read the film as more overtly interested in refashioning masculinity than femininity (see Pfeil and Jeffords). But as seen in the extensive sources 1 have read and quoted from, clearly the Linda Hamilton body was a complex and powerfully loaded image that was in need of its own investigation. '6~oanSmith. Guardian, cited in Jane Arthurs, "Thelma and Louise: On the Road to Feminism?" conference on Feminist Methodology (January 1992); quoted in Tasker, Suectacular Bodies. 139. Tl000 a number of times, but is unable to "terrninate" him. She tries to blow him up, but her injuries from his earlier attadcs make it difficult for her to reload her gun. At that moment, Schwarzenegger arrives and distracts the TlOOO by offering himseLf as a target. The Tl000 appears to terminate Schwarzenegger by cnishing him in a machine and returns to eliminate Hamilton and he-r son- Hamilton fights back, blowing hole after hole in his metal alloy body, but runs out of ammunition again and cannot finish him off. Luckily, Schwarzenegger reappears, and although he is rnissing an arm and limping (mimidùng Hamilton's disabilities), the mie Terminator is still able to blow away the T1000, sending him into a vat of molten steel, where it hally, fully disintegrates. The phallic nature of this battle is hard to miss: Schwarzenegger and his "huge gun" waste the monster with "one shot," wMe Hamilton, who can't handle her "phallus," her "phallic power," is unable to overcome the TlOOO with multiple shots, even when she does get her "gun"to work. Barred by the narrative from usurping phallic authority, Hamilton is nevertheless empowered in the spectacular register, for as Tasker remirids us, "[cinematic] images of women who wield guns, and who take control of cars, cornputers and other technologies that have symbolized both power and freedom within Hollywood's world, mobilize a symbolically transgressive iconography."" Hamilton demonstrates substantial ingenuity and mechanical competence in several arenas: she is comfortable with a variety of artillery and in the course of the film effectively uses an automatic pistol, police baton, hunting knife, laser-scoped automatic rifle, shotgun, and grenade launcher." Borrowing the competence of the Fonda-Streep woman and tuming it to killing, Hamilton is

"Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, 132. %Iirschrnan, 43-45. no longer a moll or a helper. Instead, she is a combat-trained outlaw, "one fighting marna. She can pi& a lock, swing a broom handle, crush a skull, wire bombs, and lug artillery."4gThis paramilitary aesthetic is reminiscent of the types of corporeal discipluie outlined by Foucault in the regirnes of the army. The exacting demands -on the Sarah Comor character for proficiency in multiple arenas and more intimately on the Linda Hamilton body for muscular perfection

-are distinctly evocative of Foucault's "austere regimens." They are replicated in both Pumpine: Iron II and G.I. Tane; while the Demi Moore vehicle is literally a military film, the training of bodybuilders for competition - from extreme exercise, severely limited food and water intake, and intense psychological pressure - is not very different hom the commando training and body work Hamilton undertook to create a paramilitary aesthetic appropriate for Terminator 2.

Baumgold asserts that Hamilton's arms, even at rest, show fheir rnrt~cle."~~ In this way, the symbolic strength of Hamilton's steely body - the talk of the film,according to contemporary critics - marks her as a conqueror and disavows her narrative ineffectiveness for many spe~tators.~'Due to the cultural obsession with her body, Hamilton's ultimate strength cannot be judged solely by her mistakes and mistreatment within the narrative itself; her body connotes activity even when it is narratively passive. Popular critics chose not to focus on the fact that Sarah could not kill the T1000, or that she had to be saved by Schwarzenegger and her own child, or that she repeatedly jeopardized the

49JulieBaumgold, "Killer Women: Here Corne the Hardbodies," New York, 29 July 199 1, 26. !%id., 27. S'Oldenburg's piece goes on to quote Hamilton's own frustration with the spell her body seems to have cast: "zshould have revealed me as an actor, but that was just cornpletely ignored. It was as though my body was al1 1 needed to play Sa.rah Connor. And we're not just talking about Middle Amenca. We're taiking about directors, producers" (20). mission. What so many of these reviewers seem to remember is her line and posWg: "1 don't need your help. 1can take care of myself," not the fact that throughout the story she does need both her son and Schwarzenegger's help in taking care of her "strong" self. Instead of seeing Hamilton as defined by her character's weaknesses, most critics and spectators consumed and created her rnagdcently powerN woman warrior image as a contemporary body ideal. These varied readings of the Linda Hamilton character and body fit squarely within Bakhtin's notion of heterogl~ssia;~~the heteroglossic reception of this form epitomizes the "primacy of context over text."

An Opening is Filled: Lack creates opportuniîy fordesires While the contradiction between Hamilton's narrative construction and spectacular reception is fascinating in itself, more important is the way this split ilself engenders the divergent readings of Sarah Comor's character, making the Linda Hamilton body type availabie both for rnainstream and marginal consumption and desire. Had this body functioned within an invincible narrative role, its strength might have been more threatening. Instead, as fallible and assailable, Hamilton/Connor's power can be a cause for celebration and identification instead of concem. Interestingly, though the Hamilton body was a major element in the sebgof the film, fi-om advertisements, to trailers, to her talk show appearances, Cameron chose not to address the character's sexuality

52Michael Holquist, glossary in The Dialooic Imagination, by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans, Cary1 Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press. 198 1). 428. "Heteroglossia: The base condition goveming the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the prirnacy of context over text. At any given time, there will be a set of conditions - social, histoncal, meteorological, physiological - that will insure that a word utrered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different that it would have under any other conditions; al1 utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions oFa matrix of forces practicdly impossibIe to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifuga1 forces collide; as such, it is that which is a systematic linguistics must always suppress." directly, marking her as somehow %eyond sex."j3 Since Linda Hamilton's body is far from haditionally ferninine, who would be an appropriate suitor for a woman warrior in Hollywood terms? She has a child, but significantly, he takes his mother's name as his own. As John Co~ortells it, his mother has used the men in her life for her own purposes. John's father, Kyle Reese, appears in the original Terminator only "to get Sarah pregnant as expeditiously as possible and then to be gotten out of the way: to function as efficiently as a Reese must die soon after John Connor's conception; like the male action hero, the action heroine is shown to be incapable of adult sexuality. Hamilton is painted as - - a mofher/ wamor/terrninator rather than a sexual being. " While such an absence may reflect an anxiety about Sarah Connor's complex gender coding, the gap certainly opens the text to spectatorial readings which then reinscribe sexualities, both hegemonic and marginal. Susan Bordo notes how her "male students (as weU as [her] female students) almost literally swooned over Linda Hamilton's fierce expression and taut body in Terrninator

-2."56 Her body and character aroused titillation, creating a straight following within the cultish world of science-fiction fans, where the tone of Ietters published in magazines such as Starburst idolize her strong persona, often in an explicitly fetishistic fashion. What interests me the most is how the image of Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor has, in addition to inspiring heterosexual desires, quickly acquired a cult following of her own with lesbian audiences.5i Web sites sudi as HerSalon Est Linda Hamilton among the "Women We Love,"

531bid., 26. %oldberg, 229. qasker, Spectacular Bodies, 138. %Susan Bordo, UnbearabIe(Berkeley: University of California Press, 199), 297. "Ibid., 3. and contain web pages called "Temples" for Hamilton and other female and lesbian CON like Xena and Garbo. As her fan website, Linda Hamilton Online, the Delphi Forum on Linda Hamilton, and a host of persona1 web pages attest, queer looking has inspired much debate and desire around Linda Hamilton's fabulous figure. Consider the comment on a Bifems site by Pasha, a lesbian who explained how "for the longest time 1had the hots for Linda Hamilton after seeing her in the Terminator. After Terrninator 21decided 1was in love, (that body)." On Pasha's homepage, what she calls her "coming out site," she reveals her feelings for a more recent manifestation of a queerly desirable strong woman, Xena: "You could Say 1had a cmsh on her. 1tend to go for strong women? Sonya Andermahr, a lesbian critic, notes how the butch lesbian figure has materialized across the movie screens of the 1980s and 1990s, including both Linda Hamilton and Sigoumey Weaver.

In these films, lesbian signifiers - muscles, cropped haïr, sexual independence from men - are used to denote agency, activity and toughness . . . Their huge popularity with female, not to mention lesbian, audiences is a rneasure of the appeal of the butch figure and the desire for such female role models and heras amongst w~rnen.'~ Of course, Linda Hamilton, Sigourney Weaver, or Lucy Lawless' Xena are only the latest in a long line of shong women (now physically so) that females of various sexual orientations have found desirable. Much like the great lesbian icon Greta Garbo, Hamilton has "captured the imagination of countless ~ornen,"~~ subtly opening up the radical possibilities that such "imaginations" might be holding. Thus, readings of Linda Hamilton's body as solely a "male ruse" leave

''Pasha, "Coming Out Party: More About Me, Sexuality The Agonies," hosted by Biferns WebRing, ~.home.talkcity.com/HollywoodBlvdnace~mi~~ess/i,accessed II October 1999. 59SonyaAndermahr, "AQueer Love Affair? Madonna and Lesbian and Gay Culture," in The Good. the Bad, and the Goroeous: Po~ularCulture's Romance with Lesbianism, ed. Diane Hamer and Belinda Budge and (London: Pandora, 1994), 34. 6qIollandswonh, 90. unexplored the questions of which meanings and pleasures get around or go against dominant ideological control, such as "queered" readings, and who makes them (and it's not just "queer" people) .61 As Linda Williams reminds us, the woman spectator is an equally inevitable dialectiuad2 James Cameron was probably unaware of the possibility of such a "fantasy lesbian space," and framed his star fernale body through a heterosexuality consistent with the majority of images of muscled and/or powerful women in recent visual culture. Yet, as Yvo~eTasker reminds us, when lesbians bill a "straight" action movie as a "lesbian film at a screening for lesbians" this asserts that there is "a space for such identifications within action films like this, even if they don't specifically acknowledge their gay a~dience.'"~ Nevertheless, from Hamilton, the players of Pum~ingIron II, and Ripley in the Mien series, to the stars of American Gladiators, Thelma and Louise, and Xena: Warrior Princess, spectacularly strong women have been roundly celebrated by rnembers of the lesbian and/or women's comrnunities, proving that "even without the presence of a strong receptive context, an individual viewer can fantasise a meaning in the film that need only have the most tenuous suggestion in the text? Like the oppositional readers of a film like Persona1 Best, who appropriate the film to came out an avowedly lesbian space in the world, 65 lesbian communities reading Thelrna and Louise uid Terminator 2 chose to read the

