Ó 1998 Carla Williams. All Rights Reserved

Winner, Sixteenth Annual Susan Koppelman Awards Honoring Feminist Editing of Anthologies, Multi-Authored, or Edited Books in American Culture or Popular Cultural Studies of Any Place or Period, 2001.

                         

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The easy comparison, of course, is to the auction block, although only one third of the bodies on stage tonight are black.¹ Bodybuilding is a "sport of plastic form"² judged entirely subjectively, aesthetically. There is no tape to burst through, no millisecond record to shatter. Even though this display is both celebratory and voluntary, for the black women on some level the stakes are the same as those placed on the bodies of the African women, our ancestors, who survived the Middle Passage³ only to be corralled and sold to the highest bidder upon their arrival. We have all been taught: Whenever you so much as step outside your house, you are representing the race.

Black females have historically not been in the position to determine either their individual or collective images in the popular consciousness. The black female image has generally been polarized into stereotypes of the oversexed Jezebel and the asexual, castrating mammy,⁴ with only biology, not self-determination as a contributing factor. In certain arenas, however, black females have established a strong voice with regard to bodily matters: for example, from the early blues music of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith in the 1920s to the contemporary rap music of Queen Latifah, Salt n' Pepa, and Lil' Kim, black women speak a definitive, very public position vis-à-vis the expression of their bodies. Similarly, the accomplishments of black female bodybuilders are redefining both their personal and black women's collective image in relation to a legacy of images that preceded them in history and in popular culture. Perhaps more than any other sport, bodybuilding is a triumph of control, both mental and physical. New York bodybuilder and national titleholder Linda Wood-Hoyte offered an example: "Bodybuilding is almost scientific. I love that it is an exact sport. Your body can change from the time you're backstage to when you're onstage doing your posing - it's that precise. I've seen it happen; people who just lose their definition on stage because they're nervous and they start retaining water."⁵

The success of black women in bodybuilding positions the sport as a decisive and positive means of expression through the sculptural creation of the body as a vehicle for self-definition. The complexities of defining such heightened displays of strength, femininity, and womanhood are further compounded within the boundaries of a matriarchal culture in which black men's lack of power is deemed the fault of strong, "castrating" black women. Through the act of self-presentation black women have begun to challenge and reinvent what it means to be black and female within a culture that values neither. Through their extreme manifestation of control over their own bodies, black female bodybuilders represent in physical strength the power that eludes black women in general in society.

Black women's bodies are more naturally inclined to be muscular. If I had to think quickly of an icon of black female physical strength and beauty I would instantly think of actress Pam Grier, "kickin' ass and takin' names"¹² while dominating the blaxploitation genre films of the 1970s. Resurrected in the starring role in 1997's Jackie Brown, Grier played the middle-aged, weary-yet-triumphant heroine in director Quentin Tarantino's homage to her earlier, inner-city morality tales including Coffy and Foxy Brown. Much has been made in recent press about the fact that there was neither a precedent nor a white female equivalent to the image Grier created in film. "A gun-toting community savior who posed for Players magazine, Grier was something folks had never seen before," one interviewer wrote.¹³ For three decades she has represented the conflation of sex and strength, though not necessarily muscularity, in the proudly black female body, so much so that she no longer needs to exhibit her strength to embody it.

On Halloween night 1978, around the same time that Grier was at her pinnacle in Hollywood and at the box office,¹⁴ singer and performance artist Grace Jones took the stage at Roseland Ballroom in New York City, wearing a cropped t-shirt and the "protective cup and handwraps"¹⁵ of a boxer, an androgynous man-woman literally throwing punches at the crowd and growling out sexually ambiguous lyrics against a throbbing disco beat. Several years later she became the first black woman action star in mainstream films, as villains in the 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Conan the Destroyer and in the 1985 James Bond film A View To A Kill. Like Grier, Jones was not particularly muscular, but she was "exotic": tall, very dark, unfeminine, and menacing. It was almost as if her radical blackness alone, her blue-black skin, both represented the strength that she was said to possess and explained all the curious rest. Given that, all she had to do was kick a leg up, snarl, and we were convinced. Although she often collaborated with other artists, Grace was a self-styled "freak,"¹⁶ and the difference of her physicality was exploited to both scare and seduce audiences into paying submission.

