The social sciences have developed a keen interest in the body over the last three decades. Initially viewed as ‘a social skin’ (Turner 2012) on which society inscribes its authority and notions of masculinity and femininity, recent scholarship has shifted attention to the body’s potential to influence individuals and societies through its material agency (Mol 2002). During the same period, anthropologists and other social scientists alike have increasingly focused on competitive and recreational forms of athletic activity in order to shed light upon how societies produce and stabilize gender notions and what it means to be masculine (Messner 2002). This scholarship has emphasized that the employment and alteration of human bodies through what Marcel Mauss called ‘techniques of the body’ (1935) speak to larger contemporary political, social, and economic debates (Besnier and Brownell 2012). Realizing that a theory of the body must be complemented by a methodology that does not shy away from ‘deploying the body as tool of inquiry and vector of knowledge’ (Wacquant 2004: viii), it is also unsurprising that social scientists took boxing lessons (Lockwood 2015, Hopkinson 2022), mastered Olympic weightlifting (Sherouse 2016), or engaged in capoeira (Downey 2005).
Bodybuilding, fitness, and weightlifting have drawn the particular attention of scholars interested in understanding how neoliberal logics of self-perfection reflect in athletic activities. Katie Rose Hejtmanek, for instance, suggests that the rise of functional fitness in the US gym landscape and the accompanying practices of ‘self-governance’ and ‘auditing’ of one’s training progress were a direct reaction of athletes’ fears of a ‘pending death world […], where a racialized Other is intent on bringing death, or zombie apocalypse, by upending the current world order’ (2020: 872). Focusing on the specific role of masculinities, Alan M. Klein’s ethnography of bodybuilders along the US-American West Coast, Little Big Men. Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender Construction, proposes that male weightlifters transform themselves into ‘bodily fortresses’ to protect their ‘vulnerability inside’ (1993: 3). Feeling under siege by feminism and a crisis of masculinity, the bodybuilders interviewed by Klein had turned away from an increasingly feminist society and a ruthless capitalistic economy to focus on, and achieve full control over, their bodies.
Though I shy away from transferring such psychologically inspired diagnoses to the members of the No Mercy Gym, it cannot be denied that male migrants’ interest in increasing their muscle mass emerged against the background of Pipeline’s geography of urban exclusion and men’s experience of pressure caused by what they perceived as women’s distortion of the narrative of the male breadwinner. In the No Mercy Gym, migrant men’s masculinity was not evaluated by economic criteria. Members were not interested in how much money others provided for their families or spent on their girlfriends. Rather, a man’s masculinity depended on the size of his biceps, the weight he could push off his chest, and his willingness to persevere despite physical discomfort and pain. Working out in the No Mercy Gym thus constituted an opportunity to critique notions of masculinity that exclusively focused on material wealth.
However, to the regret of some members of the gym, the size of a man’s body did not always correlate with his strength. While walking to a local restaurant that served huge portions of ‘natural’ and ‘libido boosting’ porridge in traditional calabashes, I shared a story with Carl that illustrated how difficult it was to rely on physical size alone if one wanted to estimate a man’s strength and masculinity. The day before, Arthur and I had visited a gym that Carl had shown us a couple of weeks before. While warming up in a corner of the gym, we saw a muscular guy with big arms and a mighty chest who appeared to be using heavy weights in an exercise known as ‘rowing’, during which an athlete bends over until his torso is parallel to the floor and pulls a loaded barbell to his stomach. As Arthur felt curious and intimidated at the same time, I pushed him to ask the guy if he could try to lift the weight. Arthur went to the guy, discussed something with him, grabbed the barbell, and lifted it easily. Though he had laughed heartily about the incident, Carl responded more seriously after I had finished telling the story: ‘That is unproportionate. You shouldn’t be big and weak, being strong and small, that’s better, like Bill. Bill just needs to eat more, but being big and weak, that is not good.’ While the guy Arthur and I had seen in the gym appeared strong because of his big and muscled body but actually lacked strength, Bill (a member of the No Mercy Gym) was slight but, as we all knew, definitely strong. Asking Carl about what he thought caused such paradoxical appearances, he replied that the muscles of some men were ‘big but soft’ and that ‘you can’t expect results without energy. They use steroids and supplements.’
