Purposive encounters with “lack” in strength sports and diet culture

Informed by Andrew Dickson’s paper “Biomassochism: Lacan and the Ethics of Weight Cycling,” this paper explores the paradoxes and nuances of lack and power in women’s strength sports in the United States. Utilizing historical analyses of anti-blackness and sexism in the social milieu alongside the author’s personal experience as a strength athlete, this paper explores the jouissance of a strength athlete’s experience of pain alongside the pleasure of competition, and purposive “lack” as represented by encounters with failure embedded in athletic performance. Lack and failure are also taken up within a framework of diet and exercise culture. The paper also explores how purposive encounters with lack and failure function as an aspect of indigenous narrative (Tummalla-Narra, 2015), and can be utilized as tools to reclaim a sense of selfhood and agency. Additionally, the paper takes up aspects of anti-blackness and patriarchy embedded in “wellness” culture, how a settler-colonial patriarchal environment functions to de-link subjectivity from bodily autonomy and experience, and the ways in which strength sports may enforce, or reclaim, these delinked identities.