Sometimes, however, the association of black women with an indefinable physical superiority is not as overt as in the cases of Grier and Jones. In an episode titled "Destiny" in the second season of the extremely popular syndicated television show Xena: Warrior Princess, the titular heroine Xena, played by actress Lucy Lawless, is injured in a battle and has flashbacks to her incipient warriordom. She is queen of a band of bawdy pirates who have just taken Julius Caesar into captivity. Aboard their ship a stowaway is discovered: upon being unearthed, the heavily cloaked stowaway unleashes a feral fury as he fiercely battles every man aboard the ship, reducing each to a helpless pile of quivering flesh. Xena watches captivated as the whirling dervish of self-defense makes mincemeat of the men and is finally subdued and brought before her. The hood is pulled back to reveal that the stowaway is no man at all, but rather a Gaelic-speaking, black Egyptian female escaped slave named M'Lila. The wild, untameable black female is a stereotype that evokes jungle fantasies of the wantonly permissive, if not downright sexually aggressive, "animalistic" African woman. The subject's lack of voice, as with M'Lila who does not speak the same language as her captors, is emphasized as a means of preventing the black female from literally "having a voice" in her representation and denying the black woman control.

In exchange for sparing her life, Xena demands that M'Lila, played by actress Ebonie Smith, teach Xena her secret "powers," in particular the nerve pinch. The two women form a relationship, and M'Lila is killed protecting Xena. Thus is born the "evil" Xena, whose subsequent career of wreaking havoc on the bad guys, we now learn, is an extended revenge sequence for the death of her friend and instructor. As a public act, female bodybuilding is "seen as a 'resistance to' and 'refusal of' social control,"¹⁷ an extreme of the stereotype of the uncontrollable female. Moreover, through this episode the body of the black female both symbolically and literally becomes the genesis of Xena's superior power, and thus untamable, superior strength is equated with the black female body. Furthermore, the black female does not merely go away, to resurface in another episode; she ceases to exist in order for Xena to assume her superior position of strength, as if their two bodies can not co-exist. By inference, the strong black female body is a threatening one that must be either brought down or made invisible.

You can't fool me - that's a man. Everyone is always so sure. They've never seen a woman who looked like that before so they won't believe that one can naturally exist. Having been told frequently as an athletic child that she "looked like a man," New York-based bodybuilder and physical therapist Heather Foster suggests that she was a likely candidate to exploit a physicality so readily associated with males. On the other hand, when Lesa Lewis, the 1997 National Physique Committee (NPC) USA Champion, was posed the question: If you could change something in the sport what would it be? her answer was: "Don't let the women get too manly,"¹⁸ a sentiment echoed by Wood-Hoyte.¹⁹ Although some women nevertheless choose to exploit their perceived androgyny,²⁰ it is a primary concern for many of the women involved in the sport, because if the questioning begins with gender, it inevitably segues to sexuality.

Observers cannot understand why a woman would choose to look this way, to look more muscular than a man while still expecting to be desired by one. In 1993, Angela Bassett played singer Tina Turner in the movie biography What's Love Got To Do With It?; in order to achieve Turner's remarkable on-stage stamina, Bassett pumped iron and consequently developed a highly muscular form including "an exquisite pair of biceps."²² The image of her radical female body nearly eclipsed the focus of the film, and the period clothes and wigs enhanced the incongruity because she ended up looking like she was playing Turner in drag, creating distraction from the narrative. In a 1991 - 1992 controlled study involving ten of the approximately twenty-five competing female bodybuilders in the world (including three self-described African-American women), all "mentioned that being homosexual was the most frequent stereotype attributed to her and was the one that caused her the most emotional pain."²³

To compound the association, black female sexuality has always been aligned with lesbianism. As psychiatrist and cultural theorist Sander Gilman has noted, beginning in the nineteenth century the physical development of black female genitalia was related to that of the lesbian because of the so-called "excesses" of sexuality attributed to both.²⁴ Of the terms most associated with "butch," or masculine-looking lesbian women, "bull-dyker," "bull-dagger," "bull-dyke" and simply "dyke" were originated in African American communities to refer to lesbians or bisexual women.²⁵ In the early decades of the twentieth century the theme of lesbianism and the terms associated with it often made their way into the lyrics of blues songs, particularly those performed by women, such as Bessie Smith's Prove It On Me Blues and Lucille Bogan's B.D. [Bull Dyke] Woman's Blues.²⁶ It follows from precedent, then, that the hyper-muscular black female body, as a locus of supposed masculine identity in that it connotes radical lesbianism, becomes an easy, if not logical target of frequent assumption and innuendo.

