When Love Lies Bleeding comes out in May, it would shine a highlight on a version of femininity and the feminine body that we don’t often get to see in mainstream media. The erotic thriller, starring Kristen Stewart and Katy M O’Brien, centres around a queer relationship between bodybuilder Jackie and Lou, a gym manager, and follows because the two get tousled with Lou’s criminal family. 

Together with her ripped, muscular body, sculpted six-pack and beefy arms, Katy – like many female athletes – is antithetical to the traits often considered “feminine” under the patriarchy: being soft, gentle, petite, submissive, vulnerable and even weak. As a queer woman, this outsider position is barely compounded for Katy. In several, if overlapping, ways, female bodybuilders and queer women each exist outside of a heteronormative framework of what it means to be a lady. 

Due to how muscular women challenge ideas of what is taken into account “feminine”, bodybuilding as a sport has historically been viewed as an inherent type of feminist activism when performed by women. And if we theoretically define queerness as a non-normative relationship to gender and sexuality, it is also argued that the game is queer at heart. As Love Lies Bleeding enters the mainstream, will it present a recent generation of young individuals with a queer, feminist revolutionary act to embrace themselves? Well, it’s complicated.

Dr Niall Richardson is a lecturer in Gender and Media on the University of Sussex. A former amateur bodybuilder himself, he has written papers on how the bodies of those athletes subvert and destabilise the performative boundaries of masculine and female, and thus escape the cultural confines of the gender binary. How we measure the transgressive nature of female bodybuilders, nonetheless, changes as what we consider “hypermuscularity” in women has evolved in the previous couple of a long time, he says. “In the event you take a look at the Robert Mapplethorpe photographs that Lisa Lyon was doing within the Nineteen Sixties, they were deemed to be so shocking [because] people have never seen such excess of muscularity,” he tells Dazed. “[Now] we’d just describe it as having less muscle tone than singers or performers.” 

Traditionally, Dr Richardson says, bodybuilding was considered “a direct challenge to traditional feminine iconography”, with academics comparable to Leslie Heywood or BC Shea viewing those that participated in the game as “engaging in a type of feminist activism”. This stance, nonetheless, he now considers “very overdetermined” and says academics are moving away from this interpretation. Claudia Schippert, professor of cultural studies on the University of Florida, for instance, writes that the subversive potential of female muscle is dependant on the “specific networking of gender, race, and sexuality,” while researchers Leena St Martin and Nicola Gavey have identified that male bodybuilders are equally “perceived to be unnatural, and even grotesque or repulsive by some”. 

Bodybuilding legend Bev Francis first got into the game due to her love of muscles. Described as probably the most necessary individuals to ever compete in women’s bodybuilding, she changed the face (and body) of the game during its Golden Era of the 80s and 90s. Before Francis, women who participated in bodybuilding competitions had a much leaner physique, and were even judged negatively in the event that they had more muscles than deemed “ladylike”. Francis, alternatively, had the impressively brawny construct of a powerlifter – something which infamously prevented her from competition success.

“After I walked into it, bodybuilding was already a multi-million dollar business, and I used to be just not sellable,” she tells Dazed. “The vast majority of people didn’t wish to appear to be me. I wasn’t saying that individuals should wish to appear to be me, I just liked muscle.” At skilled levels, female bodybuilding has often been aimed towards the male, capitalist gaze. There’s serious money involved in the game, and it’s delicately tied to its ability to titillate. “They didn’t wish to have people throw the magazine back, they wanted people to purchase it. That they had to have sex appeal, and I had none,” explains Francis. 

The commodification of girls’s bodies in the game is so significant that Francis claims it’s considered one of the explanations she has never won the celebrated Ms Olympia title. In 1991, Francis suffered a historic loss. She had already won the symmetry and muscularity rounds, and with only the free-pose round to go, it was an indication of a sure win. At that time, Francis had a whopping 160 kilos of muscle, achieving a figure previously unheard of in women’s bodybuilding. But mysteriously, Francis lost, prompting her to retire from the game. 

“I didn’t come to win anyway – I just got here in to mess everybody’s heads up,” she tells Dazed. “And I absolutely did, because after that 12 months, the muscular women got here back and got big again. So I felt like I actually gave it to them.” And it’s true: despite judges’ attempts in 1992 to “feminise” the game and penalise what they deemed excessive muscularity, Francis proved female bodybuilding was higher with muscle, and paved the way in which for burly figures like Iris Kyle and Lenda Murray to succeed.

Gender policing inside bodybuilding spaces can even come from queer people themselves, says bodybuilder Janae Marie Kroc. Kroc, who identifies as transgender, genderfluid and non-binary, got here out publicly in 2015, documenting her transition in Transformer. She’s also involved within the International Association of Trans Bodybuilders and Power Lifters. Whilst Kroc agrees that the stigma against muscular women in younger generations “is quite a bit less” and that there’s currently “quite a bit more tolerance” within the gay community, she says that there are still some queer people “who think that ladies aren’t purported to be big and robust”.

“I’ve definitely had other trans girls come at me: ‘Well, you’re probably not trans,’ or, ‘You wouldn’t wish to be muscular when you’re really a lady,’” she tells Dazed. “I still have a female identity, but I’m still enthusiastic about strength training. This continues to be a giant a part of who I’m.” Comments and behavior like that is “rampant”, Kroc says. “They’re adopting these patriarchal rules of what a lady is purported to be, and it’s like a contest to adapt to that. It’s surprising and disappointing and sad at times, but I can understand why that happens – it’s easier to be accepted into society when you express yourself in a historically feminine way.”

Extreme bodybuilding is transgressive. Francis says that it’s a “sport for freaks”, warning that “you do should look different to be a bodybuilder, and you will have to be prepared to take whatever comes with looking different”. Even though it will not be inherently a queer feminist act, the existence of female bodybuilders seems to push societal pressure points that Love Lies Bleeding is completely satisfied to press. Ultimately, representing these subcultures on screen is a step towards loosening the boundaries of what we imagine women should appear to be. Or, as Kroc puts it: “It’s easy to hate something you don’t understand it. If you’re face-to-face, it’s quite a bit harder.”