The Body as Battleground
A Marxist-Feminist Perspective on Fascism
October 13, 2026
IN 2022, Tucker Carlson, a far-right political commentator known for popularizing The Great Replacement Theory, released a documentary titled The End of Men. The documentary takes as its subject matter the putative end of Western civilization, which it occasionally equates with the end of humanity as such, and which is said to be precipitated by the decline of manhood, virility, and physical health.
This decline, Tucker Carlson explains, is evidenced by the reduction in sperm counts and testosterone production and an increase in erectile dysfunction and “man boobs.” The causal logic is spelled out in the documentary’s opening text: “In ages past, a cycle began. Hard times made strong men. Strong men made good times. Good times made weak men.”
What are these “good times” that have supposedly emasculated the American nation’s men? The answer appears to be a combination of state-sponsored welfare programs, feminist and LGBT rights movements, and the nefarious plotting of a globalist elite. Halfway through the documentary, a voiceover from the British far-right conspiracy theorist known as “Raw Egg Nationalist” explains that a globalist elite is destroying nations by poisoning the air, food, and water.
This plot has created fat, sick, isolated, and demoralized communities that are easy to control and manipulate, pose no threat to globalist rule, and can therefore be “milked for as much economic value as possible.” The globalist conspiracy is represented within the documentary by powerful “chemical and pharmaceutical industries.” These corporations, we are told, are “waging chemical warfare on the country and your body,” which has resulted in smaller penises, reduced sperm mobility, low testosterone, and the “demasculinization” of the male fetus.
The Far Right’s Corporeal Program
The appropriate response to globalism’s destruction of the body and the nation is, naturally for Tucker Carlson, a white supremacist politics of Christian nationalism. But how will nationalism rebuild the physical strength required for the restoration of Western civilizational superiority? Viewers are offered a range of solutions.
Carlson first introduces the so-called bro scientists. These men conduct various self-experimentations on their bodies in pursuit of regaining manhood and virility. For some, this includes eliminating plastics and fragrances, adopting meat-based diets, and taking ice baths as part of a broader program of “testosterone-maxxing” (or T-maxxing, for short).
T-maxxing, of course, anticipates the current “looksmaxxing” trend, a self-improvement practice popular among young men that involves maximizing one’s physical attractiveness as the primary means of acquiring wealth and women. Other bro scientists featured in the documentary claim that aging itself is a condition to be militated against and the body something to be repaired, which echoes the obsession with immortality among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Bryan Johnson, who spends upwards of $2 million a year on his “Don’t Die” protocol.
Viewers are also introduced to bodybuilders dispensing “red-pill fitness information” to the masses. These influencers claim to be channeling the ancient wisdom of “ancestral” diets, which usually involve consuming raw eggs and liver, red meat, bone marrow, animal testicles, and unpasteurized cheese. Similar diets have since been advertised by a range of influential figures on the far right, from the sophist Jordan Peterson to the popular online fitness guru known as “Liver King.”
Although this 2022 documentary is mostly focused on men, women do make an appearance as well. Tucker Carlson introduces an influencer named Tigerlily, who speaks out against the media’s supposed demonization of “natural” female activities, from breastfeeding through birth control to gestation.
The themes of this segment resonate with the tradwife movement that had just started taking off on social media around the same time as the documentary’s production. This movement features modern-day housewives who promote domesticity, extreme pro-natalism, and traditional gender roles to their (predominantly young and female) followers.
The documentary only features white influencers. The bodies the Christian nationalist far-right venerates are constitutively racialized as white. The bro scientists inherit eugenic legacies of the early twentieth century, including the equation of physical fitness with racial fitness, the preoccupation with degeneration, and the fantasy of a vital “Western” population corrupted by modernity (that is, “the good times”). Meanwhile, the dimensions, ratios, and bone structures the looksmaxxers chase encode a northern European phenotype as biological optimum.
There are numerous invocations throughout Tucker Carlson’s documentary of a war on bodies, virility, and fertility that threaten to wipe out the entire human race. The documentary illustrates how the body converges with contemporary processes of fascization: the weak body is figured both as the result and agent of civilizational decline and the strong body as the result and agent of civilizational renewal. We can reconstruct the documentary’s millenarian political worldview in three steps:
- A crisis in the reproduction of the natural order (read: capitalism) is …
- Threatening the biological reproduction of the human (read: white) race that …
- Can only be prevented through an ethno-nationalist politics aimed at the restoration of physical strength and virility (read: patriarchal authority).