It is striking that like Jones and Bassett, most of the top female bodybuilders are dark-skinned. In the traditional pecking order in the United States, lighter-skinned blacks have long incurred favor over darker-skinned blacks because of their closer physical proximity to an ideal of whiteness. It is a divisive prejudice that is deeply ingrained in the collective black American consciousness and is perhaps most insidiously imposed by blacks against one another, although it is certainly prevalent in the dominant culture as well. Undoubtedly, the triumphs of performers like Jones and Academy AwardÒ nominee Bassett, and those of these women athletes, are subverting and healing some very old wounds in the collective body regarding skin color.

"Bodybuilders are perhaps the most unprejudiced people I know," Wood-Hoyte remarked. "They're really more interested in judging you on your achievements." According to veteran sports writer and photographer Reg Bradford, the judging in the major competitions has been, for the most part, color-blind.²⁹ The same is not true, however, of the media coverage of the sport. On the one hand, I want to revel in the purported color-blindness of the competitions, yet I cannot help but wonder why darker-skinned, six-time Ms. Olympia Lenda Murray has never been featured by herself on a cover of the top bodybuilding magazines.³⁰

Black women are more naturally inclined to be muscular, one of the black Olympia contestants would later reiterate. I remember sports commentator and oddsmaker Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder catching hell for some similar comments years ago³¹ and while I contemplate the thin line between a compliment and a racist remark, I nod in polite agreement, for the moment wondering if there might not be something to that statement after all.³² Studies have supposedly shown that black men have higher levels of testosterone than any other ethnic group, so it stands to reason that black women would have a genetic advantage as well. Bradford notes that black bodybuilders in the Americas and the Caribbean are better developed than blacks elsewhere. He also posits the theory that the experience of slavery, the survival of the Middle Passage and the practice of breeding healthy bodies that could endure the heavy labor demanded of slaves, have given blacks a superior genetic strain that produces "the elite of the elite of the physical body."³³

Although she had never trained for the sport, Carla Dunlap, the first black woman to win the Ms. Olympia contest in 1983 (the year before Vanessa Williams made media history by becoming the first black woman crowned Miss America), placed fifth in a field of forty-five entrants in her first competition.³⁴ Yolanda Hughes, Ms. International 1997 who also placed third in the 1997 Ms. Olympia competition, began competing in 1982, placing in the top five in every local and national competition she entered.³⁵ After three months of training, Murray entered her first competition, the 1985 Michigan Championship, and finished fourth in the heavyweight class.³⁶ Laura Creavalle, a Guyanese-Canadian bodybuilder saw her first women's competition in Jamaica around 1982 and decided to become a competitive bodybuilder; six months later, she won her first competition. Like these and many of the other black female competitors, Heather Foster also entered her first competition on a lark, with no specific training (although she was a competitive athlete in other sports), and won.

"You are an artist creating a sculpture," says Foster. "You put on muscle like clay. You never get it right - there's always something you want to improve or erase. I never think my body is perfect, even though I put in 110% effort for a competition."³⁷ The issue of perfection is a contentious one. Many bodybuilders agree with Foster.³⁸ There are consequences for achieving the "perfect" bodybuilder's form. "I normally don't want attention. Usually, I'm trying to avoid attention," says Nancy Lewis.³⁹ Hughes says that she works hard to perfect her body, yet rarely goes about uncovered in public in order not to invite unwanted attention.⁴⁰ Prior to her first competition at City College in New York City, "I hadn't even worn a two-piece bathing suit," Foster recalled modestly.

