This presentation is an examination of how athletes, in particular their bodies, define a form of masculinity. Both textual and visual examples are given, and this analysis is helped by the works of RW Connell and the film Pumping Iron.

1. Masculinity through Sports:
How Athletes and Their Bodies Define Masculinity
By: David Pair, University of Southern California

2.  “Masculine gender is a certain feel to the skin, certain muscular
shapes and tensions, certain postures and ways of
moving, certain possibilities in sex” (Connell, 52-3).
 Athletes are able to represent and embody both ideal physique…

3. … as well as what is currently seen as ideal sexual qualities.

4.  Masculinity has a notion that the body can achieve the perfect
form.
 “I don’t have any weak points, … my goal always was to even
out everything to a point that everything is perfect. … It’s
perfect already, it’s down to a point” (Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Pumping Iron).

5. “Sport provides a continuous
display of men’s bodies in
motion” (54).

6. “It is the integrated
performance of the whole
body, the capacity to do a
range of things wonderfully
well, that is admired in the
greatest exemplars of
competitive sport” (54).

7.  Male athletes thus create a strong view of masculinity that
centers around perfecting the male physique and the benefits
the perfection brings to men both individually and as a gender.
Despite that very few who define themselves as masculine
achieve bodies like these, the notion of possibility of the ideal,
the perfect form, coupled with the fact that there are some
that achieve the goal (commonly if not always athletes by
definition), is what causes the persistence of this form of
masculinity.

8. Works Cited
1. http://sportretort.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/lebron-james-31.jpg
2. R.W. Connell, Masculinities
3. http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-
Oop_qW_GeRc/TvBP0ls0ZdI/AAAAAAAACcQ/5ZieFo11thE/s1600/Rafael-
Nadal-shirtless.jpg
4. http://www.odt.co.nz/files/story/2008/08/rafael_nadal_of_spain_reacts_t
o_winning_a_point_ag_48aa04a4d4.JPG
5. http://media.zenfs.com/en/blogs/sptustenexperts/rafa-nadal-bar-si12.jpg
6. Pumping Iron, 1975
7. http://www.homegymexerciseequipment.biz/wp-
content/uploads/2011/08/arnold-schwarzenegger-arms.jpg
8. http://farm1.staticflickr.com/56/188370562_8fe0f3cba9.jpg
9. http://static.desktopnexus.com/thumbnails/161733-bigthumbnail.jpg
10. http://urbansportstalk.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/rg-bush.jpg
11. http://www.inquisitr.com/wp-content/2012/02/muhammad-ali.jpg