ABSTRACT
Inconceptualising risk in the health field, there is a tendency to label social behaviour according to stereotyped constructs of personal inadequacy (Williams et al. 1995: 120). Negative labelling is intimately related to the construction of ‘stigma theory’: an ideology formulated to explain the inferiority of the discredited and the danger they represent (Goffman 1968: 15). Studies homogenising the variable project of bodybuilding are examples of stigma theory. Adopting a psychoanalytic stance, Klein states that ‘bodybuilding is, at the very least, a subculture whose [male and female] practitioners suffer from large doses of insecurity; hence, compensation through self-presentation of power to the outside world’ (1993: 174). Allegedly caused by antecedent personal and/or gender inadequacy and a masculinity-in-crisis within the larger society, bodybuilding and drug-taking represent an ‘atavistic’ strategy for concealing self-perceived flaws. In particular, the erosion of men’s traditional occupationally derived privileges in a post-industrial order prompts some to compensate for their feelings of powerlessness by embodying the physical trappings of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Accordingly, ‘the muscular body’ becomes synonymous with the culturally idealised masculine/ powerful/self-assured body (Klein 1993: 242).