This paradox is true among female bodybuilders of every race: the development of extraordinarily muscular bodies invites a lot of unsolicited responses and opinions directed at the women. As Bradford notes, "they are constantly on display."⁴¹ In a discussion of black female subjectivity, artist Lorraine O'Grady has observed that black women in general are not inclined to show their bodies publicly.⁴² The remarkably negative press in black communities over singer Toni Braxton's nude appearance on the April 1997 cover of Vibe magazine proves that the display of the black female body is still a collectively unresolved issue. Viewers were shocked and outraged; public nudity is a "white thing," and not something a successful and self-respecting black woman would indulge in.⁴³ Black female bodybuilders both subvert and are subject to this persistent myth in the black community through the very public-and very bare-display of their bodies.

If it is true that black women are more naturally inclined to be muscular, are they, then, more naturally inclined to win these contests or to represent physical strength in the media? While white participants and observers feel that black women are beginning to dominate bodybuilding just as black men do, none of the black women I speak with have that perception. Moreover, how does strength relate to power? In a sport that does not promise financial reward, in which the primary way to earn a living at it, I am told, is through selling one's image as an erotic fetish in activities like private wrestling sessions, I ponder the meaning of success, of "making it."

Eleven years after her victory as Ms. Olympia, as a member of Team Danskin, Dunlap was featured in a two-page advertisement that ran in women's fashion magazines in April 1994. On the first page, centered against a white background, was a small, faded family snapshot of Dunlap as a child standing in a comfortable, middle-class living room in a leotard and tights, striking the pose of a ballerina. The ad copy read: She picked up her toys. She picked up her cat. She picked up her clothes. Turning the page, the reader saw a full-color, full-page image of Dunlap standing triumphant and glorious, holding her husband over her head. The caption read: Now she picks up her husband. I had never before seen a strong, muscular, black female body being celebrated in a mainstream beauty magazine, and I was thrilled and proud, clipping and saving that advertisement for years.

Yet when Dunlap hoisted her white husband over her head, was she symbolically reinforcing the notion of the castrating black female who is "too much" for the black male, here literally absent from the picture? In fact, several of the top black female bodybuilders have white partners. When I described the advertisement's images to a black female colleague, the stereotype of the domineering black woman is immediately what came to mind for her, the personal transformed into the political. On the popular Amos 'n' Andy radio and television shows in the 1950s, through the character of Sapphire Stevens, the wife of George "Kingfish" Stevens, black women were depicted "as over-bearing, whip-cracking, butt-kicking, 'Never trust a Black man' females who had to constantly hound their men to get up out of bed and 'get a job.'"⁴⁴ I saw this same, tired image again as the perpetually fussing mother in the 1998 made-for-television biography of envelope-pushing basketball player Dennis Rodman. It is a persistent image attached to the black female in a society that denigrates their strength and denies them their often justifiable rage and anger by attributing their difficulty to gender and color. The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice, but when they get that black they ain't no use.

The difficulty with developing healthy relationships with partners of any race is compounded for these women, who, because of their extremely muscular bodies, narrow the playing field of potential partners who are willing to be physically matched by or in some cases subordinate to their women. Another real hazard is the fetishist who will enjoy her body in private but deny her in public. "Black and white men both like the look of black muscle but are less inclined to publicly admit their attraction to the black women in the sport," confides one of the women who experienced one such closeted relationshiUltimately, was Dunlap's black body a successful commodity, that is, did it sell the Danskin's? Did it also successfully sell a positive image of black female strength, femininity, and beauty?

Engaging the question of representing femininity and strength, artist Cynthia Wiggins, herself once a fledgling bodybuilder, created the 1994 installation titled Difference and Pathology.⁴⁵ In it she included three photographs: on the left was a foot wearing a high-heeled pump stepping up on a stool, which ironically references the pedestal of posing and competition. Cut off just above the flexing calf muscle, the photograph united the glamorous and the mundane, the elegant shoe and the functional metal stepladder; text to the left of it read: "she doesn't use her feminine strength." At the center of the installation was a close-up of a woman's full mouth and torso wearing a lacy red bra. On the right was a hand wearing a weightlifting glove outstretched over a weight that sits on the floor in front of it: was it dropped, or does she reach for it? The incongruity of the lingerie and the glove posited the question of femininity in the sport and whether or not the two can co-exist. Of her own attraction to bodybuilding, Wiggins explained that "it was just something I did, I think partly because as a girl, I wasn't supposed to." Having weight-trained on and off since high school, Wiggins returned to the gym to create Difference and Pathology. In part referencing the politics of interracial relationships and how that dynamic informs the image of a physically strong woman, she "even tweaked the color in the central image because I didn't want my race to be a determining factor in how the piece was read."⁴⁶

