Archival and autoethnographic research has produced a readable and engaging book about strongmen then and now

Claire Warden
Loughborough University

Masculine muscle seems ubiquitous at the moment, whether the premieres of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and the Korean smash Physical 100 on Netflix, Instagram accounts that promise unprecedented muscular growth through a 30-day plan, or articles about Ukrainian President Zelensky’s fitness regime. As Broderick Chow says in his fascinating, expansive work Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity, “Strongmen are in the zeitgeist again” (p. 83).

Acknowledging the contemporary trends, while valuing a forensic archival history of muscular bodies, Muscle Works recognizes the various intersecting meanings of male muscularity by employing a decidedly theatrical lens. The whole book is about finding, and addressing, gaps and lacuna, whether they be the sketchy nature of the archive where performing bodies might shed new light on socio-economic tensions (p. 6) or the way that dominant impressions of masculinity might be deconstructed by attending to a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physical culture history (p. 7). Theatricality is a vital part of this reassessment, enabling Chow to focus on important, often overlooked elements such as the social construction of the body (p. 13) and the body as excessive and spectacular (p. 15).

Chow’s humor is particularly infectious and I laughed aloud at his irritation at contemporary performance artists’ self-aggrandizing obsession with failure as a performative trope and his lamenting question “why did only white people ever seem to perform failure?”

He undertakes this task through six fascinating chapters that move from bodybuilding (1), the ‘before and after’ (2), strongmen feats (3), failure and recovery (4), antitheatricality (5) and racial impressibility (6), with an atmospheric coda which takes the reader to Muscle Beach in the 1930s. Methodologically, there is a sense of granular archival study throughout with Chow taking the time to explore untapped archives to make sense of the complexities of the muscular male. However, there is also a decidedly embodied, autoethnographic approach that parses rigorous, analytical study with the author’s own experience of lifting. There is nothing gimmicky about these reflections, rather I am convinced by Chow’s own description of these sections that are “intended to highlight forms of self-performative knowledge that have underpinned physical culture from its origins” (p. 23). While such methods are regularly used in performance studies, they are, perhaps, less familiar to those in sport history. In this way the book not only provides an alternative rendering of male muscularity but also introduces a mixed methods approach that challenges disciplinary methodological norms. One particularly effective use of the autoethnographic comes in chapter 4 where Chow introduces timely questions about what it means to engage in embodied activities in liminal, transitional spaces by reflecting on his experience at the 2017 Glasgow Canal Festival (p. 114). This story emboldens the reader to ask questions about the intersection of space and bodies, particularly spaces that are difficult to define.

There are many highlights in this marvelous book, Chow’s style ensuring that even the more theoretical, dense passages are readable and engaging. Chow’s humor is particularly infectious and I laughed aloud at his irritation at contemporary performance artists’ self-aggrandizing obsession with failure as a performative trope and his lamenting question “why did only white people ever seem to perform failure?” (p. 103). Chow is even careful to ensure that readers do not make unwarranted connections and meanings, a risk in such a long, rich genealogy of practice. For example, when considering Frank Gotch, George Hackenschmidt and the theatre, Chow takes time to illustrate that shared practices between diverse physical culture activities may well not be down to direct transmission as such but more an embodied response to socio-economic forces (p. 128). This subtlety is nuanced but important, and illustrates the care Chow takes to ensure easy lines of influence are avoided.

To pick out some of the interventions that particularly interested me. Chow spends time considering the relationship between the spectator and the spectated; how one watches and consumes the muscular body is central to the book. There are tensions here between the complicity of the spectated and the spectator, and the interpolation of the muscular body into networks of consumption and capitalism (p. 38). The analysis of feats, again, breaks the masculine muscular body down into singular astonishing actions and extends a “fantasy of individualism” that reflects socio-economic conditions (p. 84). Here the individual performs, which brings with it heightened individual risk as the performer-athlete attempts to outdo competitors or earn more money (p. 90).

The analysis of genderqueer bodybuilder Siufung Law compels the reader to confront bodybuilding as an act of becoming through lenses of the trans (p. 74). This example, alongside others, rejects the idea that the muscular male body is a stable entity; the reader always feels (in the best way) on rather shaky ground where definitive assumptions rupture. This is a theme that continues throughout the book, most noticeably in the final chapter where Chow illustrates the way that “anti-Asian racism throughout history arrests the Asian male as an unchanging thing” (p. 150). The body-as-becoming rather than static feels to me like a critical narrative in this book. In a study that focuses explicitly on masculinity from its title onwards, such a variegated impression of gender is vital to avoid stereotype, macho toxicity or just perpetuating long-established patriarchal expressions of physical culture and sport history.

As these examples illustrate, throughout Chow rejects easy answers and paradigms, preferring instead to sit with the complexity rather than explain it away. Ultimately, this book counters the self-evident assumptions about masculine muscle that are presented on our screens. Grounded in the archive, yet committed to privileging contemporary embodied experience, Muscle Works is ultimately an ethical task. As Chow reflects in the coda of the book, “I began to learn that physical strength, which I had always been intimidated by, was not incompatible with kindness and empathy; indeed, the process of building could be the start of opening oneself up to the world” (p. 183). This is a conclusion of empathetic and hopeful possibility, a theme that runs through this excellent book.

Copyright © Claire Warden 2025