ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an ethnographic study of Division I college women soccer players. It focuses on how the athletes negotiate their own body awareness and physicality with idealized, dominant notions of feminine bodies. The chapter explores how the athletes experience their muscularity and appearance in relation to the body ideal and dominant notions of femininity. It is not easy to obtain the new toned slenderness ideal embodied by the athletes. This physique requires most women to rid themselves of all fat through exercise and diet and then train to build just the right amount of "sexy, feminine" muscle. Most of the players acknowledged that some type of transformation had occurred in their bodies while playing intercollegiate soccer. The chapter also presents an ethnographic fieldwork that builds on literature in the sociology of sport, as well as research on the body from feminist perspectives.
