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Published in:
2014 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Ambiguous Exposures: Gender-Bending Muscles of the 1930s Physique Photographs of Tony Sansone and Sports Photographs of Babe Didrikson
Author : Jacqueline Brady
Published in: Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
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With recent advances in anabolic steroids, it is easy to see the gender- bending aspects of a professional bodybuilder’s body. The shaven and pumped-up pecs of male bodybuilders can grow droopy with gyne- comastia, a condition in which the body produces unwanted oestro- gen, inflating the pectoral area into protuberant lumps. Besides his developing “bitch tits,” as they are called in gym vernacular, a male bodybuilder’s testicles might shrink — in the words of one former Mr Universe,1 “to the size of cocktail peanuts” — even as his body elsewhere swells with giant balls of muscle. Similarly, a female bodybuilder, who in using steroids actually ingests male hormones, might lose the hair on her head, only to find it growing in patches on her face. Beyond the obvious development of her “manly” muscular body and the noticeable deepening of her voice, her menstruation might stop and her clitoris can elongate to the size of a small penis.