Journal of Right-Wing Studies

Scores of male right-wing influencers offer advice to young men online on fitness, diet, and bodybuilding. Representations of the “right” kind of man draw attention to rippling muscles, square jaws, and beautifully symmetrical faces as evidence of racial superiority. This contemporary resurgence of “body fascism” in the hypersemiotized online spaces of the far right, however, remains underexamined. In this article, we analyze Man’s World magazine, a digital publication edited by the neofascist lifestyle influencer “Raw Egg Nationalist.” Through gendered semiotic and linguistic anthropological analysis of the text, we argue that hardness, understood in myriad ways, is the moral flavor of a far-right masculinist speech register that combines elements of mental fortitude, muscular strength, sexual potency, and physical beauty at the individual level with racial renewal and national invulnerability at the political level. We show how readiness for violence and the “return” to traditional masculine violence are legitimated through graftings onto scientific and academic registers, and how neofascist influencers ultimately operate within boundaries delimited by neoliberal modernity. We argue that the production of a “dissident” right-wing male subjectivity is intimately interwoven with the dissemination and use of this register.