By installing the body at the heart of their political program, the far right is able to speak directly to widespread anxieties and resentments that concern embodiment, sexuality, and gender. These include atomization and (male) loneliness, sexual dissatisfaction, fertility issues, pharmaceutical profiteering, poor nutritional standards, disinformation about vaccinations, moral panics about gender (dis)identification—the list goes on.
Inadequacy of Economism
As usual, where liberals have left a vacuum, the far right has been able to colonize in bad faith issues that should be part of a left program. You often hear it suggested in progressive circles that young men and women are susceptible to the fantasies of tradwives and the manosphere due to their economic precarity.
This crisis stems from capitalism’s own failure to sustain the infrastructures required to meet our embodied needs and desires.
Young women have not experienced their “freedom” to participate in formal wage labor as emancipation, which has alienated them from mainstream narratives of neoliberal feminism and has left them vulnerable to fantasies of traditional domesticity. And young men are no longer able to fulfill heteronormative roles as breadwinners and providers through wage labor, which has left them vulnerable to seduction by manosphere grifters and con artists selling alternative routes to normative manhood through looksmaxxing, biohacking, or bro science.
While these explanations are certainly true, the focus on underemployment, affordability crises, or falling real wages risks veering into an overly simplistic, economistic explanation of the appeal of fascistic fantasies. What is being sold to men and women by the far right is, after all, not (or at least not primarily) economic security, but rather a solution to their affective and embodied desires for connection, care, intimacy, sociality, health, and sex.
Numerous commentators on the far right, including Alberto Toscano, Judith Butler, Richard Seymour, and Dagmar Herzog, have pointed out that contemporary fascist politics condenses around the private concerns of embodiment and sexuality, returning to Michel Foucault’s aphoristic claim in The History of Sexuality that the body is “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power.”1See Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2023); Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (London: Penguin Books, 2024); Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization (London and New York: Verso, 2024); and Dagmar Herzog and Alberto Toscano, The New Fascist Body (Berlin: Wirklichkeit Books, 2025). The question is why? What is it about the body that makes it such a potent site for the incitement of fascist sentiments and passions?
Rather than searching for an answer in psychoanalytic statements about the nature of embodiment itself (productive as that line of inquiry may be), this essay turns to Marxist feminism for insight. My wager is that the appeal of fascist politics lies in the current crisis of social reproduction, a crisis that stems from capitalism’s own failure to sustain the infrastructures required to meet our embodied needs and desires.
As Kim Moody has recently argued on the webpage of this journal, we are facing something more than just a crisis of “affordability.”2Kim Moody, “Affordability or Crisis of Social Reproduction?” Spectre, April 21, 2026, doi.org/10.63478/Z0n39kro. An analysis of contemporary processes of fascization requires a broader view of the systemic crisis of working-class reproduction facing post-industrial societies.
Capitalism’s Transformation of Social Relations
If the far right has managed to center the body in its political program with such success, that is because there is something there to press on. To understand what that something is, we have to take a longer view of the social transformations that capitalism has wrought over the past half century.
During this period, many rich countries stopped being places that mainly produce industrial goods and instead became places that mainly service people. As part of this transition from an industrial to a post-industrial service economy, an enormous share of the activity that keeps human beings alive—including feeding, cleaning, raising children, tending the sick and the old, soothing, listening, keeping company—was taken out of the home and shifted onto the market. Many tasks that might have once been done for free within the home became increasingly market-mediated.
An enormous share of the activity that keeps human beings alive was taken out of the home and shifted onto the market.
They are now sold back to us by private nurseries, care agencies, meal-delivery apps, wellness studios, therapist offices, and AI companions. Some of these activities (which Marxist feminists call social reproductive labor) are still done in the family, but increasingly for a wage. Much of it has migrated into private enterprise. Wherever it takes place, this labor tends to be poorly paid and precarious and falls disproportionately on racialized and feminized workers.
This reorganization of work entailed a reorganization of gender and sexuality. The single-earner household model—which functioned as the bourgeois (white, heteronormative, and respectable) ideal within the industrial economy—has given way to a dual-earner household as the norm.
Women entered waged work in their millions, and with that transformation came real and hard-won freedoms, both for women, and, more broadly, for gender and sexual minorities who could finally loosen their dependence on the heterosexual family as the only viable unit of survival. But those freedoms were won at a price, namely, a deeper, more total dependence on wage labor for survival.
As the unpaid labor that once anchored people in fixed gender roles shrank, gender itself began to feel less like nature and more like an external constraint or imposition. This is the kernel of truth in every panicked far-right tirade about the “denaturalization” of the traditional family. What they experience as the collapse of a sacred tradition is, in the first instance, capital dissolving its own former foundations.
