Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Hard Right: Muscular Rhetoric and the New Nationalism

Hard Right: Muscular Rhetoric and the New Nationalism

Kelly, Casey Ryan

Hardcover

General ReferenceGeneral Political ScienceMen's Studies

ISBN10: 0814216218
ISBN13: 9780814216217
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: Aug 19 2026
Pages: 206
Weight: 0.99
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

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--reveals 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.

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