As outcast activities, bodybuilding and Roller Derby involve intense body work leading to unruly self-presentations in terms of gender and sexual norms. Personal participation has led us, as social scientists, to identify them as transformative embodied experiences. Through these practices, we tackle the separation between the researcher’s body as object of research and the reflexive researcher as a subject, in the light of the body negotiations and translations they operate. Autoethnographic methodology, rooted in a phenomenological framework serves as a basis to describe field experience through the lens of embodied perception. It then allows for an analysis of its interaction with physical performance together with knowledge production. To do so, we explore how the body of the researcher is built through negotiations between socialization, the subculture that they study and their academic training. We hypothesize that, by doing so, the body in the research acts as part of the translating device from fieldwork to scientific language, bridging several sensory subcultural and epistemic worlds for new meanings and understanding to emerge.