Researches that describe the anatomy and physiology of human movement have aimed to produce knowledge comparing women’s and men’s physical capacities, concerned with specifying and describing “sex differences.” One of the consequences of this kind of research is that it influences teaching processes in human motion disciplines for physical educators, producing gender-marked bodies. This article uses Foucauldian discourse analysis to question how the production of sex differences is present in scientific studies dedicated to studying athletic performance that propose comparisons between sexes in strength performance. Through this analysis, we aim to describe and analyse how the epistemologies of sex and gender involved in these productions reinforce naturalised ideas of what it means to be a man and a woman, as well as question the social intelligibility of body/gender/sexuality that regulates sex/gender in our culture and in science.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.