GENDER PERFORMATIVITIES AND THE ABJECTION OF WOMEN’S BODIES IN WEIGHTLIFTING

Abstract

This article reviews gender experiences, abjection of female weight-lifting athletes’ bodies and their agencies. To this end, we provide observations about practice sessions by interviewing eight athletes under the frameworks of poststructuralist gender and sexuality studies. Athletes’ narratives expose world views based on gender and sexuality binarisms, and their bodies bear the marks of sports experiences reflected in the volume, strength and high muscular power. Such bodily inscriptions bring out instability and discontinuity of the normative sex-genre-desire system and build superlative, “robust” and consequently stigmatized and abject femininities. These changes raise “suspicion” about their sexualities and heteronormativity takes center stage in the process of abjection in their relationships of sociability. As these women “subvert” standardized bodily expectations, they performatize resistances and pluralization of femininities in sport.