What do you think?
Rate this book
Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity
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.
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.
235 pages, Paperback
Published July 15, 2024
13 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
Read
December 31, 2025Broderick Chow's book is less a history of bodybuilders and theatre than it is a series of musings about what thinking about bodybuilding as theatre or thinking about bodybuilding through theatre might have to teach us.
Chow's writing is sensual and caring, and he's focused as much on his own journey through archives and his own practices in weight rooms, gymnasia, and other fitness spaces as he is on the experiences and techniques of his historical subjects—weightlifters, bodybuilders, strongmen, and other athletes working in theatrical venues.
Chow knows that we can critique CrossFit as white supremacist, that bodybuilding has been racist and misogynist and is in service to capitalism and neoliberalism. But, as he points out, we already know all that stuff about physical culture; we even all know we're all supposed to say those things about physical culture. Muscle Works is trying to do something else: To see what might open up when we begin to look at bodybuilding and physical culture as reparative, relational, supportive, even queer.
Chow's writing is sensual and caring, and he's focused as much on his own journey through archives and his own practices in weight rooms, gymnasia, and other fitness spaces as he is on the experiences and techniques of his historical subjects—weightlifters, bodybuilders, strongmen, and other athletes working in theatrical venues.
Chow knows that we can critique CrossFit as white supremacist, that bodybuilding has been racist and misogynist and is in service to capitalism and neoliberalism. But, as he points out, we already know all that stuff about physical culture; we even all know we're all supposed to say those things about physical culture. Muscle Works is trying to do something else: To see what might open up when we begin to look at bodybuilding and physical culture as reparative, relational, supportive, even queer.
Displaying 1 of 1 review