Naturally Striated Muscle: Examining the Ideographic Crystallization of <Natural>

In U.S. America and much of the Western world, natural is a venerated symbolic placeholder for any number of assumed virtues and ideals. Present conflicts have brought forward questions about what natural (which I argue functions as an ideograph) should mean in contexts that seem to call for a formal, enforceable definition. In this study, I use the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and the context of bodybuilding to work towards a theory of how ambiguous ideographs become “striated.” In this discussion I present instances where natural has been employed as a vehicle to cause harm, and I offer an advisement to rhetorical scholars on how we might approach striated ideographs in the future.