One of my favourite books—I have read it about ten times—is Michel Foucault’s, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Just when I thought I was ready to move on to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, just when I thought I was out, Foucault pulled me back in. Oh great Saint F, please forgive me for the sin of almost forsaking you and for all the sins I am about to commit. What’s that you say, my haloed master? You command me to go forward in peace and sin some more? You urge me to don a tight leather mask and wrist restraints? Really, oh blessed bald one? What if I also attach a chained lodestone to my body, and hang limply from an overhead bar, feeling the cartilage stretch between my vertebrae? In other words, what if I do weighted wide grip chin-ups because I think they would similarly reconfigure my body.

According to Foucault: ‘We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibilities of resistance.’ Oh yeah. Though the late Foucault recommended S and M practices as one way to accomplish this ‘tactical reversal,’ I think that bodybuilding is another way. Continue reading →