Meathead Mindfulness
The male bodybuilder occupies an ambiguous space in popular culture: they are both ideals of the human form, as well as spectacles of grotesque excess. In this project, I examine competing discourses of the bodybuilder in the late 1970s. First, I briefly look at contemporary pathological constructions of the bodybuilder in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1977 appearance on The Streets of San Francisco. Then, I turn to Pumping Iron (1974 and 1977) and its attempts to normalize the bodybuilder by offering an alternative construction of the body.