Men In The Gym: Risks, Crises, And Tensions InNeoliberal Masculine Self-Making In Turkey

This thesis examines gym attendance among urban white-collar men in Turkey asa neoliberal–masculine self-making project. It explores how masculine neoliberalideals unfold in practice and what kinds of embodied selves they produce. Situatingthe research within debates on post-neoliberalism, it argues that white-collar men’sturn to the gym is an effort to restore their capacity to perform neoliberal subjectivities,eroded in Turkey amid neoliberalism-in-crisis and in parallel with globaltrends. Importantly, the analysis highlights the contested nature of this project,revealing crises, risks, and tensions—from bodily limits to temporal conflicts andperformances of hybrid masculinities entailing the risk of feminization. It showsthat men navigate the contradictions within this neoliberal self-making project byadopting the very logic of neoliberalism, rather than developing a critique of it.Moreover, this neoliberal navigation itself becomes the practice through which theyreconfigure themselves as neoliberal masculine subjects. The study thus reveals that the gym practices of white-collar men exemplify the endurance of neoliberal idealsof subjectification, even amid debates about possible end of neoliberalism.