Gender & Sexuality Studies 2026

Abstract

“The idea of woman as the weaker sex will become old fashioned and finally obsolete”, predicted Prentice Mumford in 1872. This prediction appeared to be realized when a spate of professional women bodybuilders assaulted the normalization of woman as ‘the frail sex’ by feminizing muscle and bodybuilding ‘the New Woman’. Rather than girl’s physical education being limited to riding, field and water sports in France, First-Wave French Feminist, Dr Madeleine Pelletier explained that bodybuilding had become not just a source of female fitness and physical independence, but as a career for ‘the New Woman’. This was illuminated not just by the numerous fitness and weight-lifting associations catering for women bodybuilders in France by 1900, but the spate of professional women bodybuilders feminizing muscle. Heartily endorsed by such physical culturalists as Edmond Desbonnet and Eugen Sandow, women bodybuilders grew to achieve global renown, as illuminated by Belgian-born, French performer, Athléta; 6-foot, 230 lb. American, Josephine Wohlford, dubbed Minerva; British born, Kate Williams, sensationalized as Miss Vulcana; and most of all, German-born, Kathi Brumbach. Upon defeating Sandow in a 300 lb. weight-lifting contest, she took the stage name, Sandwina, was promoted as the strongest woman worldwide, and the strongest who had ever lived until 1987. Championed by Feminists, sensationalized as ‘the new woman’, particularly by anti-corset crusaders and rational dress reformers for exposing the essentialist fiction of woman as ‘the feeble gender’, these women bodybuilders revealed how the gendered body is, following Judith Butler, performative. Nevertheless, within puericulturalist discourses, feminizing muscle became less prized for liberating the ‘New Woman’s’ body, than enhancing their sensuality and biological destiny. 

Biography

FA (FAY) BRAUER is Professor Emeritus of Art and Visual Culture, University of East London Architecture, Computing and Engineering; Centre for Cultural Studies Research; Centre for Creative and Cultural Practice, and previously Director of Research, Impact and Innovation. She is Honorary Professor of Art Theory, The University of New South Wales Art and Design; Commissioning Editor for Rowman & Littlefield International Radical Cultural Studies; Royal Society of Arts Fellow, with University of London Honours Degrees; MA and PhD, The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her books include Vitalist Modernism: Art, Science, Energy and Creative Evolution; Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture; Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre; The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture; Art, Sex and Eugenics: Corpus Delecti, The Body in British Art, Science, Medicine, and Eugenics during the Long Nineteenth-Century; Art, Occultism, Science and Women Artists (forthcoming).