- 6'Laurie Schulze. "On the MuscIe." in Fabrications: Costume and the Female Bodv, ed, Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (London: Routledge, 1990), 65. b'linda Williams. "Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Matemal Melodrama," in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Pauicia Erens (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 155. Yasker, Spectacular Bodies, 29; quoted in and with Whatling, 18. &Whatling, 18, 13. 65Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Illicit Pleasures: Feminist Spectators and Personal Best," in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 183-196. strong female characters in their own interest. In doing so, such readers deploy what John Fiske has called "the forces of resistance, evasion, and opposition that constitute the tactics of the subordinate, that are the everyday means of handling the forces of d~miriation.''~~Leaving the implications of muscled Hamilton's sexuality unexplored is much less threatening for mainstream audiences; yet, ironically, like the innumerable readings of Xena, this absence opens up a space for subtextual readings rife with lesbian in nu end^.^' Johnathan Goldberg details such a possibility in an incisive analysis of Terminator 2:

And when [TZ]inverts everything - giving, this tirne, Sarah Comor, . . . the pumped up body that could be read as lesbian even more than Ginger-chic (she's been mishandled by psydùatry, as gays and lesbians have been, and it is in an asylum - a Terminal island, not in a gym - that she has been working out), giving her ferninist separatist and man-hating lines that make "our savior," teenage John Connor, wince . . . The film may beiieve that it has reconstituted the family, but father is a cyborg, mother perhaps a 1e~bia.n.~~

Linda Hamilton is well aware of the influence that this reading has had on her career and has made numerous comrnents on the roles she has been offered since E2. "'Police officers, military officers, and lesbians -butch lesbian, right? Because I'm strong and tough. That shows no imagination,' she says disg~stedly."~~Reacting to precisely this type-casting in another venue, Hamilton asks: "Why can't 1play a ferninine lesbian? And people would answer, 'If you dont play the butch part, who can we get who's more butch than you?' It was a disappointment. What did they think I was going to do? Play every part with an

66John Fiske, "Critical Response: Meaningful Moments," Critical Studies in Mass Communications 5 (September 1988): 249; quoted in Schulze, "On the Muscle" (1990).65-66. 67Daxand the Goddess Serra, "Obsessions Home Page: Xena: Wamior Pnncess, A FAQ for Subtext Fans and the Loyal Opposition," hosted by Silver, WWW.members.aol.com/dii~~~~tesq/FAQ/FAQ~,accessed Il October 1999. "Go~dber~,24 1. 6901denburg,20. Uzi?"" Laurie Schulze rearticulates Hamilton's frustration in a more germane (and less homophobic) manner as she critiques the "ideological complex of patriarchy, heterosexism, and homophobia that equates muscularity and masculinity and that defines lesbianism in terms of masculinity." Yet even as Schulze complicates this equation, as a "lesbian reader" she leaves a space for her own affective invesbent in Hamilton's body: Hamilton and other "Çemale bodybuilders are completely 'hot,' and the bigger and more ripped they are, the bigger kick [she gets] from the ~pectacle."~~These readings of the Linda Hamilton body as lesbian/queer cross hes of gender and sexuality, as from both marginal and mainsheam positions, she is read as a lesbian or dyke. Yet the motivation or intention around naming Linda Hamilton as a lesbian holds potentially quite different meanings for a radical lesbian or a straight feminist or a man (gay or straight) with a fetish or disgust for m~scles.~' To be sure, the appropriation of Hamilton's image by queer readers, both inside and outside the academy, produces some of the strongest challenges to her narrative construction as weak and undesirable. Yet the split between narrative and spectacle of Hamilton's multi-valent "male" body in Q - she is legible either as a woman in drag as a man, or (as other theorists have proposed) as a man in drag as a woman - complicates her reception by male spectators as well. Peter Lehman has recently suggested that such a superficially masculine, "castrating woman" like Hamilton might function as a proto-male figure ont0

'O~ndreaOrr. "Linda HamiIton: Still Living Down the Body-Builder Image." Reuters, 2 July 1997. n~chulze,"On The Muscle," in Building Bodies, ed. Parnela Moore (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rurgers University Press, 1997). 23, 29. z~lthoughwe do not have the luxury of investigating further here, this topic deserves addressing. What does it rnean for spectators of varying identities to fashion readings that are always already invested - at least affected - by their position? Whether as a lesbian, as a straight person, as a transvestite, as a heterosexual, as a queer, as a gender indeterminate, what does it mean to read a character as within your own identity, or an identity you fantasize for yourself, or create specifically for the character, and potentially even against the grain of the narrative? which repressed homoerotic desire could be mapped and safely covered in a heterosexual guise?3 Clearly, viewer identification based on gender is a much more fluid practice than many critics are wiLling to accept; Constance Penley notes that as spectatorial identification shifts constantly in the course of a film's narrative, often crossing the hes of biological sex, "unconscious identification with the characters or the scenario is not necessarily dependent upon gender."" If these women sigmfy strong men for male viewers, then male desire for them could be seen as a queer desire that productively destabilizes conventional sexuality: "The danger to male heterosexuality lurks in the implication that any male sexual interest in the muscular female is not heterosexual at aU, but homosexual: not only is she 'un-natural,' but the [musded female body] possesses the power to invert normal male ~exuality."'~Thus, resistant readings, in both Schulze's analysis of female bodybuilders and my account of Hamilton's body, aren't restricted to lesbian or otherwise subcultural desire. Extending Schulze's claims about male fans of female bodybuilding to male fans of the Hamilton body, we might find that the "pleasures of [the muscled female body] as erotic spectacle may not necessarily be complicit with patriarchal and heterosexist strategies. In other words, straight male and possibly queer male desire vis a vis the built female body] may be spaces for subversive plea~ure."'~ Such a possibility demonstrates the ways in whidi popular cinema affirms gender identities at the same time that it mobilizes subversive identifications and desires.

-- nPeter Lehman, Runnino Scared: Masculinitv and the Represenration of the Male Body, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993); quoted in Pat Dowell, book review. Cineaste 22, no. 3 (1996): 49+. 74Penley, "Time Travel, Prirnal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia," 69. ''Laune Schulze, "Getting Phvsical: Text/Context/Reading and the Made-for-TV Movie," Cinema Journal 25, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 43. 76~chu1ze,"On The Muscle" (1997)- 29-30, n.4. Other Absences: Identification and Desire Sonya Anderrnahr contends that films like Terminator 2 invite women as well as men to both iden* with and desire the particular combination of masculine beauty in female form embodied by strong, self-detemg heroines like Linda Hamilton." Many female (and male) spectators indeed regarded the Hamilton body type as a new ideal for themselves, while others saw it as an object worthy of desire. But undoubtedly, there are spectators who saw it as both, that is, both an object worthy of desire and an image to be adueved. Paula Graham asserts that lesbian identification tends to focus on the representation of the masculuiized-active female body. Lesbians express both desire for and identification with the bodies of Sigoumey Weaver and Linda l am il ton.^^ Here, it is worth recalling George Leonard's riddlesque provocation: "The body you have can be the body you ~ant."~~While there is an inteLlectual/linguistic separation between wanting to be as opposed to aanting to possess this body, the lived distinction is not necessarily so clear; in fact, as Kaja Silverman has provocatively clairned, we "cannot idealize something without at the same tirne identifjmg with it."" Further, Teresa de Lauretis argues that once when we think of a spectator oscillating between identification and desire, "the analogy that links identification-with-the-look to rnasculinity and identification-with-the-image to femininity breaks down."'' This breakdown is even more pronounced here

T1~ndermahr,34. "Pau~a Graham, "Looking Lesbian: Amazons and Aliens in Science Fiction Cinema" in The Good. the Bad. and the Goroeous: Po~ularCulture's Romance with Lesbianism, ed. B. Budge and D. Hamer, (London: Pandora, 1994), 2 1 1. "Leonard, 86. This piece also had a column on Roberr DeNirols muItiple body transformations for film roles, especially focusing on his bulking up for the 1990s remake of Cape Fear. %aja SiIverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routiedge, 1996), 1. "Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism. Semiotics. and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 142-143; quoted in Mayne, 71. because of "the cinematic gaze of the action film," which codes the heroine's body in the same way that it does the muscular male hero's, as both object and ~ubject."~~Linda Hamilton's body is structured both as subject and object, hailing identification and eliciting desire through a multi-valent reception that ultimately dismantles normative notions of both identification and spectatorship. Thus, while Jeffrey Brown concludes that muscled women like Linda Hamilton are primarily subjects, and secondarily objectsY3 1 believe the strain between these two positions is much more dynamic: these bodies are simultaneously subject and object, and, as detailed above, both passive and active, both sources of spectacular and narrative development. Such contradictions, as my analysis has dernonstrated, can actually produce sites for identification: newly musded figures like Linda Hamilton, full of contradiction and ambiguity, become a site where men and women, of a variety of sexual orientations, can perform queered identifications and desires, reworking who is allowed to be masculine or ferninine, weak or strong. However, it is worth questionhg the extent to which the lïberating spaces of identification opened up in Terminator 2 ultimately work in service of "bblockbuster ideology." For blockbusters try their hardest to (and in the case of Terminator 2 do) succeed economicdy in crafting a product that deals with the crisis of meaning surrounding the female body by painting it with multiple, wide, and variant strokes. Hamilton's body and actions have been valorized alike by conservatives, radical feminists, lesbians, Rambo admirers, libertarians,

82~eff?ey A. Brown, "Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and The Poinr of No Retum," Cinema Journal 35, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 56. mBrown, 68. and technophobes. Such readings should corne as no surprise according to film theorist Miriam Hansen, who explains how

Blockbuster films, for instance, are catering to as many diverse constituencies as possible, confronting the problem of, as Timothy Corrigan puts it, "an audience fragmented beyond any controllable identity." Such films. . . [as] the Terminator films . . . no longer attempt to homogenize empincally diverse viewers by way of umfymg strategies of spectator positionhg (as 1970s film theorists daimed with regard to dassical films). Rather, the blodcbuster gamble consists of offering something to everyone, of appealing to diverse interests with a diversity of attractions and multiple levels of text~ality.8~

Hamilton was made available to be read and revered by most anyone and everyone, ultimateiy satisfymg her creators with box-office success. However, 1 would condude Chat whilex2 is consonant with the ideology of the blockbuster, this does not necessarily undermine the "progressive" identifications the film engenders. This contradiction brings us back to the central paradox of the muscularized female body as it circulates in culture in both empowering and debilitating ways. While the musded female body of Linda Hamilton can be used in the service of the "center" to show even physically strong women to be ineffectual and weak, it also sirnultaneously destabilizes fixed notions of gender and sexuality, and its reception recasts the Hamilton body and Connor character as powerful and formidable despite her failings within the narrative. For all kinds of spectators, utilizing innumerable spectatorial strategies, these multiple levels of textuality and extra-texlualihj serve multifarious needs, desires, and demands. 'TE3

