Overview

Men’s fitness as a performance—from nineteenth-century theatrical exhibitions to health and wellness practices today This book recounts the story of fitness culture from its beginnings as spectacles of strongmen, weightlifters, acrobats, and wrestlers to its legitimization in the twentieth-century in the form of competitive sports and health and wellness practices. Broderick D. V. Chow shows how these modes of display contribute to the construction and deconstruction of definitions of masculinity. Attending to its theatrical origins, Chow argues for a more nuanced understanding of fitness culture, one informed by the legacies of self-described Strongest Man in the World Eugen Sandow and the history of fakery in strongman performance; the philosophy of weightlifter George Hackenschmidt and the performances of martial artist Bruce Lee; and the intersections of fatigue, resistance training, and whiteness. Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity moves beyond the gym and across the archive, working out techniques, poses, and performances to consider how, as gendered subjects, we inhabit and make worlds through our bodies.

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9780810147362

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Reviews

"“Drawing on his deep engagement with contemporary physical culture and its histories, Chow deftly traces the enmeshment of performance in practices of masculinity, fitness, and theatricality. The result is an original and compelling study that tests the boundaries of theatrical performance and the performance of masculinity in physical culture settings while modeling innovative ways of combining practice and archival research.""—Fintan Walsh, Birkbeck, University of London"

"“Drawing on his deep engagement with contemporary physical culture and its histories, Chow deftly traces the enmeshment of performance in practices of masculinity, fitness, and theatricality. The result is an original and compelling study that tests the boundaries of theatrical performance and the performance of masculinity in physical culture settings while modeling innovative ways of combining practice and archival research."" —Fintan Walsh, Birkbeck, University of London "

Author Information

Broderick D. V. Chow is Reader and Director of Learning, Teaching and Inclusion at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. He is coeditor of the volumes Sports Plays (2022) and Performance and Professional Wrestling (2016), as well as a competitive Olympic weightlifter and British Weight Lifting qualified coach.

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