On Muscles and Microphysics: Part I
Does Meat Have a Gender?
This is the first part of an essay entitled “On Muscles and Microphysics”. Forthcoming parts will be hyperlinked below.
On Muscles and Microphysics
I. Does Meat Have a Gender?
Are muscles male or female? Most carnivores don’t care. Meat is muscle; protein and sinew. If the red weight of a sirloin steak or a broken sparrow has a gender, it is only animal. And when muscle acts, heaving like a pulley or pushing like a piston, it is a machine of pure kinetics. A muscle works regardless of the sexed body to which it is attached, carrying out any number of tasks: fucking, dancing, hunting, gathering, cooking, cleaning, lifting, writing, walking, sprinting, or mincing. Functionally speaking then, the gender of muscle is kaleidoscopic – feminine, masculine, ungendered or otherwise.
However, uneasy as they are with kaleidoscopic vision, Western cultures high and low throughout history – from sculptures of antiquity to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – have tended to participate (and increasingly so) in a reductive and stabilising fantasy that muscles are for men. Indeed, if we trace the narrative of Disney’s Hercules to its fulcrum – where a hero is made when his muscles are – we may see that the size and sweep of the body’s muscles are considered criteria sufficient to delineate the body of a man from the body of a boy. This notion – that muscles are the substrate of manhood – is the narrative too that often undergirds the awed reception to the social media genre of ‘body transformations’; ‘before’ and ‘after’ depicting a blossoming second puberty – a hardening, or a transition, into a man.
This is not to say that men without muscles – or, more accurately, men who don’t look muscular (an Overton window that is itself, unfixed and changing) – are not men. The incoherence of and struggle with genders as popular categories is dependent in part on the lack of necessary and sufficient criteria that determine them. ‘What does a man look like?’ is an open-ended question, constantly revised over place and time, with few discrete through-lines. But the collapse and conflation of muscles and manliness is powerful and, by now, hegemonic enough (thanks, Arnie) that muscularity is a means of lazily and vertically organising men’s bodies – as more or less, disappointingly or superlatively, male.
This is also not to say that muscular women and other muscular people are, in fact, men. But when someone other than a man is well-muscled, it is routinely read as a gross contradiction in any number of ways: [1] threatening, stupid, confusing, grotesque, ugly, mannish, requiring explanation. (Non-binary and on steroids is crazy). While male bodybuilders have made a slow march to mainstream embrace from the shadows of opprobrium that they lurked in for the first half of the 20th century, female bodybuilders, in particular, have been sacrificed to the muck. Women with muscles are the queer offspring birthed by the bid to solidify men’s bodybuilding as the apotheosis of manhood (ergo, as acceptable). Culture tells us men with muscles are monsters: powerful, commanding, strong. But women with muscles are merely monstrous: freakish, outsider, and terrifying.
Because muscles are so often touted as a synecdoche of manhood, you’d think that being assigned male at birth would be a royal road to a muscular body for any boy. After all, aren’t boys being told – through a distributed network of whispers, ideas, images, narratives and texts – that muscles are the telos of male gender; the rite that makes a man? Yes, you’d think. Some boys would even hope.
Of course, sexed bodies provide some biochemical advantage. If you have one, and you leave it to its own devices, the Y chromosome may prime the build of a developing body with a flood of testosterone (and other architecture) for growing muscle. But biology, it should by now be trite to say, is always a dice roll and never fated. Boys may be born with no Y chromosome and testosterone levels (which are, anyway, open to exogenous intervention) vary from body to body, year to year, quite irrespective of the gender on a birth certificate.
In any case, muscles are not, as may already be clear by now, merely biological objects. They are also artefacts that are thoroughly social and richly cultural in nature. Further still, I am inclined to regard muscles – at least those existing in an assembled relation with beating hearts and lively movement (and not, say, as bloodied meat) – not as objects at all, but as processes whose mechanics imbricate and challenge the neat separation of biology, culture and society. To view muscles as a process is to, following the instruction of Deleuze and Guattari, grasp them “in the middle”; that is, to see them not as ends or objects in themselves, but as the sensible, living proof of a constant thrum of change: building, swelling, developing, atrophying, replenishing, living, dying, and so on. The growth and development of muscle is not an exceptional example of the possibility of bodily change, nor merely analogous with other forms of change. Rather, they are a visibilising of the constant, universal flux of all life – all stuff – itself: be it entropic decay or the propulsive thrust of forward momentum.
Viewed this way – as process and not object, as in flux rather than as fixed – we might begin to unmoor muscle from its eclipsing relationship to maleness. We might also, I contend, begin to understand why the assignation of muscle to male gender is as disempowering to men, women and other folk as it is privileging of men. What happens if we refuse to see muscles as evidence of maleness and instead as evidence of maleness in process? What happens if we refuse to see muscles as a static and manly object and instead as a product of investment in a set of vexing, problematic, and unstraightforward set of governing laws we call masculinity? In other words, what if we consider that having muscles doesn’t make you manly – but manliness can get you muscles?
Part II is forthcoming.
[1] The outrage caused by these contradictions are further catalysed when other hegemonies – like whiteness – are challenged, as gleaned in the repeated, fragile and loathsome responses to the power of Serena Williams.