SADOMASOCHISM, TORTURE, AND "SUCK MY DICK": DEMI MOORE TAKES IT LIKE A MAN IN G.I. TANE

G.I. Tane struts into virgin cinematic territory in the movie's fina dimactic moment. In the interrogation scene, ~oobehas been physically bmtalized . . . Bruised and bleeding, she lifts her lacerated face out of the mud, crawls to her feet . . . and commits the final act of defiance by shouting at her batterer, "SUCK MY DICK" . . . The males in the scene, and much of the audience, are stunned . . . This unprecedented scene . . . illustrates a truth - that having a pridc is largely a matter of attitude, not foreskin. Jeanne Cordova1 -

should G.I. fane's "Su& My Dick" be the new feminist motto? Or does this text's version of victory actually perpetuate the victimization and masculine violence that it attempts to re-appropriate? Demi Moore's performance in G.I. Tane offers a dizzying array of images to the spectator: she is both superhero and supervictim, mascuLinist and masodiist, follower of male codes and feminist innovator who wins by breaking the des.Given such gender play, does G.I. Tane mark the ultimate victory of the rnuscularized female body in its critique of traditional noms of femininity? Or, might the torturing of Lieutenant Jordan OfNeil (Demi Moore) work instead to punish and contain the new strong and sexual female, thereby reinscribing convention? In her Boston Globe column on G.I. Tane. Ellen Goodman articulates how contradictory female images collide in one of the film's key scenes:

Moore is washing her hands and bashg in her acceptance as one of the boys, when a civilian woman takes one look at her battered face and says

-- 'Jeanne Cordova, ""Suck My Dick!' The Latest Feminist Message?" Lesbian News 23, no. 4 (November 1997): 34. to her: "Ain't none of my business, honey, but 1 think you should leave the bastard-" It is one of those wonderful misperceptions that says it au. The woman assumes that Moore has taken itfiom a man, when she has taken it like a man. What look like a victim feels like a victory? The crucial misunderstanding here identified by Goodman -which she reads as symptornatic of mked social messages about gender roles - resonates deeply with my reading of the musded female body. In this chapter I want to explore how G.I. Jane ostensibly celebrates the shong female body even as it simultaneously humiliates and tortures that body to force it to conform to "male" standards. After reviewing Demi Moore's star image and G.I. Tane's narrative, 1 will explore the sigruficance of the body's bnitalization in G.I. Tane. 1s this treatment more in line with voluntary sadomasodùsm or with tnily abusive torture - and why does it matter for my narrative of the muscled female body? Next, I will evaluate Moore's appropriation of the phallus in the film, its implications for the film's validity as a critique of gendered power, and its legibility as lesbianism. Here, I'm interested in why the strong woman - in G.I. rane and the oeher fihs I've considered - so inevitably evokes lesbianism as a red herring and the final test of "authentic" womanliness for the newly musded female. Finally, 1 consider whether the treatment of the muscularized female body in G.I. Tane represents an attempt to contain this body, or to liberate it. And if the muscularized heroine does indeed become liberated, then on whose terms? What are the cultural implications of the desire for a hard, muscularized female hero who plays by male rules?

Demi Moore's Star Image: Banking on the Body

2~llenGoodman, "Taking it Like a Man," San Francisco Chronicle, 23 Seprember 1997, A21.

78 The "sexy" woman - an image that intimidates women whether or not they shive to conform to it - is sexy, but as an object, notas subject. She expresses not so much her desire as her pleasure in being desired; what she enjoys is her capacity to evoke desire in the other, to attract. Her power does not reside in her own passion, but in her acute desirability. 3 According to Jessica Benjamin's definition, Demi Moore might be the apotheosis of the "sexy woman," since her star image has almost exclusively focused on the fineries of her shapely form. While G.I. Tane is the first film to portray Moore as an MFB heroine, it is only the latest in a senes of films (Indecent Proposal,

Disclosure, Striptease, The Scarlet Letter) that exploit her body as a sexual - commodity. As one article put it, "well, we've ALL seen the body before."-' While Indecent Proposal focused on her body's desirability and salability, Disclosure on her sexual desire and hunger for power, Striptease on the further sexualization of her developed form, and The Scarlet Letter on the ostracization caused by her body's uncontrollable sexual nature, G.I. Tane is similarly obsessed with her body. While it is unnecessary here to perform an extensive analysis of Demi

Moore's star text, 5 1want at least to toudi on the issues it raises since they are inevitably evoked in G.I. Tane's display of the comerstone to Moore's image - that spectacular body that has helped her to corner the Hollywood market on the irresistible triangle of sex, power, and money.6

3~essicaBenjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalvsis. Feminism. and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 89. 4~eopleWeeklv, 3 May 1993, 64. S~ichardDyer's groundbreakinp study of Stars, which laid the foundation for star analysis within film studies, inuoduced the notion of the srar rext: an intertextual constnict produced across a range of media and culturaI practices, capable of intervening in the working of panicular films. The study of stars is an issue in the social production and circulation of meaning, Iinking indusuy and text, films and society. In addition to Dyer's Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), see Christine GIedhill, "Introduction," in Stardorn: Industrv of Desire, ed. Christine GledhiIl (London: Routledge, 199I), xiii-xiv. 6~eo~leWeekl~, 8 May 1995, 72. A few years ago, Entertainment Weekly crowned Moore "the industry's rnost bankable actress;"7 her movies have grossed welI over a billion dollars. Castle Rock Pictures President Martin Shafer (who released A Few Good Men), States unequivocally that "on an international basis, Demi is the biggest female star in the world."s Such box-office numbers are cause and effect of her star power, as are her well-known Vanitv Fair photo layouts, which inevitably display her naked body. Her latest appearance in Vanity Fair (photographed by

Annie Leibovitz)g showcases not only Demi but also her three daughters, al1 nu naturel. Since we have aheady seen Demi Moore fully exposed on film, perhaps the logical next step is to display the full benefits of her DNA through her progeny so that we may admire them - and desire her more. At the risk of sounding prude, it is worth questioning Demi Moore's relentless self-exposure: is she empowered by this display? À In Benjamin, I hypothesize that Demi Moore finds more power and value as an object of desire than as a subject. She clearly gains something from showing her well-developed form, and in this latest spread, teaches her daughters to share her pleasure in being a desirable object more than a desiring subject. It is the bodily objectification of her star image that is so consistently evoked in the Demi Moore filmography. Like the stars Richard Dyer analyzes, Moore's work is typical of a consistent series of "star ~ehicles."~OSuch a vehicle rnight provide

(a) a character of the type associated with the star (eg. Monroe's 'dumb blonde' roles, Garbo's melancholic romantic roles), (b) a situation, setting

7~nneThornpson, "Moore Money: 1s Demi Worth the Big Bucks? You Betcha," -, 10 March 1995, 10- 1 1. abid. g~nnieLeibovitz, "Force of Nature," Vanitv Fair, April 2000, 384-385. lO~~er,7 1. or generic context associated with the star (e-g.Garbo in relationships with married men, Wayne in Westerns), or (c) opportunities for the star to do her/his thing (most obviously in the case of musical stars . . . but also, for instance, oppominities to display Monroe's body and wiggle walk)."

Like Monroe, Moore's star image depends almost entirely on her body and its allure, and the explicit purpose of nearly al1 of Demi Moore's fihs has been to display her body in all its "perfection." Commentary on her acting is rarely mentioned compared to the detailed descriptions of her physique: "Moore has retooled her body so that it resembles a gleaming hunk of military hardware -- stomach muscles Iike iron, breasts like 8-52's. For nearly a year she has hyped that body on Letterman, Barbara Walters."'z Or, as one of People's "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" issues avers: "She punished her 5'5", 120 lb. frame with four-hou daily workouts that included lunges, squats, and dance exeruses. The result? 'She has the perfect, round, shapely butt."'l3 In contrast to Linda Hamilton's supposed desire to escape the typecasting her body inspired,14 Demi Moore has continued to trade on such "assets" for her benefit, and her performance in G.I. Tane is no exception. Given the salient role of Moore's body in the careful calculation of her star text, it is critical to read the sadomasodùstic and/or torturous treatment of that body as it is represented in G.I. Tane.

S/M andlor Torture In G.I. Tane, Moore's famous body is sadomasodustically tested and tortured in more ways than the mainstream spectator has seen since 1971, the ll~yer,70-7 1. %wen Gleiberman, "Striptease" (movie review), Entenainment Weekl", 12 JuIy 1996. 38. 13"~erniMoore," People Weeklv, 6 May 1996, 68. I4 As Hamilton remarked, "It was as though my body was al1 1 needed . . . I would happily throw that bone [the 'Body of the 90s'I to somebody else." See Ann Oldenburg, "This Hamilton Woman," TV Guide, 29 July 1995, 20. year of Straw Does and A Clockwork Oranee. To make sense of this abuse, I draw fïrst upon Jessica Benjamin's examination of the Story of O, which 1read dialogically against G.I. Tane. And because the violence meted out in G.I. Tane often veers away horn sadomasochism and into the realm of torture, 1 will tum to Elaine Scarry's exhaustive dissection of the semiotics of torture in The Body in Pain. Like Benjamin's, Scarry's work resonates productively with themes that define the status of the musded female body in G.I. Tane: sadomasochism, gender relations, and phallic power. While Pum~ingIron II negotiated the boundaries between the "mascuhe" and "ferninine" body, and Terminator 2 raised questions around the spectator's reading/construction of the body, G.I. Jane is concemed with the physiological boundaries of the body itself, and the testing and transgressions of those limits. The fihbegins with a heated congressional hearing about wornen's role in the rnilitary. As political payback for her approval of the candidate for Secretary of the Navy, Texan Senator DeHaven (Anne Bancroft) is allowed to select one female remit, Lt. Jordan O'Neil (Moore), to cornpete for a position as a Navy SEAL. Moore enters SEAL training, where "gender norming" (lower standards for females) helps her to compete but, to her detriment, positions her as an outsider. She refuses these norms while withstanding the Master Chief's (Viggo Mortensen) continual harassrnent. Meanwhile, there is talk in Washington of shutting down military bases, including a number in Texas - a political ploy to disable the overtly phallic DeHaven. O'Neil completes basic and proceeds to SERE (survival/evasion/resistance/escape) training where, as "part of the training," she is horrifically beaten and tortured by Master Chief, which precipitates her acceptance as "one of the pys." To Save herself politically, DeHaven anonymously sends photos of O'Neil "haternizing" with other fernale soldiers to the Navy, insinuating that O'Neil "could be an embarrassment" - read: a lesbian. This prompts an investigation, stalling O'Neiirs completion of training. She leams of the plot (thanks to her boyfriend) and forces DeHaven to reinstate her in time for the final training mission. This exercise becomes real as the team of newly-minted Navy SEALs are sent on a rescue mission to Libya, where they are saved by O'Neilrs quick thinking. They return home to graduate honorably. At the heart of O'Neilfs training is her fraught relationship with her Master Chief John James Urgayle. Viggo Mortensen plays the role with great aplomb; reviews dub him a sadist par excellence. He is first introduced in slow motion - all the better to fetishize his militaristic masculu-iity. Behind impenetrable dark glasses, he lectures his recniits with D.H. Lawrence's poem, "Self Pity." As the Master Chief condudes his ode, staring into the appropriately unresponsive eyes of Lt. O'Neil, he is interrupted by a chuckle from a male recruit. He strides over and outlines his position in this soldier's universe: "The ebb and flow of the Atlantic tides, the drift of the continents, the very position of the sun along its ecliptic - these are just a few of the things I control in rny world." This image of his exquisite control makes for his thrilling machisrno; indeed here, as in the Storv of O, it is the "master's" rational, calculating, even instnimentalizing attitude that excites sadomasochistic submis~ion.~~ When OfNeilbegins SEAL tryouts, the Naval procedures to "accommodate"her are outlined: "It may not always run smooth, but we'll try to make it as painless as possible." Without missing a beat, O'Neil prophetically responds with a srnile: "Thank you sir, but 1 expect a certain amount of pain." Some of the film's reviewers maintain that Moore's role reenacts that of the traditional female masodiist, " [plunging] into sadomasochistic depths plumbed only by Sadean heroines."16Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman questions why O'Neil would even want to endure this "sado-masochistic endurance test": "With its vicarious revel in no-pain-no-gain feminist machisrno,

