Lianne McTavish has always had an affinity for working out, but it wasn't until this past year that she traded in her books for bleach blonde hair, rock hard muscles, and manicured nails to live the amped-up life of a bodybuilder.

McTavish, a professor of the history of art, design, and culture at the University of Alberta, underwent months of gruelling training and dieting in order to achieve a bodybuilder physique. Since her research focuses on the history of the body, she decided to take an "embodied" approach and immerse herself in the world of bodybuilding.

"A lot of feminist work on bodybuilding [...] talks about it as a kind of way of controlling or managing the body," she said. "What I'm doing is actually in keeping with contemporary feminist scholarship."

Her 30-hour-a-week training and dieting regimen culminated at the Northern Alberta Bodybuilding Championships held on June 4, where she participated in the women's figure category. Exhausted from a lack of sleep and food, McTavish describes the week of the competition as her lowest point and says being on stage was "not fun at all."

"The body that's pictured in those images of me on stage is kind of an impossible body that I probably had for two days because it's dehydrated, it's leaned out, it's exhausted, it's tanned, it's machined," she said. "It's never going be like that again."

McTavish noticed that by conforming to the societal norm of beauty — the blonde hair, thinner body, and revealing clothing — she was treated differently. For example, she wasn't charged at airports when her luggage was overweight.

"It's not that I'm good-looking, it's not that," she explained. "It's that I visibly try to conform to the dominant norms of feminine beauty. That's it, that's all you need to do. You make the effort and you will be rewarded socially, whether consciously or unconsciously by other people."

McTavish chronicled her bodybuilding journey under the guise of Feminist Figure Girl, a witty and often explicit blog. As her research progressed, she realized that she would have to reveal her identity in order to get the credibility and attention that she wanted.

Despite some harsh criticism, the response that she has received will also be used for her research. McTavish doesn't take the negative comments personally since she believes they're not truly directed towards her, but towards her bodybuilding persona.

"When people to respond to it, negatively or positively, they're responding to a representation, and that representation isn't me," she said. "However they respond, it reveals something about them. It has nothing to do with me."

However, McTavish worries that the media attention and her blog may change the way students now view her as a professor.

"That's all out of the window now, isn't it?" she said. "I think I'm just going to make it clear when I'm teaching that I'm professional and this is what I'm going to be like in the classroom.

"I think that this way of creating knowledge will continue to inform my research. I don't think I'll ever stop with this more popular, engaged kind of research now that I've done it."

With the bodybuilding competition past her, McTavish is ready to resume teaching in September after being on sabbatical this past year. She will also share her experience in an upcoming book.