Abstract
In this paper, we explore how women athletes’ bodies may be simultaneously shaped by multiple—and at times contradictory—understandings of sex, gender, and athletic potential. To do so, we draw from Annemarie Mol's sociology of contrasts, a theoretical framework that emphasizes that individual bodies are multiple, composed of ontologically distinct, contrasting versions that exist alongside one another. We examine this topic in the context of Olympic Weightlifting in Aotearoa New Zealand, where the historically masculine sport is increasingly dominated by talented women athletes. Analyzing data with Mol's focus on the “practicalities, materialities, events” that contribute to the physical reality of bodies, we recount the sex- and gender-based training practices, objects, and policies that shaped women weightlifters’ bodies into versions that were equal to, different from, and better than those of men Olympic Weightlifters. Critically examining the promises and challenges of these bodies, we position Mol's sociology of contrasts as a promising method to explore questions of sex, gender, and physical capacity in sociocultural research on women's sporting bodily performance and potential.
Introduction
As women's sport has grown in popularity, participation, and talent, it has been persistently debated whether cisgender women athletes have the physical potential to equal the performances of cisgender men (Capranica et al., 2013; Millard-Stafford et al., 2018) and whether training women athletes differently from men helps or hinders their health and performance (Emmonds et al., 2019; Gosai et al., 2022; Sims and Yeager, 2016). These questions about women's physical (in)equality with men athletes have a long and convoluted history in women's sport and represent multiple, contradictory ontologies of sex, gender, and athletic capacity. Drawn from lived experience, disciplinary trajectories, sociocultural and scientific research, and various threads of feminist theory, such discussions often present conflicting beliefs about the environments, conditions, and practices needed for women to thrive in sport and physical activity (Birrell, 2000; Caudwell, 2011). Exercise scientists, for example, lean on the impact of sex-based differences such as hormonal profiles and processes, muscle mass and fiber types, and body size to explain the persistent 30–40% strength gap that they measure and position as insurmountable (Millard-Stafford et al., 2018). In contrast, sociocultural scholars cite gendered pressures and barriers that negatively influence women's access to strength training and their bodily practices, arguing that the differences in physical strength between women and men are likely much smaller than they appear to be (Capranica et al., 2013; Dowling, 2000). Simultaneously, contemporary exercise scientists debate whether women should train differently from men on the basis of their physiology. Pushing back on the historical tendency to assume that all physiological data drawn from men can be applied to women, some scientists note that “women are not small men” and argue for sex-based training practices (Sims and Yeager, 2016: viii). While some conclude that such physiological differences make minimal impacts on athletic performance, others advocate for equivalent training practices between men and women athletes in a manner reminiscent of early liberal feminist arguments in sport (Birrell, 2000; Colenso-Semple et al., 2025).
In this paper, we contribute to these debates by exploring how disparate understandings of sex, gender, and athletic capacity inform women athletes’ bodies and performances. To do so, we operationalize Annemarie Mol's (2012) sociology of contrasts, a framework that positions individual bodies as simultaneously biological and cultural entities that are ontologically multiple. Drawing from our ethnographic study of two Olympic Weightlifting gyms in Aotearoa New Zealand, we demonstrate that divergent beliefs about women athletes’ physical capacities and bodies—that their athletic potential is both boundless and delimited, that their bodies are equivalent to and should be treated the same as men's, and that they are materially different from men and require sex- and gender-based training practices—coexist within women athletes’ training environments. Moreover, we show that despite their contradictory implications for women athletes’ training strategies and bodily practices, each simultaneously contributes to the construction of their bodies and athletic performances. Critically reflecting on the effects of these bodies on women weightlifters’ performance and health, we explore what Mol's sociology of contrasts can offer to our understanding of women athletes’ bodies and physical capacities.
Theorizing sex, gender, and bodily difference
Various strands of feminist theorization have aimed to address the material differences between cisgender women's and men's bodies without lapsing into biological determinism (Blackman, 2021; Thorpe, 2014). In particular, corporeal feminists, feminist posthumanists, and feminist new materialists have theorized about the simultaneously sociocultural and biological formation of women's bodies (Barad, 2003; Braidotti, 2013; Fausto-Sterling, 2005; Frost, 2011; Grosz, 1994; Haraway, 1991; Wilson, 2015). Pushing back against nature/nurture dualism, these frameworks position bodies as being continuously formed as they agentically respond to their environmental and sociocultural surroundings. Taking up such ideas, women's sporting bodies have been described as “biocultural” (Thorpe et al., 2021) or “socionatural” (Markula, 2023): sportswomen's bodies are shaped by their social and material surroundings, with biological and sociocultural forces simultaneously informing the limitations and possibilities for their bodily capacities (Frost, 2016).