G.I. Tane makes heroism look - literally - like hell."17 This same review refers to the "dozen new varieties of torture" that O'Neil endures beyond the suffering of her male crewmates. While such popular reviews tend to elide the distinctions between torture and S/M, lumping them both together into an undifferentiated arena of pain and suffering, the differences are crucial to preserve if we hope to understand the logic behind the film's often brutal images.

Consent>Voice>Moral ResponsibilitpPain In The Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin outlines how femininity has become assouated with the posture of slave and masculinity with that of master, and theorizes the influence of such associations on the psyches of men and women generally.18 From her model, one could suggest that if G.I. Tane had presented OtNeil simply as a victim of abuse, the spectator would quickly have categorized her as the familiar "suffering female" waiting to be rescued by a man in the traditional action and militas. genres. But though G.I. Tane does illustrate the suffering of a good woman in great detail,19 it inverts the standard dynamic.

?John Simon, "G.I. Jane," National Review 49, no. 18 (29 September 1997): 60. 170wen Gleiberman, "G.I. Jane," Entertainment Weeklv, 22 August 1997, 105. 18 Benjamin, 8. 'Wi~liamGibson, Wamor Drearns: Paramilitarv Culture in Posr-Vietnam America. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). 52. For Lt. O'Neil has volunfeered for this role, and the ordeal that she suffers is not perpetrated against her will, nor is it meted out by the stereotypical villain; rather, it is confrcrcfzral.As in all sadomasochistic contracts, O'Neilfs consent is fundamental. Consider Benjamin's outline that describes how consent operates in the renowned sadomasochistic text, The Storv of O: d The story is driven forward by the dialectic of control. Since a slave who is completely dominated loses the quality of being able to give recognition, the struggle to possess her must be prolonged. O must be enslaved piece by piece; new levels of resistance must be found, so that she cm be vanquished anew. She must acquiesce in ever deeper humiliation, pain,. and bondage, and she must will her submission ever anew, each time her masters ask her, "0,do you consent?" The narrative moves through these ever deeper levels of submission, tracing the impact of each fresh negation of her will, each new defeat of her resistance." Lt. O'Neil similarly wills her submission ever anew; in G.I. Tane the Master Chief's query to her, "Are you ready for the next evolution?" is the equivalent of Sir Stephen's "O, do you consent?" Indeed, as 1 will show below, the film's narrative is propelled by a series of scenes of O'Neil's voluntary degradation. Early in her training, OrNeiloffers her body as a step to be trod upon by her male classrnates on the obstacle course. The ease with which O'Neil sacrifices her body for the benefit of her crew has a dual resonance: it exemplifies traditional notions of male teamwork, while it serves up the equally familiar image of female martyrdom. As Benjamin has pointed out:' masochism is traditionally categorized as "female," yet OfNeil'ssacrifice might also be interpreted as an heroic act of self-mastery. These issues of self-mastery and consent form perhaps the crucial dividing lineç between sadomasochism and torture; torture is of no interest to the sadomasochist, since his or her pleasure can come only with the recognition subjective self-mastery. Torture is by definition infLicted without consent or contract; as such, the status of the subject of torture reverts to that of an object. Without the tensions of intersubjective consent, the erotic spectade of sadomasodusm would be deskoyed for both sadist and masodust. According to Elaine Scarry, consent is impossible in torture because the voice is absent; the torturer often speaks for the tortured, erasing the latter's subjective identity." This is literalized in a scene early in O'Neilfs training when she asks the Master Chief to discontinue "gender nomùng," as she prefers to compete on the same level as the other recruits. The Master Chief, imtated by OrNeil's insubordination, usurps her voice with the statement, "When 1want your opinion, I'Il give it to you." And, as Scarry makes dear, claùning the voice of the tortured is integral to the legitimation and substantiation of power:

[Torture] then goes on to deny, to falsify, the reality of the very thing it has objectified by a perceptual shift which converts the vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convinüng spectade of power. The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of "incontestable reality" on that power that has brought it into being. It is, of course, precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used . . . What assists the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power is an obsessive, self-conscious display of agen~y.~~

As the victim's suffering increases, the ability to convey the experience of it decreases, leading to the diminishment of the voice. This absence/silence itself supports the fiction of the regime's power. In the case of G.I. lane specifically, the film becomes a spectacle of torture when it silences O'Neil's subjectivity and amplifies the abjection/objectification of her body.

- "Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmakino ofthe World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 27. "Md. Despite the Master Chief s assertion that desire to Save lives motivates his acts, an interrogation of O'Neil by both Master Chief and his colleagues approxirnates the dynamics of torture more closely than those of sadomasochism during the SERE training scenes. OfNeiland her crew have been captured, and çhe is taken inside to be "questioned." The absurdly irrelevant questions testify to their efforts to leave meaningful communication behind: "What is your father's name OfNeil?Simple question, no reason not to answer unless you want to bleed . . . How about brothers and sisters, you got any of hem? . . . You hungry, OfNeil?What's your favorite food, honey?" Scarry cornpellingly explains the shange coexistence of meaninglessness and urgency in questions like these:

The idea that the need for information is the motive of the physical cruelty arises from the tone and form of the questioning rather than from its content: the questions, no matter how contemptuously irrelevant their content, are announced, delivered, as tho rcglt the y [motivate] the cruelty, as if the answers to them [are] crucial." Inquiries about O'Neil's relatives or favorite food simply mark tirne until the real accusations (phrased as questions) are made. Master Chief: "Why didn't you carry out your wounded lieutenant? Was he too heay or were you just plain chicken shit? Do you think we should go easy on women, lieutenant?" This final question is, of course, central to the film; however, as Scarry's analysis makes clear, the interrogation that masquerades as a motive for torture - and by implication, the central question of the film itse'f -is a fiction, a masquerade. Indeed, this use of verbal interrogation in torture tends to blur the witnesses' empathic affiliation, even though

it is difficult to think of a human situation in which the lines of moral responsibility are more starkly or simply drawn, in which there is a more compelling reason to aily one's sympathies with the one person and to repel the daims of the other. Yet as soon as the focus of attention shifs to the verbal aspect of tordre, those lines have begun to waver and change their shape in the direction of accommodating and crediting the torturers?

The spectator is riveted to her seat as the Master Chief screams at O'Neil "Do you think we should go easy on women Lieutenant? Do you?" While he has her in a headlodc, she glïbly replies, "Fu& you." The Master Chief, like the film's audience, is pleased with her response: "I'm so glad we agree." It is preusely her voiced defiance that aLlows for the semblance of consent, the continuation of this

brutal scene, and the completion of her training. Spectators too ionnt to know: should the Navy/military "go soft" on women? CmMoore/OINeil take it like a man? In this way, spectating G.I. Tane necessitates active participation in this ritual of abuse, and it is possible that the audience is, in fact, less ambiguously implicated in torture than the Master Chief, since spectators merely watch to find out "how much she cm take," without having the close contractua1 ties that link Master Chief and OfNeilin their sadomasochistic relationship. This blurring of the distinction between performing actual torture and watdiing it without intervening also arises within the narrative of G.I. Tane. O'Neil's body is used as a bargaining chip with her male teammates, who have the opportunity-to prove their masculinity by "saving her femininity" frorn the Chief's relentless abuse (this desire to "çave feemùùnity" is also the weakness to which the Master Chief himself will ultimately succumb). The Master Chief tries repeatedly to prove that it is the presence of women that makes men weak; however, one wonders why it should be a sign of weakness to want to stop torture or abuse. Within the scene of torture, what exactly is the moral responsibility of the bystander who witnesses scenes of abuse? Are OrNeil's teammates more or less "manly" because fhey stood by and watched her abuse and near rape at the hands of Master Chief? Such arnbiguity cuts to the very heart of the changing roles of men and women in our culture, and this conflict between male moral codes - the film suggests - is one that the military is loathe to engage. The extent to which OJNeilfsteammates (and the film's spectators) are morally culpable for their spectatorship depends largely on the purpose of the pain inflicted on OfNeil, for the function of pain diverges widely in the practices of sadomasodiism and torture. The Master Chief s conceptualization of pain - as a tool for greater understanding and pleasure -initially falls in line with a sadomasochistic posture: while straddling O'Neil on the opening day of basic training, the Master Chief advises, "Pain is your friend, your ally." As Benjamin makes clear, S/M practices are actually more invested in power play and the establishment and transgression of the body's boundaries than in actual physical pain.26Yet the Master Chief's abuse moves beyond S/M and into torture as he teases OJNeilwith a rhetorical interrogation: "But you know the best thing about pain? . . . It lets you know you're not dead yet." Within an S/M dynamic, the Master Chief may be correct. However, without consent, in the realm of torture, sans vuce, pain is not knowledge, it is mimetic of death. Scarry details how physical pain mimes death and the Il-ifliction of physical pain is a mock execution:

