Reading #3: Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Hard, Technological, Anti-Feminine Body

I took a class Freshman year about gender and sexuality. When it came to masculinity and bodies, Arnold Schwarzenegger was not only the first person brought up and discussed, but was he main focus for that section of the class. Discussing Schwarzenegger's body as the true embodiment of masculinity was extremely obvious to me (and the rest of the class) primarily because we have all, as a generation, internalized the fact that Schwarzenneger IS masculine: his hard, machine-like body is the epitome of masculinity and manliness. I remember a video we watched during Schwarzenegger's body building days, where he compared sculpting his body to creating or sculpting art. His body was something he could create and mold into perfect and peak physical shape in order to make himself (or rather, his body) into something that represented perfect masculinity. In this regard, Schwarzenegger created the fact that the body can represent masculinity, and his body was the standard to which all masculine bodies would have to live up to.

I never thought about why Schwarzenegger's perfectly sculpted body was definitively masculine, I just knew that it was. Viewing Terminator 2 and the reading of "Terminal Resistance" explained a lot to me, and make me think about why Schwarzenegger and his body are what our culture immediately conjures up in our minds when we think about what is definitively masculine.

First of all, Schwarzenegger is a cyborg in the film, which combines his ultra-manliness with technology. The reading explains that Schwarzenegger "fuses the natural ability of the athlete with a symbiotic relation to technology." Hardness, technology, and the human body are all fused together within Schwarzenegger's cyborg character to create a killing machine, an "armored body." Killing, hardness, and armor are all definitively masculine in our culture, and fusing them all together makes Schwarzenegger the most masculine of any thing-- human or otherwise-- that we have ever seen. Technology and its ubiquity in our culture has resulted in many new inventions and a reexamination of the future. Technology is not necessarily associated with masculinity, but when technology and computers are used to kill or in combat, technology is definitively associated with masculinity (since war and aggression are characteristics that are extremely masculine).

The other aspect that I find incredibly interesting that makes Schwarzenegger's character definitively masculine is that he is the opposite of what is definitively feminine. The reading explains that "the characteristic masculine aversion to the soft, the liquid, and the gooey-- elements associated with the monstrous feminine". Schwarzenegger's character is distinctly hard, and is now in conflict with the "liquid metal" T-1000, which has been compared to the "feared flow of the feminine." By being compared to the distinctively femininity of the "flowing" and softness of the T-1000, Schwarzenegger can show off his masculinity even more, by being the complete opposite of it and showing off his hardness. Schwarzenneger exaggerates the "anachronistic industrial-age metaphor of externally forceful masculine machinery." By being the exact opposite of the feminine, he literally is able to embody what is definitively the super-masculine.

Questions:

1. Even though the film portrays Schwarzenegger as the opposite of feminine, the reading discusses that the film (and Aliens as well) can be viewed as "feminist" movies. How can T2 be read in a feminist text?

2. Schwarzenegger obviously has a very different star text now. What is it and how is his uber-masculinity a part of it?

3. Since Schwarzenegger is no longer the embodiment of the extreme masculine body, who represents what is definitively "masculine" and how is it different from Schwarzenegger's embodiment?