The service economy is extraordinarily good at forging new markets by reaching ever deeper into the most intimate registers of human need and desire. It promises us quick access to connection, belonging, care, recognition, and desire itself.
Arlie Hochschild saw this coming decades ago when she coined the phrase “emotional labor.”3Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983). She used it to describe how service workers are required to manage their own feelings to produce a positive feeling in someone else (usually a customer or client), like when a nurse soothes an anxious patient or a hotel receptionist patiently deals with a demanding guest.
Nevertheless, while the service economy has developed countless innovations to pierce and cater to our most private needs and desires, it has left us more atomized and disaffected than before. Service workers are underpaid and report high levels of burn-out, and consumers find that the products and experiences sold to them fail to create an enduring sense of wellbeing. The more we are sold care, intimacy, wellness, and connection, the more we have become lonely, anxious, and depressed.
The Erosion of Reproductive Infrastructures
This whole arrangement is being propelled into an ever-deepening crisis. Capitalism has eroded reproductive infrastructures from both ends at once. On one side, it has corroded many nonmarket structures of social reproduction, including the kinship networks, extended families, neighborhoods, and community institutions that used to absorb the work of keeping people alive on a daily and intergenerational basis.
On the other, it has refused to invest properly in the new market structures that have replaced them within the service economy, because—and we will come back to this—there is so little profit to be had there. The result, Alyssa Battistoni has recently pointed out, is that care is costly and scarce while manufactured goods are cheap and abundant.4Alyssa Battistoni, “Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction,” American Political Science Review 119, no. 3, (2025): 1213–14.
This is what many commentators have started calling “the care crisis.” It is the real problem to which fascism offers its fake solutions, from the tradwife who promises to restore the unpaid feminine labor that capital no longer underwrites to the influencer who sells raw liver as a cure for a malaise that is, at its root, social.
Where does the crisis come from? Why does capitalism fail to sustain the (market and nonmarket) reproductive infrastructures that it depends on for its own reproduction? The first thing to say is that capital is not a subject sitting in a control room arranging the world to its advantage. This is not a conspiracy, however much the Raw Egg Nationalists of the world would like it to be one.
Capitalism is a contradictory process with contradictory needs. It needs a healthy, educated, cared-for workforce, but it also needs to drive down the cost of producing one. It therefore at times undermines its own conditions of reproduction. Nancy Fraser has recently used the word “cannibalism” to describe this feature.5Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It. (London and New York: Verso, 2022).
Capital devours the social and ecological foundations it stands on, like a creature eating its own legs. The reproductive crisis is, accordingly, not an accident or an external shock. It is capital consuming the very thing it depends on.
But this still leaves a question open. Why hasn’t the commodification of care resolved capitalism’s contradiction by making the business of producing a workforce profitable? Why is reproductive labor, specifically, so resistant to being made profitable? Why can’t capital simply industrialize it the way it industrialized weaving or steelmaking?
The Body’s Resistance to Subsumption by Capital
Here recent Marxist feminist writing gives an answer: because of the body. The service economy, as we have seen, is fundamentally about drawing the human body and its complex needs and desires more completely into market relations. In reproductive work the body is both the instrument of the labor and its product.
It is the thing that does the caring and the thing being cared for. But the body, it turns out, is a tricky raw material for capital. Alyssa Battistoni and Gabriel Winant have both recently argued that the anemic growth and stagnant productivity of post-industrial service economies trace directly to the body’s resistance to subsumption by capital.6See Alyssa Battistoni, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025); and Gabriel Winant, “The Baby and the Bathwater: Class Analysis and Class Formation after Deindustrialization,” Historical Materialism 32 no. 2 (2024): 3–30.
The work of social reproduction stays stubbornly low in productivity because the body unfolds according to a logic capital cannot control or override. You cannot rationalize, mechanize, or speed up the indeterminate, idiosyncratic, around-the-clock business of tending to a living organism.
The body’s needs, rhythms, vulnerabilities, and opacities are exactly what evade the forms of standardization that generate fat profit margins.
The work of social reproduction stays stubbornly low in productivity because the body unfolds according to a logic capital cannot control or override. You cannot rationalize, mechanize, or speed up the indeterminate, idiosyncratic, around-the-clock business of tending to a living organism.