Bill Dobbins' 1994 photography book The Women features twenty-seven female bodybuilders and fitness competitors, including four black women, among them the then-reigning Ms. Olympia Murray. Images of Murray dominate the book with a total of fourteen; there are four photographs of Hughes; four of bodybuilder and "American Gladiator" Sha-Ri Pendleton;⁴⁷ and four of Creavalle, a ten-time Ms. Olympia competitor. Creavalle is an extremely confident and outspoken competitor who has encountered more than a little resistance during her fifteen years in the sport due to her frank and forthright personality.⁴⁸ She described photo sessions with Dobbins as intimidating; in true, coaxing-photographer fashion, Dobbins would tell her she didn't "look sexy enough" in order to obtain a desired pose from her.⁴⁹

Interspersed throughout the book, the images of Creavalle form a compelling narrative about identity and race in the world of bodybuilding and beyond. In the first image she is seen from behind seated on the bench of a weight machine, wearing a black, thong bathing suit, and bending over to the left to pick up a three-pound Weider barbell as the left strap of her suit slips provocatively off of her shoulder. She wears a curly blond wig, which stands out in bold relief against her glistening, red-brown skin. Her face is completely obscured. The next image is a two-page spread of her lying unclothed on a sofa that is the color of her skin, her arms gripping the back and arm and her calves flexed and erect. Her face is turned from the camera, although a sliver of her profile is just visible beyond a straight, auburn-colored wig styled into a fli

The next image shows Creavalle in the auburn wig seated on a wooden bench, turning toward the camera in a three-quarter pose, her hands constrained in a wooden vise reminiscent of prisoners' stocks. Half of her face is visible, turned seductively toward the camera as if in coy compliance with her restraints. While the flexed strength of her body is meant to suggest that she cannot be captured or confined by such an antiquated device, the reality connotes a bondage that she enjoys and participates in for the pleasure of the viewer, a willingness to tame herself, or be tamed, in order to seduce. That her clearly superior strength does not allow her to break free of the constraint within the frame is a racially charged metaphor for black women's actual lack of power, even when they are among the most physically powerful women in the world.

The final image of Creavalle is the only one that does not take up a full page and the only one in black and white. It shows Creavalle seated in profile on a marbleized pedestal, her face once again obscured by a cascade of blond curls and her hands clasped against her forehead in a pose reminiscent of Auguste Rodin's 1880 sculpture The Thinker. The implication is that Creavalle is here only playing the role of a thinking person; the smaller size of the image and the lack of color in the photograph suggests that this pose does not reflect her strongest attributes, thus visually reinforcing the widely-held notion that bodybuilders are not intellectuals. Furthermore, the exaggerated wigs throughout the layout, so incongruous on the black body, function as a comment on the necessity of adhering to the standard of blond-haired beauty that is prevalent in the sport. Altogether, the photographs are highly sexualized representations of the businesswoman Creavalle, who is one of only two female bodybuilders (and the only black woman) under contract with the Weider Corporation (Creavalle writes a cooking column for Muscle and Fitness magazine) and who runs fitness camps in Maine and Florida. Wood-Hoyte also refutes the dumb-jock image daily: she is a top level professional in a Fortune 500 company, readily acknowledging that her executive career is an anomaly within the sport.

In the world of female bodybuilding, I am the Other in an arena of women who sculpt their bodies into specimens of desire and beauty, power and pride. Every one of the black women that I spoke with cited a sense of personal challenge and achievement as the reason they became involved and the reason they continue to build their bodies. It has proven to be a realm where black women can excel based on their own merits and over which they exert the ultimate control of their bodies: strong, sexual, and otherwise.