Each [pain and death] only happens because of the body. Ln each, the contents of consciousness are destroyed. The two are the most intense forms of negation, the purest expression of anti-human, of annihilation, of total aversiveness, though one is an absence and the other a felt presence, one occurring in the cessation of sentience, the other expressing itself in grotesque overload?' Torture, unlrke S/M, is not an erotic violation, but the creation of an illusion of power that arises from the violation of the boundaries of another, from this threatened execution. In contrast, sadomasochistic pain is prirnarily an affirmation of identity, an effort to locate the subject, and a reality check to remind its practitioners that they are alive. During the SEN: training "interrogation" scenes, the Master Chief is clearly engorged with his own macho pride and invested in the legitimation of his military might as he terrorizes and attempts to rape O'Neil. But while the Master Chief seems to efface O'Neil's subjectivity and substantiate his own, he announces to the trainees that he is being hard on Lt. O'Neil in order to "save her Me, and yours." Such a sadomasochistic view is rational, instrumental, and altogether reminiscent of the sadists from Sto~of 0; the abuse of O is said to be more for her "enlightenment" than their pleasure, so that even in using her they do not appear to need ber? The oscillation between S/M and torture becomes evident- Yet it is this pretense of an objective distance maintained between sadist and masochist that offers a form of protection; this protective power in tum constitutes the authority that inspires the love of the masochist and transforms violence into an opportunity for voluntary submi~sion.'~Moreover, while the Master Chief contends that he is merely doing his duty to "save her life," his continuing sadism towards her is in fact a love offering; in return, the masochist's endurance of the sadist's wemitting attack alleviates his fear and @t that his aggression will annihilate her. Indeed, as G.I. Tane bears out, O'Neil's exemplary masochisrn frees him to break through to ever higher levels of sadism, pushing the envelope between S/M and torhire.30 The difficdty in reading OrNeil's treatment in G.I. lane is that it is often doubly legible as either S/M or torture or both, and how one reads a scene depends largely on the intention of the interaction. During the SERE "interrogation" scene, what the Master Chief rnight see as contractual ("should we go easy on women, lieutenant?" O'Neil: "Fuck you." Master Chief: "I'm so glad we agree."), subjectively affirming masochism, verges into the dynamics of torture. The Master Chief-O'Neil relatiomhip in G.1- Tane evokes yet another familiar narrative trope wherein men see "woman" as a dangerous or weak "other" who threatens the self, and who thus must be brought under control? Such men, threatened by women who get too close to thern, enjoy vicariously the punishment of such women at the hands of some putative enemy, al1 the while avoiding guilt by blaming and pursuhg that designated enemy for his crime? In fact, the punishment of these women and the punishment of the iuusory enemy are effectively one and the same - in fact the women are the primary enemy, since it is their ability to elicit male vulnerability that must be punished and destroyed. This merging of extemal enemy and interior threat occurs in the torture scenes in G.I. Jane, where the murky ground between the outside and inside threat is symbolized in a battle of the sexes fought in an appropriately militaristic setting. Given psychic overlays of extemalized and psychic aggression, the subtle differences between sadomasodustic dynamics and those of torture in the film are often illegible: ultimately, the treatment of

30~bid.,68-69. 31~bid.,220. 32~illiarnGibson, W-or Drearns, 53. O'Neil's body os~atesambivalently between S/M and torture. As in many other cultural arenas, this representational ambivalence points to a cultural anxiety - here, about the significance of the muscularized female body and its ability to disturb the culture's network of gender roles and expectations.

Rape and the Phallus The specter of erotic violation is raised throughout G.I. Tane, further marking the threat and vulnerabili~of O'Neilrs rnuscled body. From the kst moment she enters the mess hall, to her crewmate Slovnik's lesbophobic . remark, "Ail I'm saying is one night lord -just give me one night and I'll set her straight," to the dimactic torture scene, O'Neil is constantly reminded of her vulnerability as a womad3Rape, Benjamin makes ciear, is an act that humiliates women with their own femininity, a femininity which stands as a threat to the masculine ego." But O'Neil refuses such humiliation during the SERE "interrogation" scene; she coolly responds to the Master Chief's comment about "practicing" rape, "Oh yeah, 1thùik about it, just like the men do," while he forces her over an oil barre1 and cuts off her belt. Moreover, her invocation of the potential of male rape, the penetration of the male, radically threatens male identity. The violation that threatens to dissolve the difference between men and women must not be left unchallenged, and the Master Chief - in a scene 1 analyze in more detail below - tries to reassert tus masculinity through this attempt to rape O'Neil. This virtual rape tries to resolve the cultural anxiety and

33"~sAndrea Dworkin insists, "The process of kiliing . . . is the prime sexual act for men in reaiity and/or imagination." SirniMy, women's subordination, heterosexuality, and gender identity, are al1 defined by sexual violation." Benjamin, 216. %Benjamin, 160. contain the threat of the MFB. (Remember here that rape is by definition non consensual, placing it in the domain of torture, not sadomasochism.) In the sadomasodustic dynamic as analyzed in the Storv of O "each act the master takes against [his slave] establishes his separateness, his difference hom her. He continually places himself outside her by saying, in effect, '1 am not yo~."'~~Similarly, in G.I. Tane, the symbol of male mastery through the penis emphasizes the difference between O'Neil and the Master Chief, affording him "the right" to hurt her. In effect, the Master Chief desperately repeats "1 am not you" throughout G.I. Tane by reiterating his difference from OfNeil, his need to Save her, and his abuse of her. But why must the sadist find enjoyment more in his command than in her service, and why must the phallus distance and symbolize his command? Such distancing maintains the mirage of a discrete subjectivity and denies the sadist's sc~pulousdependence on - and subjective merging with - the masochist. The phallus thus syrnbolizes the master's resistance to being absorbed by the thing he contr~ls;~which is why the Master Chief works tirelessly to sustain the difference between himself, his male troops, and OIN*eil. This psychological dynamic aids us in understanding the radical nature of O'Neil's absorption of phallic power: her appropriation of the phallus serves to threaten and ultimately destabilize the gender boundaries everyone else in the film works so doggedly to uphold. Benjamin dearly understands the difference between athibuting power to the phallus and attributing power to the father - the arbitrary symbol of power vs. the actual bearer of p~wer.~'Nevertheless, Benjamin cautions, such an emphasis on the phallus may ultimately sustain the patriarchal monopoly on desire, subjectivity, and individuation: "Ln a culture in which the representation of the body is organized and dominated by the phallus, woman's body necessarily becomes the object of the phallus."38

Lesbo on the Loose: Does Demi Moore have a "cock-in-the-head"? LtOrNeil's hiumphant "suck my di&" illustrates the limited nature of

Benjamin's conclusion: the phallus cmbe absorbed and wielded effectively by those who choose to use it The woman's body is not necessarily the object of .the phallus. It is - as Benjamin herself details - an arbitrary sign, not wholly tied to any reality. And this fact is borne out by Jeanne Cordovars lesbianized reading of this scene with which I introduced the chapter. As Master Chief is about to rape O'Neil, she kicks and headbutts him; a brutal fight ensues. Master Chief thrashes her, prodaiming to the soldiers that he is merely "trying to save her Life, and yours"; he admonishes O'Neil to "seek life elsewhere." Her defiant reply, "Suck my dick!" is greeted by the cheers of her crew and secures her acceptance by the other soldiers. Cordova's reading of this scene reveals the implications and benefits of such a "cock-in-the-head" and deserves to be quoted in full:

The scene suggests that in order to win the status and privileges of men a woman has to act like a man. The movie illustrates that this approach works. My own experience in the world of men demonstrates that if you want the respect accorded to men in the political or business world, act like a man. (But always, always LOOK like a woman. Men insist upon illusion.) In G.I. Tane, Moore's character does this supremely by hurling that bottom line faggot-baiting epithet, "Suck my dick!" The males in the scene, and much of the audience, are stunned. Moore, a woman, has no dick. But this unprecedented scene illustrates that she does indeed have a cock in her head. "The cock-in-the-head" is well-known slang in butch-femme sectors of the lesbian community. The expression illustrates a truth - that having a prick is largely a matter of attitude, not foreskin. For this reason 1 think G.I. Tane pushes the ~nderenvelope. The film shows a strong woman syrnbolically appropnating the ALmighty Penis. It works beautifully in the film, and it works in real life. Moore, who seems to be consciously articulating a new superwoman icon halfway between Madoma and Martina Navratilova, is perfectly endowed to make this new image work. She is sexy to both women and men, she is buffed to the max, she cmgo butch or femme at the drop of a click, she's got a strong jaw, and she's got too much rnoney to care what anyone thinks of her. In other words, she's got the raw attitude-39