Disapproving of injecting steroids and taking supplements, Carl emphasized the need to train hard and eat natural food rich in protein like
omena (Dholuo, ‘freshwater sardines’), porridge (Kiswahili,
uji), eggs, groundnuts,
mboga kienyeji (Kiswahili, ‘indigenous vegetables’), and
ugali (Kiswahili, ‘stiff grain porridge’).
1 Carl also rejected taking drugs for minor illnesses such as coughing, light fever, or headaches. After telling him that I had tested positive for COVID-19 and wondered whether I had been infected in the gym, he remained calm and urged me to take garlic, lemon, ginger, and honey. Carl’s training philosophy was equally simple and straightforward. Members should arrive at the gym after breakfast and focus on the major compound lifts such as bench presses, squats, rows, and deadlifts. After lifting as much weight as possible, they should go home, eat well, and rest. For a strong and big body, men only had to eat plenty of good food, be patient, and persevere through painful, long, and exhausting exercise sessions. ‘No pain, no gain’, as members of the No Mercy Gym
reminded each other if someone complained about sore muscles or any other discomfort.
Carl contrasted his training philosophy with the one he believed most weightlifters in other gyms adhered to. His philosophy emphasized a balanced diet, natural strength, health, and a simple but physically and mentally taxing training that focused on the development of the body’s larger muscles. The style of training he criticized was determined by the attempt to achieve a specific physical appearance characterized by a big chest, defined abdominal muscles, and muscular arms, the so-called ‘Johnny Bravo look’ (figure 9). To achieve such results quickly, and without effort, many men, according to Carl, embraced the use of machines and, in addition to supplements such as protein shakes and creatine, the use of steroids allegedly illegally imported into Kenya by Cuban doctors who had arrived in the country as part of a health cooperation agreement between Kenya and Cuba.
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Figure 9 Sign giving direction to the Phenomenal Gym. Cartoonish figure with emphasized arm, chest and abdominal muscles, the so-called ‘Johnny Bravo look’. Photograph by the author, 2 February 2022.
In contrast to the Georgian weightlifters studied by Perry Sherouse (2016) who classify bodies and the techniques used to create them as either male or female, Carl distinguished between two types of male bodies resulting from different training philosophies. While Carl’s training regime could lead to small bodies that were hard and strong but would become big if the athlete started eating more, the other training regime produced big bodies that were weak and soft and would become wrinkled if the athlete stopped training. A man who looked strong might thus be a weakling trying to impress women without putting his energy into hard and painful training. In other words, a man’s outer appearance was an inaccurate measure of his body’s actual strength. Being just big did not prove a man’s masculinity. In as much as fast wealth depended on the willingness to sacrifice one’s own or the reproductive power of relatives, taking steroids furthermore damaged men’s virility. While working out with heavy weights was seen as increasing sexual stamina and performance, taking steroids reduced men’s ability to perform sexually. Supplements, in other words, caused men to be ‘flat’.
Local notions of masculinity, and the bodies into which these were inscribed, grappled with what Achille Mbembe has characterized as the postcolonial decoupling of the sign from the thing it signifies (2001). While the economic success of young politicians and landlords with large potbellies did not signify decades of hard work but merely their capacity to gain wealth through illicit and occult means, the big but soft and weak muscles of steroid-users evoked the physical strength and sexual energy of a massive male physique without actually embodying these properties. According to my male interlocutors, it was women’s naivety and thirst for short-term gratification that made them fall for such deceptions, even though the material excesses of fake muscles and fast money did not signify anything real and sustainable. Rather, they were based on ‘summoning up the world of shade’ (Mbembe 2001: 145) populated by members of the satanic Illuminati who sacrificed children and suspicious doctors who sold steroids that led to erectile dysfunction. Working out in accordance with Carl’s training philosophy forestalled such a loss of reproductive agency. In contrast to the injection of steroids, training in the No Mercy Gym even offered recreational weightlifters an experience of increased control over their lives by giving their days form (Sheng, ‘plan, agenda’) and a proper structure. Instead of promising fast results, Carl continuously advised members to accept that the goal of having a massively muscular body that not only looked but actually was powerful and strong could only be achieved after years of hard work.