Science and Technology Studies scholar Annemarie Mol contributes to this scholarship by examining the range of not-just-biological, not-just-social bodies that are created in specific contexts and points in time. Mol begins from the position that bodies are created in dialogue with the multiple environments and human/non-human actors that they interact with. Emphasizing that individuals’ bodies are physically constructed—i.e., enacted—within each context that they occupy, Mol (2012) proposes that every human body consists of many contrasting versions that “are neither physical nor social, but both at the same time” (120). Individual bodies are therefore multiple, with no single version being more “real” than another. She argues that it is important to document and compare the multiple, contrasting versions of the body because it matters which versions are being created and valued. Mol (2002) describes this as the ontological politics of the “body multiple,” “a politics that has to do with the way in which problems are framed, bodies are shaped, and lives are pushed and pulled into one shape or another” (viii).
Contrary to more linguistically oriented examinations of bodily construction, Mol indicates that “perspectives”—i.e., ideologies, discourses and narratives—are of secondary concern in understanding how bodies are “done in practice” (2002: 13). To trace how bodies are multiply created, Mol prioritizes documenting “practicalities, materialities, events” (2002: 13) to get closer to “the body's physical reality” (11). Mol's emphasis on the (inter)actions and materials that shape bodies draws from Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a set of methodological sensibilities that aims to document the complex, networked creation of social phenomena (Latour, 2005; Mol, 2010). Given this constructionist orientation, ANT researchers are directed to map the many human and non-human entities—i.e., “actors”—that interact to produce the phenomenon of interest. Mol (2012) describes this mapping as a “cartographic exploration” (125) of the body, encouraging researchers to trace the body's multiple enactments and holistic construction.
Mapping and examining the many contrasting versions of the body alongside one another, Mol calls her approach to understanding the body the “sociology of contrasts” (2012: 126). To date, Mol has applied this lens to a series of bodily characteristics and topics, including atherosclerosis (2002), hypoglycemia (Mol and Law, 2004), the taste of bitterness (Mol, 2012), and the enactments of women's bodies by scientific disciplines (Mol, 2015). Beyond Mol's writing, some scholars have found her concepts and processes effective in understanding the holistic construction of bodies. Jordan-Young and Karkazis (2019), for example, use Mol's concept of multiple bodies to parse out the biocultural creation of testosterone. Tracing testosterone in multiple contexts, they recount that the molecule “breaks into a thousand pieces” (33). In labs, scientists decide how to source testosterone, follow its interactions within the body, and measure its effects, with each methodological choice producing a different version of the molecule. In fertility clinics, testosterone is administered as a booster for egg production; in sport, testosterone is administered as an aid for some aspects of performance. Drawing from Mol's ontological politics, they note that testosterone's prioritized enactment as an all-powerful “male” hormone has severely limited our understanding of its effects on women's bodies.
Some scholars of sport and physical culture have engaged Mol's understanding of the body, including the role of non-human materials in the enactment of human bodies. For example, Kuruoglu (2024) uses Mol to interpret Caster Semenya's forced bodily manipulation, demonstrating that women athletes’ bodies are enacted into specific shapes through interactions with environments and objects (e.g., policy documents, exogenous hormones). King and Weedon (2020) draw on Mol to map the multiple realities of whey protein powder, exploring the entanglement between human bodies, non-human objects, and the environment by following the material as it shifts from one enactment (unwanted dairy byproduct) to another (muscle-building supplement). They also note a key limitation of Mol's sociology of contrasts. Despite their efforts to closely follow whey protein powder, they note that sociological methods do not allow the researchers to view the minutiae of the body's “physical reality”: “[Mol's] approach stops short of fully expressing the physical, material mutations that occur as bodies are enacted” (King and Weedon, 2020: 188).
Other researchers have drawn on Mol to parse the multiple bodies of physically active individuals. For example, Kerr (2016) uses Mol's bodily multiplicity to show that the disparate tools and knowledges of sport medicine practitioners and elite coaches enact gymnasts’ bodies differently. Moyer (2021) draws on Mol's theorization to discuss how women athletes’ bodies are split into physical and digital versions during anti-doping testing, demonstrating that each sample—often framed as representing the body as a “whole”—instead has the capacity to “enact different results through testing” (223). Finally, Jette and Esmonde (2020) utilize Mol's concepts to analyze the forms that pregnant women's bodies take in government recommendations for prenatal exercise, linking these bodily enactments to existing power relations and discourses using Mol's concept of ontological politics.