Much like the queered appropriation of Linda Hamilton's body from T2, this lesbianized reading proves that some spectators are able to (re)daim as pro- lesbian elements of G.I. Tane that on the surface other readers (including myself) might see as predominantly lesbophobic. As my chapter made clear, context, perception, and reception of films and stars are much more creative and fluid than classical film theory has baditionally acknowledged. Regardless of this appropriation, the film's representation of lesbianism and its purportedly "realistic" telling of a clear violation of the Arnerican military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy are fraught with contradictions. As mentioned in the earlier summary of the film, the charge of O'Neil's "embarrassingl'lesbianism is constructed b y Senator DeHaven (Anne Bancroft) for her own political benefit; after O'Neil has sewed her purpose, she can be dismissed/contained with one intimation of lesbianisrn. The lesbophobia inherent in the process of full integration of women in the military is introduced in an early DeHaven scene. While reviewing possible candidates - all with stellar statistics - DeHaven look at pictures of one of them performing a leg press, another rwnning, and jokes: "Perfect, until they do a chromosome check . . . Do you want to see her on the cover of Newsweek?" But when DeHaven cornes across the bio and photos of O'Neil, she proclaims her "top drawer, with silk stockings inside." Afterwards, when DeHaven and OfNeilmeet for the fkst rste, DeHaven literalizes the issue: "Have you got a man? At home, a fiancé, a steady beau? You know, some kind of solvent heterosexual. 1hate asking, but 1don't want this thing blowing up in our faces if you happen to be batting for the other side." DeHaven's feigned discornfort at her own blmt question both mocks and capitulates to culture's rampant hornophobia, so often epitomized by the - military. In this way, DeHaven's "charge"of lesbianism is a familiar strategy to contain the threat of a powerful woman. The timing of DeHaven's charge - after the Master Chief s unrealized rape, and fouowing OfNeil'svictorious insult - is also suspect. Only after the Master Chief is unable to penetrate the "body armor" (O'Neil refuses objecthood) and after O'Neil daims phallic power (and subjecthood) is she positioned as a prime candidate for lesbian "accusations."Whïle the film critiques DeHaven's lesbophobia and sympathizes with O'Neil's unfair dismissal, the false charge of lesbianism nevertheless hivializes the sign of lesbianism and reifies the notion that while women cmbe strong, to be accepted they must also be readable as "feminine"- i.e. not lesbian. Demi Moore was chosen by the filmmakers, as she was chosen by Senator DeHaven, because she could play "tough, but still feminine." But why this constant refrain to "still feminine?" Why are questions of femininity - and lesbianism - still asked of the muscled female form? This concept of feeminiriity - the major factor in Bev Francis' loss in 1984's Pumping Iron II -still appears to be the ulcimate test of "authentic womanliness." This constructed notion of what is "feminine"continues, stereo~pically,to exclude anyone who might be lesbian. Or to be more accurate about this lesbophobic fear: it excludes anyone who can be rend as lesbinn - that is, anyone who appears %utch." Thus, the lesbian ruse in G.I. Tane confirms that it is acceptable to be big and muscular, as long as you look like Demi Moore, Rachel McLish (the self- proclaimed "powder puff' from Pumpine Iron II) or Gabrielle Reece, volleyball superstar-supermodel, who proudly claims to be a "power ~hick."'~This continued redefinition, both by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, of acceptable and desirable ways of being women allows for very few choices. And anything that skates too dose to the "lesbian Mt"- continues to be patrolled, policed, and contained. While Bev Francis (recall her "chromosome check") was used as a foi1 to make the other cornpetitors in Pumpine Iron II appear "normal," the charge of hornosexuality is similarly used to hetero-normalize Demi Moore's character. It is a transparent use of lesbianism as "deviance" that allows spectators to know unequivocally that both Demi Moore and the characters she plays are not only straight, but epitomize and define heterosexuality. Thus, the film appears to be simultaneously critiquing Iesbophobia and fahgprey to it. In this way, G.I. Tane is fully in line with dominant cinema, that as Andrew Weiss has arg-ued, "works to contain the most threatening aspects of women's sexuality by using lesbianism as its boundary, to make what is unspeakable . . . harmlessly la~ghable."'~

40 Reece States in her autobiography: "Fernininity and scren_otharen't mutually exclusive. We can sport strong bodies but be chicks at the same rime." She also proudly chooses to mascara her long, luscious Iashes before she goes out and slams the volleyball into her opponents face. And what does that rnean to Gabby? "True power cornes from knowing we have the choice and phying it whichever way we like." Gabrielle Reece as quoted in Heywood, 206. '"~ndreaWeiss, "A Queer Feeling When 1 Look at You: Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s." in Stardom: Industrv of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 297. OtNeil initially laughs off the accusations. She asks, increduIous, "Sir, is someone suggesting that I'm a lesbian?" Clairning Phallic Power. Can she "take him from behind" with her "gun"? The attempted containment of Lt. OfNeil's phallic power is hirther evidenced in the final action sequence of the film, which occurs just after the SEALs amval in Libya. The Master Chief and Moore have gone ahead of the team to check for "hostile presence." When a Libyan soldier approaches their location, O'Neil momentarily usurps phallic power by intending to kill him while the Master Chief ta& her through it. Note the interlinking of the gun and the phallus in this scene -and the potential for OfNeil's symbolic appropriation of not only the phallus ("Suck my di&!") but also of the phailic weapon, the gun. In this unrealized metaphoric "rape" scene, the Master Chief switches roles from sadist to teacher as he details what O'Neil must do to "take [the Libyan solider] down;" he tells her to "make it silent, control your breathing." The rational sadist holds her hand through what is to be her debut as a sadist, "rapist," and killer, giving her tips like, "He's a big boy, you're going to have to take him from bel~hd."'~Master Chief offers his assistance, "You want me to do it?" But O'Neil turns him down: "Negative, I'li do what 1have to do. It's my call." Here she hies to clairn the killing as her own, but Master Chief is unable to relinquish his patriarchal role to her, and insists on "taking him," as it were, himself. O'Neil protests, but in the end Master Chief does exactly what he warned the other men not to do: he compromises the mission to Save her; the other Libyan soldiers hear his gun shot and move in. Interestingiy, the ("rape") killing of the male b y the female sadist is unrealized, because the film is not prepared to let us see

'"It is interesting to note that it is an Arabic/Asiad"Onental" man who is about to be "feminized/raped/taken from behindkilled." Within the context of a Hollywood film, 1 wou1d doubt that the filmmakers are even aware of the racist implications of such a choice. The Libyan guard - while large and burly - invokes the racialized notion of "Oriental" man as soft, already feminized, already available to be taken. Indeed. within Hollywood's racist paradigrn it wouId be filmically inconceivable for such a role to be filled by a Caucasian enemy. Afier alf, homophobia teaches us that a "real (read, white) man" is not available to be "taken frorn behind." OfNeil"take someone dom." Ln this militaristic male setting she can only be the wounded, not the wounder, the masodUst, never the sadist. In this way, O'NeiI remains controlled by traditional notions of what it means to be a woman, even though her body is far beyond tradition. In the end, the film more expliutly emphasizes not OfNeil'sweakness but that of the Master Chief. Senator DeHaven ciaims that women aren't in combat because the polls demonstrate that "people aren't ready to see women corning home in body bags." The film itself is not about to present the spectator with O'Neil in a body bag. But G.I. Tane inadvertently raises and answers the truly threatening question: is the public prepared to watch women put other soldiers in body bags? The fact that those other soldiers would ostensibly be men speaks directly to O'Neil's usurping of phallic power and male privilege. This opportunity for women to kill men - the truly threatening scenario - is also denied Sarah Connor/Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2; she can be the mother of the savior, the parhier of the good Te&ator, but she herself cannot terminate, a job better left to the ultimate man/machine, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And while the spectacle of women as strong, bloodthirsty, and barbaric (Le. like men in war) remains an ambivalent "success" at best, it is a scenario still eschewed by soüetyfsprescribed gender roles.

The question remains: how do we want to define success for women in the military and elsewhere? Women being men? Women killing as men? As a feminist slogan from the 1970s stated: "If your goal is equality, your standards are too low." The purpose of feminism, as this reader sees it, is not for women to be the sarne as men, but to have the heedom to be whatever they choose. While the notion of equality, and specifically equd opportunity, is crucial to adueving such liberation, some versions of such "equality" are clearly less desirable than others. Jeanne Cordova in her rehashing of G.I. Jane argues that to effectively "win the status and privileges of men, a woman has to act like a man." But do we really want to use that as a standard of success? In G.I. Tane, that would rnean equal participation in the conservative, militaristic ideology the film works so hard to fetishize. Moreover, those women like Bev Francis in Pawho succeed at achieving this il.Lusory status - of just "like a man" - are often repudiated as an "other" for their visible disturbance of gender boundaries. Ellen Goodman condudes that this confusion and anxiety over gender roles is not just

. . . in the regal and military ends of the spechum. Women are now told to be proud of their bulging biceps and sco&I of the male inability to ask directions. They can't cry at the office but want men to cry at home. They believe in equality but don't know what kind. Many men, on the other hand, in and out of the rnilitary, don't think women will be equal until they are the same as men. But these men themselves are under pressure to be different.'"

So while O'Neil's adoption of "masculinity" is somewhat successful, it is also ultimately limited; entering the rnilitary means confomllng to a masculine, hierarchical world? And, as Jeanne Cordova makes clear, her limited success is allowed because although she is tough like a man, she still look "like a woman. Men insist upon illusion." This translates clearly to a continued repudiation/exdusion of any woman who can be read as "lesbian," or 'butch." In G.1 Tane, OrNeil is "one of the guys," yet she can't kill. She is a heroic masochist, but an unfulfilled sadist. Çhe is tough, but must sabe ferninine. Ultimately, the

- -- uGoodrnanlA2 1 UJulie Wheelwright, Amazons and Militarv Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, ~iness(London: Pandora, 1989), 78. success of Moore's muscularized body -submitted to sadomasochistic and torturous treahnent for its broadung of gender boundaries - is also its failure. WHAT NEXT FOR THE "MODERN AMAZON"?

while the focus of this trans-generic study was lirnited mostly to mainshem film, the field upon which the muscled female body plays is nearly infinite. Earlier in my work, 1antiupated the MFB's fall in popularity; 1 could never have predicted its millennia.1 abundance on our cultural screen: in professional wrestling on television, through the continued popularity of Xena: Warrior Princess, in a recent focus on survivalism and extreme sports, and with female bodybuilding's debut at the Summer 2000 Olyrnpics. Most recently, the MFB was elaborately showcased on the stage of high art in the Picturing the Modem Amazon exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (NYC). The variety of visual texts presented in the show (and its accompanying volume), from comic books to collage, sculpture to video, photography to painting, consistently evokes (and avoids) three of the most persistent thernes of my study of the MFB: femininity, lesbianism, and spectatorship. Clearly, "femininity," as it informs al1 my theoretical questions, remains elemental to any study of a woman's body and becomes especially important as one looks at female bodies that challenge the very basis of its utility. In intemiews with "hypermuscular women" whose prototypes are female bodybuilders, the Picturing the Modem Amazon volume confronts this issue directly. To fhe query "what does femininity mean to you?", bodybuilder Andnilla Blandiette responds:

The word [femininity] really doesn't seem to have much meaning. The barriers of what is feminine and femininity have been shattered over and over. Women Wear trousers, cut off their hair - both in the past looked upon as being unferninine. Women do alrnost every activity that males do and vice versa. Therefore, this word has got to be extinct!'

While 1agree in part that much of what "femininity" evokes has been successfdy challenged, the term continues to have strong cultural purdiase. In contrast to massive bodybuilders like Bev Francis who populate the book and exhibition, the average woman who engages in weight training has, Literally, much smaller goals; they usually work out to attain toned biceps and sleek thighs. Fit, but stiu "feminine," they remain party to a prevalent fear of muscle mass. Remember: it is bodies Eke Linda Hamilton's and Demi Moore's that becarne the ideal, not Bev Francis'. Lenda Murray, a six-tirne Ms. Olympia (the most pres tigious title in bodybuilding), articula tes why:

If 1use the word bodybuilding [women] alrnost always correct me and teil me that it's not bodybuilding they want to do, they just want to incorporate weight training into their physical fitness program. When they think of bodybuilding they think of building. They think of mass, they think of - especially if it's a woman - I'rn going to be too big. That's not fenùnine. So they don? want to call it bodybuilding.' Nthough Andrulla Blanchette argues that muscle isn't gender bound, another top cornpetitor reminds us why the toned ideal is more desirable than the bodybuilder image. While the buffed Xena is a massively popular television idol, her figure does not radically disturb the notion of hmininity in the way that Bev Francis' does. So while muscled women have shown femininity to be an arnorphous sign awaiting shape and definition, we shodd keep in rnind that traditional notions of what it means to be a woman continue to hold sway in culture.

