Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity (Performance Works) - Softcover

Broderick D.V. Chow (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081014736X ISBN 13: 9780810147362

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2024

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081014736X
• ISBN 13: 9780810147362
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240