You cannot, for example, “automate” looking after an infant. A baby has to be held, fed, and watched twenty-four hours a day, and no consultant has ever shortened that. You cannot make a wound close faster by deskilling the nurse or compress a course of physical therapy by intensifying the labor. Medicine heals at the body’s pace, not the market’s.
To put this point plainly, capital cannot master the body. Its needs, rhythms, vulnerabilities, and opacities are exactly what evade the forms of standardization that generate the fat profit margins we find in manufacturing.
Which is why those complex embodied needs get pushed out of the wage and back into the unpaid, feminized, racialized relations of dependency where they can only be met, if at all, for free. As market solutions fail to meet our bodily needs, they once again have to be met within nonmarket structures like the family, which have been left strained, or within carceral institutions like the prison, which have expanded.
The body’s resistance to capitalist rationalization is not the only domain in which fantasies of bodily mastery have repeatedly failed. Trans theorists have, in recent years, been describing the body in remarkably similar terms as something that resists attempts to remake it from above.
In Histories of the Transgender Child, Jules Gill-Peterson shows that it was the medical establishment, not queer people, who first dreamed of the body as infinitely plastic.7Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). The child’s body was imagined within the mid-century clinic as a raw material that physicians could mold, correct, and improve by an act of will, thereby enabling the body’s instrumentalization in the service of medical science.
This plastic potential was, crucially, a property of whiteness. Racialized children were denied even the fantasy of malleability. In Hermaphrodite Logic, Juliana Gleeson sharpens the argument further.8Juliana Gleeson, Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation, (London and New York: Verso, 2025). The very vocabulary we now associate with academic feminism (like social construction, socialization, and assignment) was actually forged by mid-century sexologists to justify a thoroughly conservative project.
Doctors and parents alike agreed that gender was socially constructed, and on exactly that basis they authorized brutal surgical interventions on intersex newborns, bringing the child’s anatomy into line with cultural expectations. Within medical discourse, the idea of the body as something actively constructed legitimized attempts to correct and optimize the body toward a binary norm. But, both Gleeson and Gill-Peterson’s studies show, the body resisted, creating repeated crises for physicians’ and psychologists’ categories of sex and gender.
Just as capital tries and fails to master the body, so too does the medical establishment try and fail to master the body. And every political project built on the fantasy that the body can be perfectly produced to specification will run aground too.
Here we can close the circuit back to the contemporary far right and sketch a new three-step view of the relationship between the body and social decline:
- Capital fails to fully subsume the human body.
- That failure then becomes the engine of an intensifying reproductive crisis.
- The reproductive crisis is what fascist body politics feeds on by offering counterfeit solutions to real problems that capital’s own dynamic has generated.
The seduction of fascism, to put it simply, is that it promises to solve the problem of the body without solving capitalism. That is the whole offer, and it is being sold in a thousand variations to anyone who spends long enough scrolling.
The Body’s Social and Historical Character
What, then, do we actually do about the body? For any Marxist, the starting point must be a recognition of the social and historical character of the human body. The body and all its needs and desires are socially mediated, all the way down.
There is no pre-social or natural body—one that we have lost, or that capitalist modernity has corrupted—waiting to be recovered. Following Søren Mau’s recent reconstruction of Marx and Engels’s writings on the body, we can say that the transhistorical truth of the body is its mediation, which is to say that human beings do not and cannot meet their needs except through other people, through some particular arrangement of social relations into which they were born.9Søren Mau. 2026. “Karl Marx and the Body: Towards an Eco-Marxist Philosophical Anthropology,” Body & Society 32, no. 1, (2026): 3–27.
Human beings must actively transform their material surroundings into means of subsistence in order to survive—and there are countless different ways of doing so. This indeterminacy, as Mau neatly expresses it, gives us human historicity itself: the sequence of different mediations of our metabolism with nature that have allowed us to reproduce ourselves as a species.
A socialist politics of the body has to be a politics of invention: the search for new social relations capable of meeting human need.
Our question, then, cannot be about the “natural” way to organize the human body, as the body’s relationship to nature is always mediated by particular social relations. The question is only ever which social relations, at whose direction, and in whose interest. A socialist politics of the body, then, has to be a politics of invention: the search for new social relations capable of meeting human needs and desires in a way that allows for the full flourishing of every person.
What those relations should actually look like is not for any of us to decide in advance. Once we have acknowledged that embodied life can be other than what it currently is (and that there are almost endless possibilities for what it can be), the truly demanding question is what it would mean to collectively determine and take responsibility for the ways we choose to satisfy our needs.
