Corpo laboratório: experimentos de mulheres fisiculturistas

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to understand how women bodybuilders build their athletic subjectivities through extreme body modification. We conducted semi-structured interviews, remotely via the Jitsi Meet platform, with three athletes selected according to their time of practice and experiences in different categories of bodybuilding. Our analysis was conducted by the techniques that act in the development of a sporting identity of the surveyed bodybuilders, namely: training, food, and chemistry. The data show that the body of these women can be thought of in analogy to a laboratory, a ‘place’ of extreme experiments and constant testing that generate a type of athletic performance, as well as a type of athletic subjectivity.