Unfiltered: The Rhetorical Play Series Begins | Coming to the Defense of Bev Francis Who [Erases] Boundaries
Volume 1 | Issue 1 |
Hand on tight my readers because there is about to be some turbulence on this flight. The following is an artifact analysis of the video: East Coast Mecca: Bev Francis and Female Bodybuilding | Generation Iron alongside Susan Bordo’s text Unbearable Weight in which I hold nothing back. So, hopefully you enjoy it (lol - yes I am laughing out loud with my dry sense of humor) because it may have you on the edge of your seat just a bit, fingers crossed.
Note: I would recommend to click the link above and watch the East Coast Mecca video in discussion to fully grasp the context of what will be argued.
“If you’re going to be a bodybuilder, you have to have the mindset where you don’t mind people looking at you strangely because let’s face it a bodybuilder looks different. You can be a world champion tennis player, you could be a world champion lacrosse player, world champion track and field athlete, and you can still look normal when you put clothes on to look normal, you can’t be world bodybuilding champion and look normal with clothes or without, you’re different. - Bev Francis, Network.
Beverly Francis is a legendary icon for women in bodybuilding that I believe gets truly underscored for the impact she brought into the world of fitness by philosopher Susan Bordo, which although she only mentions it briefly, her failure to to give context behind the larger issues can be seen to impact her credibility. In Unbearable Weight, Bordo writes in her chapter on “The Body and Reproduction of Femininity, on how their is a need to reconstruct the discourse of the “feminist paradigm” and follows through that in pursuit of Foucault, “we must first abandon the idea of power as something possessed by one ground and leveled against another; we must instead think of the network of practices, institutions, and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain”(167). Also, we must take into account her second point on the need for “adequate analytics whose central mechanisms are not repressive, but constitutive: a power bent on generating forces, making them grown, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit or destroy them”within the feminine. Finally, significant is her third point in which Bordo motions for a “discourse that will enable us to account for the subversion of potential rebellion…(Bordo 167) Her strategy takes its route that it will focus on “gender-related” and historic disorders such as “hysteria,”agoraphobia, and anorexia”(167). In my analysis, I will attempt to ground the shortcomings Susan Bordo takes on with the threefold route above, which are many that present themselves as a double edged sword, and argue that her suggestion of the above disorders as having developed “out of the practice of femininity itself” is quite outdated and more so explicitly empty of any authentic ethos.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Writer's Table to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.