ABSTRACT
The women's movement of the 1960s, conjoined with Title IX and the subsequent fitness revolution, gave impetuous to alternative ideals of feminine beauty whose scope has widened to include an athletic aesthetic of toned and taut muscle. The athletic aesthetic was reproduced in diverse popular discourses such as fashion magazines, which described the 1970s somatic ideal of women as the “Action Beauty,” and in the inauguration of the sport of women's bodybuilding. Women bodybuilders pushed the perimeters on femininity even further. Their bodies argued that muscles are not the exclusive domain of men. These athletic contours were culturally unruly and contained elements of subversion that challenged the patriarchal hegemony of the Western bio-reductivist gender order.
