ABSTRACT
Recently I attended a university seminar on the nature of ‘expertise’ and talked with twomedical sociologists about bodybuilding, drugsandrisk. Their viewsare typical: ‘steroids are dangerous’, ‘bodybuilders, they’re barmy, if they possess any form of expertise, it’s not worth knowing about’. These sentiments illustrate Aoki’s (1996: 59) point that academics, ‘usually circumspect about not denigrating minorities of any type [...] nonetheless too often sneer at bodybuilders’. ‘Irrational’ risk behaviours such as steroid ‘abuse’ only confirm widespread suspicion that bodybuilding is a ‘shadowy’ subculture. Mainstream reactions to drug assisted bodybuilding are comparable to reactions evoked by televised operations of ‘disfiguring’ cosmetic surgery on the performance artist Orlan: ‘indignation that this could be calling itself art; offence at the misuse of medical science [...]; confusion at the apparent pointlessness of the whole exercise’ (Goodall 1999: 160).
