Hard Right

“Hard Right reveals fresh insights on how masculinity discourses shape who and what is considered valuable. As scholars continue to interrogate the new ways that autocratic and fascist goals gather support, this book makes plain the motivations for those pursuits and how rhetoric facilitates such purposes.” —Leslie A. Hahner, coauthor of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right

“Kelly writes with coherence and insight on a topic that is both timely and likely to be of enduring interest for many years. Hard Right makes a significant and novel contribution that will be important across multiple audiences.” —Calum L. Matheson, author of Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic Age

A groundbreaking examination of far-right rhetoric around fitness and the human body and how such rhetoric serves white nationalist, masculinist aims.

In recent years, far-right, white-nationalist groups in the US have churned out streams of discourse glorifying “muscularity” as the ideal masculine form. This preoccupation with physical fitness—along with expressed fears of declining testosterone levels in men, race-mixing, and transgender women—all reveal the masculine bodily fantasies and anxieties that underwrite the political unconscious of the far right. In Hard Right, Casey Ryan Kelly examines the link between extreme fitness culture and fascist organizations, arguing that the human body operates as a privileged signifier of national belonging in the rhetoric of the far right.

Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, Kelly shows that far-right rhetoric constructs fantasies of recovering the “natural” or primal masculine body. These fantasies are frequently accompanied by anxieties about “soft,” disabled, and ambiguously gendered bodies, all of which are seen as signs of degeneracy that must be transformed, exiled, or eradicated for the sake of national and racial health. Through its examination of “Red Pill” fitness influencers, “bro science” conspiracy theories, far-right podcasts, and more, Hard Right ultimately shows how the cultural logics of men’s health and physical fitness converge with the political logics of white nationalism and late fascism.

Casey Ryan Kelly is Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of five books, including Caught on Tape: White Masculinity and Obscene Enjoyment and Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood.

Contents

List of Illustrations
INTRODUCTION Body Dysmorphia
CHAPTER 1 “Do You Even Lift, Bro?”: The Red Pill Meets Fitness
CHAPTER 2 The Fitness Dark Web
CHAPTER 3 Bro Science and Body Vernaculars
CHAPTER 4 Active Club Propaganda
CHAPTER 5 UFC Nationalism
CONCLUSION Muscles über Alles?
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index