ABSTRACT
‘She's an abomination,’ said the owner of a fashionable New York gym chain about a bodybuilder in her early forties. ‘I could love them all,’ wrote semiotician Marshall Blonsky about the twenty-seven bodybuilders in Evolution F, a 1995 performance that included three women in their forties and one each in her fifties and sixties. 1 These two statements, both made in 1995, bracket the extremity of response to an aesthetic spectacle, which is not just the female bodybuilder, but also, more complexly, her older incarnation.