In the world outside of bodybuilding, I am one of them, a black woman, opening a window onto their experiences and aspirations that will inform and instruct the way all strong black women can be understood beyond the stage and in spite of their bodies. Wood-Hoyte concludes: "Bodybuilding is a magnificent sport. I accept it with all its faults."⁵¹ Although successful competitors like Creavalle see the sport as a dying one in which the champions are getting physically bigger while general interest in and acceptance of the sport for women is waning, she will still compete in the 1998 Ms. Olympia contest in Prague, Czechoslovakia. With the recognition of its limitations, theirs is a crucial presence in the representation of black women, their participation in the sport essential.

"I'm no Amazon-I hope not,"⁵² states Creavalle emphatically, refusing to align her personal image with the mythical fantasy of male-bashing, female domination that is connoted by that word. I would prefer to call her and all of the others simply strong black women, or exceptional athletes, and allow their accomplishments and talent-rather than, say, photographs by a white male photographer-to define their images. Yet there is an undeniable history of the image of black women that informs the interpretation of these modern standard-bearers and sets them apart from the other women in the sport. Artists like Wiggins, who has an acute understanding of both that legacy and the practical reality of the sport, attempt to reconcile the two and forge a new consciousness that gives agency and responsibility to the subjects. Whether the sport survives, metamorphoses, or fades away, the body of the black female bodybuilder is now part of the discourse, and that image will continue to inform the collective understanding every time a black woman takes the stage.

1.All of the women interviewed for this article identify themselves as being of African descent.

2.Bill Dobbins, The Women, New York: Artisan (1994), 11.

3.The phrase "Middle Passage" refers to the transport of Africans to the Americas via slave ships across the Atlantic Ocean.

4.K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy, London: Routledge (1993), 36 - 37.

5.Interview with author, February 1998.

6.From Carla Dunlap biography, http://www.tiac.net/users/flexcom/ cited on 12 January 1998.

7.The Ms. Olympia contest was held 22 November 1997.

8.Ron Avidan, "Gossip, News & Opinions, " at http://www.getbig.com/gossip.htm cited on 5 February 1998.

9.Reg Bradford, conversation with author, February 1998.

10.Lenda Murray, Yolanda Hughes, Laura Creavalle, Vicky Gates-Lewis, and Nancy Lewis were the black competitors in the 1997 Ms. Olympia contest. Although many people assume competitor Andrulla Blanchette to be black, she does not identify herself as such.

11.Laurie Schulze, "On the Muscle," in Building Bodies, edited by Pamela L. Moore, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press (1997), 18.

12.Lyric from "Coffy Baby," by Roselle Wearen. Music by Roy Ayers, performed by Denise Bridgewater, 1973.

13.Scott Poulson-Bryant, "The Illest Na Na," Vibe, vol. 6, no. 1 (February 1998) 80.

14.Unlike many early black stars, particularly female, the sex-and-violence image she created and sold did result in power for Grier, who retained a percentage of future profits. Ibid., 80.

15.See Miriam Kershaw, "Postcolonialism and Androgyny: The Performance Art of Grace Jones," art journal, vol. 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997), 19 - 25 for a discussion of Jones' performance art; and Jean Paul Goude, Jungle Fever, New York: Xavier Moreau, Inc. (1981), 102 - 115 for an alternate discussion of and images from this performance piece.

16."Freak" is a term frequently leveled at female bodybuilders. See Schulze, 18.

17.Ibid. 18.

18.http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/6118/lewis.htm cited on 1.30.98.

19.Interview with author, February 1998.

20.Florida-based bodybuilder Gillian Hodge, who no longer competes, was for a while, I am told, cross-dressing as Dennis Rodman. She also shaved her head at one point, in defiance of the established (competitive) female bodybuilder standard of hyper-feminine hair.

21.Alan M. Klein, "Pumping Irony: Crisis and Contradiction in Bodybuilding," Sociology of Sport Journal 3 (2, 1986), 112 - 133, as cited in Leslee A. Fisher, "'Building One's Self Up': Bodybuilding and the Construction of Identity among Professional Female Bodybuilders," in Moore, 155.

22.Dobbins, 8.

23.Fisher, 156.

24.Sander Gilman, "The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality," in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press (1985), 89.

25.Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues, Cambridge University Press (1994), 100, and Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920 - 1930, New York: Pantheon Books (Circles of the Twentieth Century Series, No 1. 1996), 135.

