Big Freaky-Looking Women: Normalizing Gender Transgression Through Bodybuilding

Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with 10 college-level female bodybuilders, this paper focuses on several aspects of female bodybuilding that are underexplored in existing literature, including purposeful gender transgressions, gender attribution, racialized bodies, and the conflation of sex, gender, and sexual preference. We draw on critical feminist theory and the social constructionist perspective to enhance collective understanding of the subversive possibilities emerging from female bodybuilders� lived experience. Collectively, female bodybuilders� experiences affect somatic and behavioral gender norms in a wider Western-type industrialized society such as the United States. A partir de l�observation participante et d�entrevues en profondeur avec 10 femmes culturistes universitaires, cet article se centre sur plusieurs aspects du culturisme feminin qui sont sous-explores dans les ecrits, incluant la transgression intentionnelle des genres, l�attribution des genres, la « racialisation » des corps et la confusion existant entre le sexe, le genre et l�orientation sexuelle. Nous empruntons a la theorie critique feministe et la perspective de la construction sociale pour ameliorer la comprehension des possibilites subversives emergeant des experiences vecues par les femmes culturistes. Collectivement, ces experiences affectent les normes de genre au plan somatique et comportemental dans une societe occidentale comme les Etats- Unis

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