“It’s like Lifting the Power”: Powerlifting, Digital Gendered Subjectivities, and the Politics of Multiplicity

Abstract

Powerlifting, a competitive strength-based sport, offers a rich and compelling site for investigating the digital mediation of gendered subjectivities. The substantive implications of feminist knowledge as interventions in physical cultures are well documented. This article seeks to extend the onto-epistemological precepts of a Feminist New Materialist framework to further a generative analysis of women’s physically active moving bodies. The digital lifting journeys of ten women and their physical-digital everyday experiences of becoming-strong comprise the sample with the intent of understanding something different about the micropolitics of self-world transformations entangled within moving-desiring practices. Hence, we argue in this article that the ephemerality of digital traces embedded within networked-based platforms such as Instagram have the potential to change the ‘Face’ of strength-based sport with significant implications for expanding the cultural imaginary of/for sportswomen more broadly.

Keywords:

• Digital media
• feminist knowledge
• feminist new materialism
• gendered subjectivities
• Instagram
• Powerlifting
• strength-based sport

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the women who volunteered to be part of their study.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Australian Research Council (DE180100377).