A Body Politics Worth Fighting For
I want to end this essay with a provocation. If abandoning the notion of a “natural” body is a prerequisite for emancipatory politics, then I believe that we might actually be able to find a utopian kernel buried within some of the manosphere formations this essay has been criticizing.
Looksmaxxing and biohacking embrace market-mediated strategies for optimizing the body, including various pharmaceutical, hormonal, surgical, and chemical interventions. For looksmaxxers and biohackers, transgressing the natural limits of the body is, in many ways, the point.
Body optimization practices therefore often abandon the fetish of the “natural” body altogether. The goal is not to revolt against capitalist modernity and return to a natural body, but to apply the logics of capitalist modernity to the body by treating it as a portfolio, an investment opportunity, a managed asset. This is most strikingly evident when their followers rank the “Sexual Market Value” (terminology borrowed from the incel movement) of their bodies to judge how successfully they have been optimized.
This hyper-commodified body politics inadvertently demolishes the presupposition of many of their fellow manosphere influencers—namely, that there exists a natural body whose integrity is violated by market mediation. But while looksmaxxers and biohackers embrace the notion that the human body is produced socially, there is a limit to what looksmaxxing can produce, and that limit is set by the body itself.
Consider the streamer who performs online as Clavicular, and who has lately taken to appearing alongside the likes of Nick Fuentes and Jake Paul. He is instructive precisely because he is at once an avatar of looksmaxxing’s promise of total self-optimization and a creature of the fascist manosphere scene.
By his own account he began injecting testosterone at fourteen, later moving on to steroids, to meth as an appetite suppressant, to “bonesmashing,” to planned jaw surgery. He has treated his body as an optimization problem with no terminal state.
And yet, in April 2026, on a livestream in a Miami mall, in front of thousands of viewers, his body gave out. He slurred and stopped responding, in what officials treated as a suspected overdose. His long-term health has since been a running theme among observers.
The hormonal dysregulation, the cardiovascular strain, the real questions about his fertility that trail years of self-administered hormones, and the psychological toll of treating his existence as a problem to be perpetually solved, are not unfortunate side-effects of a project that is still being perfected. They are, as we have already seen, expressions of the body’s fundamental resistance to systematic commodification. The total subsumption of the body into the logic of capital, which looksmaxxing culture promises, is precisely the thing capital cannot achieve.
So, if we are serious about abandoning the idea of a natural body, we should note that this does not automatically bring about a more emancipatory politics of the body. A world in which we collectively determine how to meet our embodied needs and desires in a way that is fruitful for all has to be built.
As part of this process, we can be honest that many of the practices appropriated by tradwives and looksmaxxers are not objectionable in themselves. Looking after your physical health, spending an afternoon cooking something delicious, and finding ways to feel stronger and more alive in your own skin are all good things. They are, arguably, among the things most worth doing.
The problem isn’t the activities themselves, but the social relations the activities are embedded in, which turn them into an imperative—freighted with the fascist demand for perfectibility and racial superiority—to generate capitalist wealth. The proper question is what these activities would look like outside of capitalist social relations, if they were pursued for the sake of human flourishing rather than accumulation.
Marx and Engels, in one of their more lighthearted moments, imagined communism as a society in which you might hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner, without ever becoming a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critic. Now picture the following day as one in which you might work out in the morning, cook a long lunch with people you love in the afternoon, have unhurried sex in the early evening, and argue about politics late into the night, without having to ask whether any of it was making you more attractive, more productive, or more profitable. That might be a body politics worth fighting for. ×
Notes & References
- See Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism, and the Politics of Crisis (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2023); Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (London: Penguin Books, 2024); Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization (London and New York: Verso, 2024); and Dagmar Herzog and Alberto Toscano, The New Fascist Body (Berlin: Wirklichkeit Books, 2025).
- Kim Moody, “Affordability or Crisis of Social Reproduction?” Spectre, April 21, 2026, doi.org/10.63478/Z0n39kro.
- Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983).
- Alyssa Battistoni, “Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction,” American Political Science Review 119, no. 3, (2025): 1213–14.
- Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It. (London and New York: Verso, 2022).
- See Alyssa Battistoni, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2025); and Gabriel Winant, “The Baby and the Bathwater: Class Analysis and Class Formation after Deindustrialization,” Historical Materialism 32 no. 2 (2024): 3–30.
- Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
- Juliana Gleeson, Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation, (London and New York: Verso, 2025).
- Søren Mau. 2026. “Karl Marx and the Body: Towards an Eco-Marxist Philosophical Anthropology,” Body & Society 32, no. 1, (2026): 3–27.