Chinks in the Merged Attachment: Generational Bequests to Contemporary Teenage Girls

This essay reviews Picturing the Modern Amazon, an exhibit of the representations of hypermuscular women presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City from March 30 to June 25, 2000. Taking a sociohistorical approach, the essay situates the museum exhibit in the context of the development of American bodybuilding. The images of the Modern Amazons are linked to the intensification of capitalism and the subsequent growth of the bodybuilding, health, and fitness industries. From this perspective, we see that the Modern Amazons face a cultural paradox, for they are both gender-bending figures of muscular excess and a mainstream form of mass production; thus, they simultaneously overturn and recuperate gender norms. This essay explores the ways in which the exhibit itself embodies contradictions. In its attempt to celebrate the subversive aspects of hyper muscular females, the show decontexualizes the Modern Amazons, removing them from their muscle-building spaces and processes and rendering them into visual commodities.