Spectatorship theory has been much used and much critiqued as a means of understanding the gendering of “the look” and its object. The article revitalizes spectatorship theory to understand the way in which gender and looking create an ethical problem in the practice of judging—in this case, judging bodybuilding during the sport’s crisis over the proper female body in the early 1990s. The article also explores some of the controversies about sport as spectacle that occurred in the rough time frame of bodybuilding’s spectatorial crisis.
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