Outside and Inside the Gym

This chapter explores how female bodybuilders seek to maintain a viable sense of self despite being stigmatized by the gendered ‘interaction order’, the unavoidable presentational context in which identities are forged during social life (Goffman 1983). In examining their attempts to avoid the detrimental effects of these interactional norms, we draw on a two-year ethnographic study of British female bodybuilders and focus upon the workout: a ritualized activity-space central to the identity affirming activities of these women. Drawing on Victor Turner's (1992) analysis of liminality, we argue that while the workout is key to the creation of female bodybuilders’ identities, and is relatively autonomous from wider interactional norms, the experiences associated with, and the social consequences of, this activity remain phenomenologically and culturally ambivalent. Immersion in the rituals and routines of weight lifting provide female bodybuilders with a temporary, “liminoid,” escape from daily life, but offer no permanent solution to the “spoilt” identities attributed to these women.