Michael Eisenbrey—Response 3
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QUESTION
How do American bodybuilders and Indonesian tombois construct and perform masculinity in similar and different ways?
ABSTRACT
Tristan Bridges's "Gender Capital and Male Bodybuilders," Evelyn Blackwood's "Trans Identities and Contingent Masculinities - Being Tombois in Everyday Practice," and Anne Fausto-Sterling's "How to Build a Man" all describe ways in which masculinity is defined, maintained, or performed. Sex reassignment, the subject of Fausto-Sterling's essay, is a frequently violent practice which grants no agency to the person most concerned, but bodybuilders and tombois both represent conscious efforts to shape and define masculinity. Although bodybuilders are operating within the range of masculinities openly embraced by American society, if not the very picture of hegemonic masculinity, their identity is a more isolating, restrictive one than that of Indonesian tombois, whom we think of as living in a much less tolerant society.
BODY
Bodybuilders construct a mutually supportive community at the gym, a kind of voluntary kinship structure in which their masculinity is celebrated and exalted; they close themselves off from other social spaces, which might be hostile to or contemptuous of that masculinity. Outside of the gym, they congregate in spaces (especially work environments) where their bodies and their masculinity are valued and respected much as they are at the gym (e.g. as bouncers and doormen or in work demanding of physical strength).
Indonesian tombois also associate with like-minded individuals and form a voluntary, mutually supportive community, but at the same time, they maintain their ties to a biological and cultural kinship structure, into which they are born and which is essential to their identities. At times, the demands of this community supersede their expression of masculine identity. As one tomboi says, "no matter what, family stays number one, a girlfriend is number two…there is no such thing as ex-family" (467). Tombois' willingness to be flexible with their gender identity, to perform femininity in certain familial or neighborhood contexts, allows uneventful social functioning where great stress and friction might otherwise occur. To some Western eyes, this behavior might seem to be the betrayal of a "true" identity, which tombois suppress or conceal for reasons of expedience or familial respect, but Blackwood believes it undermines the very idea of a singular, absolute identity.
Arguably, the flexibility practiced by tombois as opposed to the relative rigidity of bodybuilder identity and social life is also a product of matters of safety, cultural attitudes not related to family, and disparate degrees of social difference between tombois and the norm around them and bodybuilders and the norm around them. A stubborn insistence on any kind of transgender identity in all spheres of life would probably be met with much greater resistance, whether in Indonesia or the United States, than insistence on a particular of hyper-masculine identity like that of bodybuilders. At the same time, the markers of tombois' masculinity, like dress, speech, body language, and behavior (drinking, smoking), are relatively easy to shift or conceal if need be. Bodybuilders' masculine identity is inscribed on their body in a much more obvious, inescapable way. It is easier for bodybuilders to set themselves apart at all times than it would be for tombois; easier for tombois to shift between gender performances than it would be for bodybuilders. That said, the example of tombois troubles the idea of a "true," unitary identity in a provocative way.
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