As evident throughout this literature, Mol's concepts offer a promising approach to understanding how women athletes’ bodies are holistically and multiply shaped and why this multiplicity matters. In this paper, we meaningfully add to this body of work by applying Mol's sociology of contrasts to examine how women athletes’ bodies may be multiply and bioculturally enacted within their training contexts. Moreover, we go beyond the simple identification of bodily versions by analyzing how these multiple versions of the body matter. Drawing from Mol's ontological politics, we discuss not only how women athletes’ performances and health were enacted by each version of the body, but what these bodies allow us to understand about the complexity of sporting engagement with debates about sex, gender, and athleticism.
Context and methods
To explore the multiple enactments of women athletes’ bodies, we situated this study in the context of Olympic Weightlifting, a barbell-based strength sport wherein athletes compete to lift the most combined weight in the two Olympic lifts (the “snatch” and the “clean & jerk”). In the snatch, the barbell is lifted overhead in a single, technically demanding movement; during a clean & jerk, the bar is first lifted from the floor to the athlete's shoulders, and then to arm's length overhead. Based on the understanding that heavier athletes are capable of much greater levels of absolute strength than lighter athletes (Nelson and Jette, 2023), competitors are divided into weight categories that range from the ultralightweight (≤48 kg for women, ≤ 60 kg for men) to the unbounded superheavyweight (>86 kg for women, > 110 kg for men). A historically masculine sport, Olympic Weightlifting has been included in the Summer Olympic programme since 1896 but only began allowing women to compete at the Olympic level in 2000.
Olympic Weightlifting presents an intriguing context to explore the application of contradictory beliefs about women's bodies and athletic potential due to an ongoing disparity within the sport between longstanding and novel understandings of the relationships between sex, gender, and strength. The size of the strength difference between men and women Olympic Weightlifters has long been “settled” knowledge: controlling for bodyweight, women Olympic Weightlifters lift 30‒40% less weight than men (Millard-Stafford et al., 2018). Yet in multiple Western countries—including the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand—the population of women Olympic Weightlifters is growing rapidly, generating new questions about the strength they might be capable of and whether old approaches are responsive to athletes’ sex and gender.
In alignment with Mol's approach and informed by ANT sensibilities, we drew on several ethnographic methods—participant observation, coach interviews, and repeated athlete interviews—to create an in-depth account of the practices, events, and materials that shaped women Olympic Weightlifters’ bodies at two gyms in metropolitan areas of Aotearoa, New Zealand. All methods were granted ethical approval by the University of Waikato. Pseudonyms are used throughout this paper to refer to all participants and field sites. Two gyms—Solo Weightlifting Club and Atlas Barbell Club—were chosen for the study for two reasons: (a) to more thoroughly engage with the small Olympic Weightlifting community in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and (b) to better represent the cultural diversity of the country. Originally populated by the Māori, the Indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa New Zealand, the British colonization of the country in the 1700s and the more recent waves of immigration from Pacific and Asian nations have made the country increasingly ethnically diverse (King, 2003; Terruhn, 2020). In its most recent census, Aotearoa New Zealand was reported to be composed primarily of individuals of Pākehā [NZ European] (67.8%), Māori (17.8%), Pacific (8.9%), and Asian (17.3%) ethnicities (Stats NZ | Tatauranga Aotearoa, 2024). In light of this diversity, two gyms were recruited for the study based on (1) the number of women Olympic Weightlifters actively training at the gym (>15), and (2) their locations in areas that differed socioeconomically and ethnically.
Solo Weightlifting Club is an Olympic Weightlifting gym situated in a low-income area with a high proportion of Pacific athletes. The club has between 60 and 70 members, roughly half of whom are women. Atlas Barbell Club is in a more affluent area with a higher proportion of Pākehā, Asian, and European immigrant athletes and has around 55 members, 80% of whom are women. During participant observation, the first author—a cisgender white American woman and Olympic Weightlifting athlete, coach, and researcher with over a decade of experience in the sport—took part in team training sessions at each gym once or twice per month. She also attended assorted local, national, and international Olympic Weightlifting competitions where the athletes competed. These ethnographic observations continued for 12 months and resulted in thirty written field notes. Field notes broadly explored how men and women athletes were trained differently from one another, documenting the Olympic Weightlifting practices and materialities that contributed to (sex- and gender-related) bodily enactment.
