Editors: Noelle Brigden, Melissa M. Forbis, and Katie Rose Hejtmanek

Proposals by: 15.06.2019

Traditionally, strength sports, which focus strictly on the development and individualized application of physical power, were reserved by public perceptions and athletic institutions as a masculine domain. However, strength sports have seen an exponential growth of women’s participation in the past decade. These sports have also diversified beyond gender to include LGBTQ, people of color, older and disabled athletes and practitioners. Interdisciplinary sports scholars have noted that sport can both reinforce and reimagine identities, including gender. As such, athletic forums and the athlete’s own body become sites of political struggle, and of capitalist commodification. Since strength sports are tightly linked to the exercise of power and the performance of conventional understandings of masculinity, they are a particularly potent platform for insurgent gender practices.

This edited volume argues that this exponential growth of strength sports in the contemporary moment is no coincidence. Across the globe, increased hostility toward racial, ethnic and gender difference, and setbacks in rights and demands for equality mar the contemporary political moment. This hostility responds to and reinforces a deepening cycle of economic precarity, environmental injustices, mass incarceration and police targeting of racial minorities, societal and border militarization, the War on Terror, the withdrawal of economic protections for vulnerable peoples, and a reassertion of control over women’s bodies and sexuality. In the face of this oppression, sports have become a critical site of resistant practices. Despite sports being a powerful site of social control and resistance in most parts of the globe throughout modern history, they have too often been ignored by scholars. Situated within this context ongoing political struggles, and building on a literature that explores the intersectional politics of embodied … read more and source (Web).