Musclebound: Physique and Crime from Sandow to Schwarzenegger

Jeffery Dennis, Minnesota State University

From the 1930s to the 1960s,, criminologists, writers, and filmmakers almost invariably associated muscular physiques with a sort of innate criminality. The mob enforcers of film noir, the dumb jocks of beach movies, the muscular creations of mad scientists, and the mesomorphic juvenile delinquents photographed by Harvard psychology professor William J. Sheldon were presented as devious and unpredictable, as violent aggressors, and as sexual outsiders. There were few dissenting images until the 1980s, when Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Joe Weider's "Muscle and Fitness" attempted to civilize and heterosexualize muscle. This study draws on on queer and narrative theory to examine the presumptive criminality of men with muscular physiques as a reflection of the political and social fears of the World War II and Cold War eras.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 176. Constructing and Responding to Crime