To supplement participant ethnography, in-depth semi-structured interviews were used to lend visibility to subtle practices and materialities. To understand how women weightlifters manipulated their bodily practices, seven women weightlifters who trained at the two gyms participated in four interviews over the course of a 12-month period that started three months after participant observation began. The athletes interviewed were between 20 and 49 years old, competed at the national or international level, and identified with a range of ethnicities, including Māori / Pākehā (1), Cook Island Māori (1), NZ Samoan (1), Pākehā (2), Pākehā / French (1), and UK British (1). Repeated interviews allowed an understanding of the ways that athletes’ bodily practices evolved over time, providing a view of the outcomes of different bodily enactments. Eight to ten months into ethnographic observation, single interviews were held with each of the three coaches involved with the athletes at the two gyms. Two of these coaches were men (Dave—Atlas, Kerry—Solo) and one was a woman (Chelsea—Atlas). These interviews examined how the coaches implemented their understandings of the “best” way to train women weightlifters.
Our analysis of ethnographic field notes and interview transcripts was informed by ANT and Mol's sociology of contrasts. In alignment with ANT, we took an interpretive approach to analysis, wherein we sought to understand how women's bodies were constructed within their contexts. First, we read the data to identify the “practicalities, materialities, events” (Mol, 2002: 13) that shaped women athletes’ bodies. During this phase, we examined how women weightlifters’ bodies were constructed in comparison to men's in the same gym spaces. Recognizing the limitations of Mol's sociology of contrasts, we sought to identify women weightlifters’ experiences (e.g., instances of strength gain and injury) to understand the “physical reality” (Mol, 2002: 11) and effects of the multiple bodies being constructed. We then aimed to identify the multiple bodies that these practices, materials, and events created by examining the data for varying and contradictory knowledges about women weightlifters’ bodies and strength potential. Finally, we sought to achieve an understanding of the ontological politics of these bodies by (a) exploring the benefits and challenges that they posed for women weightlifters’ performances and health and (b) relating them to broader debates of sex, gender, and athletic capacity.
Our understanding of analytic “reliability” (Krefting, 1999) was guided by a key ANT concept: that the purpose of ANT research is to describe actors’ “own frames, their own theories, their own contexts, their own metaphysics, even their own ontologies” (Latour, 2005: 147). To ensure that the study was responsive to the multiple Māori and Pacific women in the two gyms, cultural advisors were regularly consulted about the study design, its implementation, data analysis, and the write-up of findings. In addition, we regularly engaged in member-checking (Smith and McGannon, 2018) with athletes and coaches by hosting information sessions to update participants on progress in data collection and early findings every six months after the study began. Participants were encouraged to offer critical feedback to bring the researchers’ analyses closer to their lived experiences.
Multiple bodies
In this analysis, we recount three different “woman weightlifter bodies” that were enacted through combinations of training practices and materialities: the equal body, the different body, and the better body. We conceptualize these bodily enactments as being “neither physical nor social, but both at the same time” (Mol, 2012: 120). As we define and analyze these bodies, recounting the practices and materials that enacted them, we therefore explore their physical compositions and capabilities and the understandings of sex, gender, and strength that informed them. We understand these contradictory bodies to exist simultaneously, leading us to refrain from categorizing the athletes by the version that they most exemplify. Instead, we allow them to have multiple bodies: “more than one and less than many” (Mol, 2015: 61). Each weightlifter in this study experienced at least two of the bodies that we outline, often shifting between versions during training sessions.
Before recounting the multiple bodies of women Olympic Weightlifters, it is important to note that these bodies were shaped not only by sex and gender, but by culture, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, and so on. While Mol focuses on how differences are made through particular bodily enactments and does not engage specifically with the concept of intersectionality, herein we lean on the work of M’charek (2010), who explores intersectionality in relation to Mol's concept of multiplicity. Taking inspiration from M’charek (2010), we frame the many aspects of individuals’ identities as “not given, but enacted,” and “neither fundaments nor qualities that are always embodied” (313). In other words, difference—whether related to sex, gender, ethnicity, age, and so on—may be enacted multiply (or not enacted at all) in the various contexts that individuals occupy. Therefore, while this analysis focuses on enactments of sex and gender, where appropriate, we recognize how other aspects of athletes’ identities were enacted in ways that intersected with the sex- and gender-based bodies recounted herein.
