Strength Knows No Gender
Or, "What I Like about Weight Lifting, Part 1" In addition to "Strength Knows No Gender" I’ve been tempted by some other weight lifting shirts too. I like
"I don’t tone, I train" and "You say big like it’s a bad thing." I guess it began in my first year of grad school. The story starts with a tuition fee waiver which is usual in the US for graduate students. Take anything you want, no fees. Most people stick to their home subject or maybe, maybe a language, but my first year away from home was lonely. I left a boyfriend and a girlfriend home in Canada. One relationship ended and the other became a long distance letters and phone calls kind of thing (pre-email, yikes). So I took the tuition waiver and ran with it. Another female grad student and I signed up for a university PE course, Weightlifting Fundamentals. It changed my life and my relationship with my body. I’ve never been small and weightlifting started out with the thought that if I’m going to be large I may as well be strong. I am no longer as large as I was then but what I like best about my own body still are the things it can do. I know there are many body builders who train for looks, but function has always been master over form for me. I loved the austerity of that side of the gym, the unrelenting focus on steel and strength. We trained hard together and became friends, that other grad student and I, friends to this day. I did get the one B on my grad school transcript and since it just said "Fundamentals" I had to explain when I was on the job market that it was weight training, not logic or metaphysics. These days I go to the local Y on my own a few mornings a week and then on the weekend with my daughter. I’ve been thinking lately about how weight training connects to other issues of embodiment. There is a very neat weightlifting site on the web, stumptuous.com, with all sorts of advice and inspiration for women weight lifters. The site’s creator and ongoing author is Krista, or Mistress Krista to her training subjects and adoring fans. She’s also an academic with an interest in trans issues. For example, see this article on Weight Training for MTFs. She’s also the author of some very cool papers, such as The Bodybuilding Grotesque: The Female Bodybuilder, Gender Transgression, and Designations of Deviance and now has edited an anthology called Trans/forming Feminisms: Trans-Feminist Voices Speak Out. I think I should call her sometime and chat about weight lifting, embodiment, and trans theory. More on the joys of weight lifting to follow. These days I’ve been working on some of the Olympic moves, parts of them at least, and that’s been really fun. And all of this is absolutely essential for me as part of surviving the January diet season, both watching in horror as friends partake in the annual calorie counting ritual and holding fast to my own determination never to get on that particular yo-yo ride again. 