- '~ndnillaBlanchette, quoted in Joanna Frueh, "Interviews with Women Bodybuitders," in Picturing the Modem Amazon, ed. Joanna Frueh, Laurie Fierstein, and Judith Stein (New York: Rizzoli, 2000), 164 (hereafter cited as Modem Arnazon). 'Lenda Murray, quoted in Joanna Frueh, "Interviews with Women Bodybuilders," in Modem Amazon, 154. The Modem Arnazon exhibit further testifies to how the muscularized female body continues inevitably to evoke the "bogeyman of lesbianism." From disavowals to critics' questions to spectators' desires and fears, lesbianism hovers over the body of the strong woman. As the previous chapters indicate, spectators' reception and perception of such intimations are tied up with their personal invesiments regarding lesbian identity and identification. While many muscled women are affected by our society's lesbophobia, René Toney, whose 19" biceps are currently acknowledged to be the largest of any woman in the world, appreuates the variety of desires inspired by her body: "1 like being attractive to both sexes and transgender or whatever. It's very flattering that people can look at me - men, women, hanves . . . and find something attra~tive."~But Toney is rare in such appreciation (Xena notwithçtanding4).Bev Francis, in and again in Modem Amazon continues to disavow her body's connection with lesbian iconography. She is the only intewiewee in Modem Amazon who -in addition to her bodybuilding photographs - is also seen posing with her husband and children; in effect, she is still desperate to prove her hetero-femininity in spite of her muscles: "My whole Life has been justification. . . I'm very secure in my sexuality. Even when 1was a tomboy 1never wanted to be a boy. 1never wanted to have a penis. It was like the last thing I wanted."' Francis remains uneasy with her own challenges to traditional notions of femininity, even as she successfully achieves what is undeniably an effective

-- - - 3René Toney, quoted in Joanna Frueh, "Interviews with Women Bodybuilders," in Modem Amazon, 166. ' In Modern Amazon, lesbianism is contained within the section of muscular comic book women, including "portraits of BattIeaxe, Jaguar, Nixa, and oh yes, Bitchy Bitch, Horny Biker SIut and Hothead Paisan, the Homicidai Lesbian terronst, who to real aficionados of the buffed body, are lead characters from fernale comics who make television's Xena look like Twiggy." From Michael Rush, "So They're Muscular: Want to Make Something of It?" New York Times, 19 March 2000, 39, 41. 'Bev Francis. quoted in Joanna Frueh, "Interviews with Women Bodybuilders," in Modem Amazon, 156- 157. appropriation of phallic power. In fact, Picturine the Modem Amazon itself participates in this familiar disavowal of a link between female muscle and lesbianism; it is relegated to a footnote in Fierstein's introduction, but is worth rescuing from literal marginality here:

Many people assume that hypermuscular women are lesbians. If we begin with the broadly accepted definition of a lesbian as a woman who is sexually and emotionally drawn to other women, what has muscle to do with that? The percentage of hypermuscular women who are lesbians is probably about the same as the percentage of lesbians in the rest of the population. Because many people consider both lesbians and muscular women to be manly or desirous of being men, it is easy to see how people conclude that muscular women are lesbians. But neither lesbians nor hypermuscular wornen want to be men. If that were so, they wouId be transsexuals. Fear of this stereotype, hypermuscular woman as lesbian, lives with bodybuilding cirdes along with the stereotype of male bodybudders as homoerotic syrnbols. These stereotypes account for a good deal of homophobia and lesbophobia within that milieu.6 While Fierstein dismisses this link as a "stereotype," at moments in Modem Amazon, e.g. Barbara Hamrner's piece, "Charlene Atlas #3: IMPOSSIBLE, 1998," this repressed comection is brought to light. Here, Hamrner replaces her head on the male body of those iconic bodybuilding advertisements aimed at weakling men hoping to become huhggimts. The text next to the impressive before-and-after shots (now oddly altered by the addition of Hammer's head) reads: "Impossible? Not for the super bodybuilding system!" Harnrner redirects to women the cal1 traditionally made to men, but leaves the rest of the text and image untouched: Most WOMEN never realize their potential for muscularity . . . Very few women are satisfied with the way they look at present. They know themselves that they wouldn't mind having a REALLY MASCULINE BODY -one that will " turn on" the girls and make the guys envious . . . Whatever you look like today, we cmirnprove on it: Arms - Develop

6Laune Fierstein, "Introduction," in Modem Amazon, L 8-19.

105 big, powerful arms - the kind girls love to be held in! Command respect from everyone you meet!'

Thus, regardless of the near-constant disavowal in the exhibit, the "specter" of lesbianism surfaces again, not only in the text and images of the muscularized woman, but also through the spectatorial pleasure 1 as a viewer gain from this "refusal of a refusal;" bodybuilding culture's irrepressible attempts to deny queer identity, pleasure, and participation in its very ranks are deliciously subverted via its own historical iconography. The "specter's" resurfacing should corne as no surprise, as 1 have repeatedly demonstrated how the reading of such figures is so intimately connected to an often queer spectatorial position (not necessarily connected to "authentic" queer/gay identities), what Claire Whatling calls "a way of looking lesbian."* Like Whatling, 1have joined a group of writers in film studies today (Judith Mayne, Yvonne Tasker, Janet Staiger, Henry Jenkins, and Rhona Berenstein) who maintain "that perhaps the most interesting thing about films is the audience which watches tl~ern."~WatdUng movies, such scholars aver, cm be a transfomative and productive process, and films featuring the muscularized female body are no exception. As a critic, 1 am less interested in proffering a "correct" reading of a particular film than in exploring the range of possible readings and reading styles at any given time, and their relation (or lack thereof) to actual spectator~.'~Because queer, or "queered," or muscled spectators participate in a broad range of looking relations, contesting, resisting, revising,

'~arbaraHammer, "Charlene Atlas #3: Impossible, 1998," iris print, 18x12, in Modem Amazon, 84. 'Claire Whatling, Screen Drearns: Fantasising Lesbians in Film (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1997), 6. 'Whatling, 10, no. 7. "Janet Staiger, quoted in Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge. 1993), 67. interrogating, and inventing on multiple levels, we must address the ways al1 spectators (including au versions of identity formation -sex race, class, sexuality, nationality, etc.) read and respond to dl texts, and not only those displaying "genetic celebrities" like René Toney, Bev Francis, or Linda Hamilton."

Where We Have Been The MFB's sway in visual culture continues unabated, and the readings set forth in the preceding chapters, while necessarily unable to address in full all the cultural manifestations of this fom, remain sensitive to the cornplex reception of visual texts. These readings provide the beginnll-igs of an answer to the question with which 1began the thesis: "How do muscularized female bodies in film both perpetuate traditional notions of what it means to be a woman as they sirnultaneously challenge and resist them?" In Pumpin~Iron II, Bev Francis was considered a "freak," abject, neither male nor female; her body inaugurated the debate around the meaning of the truly muscularized female form. Contemporary boundaries of "femininityW-with which Francis definitively broke in her powerfd performances, masquerades, and drag - are established in the service of the "center," yet are not entirely in the "center's"control. At times, in the film's enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality, its increasing comrnodification of the body, and the filmmaker's inability to confront directly issues of race and dass, Pum~innIron II fdsback upon traditional modes of address towards the radical form it features. Yet, while the film's finale rebukes

"bel1 hooks, quoted in Whatling, 19. For a rare and powerful look into the specific issues raised by black female muscularity, see Carla Williams', "Hardcore: the Radical Self-Portraiture of Black Female BodybuiIders," in Modem Ammon, 104-1 16. Francis, her physique set the stage for the emergence of the body of the decade to follow: the musdarized female form. This form, epitomized by Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, at first appears as a normalized version of this bodily ideal. L2 undoubtedly worked self- consciously to maùiçtream the muscularized form, with a star body much doser to Rachel McLish than to Bev Francis. But as the Hamilton body and the Sarah Connor charactes were (re)read by spectators, they provoked a serious challenge to any simple understanding of the gaze, desire, and identification in dominant cinema. From lesbians who claimed her as one of their own, to feminists who saw her as a new "Hera," to critics who proclaimed hers the %ody of the 90s," Linda Hamilton and her body's power moved outside the narrative confines of James Cameron's script. This split between spectacle and narrative was, in fact, incredibly productive for the viewer, enabling a rich diversity of readings. hdeed, the near-infinite analyses of her spectacular body testify to the complexity of film spectatorship, proving that spectators can be at once taken in by the consenrative ideology of the story while they still produce their own subversive readings of the text. As 1hoped to show, the script's familiar containment of Conrior is only part of the story; indeed, in focusing on the power of her body, the script participated in a construction of Comor/Hamilton that transcended the manifest narrative. It wodd seem that more recent attempts to contain the muscularized female body have met with greater success, as G.I. lane attests. Here, the MFB - via Moore's implacably sexualized star image, which combines visible strength and courage with popular notions of femininity and sexuality - is sadomasochistically tested and violently tortured. Such punishment, 1have suggested, is inspired by the "category confusion" Moore's musded form embodies and provokes. As gender roles in society shift and slide, O'Neil's (somewhat) successfd appropriation of phallic power cannot go unchallenged. The film's narrative response -falsely accusing her character of lesbianism - simultaneously reifies and critiques the "red herring" of lesbophobia that persistently surrounds the muscularized female body. Ln the end, of course, Lt. O'Neil's success means that she can "take it like a man," not that she can give it. While Moore's character is shown suffefering in bloody detail, she cannot kill or Save another soldier by herself (much the same as Sarah Connor/Linda Hamilton in E).If the message of G.I. Tane is that success is being "like a man," would that entail a continuation or a critique of traditional notions of womanliness? While the film's conservative militaristic paradigm maps success according to traditional (white) male standards, the MF'EYs spectators (myself included) read these figures as more than just "as strong as a man - any man." Indeed, these forms erode the equation between maleness and strength, refiguring femininity to indude new radical notions of what it means to be a woman, and what %eing a woman" can now look like. Far removed from former icons of femininity like Twiggy or Marilyn Monroe, these bodies deconstruct and embrace femininity as they powerfully pose, defensively dissemble, and coolly contradict earLier forms of screen femininity. In this way, and in lùie with the Foucauldian mode1 of power and its appropriation that I delineated in my introduction, this toned form, crafied as a response to a

"cultural need," is more than capable of diallenging the paradigm from which it arose. Visual culture as always is a training ground for individuals as it teaches them the appropriate body for the cultural moment; this "training" was clearly operative both in the normalization of the MFB, as well as in its refusal of those very noms, since the MFB offered another avenue for women's liberation via this newfound physical sbength. While contemporary power relations continually work towards an unattainable s tasis point, instability is their destiny . Such instability, my study suggests, is dearly evidenced in d three films, and especially in their varied spectatorial readings. Altemating ambivalently between critique and conforrnity as they circulate ever-widely through visual culture, these MFBs speak dearly to the confusion in culture around appropriate gender roles and their visual manifestations.

