"Muskler är för män"

Sammanfattning: The study aims to explore how female weightlifters discuss and question the discourse ”muscles are for men” and other assumptions about body and gender norms in strength training. The study focuses on how the accounts, through commentary and appearance, put themselves against traditional gender norms and how strength training operates as a norm-breaking practice. Further, the essay analyzes the wightlifters' Instagram accounts, through their bodies in pictures and discussions in text, as a form of activism. The study is based on a discourse analytical method, with a social constructivist view of reality, and of the study's concepts of body and gender norms. The study uses Butler's theory of performativity, as well as Foucault's and Hall's theory on representation as tools for analyzing. The result shows that female weightlifters create and recreate gender and body norms through their participation in weightlifting, and thus how weightlifting works as a signifying practice through their bodily representation. The accounts both adapt and oppose norms of femininity concerning the strength training on their platforms. The study then shows how the accounts, through conscious and unconscious activist actions, represent a fluid understanding of gender that goes beyond the binary division between the sexes.