The equal body
At Solo Weightlifting Club, the training program for the day is written on the small whiteboard on the concrete wall of the gym. It is going to be a very heavy day of lifting, with athletes encouraged to “max out” or attempt a new personal best if they are lifting well. Snatch, eight singles at 85+% of the athlete's best. Clean & jerk, eight singles at 85+%. Front squats, five sets of two reps at 85+%. At Atlas Barbell Club, the gym's program is available to each athlete on an app called TrainHeroic. Today might be described as “death by squats”: a set of 15 at 40%, a set of 13 at 50%, and so on, with each further set descending towards lower repetitions while ascending in weight. Light technique work in the snatch and clean & jerk follows. These are not “men's” or “women's” programs. They are Olympic Weightlifting programs. [Field notes]
Through equivalent training practices and environments, the equal body is enacted to be physically the same as men's, composed of the same basic components. These bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments are not sexed or gendered; they are simply components of the body that need to become stronger. The equal body is governed by basic principles of strength: if the athlete trains with weights that push their outer limits, the equal body will be able to lift heavier weights over time. It does not respond differently to heavy resistance training, and it is capable of the same work intensity. This version of the woman weightlifter body is felt to be a success: “you look at the female athletes that are breaking through or who have broken through. They've all trained on the same program in the same way as the guys have” (Dave, coach). In one case, a woman weightlifter's performance was pushed higher by the equal body. During her first interview, a Solo athlete recounted comparing her performance to one of the men weightlifters: “I'm lifting more similar numbers to Joshua now. Yeah, so it's kind of like, what up. Fight me. Who's gonna be the first one to snatch 100 kilos.” As in her case, equal treatment of men's and women's bodies could result in positive strength outcomes for women athletes.
The equal body is based on the belief that strength development is informed by too many factors to be reduced to sex or gender. The influence of commonly cited differences between men's and women's bodies is discarded: “they're working towards similar competition timeframes, [using] a blueprint of a program that we've worked to, but still then adapted to whatever the reality is for that athlete. That to me has nothing to do with sex” (Chelsea, coach). In Chelsea's narrative, individual factors such as life stress, injury, and nutrition are more impactful on strength than intrinsic biological factors. This perception was broadly shared by the women weightlifters, who believed that strength was complex and objected to the idea that they might be trained differently based primarily on sex or gender. At Solo Weightlifting Club, this sentiment was further supported by an interpretation of Indigenous knowledge. A Māori wahine [woman] weightlifter pushed back against the importance of sex and gender in determining athletic performance, stating that “Te Ao Māori [the Māori world and worldview] is very holistic. It's not just one-dimensional.” Using Te Whare Tapa Wha, a Māori health model (Durie, 1998), she described strength outcomes as the result of mentality, physical health and training, family and teammate support, and spiritual connection. While an in-depth exploration of the enactment of Indigenous women's bodies within Olympic Weightlifting is not possible in this analysis, Indigenous scholars are doing such needed work in examining Māori and Pacific sportswomen's knowledges and experiences of sport and strength (Gibbons et al., 2025; Nemani and Thorpe, 2023; Ogilvy, 2022; Palmer, 2016). Nevertheless, these aligned understandings of sex, gender, and strength asserted that women and men do not differ enough to require different treatment, echoing liberal feminist arguments that posit that women athletes can achieve equality with men simply through equal treatment (Birrell, 2000).
Yet, the equal body also presented challenges for women weightlifters. To enact a body that was equal to men's, the women athletes at Atlas and Solo suppressed differences attributable to sex. To keep her coach from changing her training program, one weightlifter underplayed reproductive health scares as “just hormonal changes.” An athlete who found that her menstrual cycle significantly impacted her training expressed an interest in trying a program structured around her cycle, but decided not to pursue the idea: “I’d love to try it…but it's not fair on him to have to follow my cycle. I mean, maybe when I, if I hit a certain performance, right, and I maybe started paying him more money…” To this weightlifter, the menstrual cycle was an unwelcome addition to the equal weightlifter body, too much to ask a coach to accommodate, even if it might improve her performance. These cases reveal that the equal body was one that had equivalent capacity for strength development if it lacked “flaws” related to sex, thereby encouraging women weightlifters to suppress meaningful differences to the potential detriment of their health and performance.