Where I Would Like to Go Due to the limited scope of a master's thesis, 1have been unable to treat a number of topics that would have been more adequately accommodated in a more extensive study. In a dissertation, for example, 1would have devoted another section to issues of class and race that have historically been tied to the muscled body.12 Oprah's body battles as they crisscross these topics would have made for fascinating analysis. Had time and space allowed, I would have liked to conduct sociological interviews with spectators of the MFB, especially queer- identified readers who could personally substantiate the theory of "reading subtextually/against the grain." Other forms of queer spectatorship remain unaddressed here, especially the gay male's relationship to the muscled female body. How does the MFB resonate with their own bodily standards, and as it crosses the line of androgyny, how might it serve as a location of desire for them? A study not limited to film would have been able to examine Xena:

"~nearlier version of this thesis included a chapter devoted excIusively to this analysis, but for reasons of theoreticai coherence, it was eliminated. Warrior Prbcess in a less cursory fashion. This show, which grew up with and through the intemet, and consuously played with its audience's subtextual readings, wodd have been a valuable addition to mv readings of queer spectatorship in a.Finally, while this thesis was necessarily restncted to mainstream Hollywood movies, a more expansive study rnight move productively beyond this genre-crossing analysis to read how independent film traditions, induding art, feminist, and camp films, have envisioned this body. These unexplored avenues of inqujr remain open as 1 make plans for future scholarship.

Post-Modem Amazons

To men a man is but a mind. Who cares what face he carries or what he wears? But woman's body is the woman. Ambrose ~ierce'~

More so than men who are coaxed toward social success, toward sublimation, women are body. Helene Cixous14

At the start of a new millenniurn, why does the body still define what it means to be a woman? Bierce's assurnedly antiquated paradigm is strangely similar to Cixous' own reading during an earlier wave of feminism; today as the third wave struggles forward, the model's resonance is disturbingly fixed. If such a definition is inescapable - if women are stili to be defiried by our bodies-then what are we to do with them? Each of the three films 1have studied speak to this question/equaîion in the various ways they construct these characters, these

I3~rnbroseBierce, quoted in Robin Morgan. ed. Sisterhood is Powerful: An Antholoov of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement (New York: Randorn House, 1970), 36. I4Helene Cixous, quoted in Mary Ann Doane. Femme Fatales: Feminism. Film Theory. Psvchoanalvsis (New York: RoutIedge, 199 1)' 22. bodies, as subject and/or object. Pum in^ Iron II, Terminator 2, and G.I. Tane objectify the body in ways that are both limiting and enabling: their images both recall and rebuke the traditional representation of woman as image to be looked at. These bodies, while stunning, spectacdar objects, are also incredibly powerfd subjects, active agents, who determine a path with and through the body. It is the development of a powerfd, muscularized body whidi affords them this role. Perhaps this is why academic and bodybuilder Leslie Heywood would argue that, in a world where women's bodies are both too visible and invisible, the work to do is bodybuilding:

Bodybuilding is the manifestation of the will to be visible. Though her body is still [the woman's] substance, its tangible sign, the coding of that substance has changed. hstead of the paradox of a substance that is inçubstantial, a physical visibility that is coded as social invisibility or lack of intrhsic worth ("she's a body, not a brais), the female bodybuilder's body signals the presence of a controlIing mind . . . The muscular femaie body, mind and muscle, fuel and flesh. A mark against history, insubstantiality, meaninglessness. An irrefutable indication of presence, sustained work, and the desperate desire for meaning and significance as an individual that fuels it,"

As we work on our bodies and minds, we both fuel and fight this odious paradigm - women-as-body. We take Our brushes and pens, barbeus and dumbbells, our minds and bodies, and work on, against, and through traditional notions of what it means to be a woman, to be "ferninine," to live in this world in a woman's body. We shape Our bodies to our own idealsr to society's image, to a parent's fear, as we operate within and without the Foucauldian apparatus. And as Bordo remarks, it is tiring work:

My students know that as long as they keep up their daily hours at the gym, they can feel pumped up . . . But how, they wonder, cari they

15~eslieHeywood. "Ghettos of Obscurity: Individual Sovereignty and the Suuggle for Recognition in Female Bodybuilding," in Modem Arnazon, 80. possibly keep it up their entire lives? They know there is no equilibrium there, that the conditions of their feeling all right about themselves are precario us.' ci Today, control over the body has come to mean control over one's destiny. Our bodies are our religion, and like all religions, this one is full of converts, true-believers, wanna-bels ,and outcasts. There are still snake-oil salesmen (lose 30 pounds in 30 days and make money too!!!), proselytizers (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and evangelizers (You Gotta Eat, You Gotta Move, and You Gotta Breathe). Diet regimes promise to carry us to salvation, and hainers - for a fee - will work out with us, will uy with us, will do just about anything to improve our souk and bodies. We confess our sins (flourless chocolate cake AND a crème brulée) and make penance as often as possible (Stairmaster for forty minutes and at the highest level whether it kills me or not). What more is there to do? This new standard of corporeal beauty requires an ever-increasing investment of time and anxiety, what Joan Brumberg calls the "body project;" it is more readily legible as an attempt to contain women's energy and focus. As Brumberg observes in The Body Proiect, women in the 1980s and 1990s saw their bodies as the primary path of self-realization and identity in a way that wornen never had before. Although some bodybuildeïs claim that the development of a strong female physique functions as personal and political activism, this obsession with sculpting the body at the expense of other interests has obvious limitations. Indeed, s& a consuming preoccupation with fat and diet may function as one of the most powerfd normalizing mechanisms of OLU century, insuring the production of self-monitoring and self-disciplinhg "docile bodies"

-- 16 Sussui Bordo, quoted in Leslie Heywood, Bodvrnakers: A Cultural Anatomv of Women's Bodybuilding (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 189-190. sensitive to any departure from social norms - and habituated to self- improvement and self-hansformation in the service of those norms." But how did the MFB, a strong and controlled female body, a rebellious body, become a normalized and disciplined ideal body? Such normalization is neither seamless nor complete, and more importantly for my study, visual culture participates both in the promotion and degradation of this contradictory form. My work suggests that, ironically, the ideological center and its manifestation in mainstream Hollywood attempted to recuperate and contain this strong female body by producing desire for it. The circulation of images of the MFWs rnodified, feminized version in films like a and G.I. Tane, made it possible for women whose toned form seemed a challenge to norms of "femininity" to become the apotheosis of the normalized, disciplined body. In this way, the buffed female body is both the body in need and - if my readings of Pum~ineIron II, Terminator II, and G.I. Tane are any indication - the once-and- future body of disruption. As Foucault maintains, once power creates a normalized and discipliried body, that body's discipline and effiuency -and its cornplex circulation in visual culture - cm be re-directed against the apparatus. Power, after investing itself in the body, can find itself exposed to a counterattack in that same body, and this dynamic is powerful evidence in the continuing struggle around and through the muscularized female body.18

"Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism. Western Culture. and the Bodv (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 186. "Michel Foucault, PowerKnowledoe: Selected Interviews and Other Wrirings. 1972- 1977, ed. Colin Gordon. Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo MarshaIl, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 56. FILMOGRAPHY

Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. With Sigoumey Weaver. Twentieth Century Fox, 1979.

3 Alien .Dir. David Findier. With Sigoumey Weaver. Twentieth Century Fox, 1992.

Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. With Sigourney Weaver. Twentieth Century Fox, 1986.

Alien Ressurection. Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet. With Sigoumey Weaver and Winona Ryder. Twentieth Century Fox, 1997. Basic Instinct. Dir Paul Verhoeven. With Sharon Stone- Guild, 1991.

Beverly Hills Cop II. Dir. Tony Scott. With Grace Jones. UTP/Paramount, 1987. Body of Evidence. Dir. Uli Edel. With Madoma. UIP, 1992.

Cobra. Dir. George Pan Cosmatos. With Brigitte Nielsen. Wamer, 1986. Conan the Barbanan. Dir. John Milius. With Grace Jones. de Laurentiis, 1981.

Dick Tracv. Dir. Warren Beatty. With Madonna. Touchstone, 1990.

G.I. Tane. Dir. Ridley Scott. With Demi Moore. First Independent, 1997.

How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Dir. Kevin Sullivan. With Angela Bassett and Whoopi Goldberg. Twentieth Century Fox, 1998. Julia. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. With Jane Fonda. Twentieth Century Fox, 1977.

Mute. Dir. Alan Pakula. With Jme Fonda. Wamer, 1971.

Meshes of the Aftemoon. Dir. Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid. With Maya Deren. Evergreen Films, 1943.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Dir. George Miller. With Tina Turner. Warner, 1985.

Pumping Iron. Dir. George Butler and Robert Fiore. With Arnold Schwarzenegger. White Mountain Films, 1976. Pumping Iron II: The Women. Dir. George Butler. Blue Dolphin, 1984. Red Sonia. Dir. Richard Fleischer. With Brigitte Nielsen. MGM-UA, 1985.

Rocky N. Dir. Sylvester Stallone. With Brigitte Nielsen. MGM-UA, 1985. Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Johnathan Demme. With Jodie Foster. Rank/Orion, 1990.

S. Dir. Kathyrn Bigelow. With Angela Bassett. UIP, 1995. The Terminator. Dir. James Cameron. With Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Orion, 1984.

Terminator 2: Tudoment Dav. Dir. James Cameron. With Linda Hamilton and Amold s&arzenegger. Guild, 1991.

Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. With Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. UIP, 1991.

Truth or Dare. Dir. Alek Keshishian. With Madonna. Rank, 1991.

What's Love Got to Do With It. Dir. Brian Gibson. With Angela Bassett. Buena Vista, 1993.

Waitina to Exhale. Dir. Forest Whittaker. With Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett. 1995. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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