ABSTRACT
In this introduction, we examine the growth in and diversification of practitioners of strength sports with an intersectional focus on gender. Across the globe, increased hostility toward racial, ethnic, and gender differences, and setbacks in rights and demands for equality mark the contemporary political moment. Because strength sports tightly link to the exercise of power and the performance of conventional understandings of masculinity, they provide a particularly powerful platform for insurgent gender practices. In the face of ongoing embodied precarity, strength sports have become a complex site of both resistance, challenging traditional notions and definitions of “strength,” and the reproduction of patriarchy. To explore the potential for this embodied resistance and recapitulation, this volume gathers an interdisciplinary team that spans political science, sociology, gender studies, humanities, and biological and cultural anthropology. In this introduction, we highlight their theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions to the critical study of sport.
