Being some body

There's something utterly queer about bodybuilding, complete dedication to the cause of realising the extremes of the body's potential, leaving men with chests like Lolo Ferrari and women looking like they might have been men until recently. But, the story goes, this is all within the scope of the body's natural potential...just a case of understanding how to make it do what you want it to, how to sculpt and mould it and make it look like you want.

This is invariably aided by various supplements and nutritional aids, in combination with a strict dietary regime. And sometimes there's a little help from injections, hormones most likely. But we all eat and we know that affects our body - so we avoid some things because of a higher fat content, or ignore advice to the contrary. So there's not much unusual in that side of bodybuilding. But then if we all have hormones pumping round our bodies anyway, what's so wrong with putting them places they don't get made, or adding to the ones we already have? The seemingly constant flow of athletics doping scandals at the moment also makes one wonder: if it's safe, why is it necessarily against the rules to take certain performance enhancing drugs? Caffeine's ok, but amphetamines aren't...Presumably we could solve the problem of cheating by changing the rules...And yet under other circumstances, hormones are not just against the rules of sport but against the unwritten rules of our society, as any transsexual will tell you.

Where does 'normality' end and body modification start? How far can one go in toning and sculpting and building without overstepping the boundaries? How close can one go to the edge without falling over it? And does going close to the edge constitute a violation in itself, since to sculpt and mould is always something of an attack on the status quo?...answers on a postcard please...

What I'm really wondering, though, is how far I can go...how much commitment I can give to the higher cause of indefiniteness: with all my bumps and curves and flab, my body is (I think) unavoidably female, and I defend against this definiteness with clothing and hair and physical mannerisms. But what if I too can do something to my body to shift that? What I want to achieve is not the queerness of the bodybuilder: to me, they are repulsive, monstrous, too detailed and confining somehow. Instead, I wonder how unfemale my body can be without breaking the rules of how to sculpt and mould a body: how sculptable am I?