The empowerment-subservience paradox in Filipina bodybuilding

Abstract

The social contexts in which athletes train shape how they experience empowerment, identity, and the limits of their agency. This article examines how Filipina women bodybuilders navigate a sport that simultaneously challenges and reinforces gendered norms in a Global South setting. Based on 15 semi-structured interviews, the findings show how women athletes construct meaning around their bodies, health ideals and social roles within a fragmented and commercially driven fitness industry. A central paradox emerges: bodybuilding provides women with a powerful sense of agency, discipline, and physical transformation, yet this empowerment is deeply entangled with economic precarity, gendered expectations, and the normalisation of pain, obedience, and dependence on authority (male) figures. Participants invest in their bodies as forms of cultural and bodily capital, but this investment often requires financial sacrifice and compliance with coaches, judges and institutional structures that privilege male standards of femininity and muscularity. We argue that empowerment in this context cannot be understood through Western-centric models. Instead, it operates as a negotiated and contradictory process shaped by local socio-economic conditions, religious values and the gendered politics of the bodybuilding field. By foregrounding the experiences of Filipina women bodybuilders, this study expands current understandings of how agency, gender and embodied identity are constructed and contested within Global South sport cultures.