26.No white female performer, except perhaps Marlene Dietrich, was so explicit-or celebratory-about her lesbian identity.

27.Dobbins, 26.

28.Bruce Chatwin, "An Eye and Some Body," in Robert Mapplethorpe, Lady: Lisa Lyon, New York: St. Martin's Press (1983), 16.

29.Wood-Hoyte and Bradford interviews with author, February 1998. Not every competitor felt that the competitions were color-blind. One believed that judges try to discourage the black women by giving them unjustified lower rankings.

30.The closest Lenda Murray came to making a cover of a widely circulated magazine was Weider's Muscle and Fitness in 1997, but a white fitness athlete was superimposed alongside her image. Murray was on the cover of Women's Physique World (which has a smaller circulation) in 1992 and has been on numerous covers with other bodybuilders. Yolanda Hughes was on a cover of Women's Physique World in 1997. My thanks to Reg Bradford for calling this to my attention.

31.In a 1988 interview with WRC-TV in Washington, Snyder was quoted as saying that during the Civil War, "'the slave owner would breed his big black with his big woman so that he would have a big black kid. That's where it all started.' The station was seeking comment in connection with Martin Luther King's birthday, asking about the progress blacks have made in society. Snyder also said if blacks 'take over coaching jobs like everybody wants them to, there's not to be anything left for the white people.' Later, Snyder said a black athlete was better that a white one because 'he's been bred to be that way because of his thigh size and big size.'" Information from Snyder's obituary at http://espnet.sportszone.com/editors/nfl/news/0421greek.html cited on 5 February 1998.

32.This question and all claims to support this notion are part of an ongoing debate among scholars, scientists, and other interested parties.

33.Conversation with author, February 1998. Bradford's comments are very similar to Snyder's, although Bradford does not use the inflammatory, derogatory language that got Snyder fired. Bradford is African American.

34.Biography of Carla Dunlap on her web page: http://www.tiac.net/users/flexcom/ cited on 14 November 1997.

35.Conversation with author, December 1997, and http://www.goyo.com/profile.htm cited on 20 December 1997.

36.http://www.frsa.com/pixfemuscle/lenda.html cited on 20 December 1997.

37.Conversation with author, February 1998.

38.Fisher, 153 - 155.

39.http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/6118/lewis.htm cited on 14 January 1998.

40.Conversation with author, December 1997.

41.Conversation with author, February 1998.

42.Lorraine O'Grady, "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity," in Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven, eds., New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, New York: Icon Editions (1994), 152 - 170.

43.See Karen Grigsby Bates, "Let's Not Indulge Society's 'Chocolate' Fantasies Media: Black women posing nude feed an image of the wanton hussy that so many others have worked to disavow," Los Angeles Times Home Edition, Opinion (September 9,1997), B-7; Donna Britt, "Beauty-parlor sense shuns temptations," The Dallas Morning News Home Final (June 18, 1997), 8C; and Michel Marriott, "Black Erotica Defies Cultural Tradition," Arts & Living, The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, OH (June 15, 1997), 2J.

44.Byron L. Crudup, "Bring Back Amos n' Andy, Please?", http://www.users.fast.net/~blc/amos1.htm cited on 5 February 1998.

45.The title is derived from Gilman's Difference and Pathology cited above.

46.All Cynthia Wiggins quotes from a conversation with the author, June 1998.

47.Pendleton was Gladiator "Blaze" on the television program.

48.It is believed that such outspokenness has cost Creavalle the title of Ms. Olympia.

49.Conversation with the author, July 1998. It is significant to note that Creavalle does not use the Dobbins photographs for publicity, nor does she profit directly from them. They are his work with her functioning as the model only.

50.Gerard Hauser, guest editor, "The Body As Source And Site Of Argument," from a call for papers, Argumentation & Advocacy journal, sent as an e-mail 13 November 1997.

51.Interview with author February, 1998.Wood-Hoyte cites her inability to be in any way spontaneous in her social life as the biggest down side to bodybuilding. "My friends are pearls, jewels. I have to plan very carefully to spend any time with them."

52.Conversation with the author, July 1998.