I am someone fascinated with fitness. With an academic background in history, rather than theatre studies, I have spent my academic career trying to understand how fitness and gym cultures emerged over time and what impact this had on the individual. While I have had some success with the history, I consistently find myself struggling to understand how fitness feels, and indeed how it was felt or performed. Broderick Chow’s new book manages to address both of these areas in wonderfully engaging and inviting passages. Chow’s Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity offers a compelling analysis of the intersections between physical culture, masculinity and performance. Moving beyond the simple history of fitness, Chow’s work explores how fitness practices like bodybuilding, weightlifting and physical training have shaped and been shaped by theatricality, aesthetics and identity. In fact, Chow deliberately decides to focus on the theatricality of fitness. For this reason, the book’s structure is thematic rather than chronological, with chapters titled ‘Hypertrophy’, ‘Transformation’, ‘Strength’, ‘Failure and Recovery’, ‘Grappling’ and ‘Mirror’. Each chapter engages with a specific ‘logic’ of physical culture as it relates to masculinity, race, class and community.

Muscle Works makes a significant intervention in the fields of performance studies, masculinity studies and the history of physical culture. Chow’s interdisciplinary approach draws from theatre studies, queer theory and sociology, situating physical culture not merely as a pursuit of bodily aesthetics but as a complex performance of gender, power and racial politics. He challenges earlier studies of physical culture that emphasized ideological and disciplinary readings, instead proposing a more fluid, embodied and theatrical understanding of the practice. The influence of Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity is evident throughout, but Chow’s use of theatre as a conceptual and literal frame is innovative for people like me. By showing how physical culture is ‘theatrical’ – in that it is self-consciously performed before an audience, be it spectators, peers or oneself in the mirror – Chow’s work aligns with a broader scholarly trend toward examining the performativity of everyday life.

While scholars have noted the theatricality of bodybuilding – especially in competitions – Chow’s decision to treat physical culture’s theatricality as an ongoing, everyday practice is novel. His analysis of the role of ‘ephemera’ – scrapbooks, photographs and training logs – as evidence for physical culture’s archival history is particularly significant. Rather than treating physical culture’s records as ‘failed’ archives, Chow frames them as crucial sites for queer historiography, where indeterminacies are opportunities rather than shortcomings. In addition, Chow’s focus on racialized masculinity – especially in his discussion in the ‘Mirror’ chapter and Asian male body image – adds a necessary layer to existing discussions of masculinity in physical culture.

The arguments of Muscle Works are engaging, and the material is well organized, with each chapter offering a distinct conceptual ‘logic’ of physical culture. The quality of scholarship is exceptional, drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary sources and engaging deeply with historiography and critical theory. There are no obvious omissions, though readers might desire more exploration of the implications of theatricality for contemporary fitness spaces such as CrossFit or Instagram ‘fitfluencer’ culture. The ‘Mirror’ chapter – which addresses racialized bodies and Asian male embodiment – is one of the most interesting and productive. Here, Chow’s analysis of the ‘built Asian body’ stands out as a significant intervention in discussions about race and masculinity in physical culture which has tended to omit Asian bodies.

Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity is a landmark contribution to the study of performance, physical culture and masculinity. Chow’s interdisciplinary approach repositions physical culture not only as a set of bodily practices but as a historically situated and deeply theatrical masculinity performance. It is, in short, a treasure to read and I would encourage everyone from fitness fanatics to undergraduates, graduates and professors to read it.