The different body
As weightlifters filter into Friday afternoon training at Solo Barbell Club, Kerry tells each athlete which platform to lift on. Because there are more lifters than there are platforms and barbells, athletes with similar strength levels are placed together so they waste less time and energy changing plates between lifts. Elite lifters Stacy, Elise, and Ruby are instructed to share a platform and a barbell, as are Joshua and Steve. Men lift with men, women lift with women. This is not done because the women weightlifters are all weaker than the men, but because they do not lift with the same barbells. Men use 20 kg bars, while women train and compete using thinner 15 kg bars that are better suited to their smaller hands. [Field note]
The coaches at the two gyms further aided in the enactment of the different body through their coaching strategies. Some of these practices stressed the importance of gender: fearing negative body image and disordered eating, Kerry “positively reinforced” women weightlifters when changing weight categories, while Chelsea emphasized to women athletes that bodyweight was “just another metric within the sport.” However, much of the coaches’ enactment of the different body emphasized the influence of the menstrual cycle on women weightlifters’ performances. For instance, Kerry and Dave often asked women weightlifters about their menstrual symptoms and made unstructured, on-the-spot alterations to athletes’ programs, while Chelsea worked closely with one athlete to develop a training program that was planned around her menstrual cycle because it had a strong effect on her training. Dave dissuaded women athletes from cutting weight through dehydration, fearing impacts on their hormones. Dave also decreased the training loads for women weightlifters experiencing menopause or perimenopause, simultaneously enacting these athletes’ bodies as sex- and gender-based bodies as well as aged bodies that were characterized by lower capacity to recover from and adapt to “normal” training programs.
Recounting these policies, practices, and equipment, it is evident that the different body was an entirely distinct version of the woman weightlifter body, understood and constructed to diverge from men's. Take, for example, the influence of gender-based weight classes. Although all Olympic Weightlifters are incentivized to cut weight to maximize their competitiveness (Nelson and Jette, 2023), women athletes were encouraged to shape their bodies to be smaller than men's due to the lighter range of weight classes available to them. Through the IWF's gender-based barbell policy, the different body were also enacted to have specific skills. Due to their smaller diameter, 15 kg barbells readily oscillate to a degree that increases with the weight on the bar. The different body therefore excels in controlling and manipulating variable degrees of bar oscillation during maximal-effort lifts, while men weightlifters do not develop this skill until they lift much higher weights. Finally, through coaches’ interest in accounting for the menstrual cycle, the different body is also enacted to be responsive to women's hormonal and reproductive health. For example, to ensure the success of his athletes’ careers, Kerry referred several women weightlifters to high-performance dietitians and reproductive specialists to manage their menstrual dysfunctions.
The different body was based on a rejection of the idea—historically prevalent in sport and exercise science (Sims and Yeager, 2016)—that “women are just small men” (Kerry). At Atlas and Solo, women's bodies were understood to differ in ways that could not be overlooked when training for high performance. These differences could be small, but were vital to account for: women athletes had smaller hands, lighter bodyweight, fluctuating estrogen and progesterone, and a predisposition towards disordered eating behaviors. In light of these differences, athletes recounted appreciation that their coaches acknowledged that “some female athletes do need to be trained slightly differently,” and all three coaches spoke of the need to “coach the individual,” recognizing the potential for difference when working with women athletes.
As with the equal body, the different body was not without consequences for women athletes. Ultimately, this version of the woman weightlifter body predominantly reflected IWF and coach knowledge regarding the differences between women and men. Reflecting the work of feminist scholars who have critically interrogated essentialist and stereotyped sex- and gender-based coaching practices (Avner et al., 2025; Schofield et al., 2022), coach knowledge was particularly influential in this study. At Atlas, challenges arose when women weightlifters’ bodies did not fit their coach's model of expected difference. Two athletes chose a woman—Chelsea—as their new coach when they found that Dave's understanding of women's bodies failed to fully address the challenges they faced. One of these athletes believed that Chelsea would be more responsive to “women's issues” like amenorrhea and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) that she had struggled with. The other appreciatively noted Chelsea's openness to experimenting with the menstrual cycle-based training programs that Dave had once dissuaded her from. These experiences demonstrate that when women's bodies were unexpectedly different, beyond the bounds of the different body that their coach envisioned, limits were placed on their health and performance.
