ABSTRACT
Describing various orientations to lifting weights, for the purposes of clearly demarcating bodybuilding subculture for analytic attention, would appear straightforward. However, classifying particular groups and subgroups – which, in an ethnography, necessitates close attention to participants’ understandings – is not straightforward given the occasioned and contingent nature of ‘lay’ and sociological seeing (Silverman 1993: 201). The following statement was voiced by a young man who was loath to describe himself as a ‘bodybuilder’:
Barry: I know people who go for [bodybuilding] competitions but don’t like to be classed as bodybuilders [...] if a girl says: ‘this is my boyfriend, he is a bodybuilder’, there is a stigma attached to it. ‘A bodybuilder, oh, steroids’ and that type of thing, or ‘he thinks he is hard’ or something like that. Whereas if you say ‘weight trainer’ that has more to do with fitness which is more acceptable than just ‘bodybuilder’.
