Performing political masculinity on the bodybuilding.com forums

This paper examines how online fitness communities have become informal arenas for producing and circulating political masculinities. Using the bodybuilding dot com forums between 2005 and 2015 as a case study, it explores how users negotiated strength, authority, legitimacy, belonging, and resentment in ways that frequently overlapped with broader political discourses about nation, race, gender, and moral order. While ostensibly devoted to training advice, these forums developed into cultural spaces where young men debated social change, expressed frustration with perceived loss of status, and rehearsed narratives of threat and decline that later became central to far right and anti gender movements. Drawing on digital ethnographic methods and a close reading of threads on topics such as aesthetics, self improvement, dating, and health, the paper tracks how the language of lifting was used to articulate wider ideas about hierarchy, discipline, and value. The analysis highlights how humour, irony, and insider slang worked to normalise hostility toward feminists, queer communities, migrants, and racialised groups while preserving a sense of camaraderie and authenticity among users. Rather than treating the forums as marginal or apolitical, the paper shows how everyday exchanges in these spaces helped consolidate affective styles of masculinity grounded in grievance, nostalgia, and a celebration of hardness. By tracing links between fitness culture and contemporary political masculinities, the paper contributes to wider debates on the emotional and cultural foundations of anti gender politics. It argues that online lifting spaces offer a key site for understanding how young men learn to interpret their own bodies, their anxieties, and their uncertainties through political frames. The study forms part of a broader project on digital strength cultures and the role they play in shaping masculine identities in the twenty first century.