The better body
Every year, it seems that there are fewer men and more women competing at the Weightlifting New Zealand National Championships. At 2024 Nationals, there are 35 men competing and 53 women. Most men compete in the heavier weight classes, but the few elite lifters in those categories are in a league of their own, with no others in their weight class that are close to the gold medal. The women's sessions are a different story. Two of the women's categories have a pair of closely grouped competitors vying for gold medals and spots on international teams, with multiple up-and-coming competitors positioned to vie for a place on those teams in the coming years. In this far corner of the world, Olympic Weightlifting has become a women's sport. [Field note]
In this context of greater competitiveness, the women weightlifters of Atlas and Solo pushed themselves—and were pushed—to match the athleticism of their (women) teammates and competitors. One nationally competitive athlete was inspired to work towards higher levels of performance when she began training at Atlas: “at a CrossFit gym, if you're more into weightlifting, you're gonna be at the top there. You know, so that's gonna be your limit. But then you go somewhere where everyone is on a similar page, you get humbled very quickly.” Women on the elite pathway framed their lives around the sport, putting full-time jobs and university on hold to make more time for training and recovery, and completing additional training sessions in the hopes of reaching levels of strength that would qualify them for international competitions. At Atlas, one athlete consistently refused to leave the gym until she finished the additional injury-prevention work on the personalized program that Dave created for her. An internationally competing Solo athlete used a spreadsheet that outlined the progression of elite women weightlifters in her weight class to set goals for her performance over the next several years. Two weightlifters repeatedly cut weight to become more competitive in international competitions, while another went up two weight classes. The three women attempting to qualify for the Olympics competed 11 times in 10 months, a nearly unimaginable rate for the sport.
These training practices, competitions, and materialities supplied the elite and aspiring women Olympic Weightlifters with opportunities to develop physical capabilities that are primarily accorded to men in other sports (Capranica et al., 2013). Through additional training sessions and injury-prevention work, the better body was enacted to be stronger and more resilient than men's; through frequent competitions, women weightlifters were more exposed to maximal-effort lifts that allowed them to refine their technique under duress. There were two additional characteristics of the better body: its unknown potential for strength, and its capacity to take whatever shape was required to compete and succeed. The better body was an ideal athlete's body, strictly following training and dietary programs. It could be lighter or heavier, it could recover from multiple training sessions per day, and it could achieve personal best lifts on schedule. The better body was unquestionably successful, with the women athletes at the two gyms often achieving levels of strength that were rare or unimaginable in the country a decade ago.
Unlike the other two bodies, the better body was not situated in established knowledge about sex, gender, and strength. Every coach and athlete had a theory about what was leading to the rise of women's Olympic Weightlifting. An Atlas athlete hypothesized that women were simply working harder: the women weightlifters in the country might be “stronger as a proportion of their total potential strength compared to men.” Kerry believed that men weightlifters new to Olympic Weightlifting were challenged by being outlifted by women: “I think a lot of the young men are intimidated by it, and when it starts getting hard, it's easy just to quit.” Men joined the sport and discovered that they were weaker than they thought they were; women found that they were stronger than they ever thought they could be. Kerry further speculated that the levels of strength currently achieved by women weightlifters might be well short of their future potential: “I'll be sitting here in 20 years’ time going ‘oh, what was all fuss about?’” With every new national record, the better body created new knowledge about what women weightlifters’ bodies could become.
Although the better body reflects a positive future for women weightlifters, it also merits criticism. The better body was a disciplined and controlled body (Barker-Ruchti and Tinning, 2010) and was not always a healthier body. Specifically, the need to lose weight to fit into a weight class was a significant challenge for two of the elite women weightlifters at Atlas and Solo. When attempting to qualify for the Olympics, a Solo athlete purposefully lost six kilograms and experienced multiple challenging weight cuts to compete in a lower weight class, while an Atlas weightlifter developed RED-S and experienced athletic burnout while trying to secure her ranking over another woman in her weight class. If women's Olympic Weightlifting continues to grow in membership and competitiveness, the highly disciplined better body indicates the potential for widespread risks to women athletes’ physical and mental health even as their strength increases.
The ontological politics of women weightlifters’ bodies
Mol argues that by allowing the body to be ontologically multiple, the sociology of contrasts allows researchers to suggest improvements to the construction of the body in new ways. Rather than “intervening in a few upstream variables” (Mol, 2012: 126)—e.g., suggesting changes to training practices—that improve just one version of the body, Mol calls for researchers to think differently: “As we differentiate between them, we may come to wonder which version of the body to foster, cherish, strengthen” (2012: 126). She further directs researchers to consider which body to strengthen by asking whether each is “good for the subjects (human or otherwise) involved in it” (2002: 165). In the context of our analysis of the bodies of women Olympic weightlifters, we use this directive to explore whether these bodily enactments were “good” for women athletes’ health and performance.
