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Le corps des femmes culturistes peut être appréhendé comme un objet potentiel de transgression ou de déplacement des frontières entre ce qui relève du féminin et du masculin. En effet, que penser des femmes adeptes du culte du muscle dont l'apparence physique s'écarte définitivement des canons esthétiques standards ? Interroger le corps féminin culturiste au regard de la beauté normative nécessite d'examiner le rapport à la norme. Cette présente contribution sur « le sport et la femme » tente de resituer, d'un point de vue sociologique, leur démarche de construction musculaire. L'analyse s'inscrit dans une perspective micro-sociologique et relève d'un paradigme interprétatif. Elle se propose de rendre compte du parcours des femmes culturistes et de restituer les étapes d'une démarche singulière.

To understand young people motives for practicing sports is no longer possible to appeal to founding values of modernity like search for improvement, control of oneself and the environment, surpassing the other and achievement of this emblematic form of confrontation represented by practicing sports in an institutional context. The growing importance of sport activities is justified by its recreational intensity, the feelings encountered and the possibility of sharing experiences. The aesthetic side of existence fully develops in free sport. This tendency, presented as an hypothesis, is confirmed by two surveys of young people aged 15 to 20. The first one tries to determine the factors leading high school populations to the activities ; the second one attempts to draw the profile of applicants to the STAPS path at university.

This article aims to study the process of conversion to bodybuilding in order to understand how some gym enthusiasts progressively organise their lives around this activity. Our observations, drawn from an ethnography of a gym and 30 semi-structured interviews with different profiles of gym-goers in French-speaking Switzerland, suggest that the grip that bodybuilding takes on individuals results from processes akin to conversions. Two paths to conversion – consonant and introspective – are identified. They correspond to distinct uses of bodybuilding, which do not have the same consequences in the practitioners' life courses. While consonant conversions stabilise life courses by reinforcing an occupational status, introspective conversions inflect them significantly.

Female bodybuilding raises an obvious question: how should we judge these metamorphosized bodies and associated practices? We will reframe this question as part of a short communication on what many people judge to be a paroxysmal body that is deservedly discredited. Drawing from Kant's distinction between 'free beauty' and 'adherent beauty', our commentary revolves around the notion of aesthetic judgment. Different expressions of this are considered. For our purposes, manifestations of these judgments are discussed in two 'ideal typical' interactional contexts: one between bodybuilding enthusiasts and the other between female bodybuilders and non-affiliates within the cultural mainstream. The issue of judgment within sociological writing on female bodybuilding is also raised alongside our endorsement of an embodied, interactionist approach and qualitative research.