Although each body played a positive role in women Olympic Weightlifters’ performances, our analysis challenges the idea that any one of them should be prioritized. Through equal, different, and better treatment, each version of the body was enacted to have the same (or greater) potential for strength development as men, but had weaknesses in its construction. The equal body encouraged women weightlifters to obscure meaningful sex- and gender-related differences; the different body was enacted through coaches’ and the IWF's understandings of sex and gender; the better body was so highly controlled and manipulated that it could put athletes’ wellness at risk. Moreover, we note the alignment of two of these bodies with an ongoing question in critical sport studies: the ways and extent to which women athletes should be treated differently from men (Avner et al., 2025; Schofield et al., 2022). Nurturing only the equal body might reaffirm the idea that “women are small men” despite differing in meaningful ways (Sims and Yeager, 2016), while prioritizing the different body risks endorsing coaches’ use of stereotypes regarding women's bodies and minds (Gosai et al., 2022).
We therefore suggest that exploring the ontological politics of women Olympic Weightlifters’ multiple bodies contributes to longstanding debates about how best to improve women athletes’ performances. This analysis demonstrates that each approach—whether focused on equal treatment, accommodating difference, or providing women with superior training opportunities—results in positive and negative outcomes for women athletes. It also shows that these highly disparate understandings of sex, gender, and athletic potential can and do coexist within individual training contexts and meaningfully shape women athletes’ bodies. Rather than using one perspective on the relationship between sex, gender, and strength, the athletes and coaches of Atlas and Solo alternated between three when determining how women Olympic Weightlifters “should” train. Moreover, they carefully balanced and alternated between these contradictory beliefs and bodily enactments, continuously weighing the functionality of equal, different, and better treatment and striking a nuanced middle ground between complete equivalence and difference.
Conclusion
In this paper, we have explored how women athletes’ bodies and capacities for athletic performance may be shaped by contradictory understandings of sex, gender, and athletic capacity. Drawing from Mol's sociology of contrasts, we examined the “practicalities, materialities, events” that contributed to the “physical reality” of the bodies of women Olympic Weightlifters in Aotearoa, New Zealand. We demonstrated that women's capacities for maximal strength and strength development are complex, the product of training and dietary practices, gym environments, objects, sport policies, enactments of other aspects of their identity (i.e., ethnicity, age), and many other actors and actions. Moreover, many of these “practicalities, materialities, events” were aimed at constructing disparate versions of these athletes’ bodies. At Atlas and Solo, women weightlifters’ bodies were not shaped by just one perspective on women's capacity for strength development, but multiple: women weightlifters were simultaneously as strong as, weaker than, the same as, and different from men. Yet while each body was enacted to allow women weightlifters to achieve higher levels of strength, we noted flaws that prevented these athletes from achieving higher levels of strength while prioritizing their health. As a result, we do not consider it constructive to prioritize a singular version of the woman weightlifter body.
Engaging with Mol, we posit that knowing women's sporting bodies as multiple offers potential implications for sport policies and “best practices” related to women athletes. In particular, our analysis suggests that recognizing and addressing women's bodies as “equal to” men's through policy and practice does not prevent us from simultaneously addressing them as “different from” men's (or even as “better than”). Such multiplicity does, however, require sensitivity to the effects of these disparate bodies. Effective policies and practices aimed at improving women athletes’ performance and health will recognize that multiple understandings of sex- and gender-based difference may structure women athletes’ experiences. Such understandings then call upon policy-makers and coaches to take multiple, divergent, and potentially contradictory actions to improve women athletes’ sport experiences.
In light of these contributions, we advocate for further use of Mol's sociology of contrasts to examine women athletes’ bodily possibilities and athletic potential. Mol's approach not only enables a nuanced view of the complex, contradictory, sex- and gender-based treatment of women athletes but also draws a coherent link between practices, objects, knowledges, and the material construction of these athletes’ physical capacities. Moreover, this same emphasis on multiplicity and enactment allows researchers the means to explore how multiple similarities and differences—e.g., ethnicity, age, sexuality, gender identities, disability—are enacted in ways that align with, contradict, and inform sex- and gender-related bodily enactments and athletes’ bodily capacities. While we agree with King and Weedon's (2020) critique that Mol's approach to studying the body does not render its physiological workings easily visible, we posit that Mol's sociology of contrasts offers the possibility of further in-depth sociocultural engagements with questions of sex, gender, and athletic capacity by allowing us to more closely understand how women athletes’ bodies are enacted to fulfill or fall short of their potential.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical approval
Ethical approval for all study methods was granted by the University of Waikato Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC), Sport and Human Performance. The ethics approval number for this research is HREC(Health)2023#17.
Informed consent
All participants taking part in data collection provided written consent to participate prior to data collection. All participants provided consent for the publication of research based on the data collected in this study.
Data availability statement
Study data cannot be shared due to participant privacy guidelines required by the University of Waikato HREC.
