Sizing up the ‘Dadbod’: Fitness, age and resistance in a male body type

Abstract

This article considers the cultural significance of a body type that has been largely overlooked in contemporary masculinities scholarship: the ‘Dadbod’. Defying popular culture’s typical preference for midlife invisibility, the paunchy physique of the Dadbod (often with ‘love handles’) centres a split discourse in being the object of both celebration and opprobrium. Prevalent in both celebrity and lifestyle discourse (often in contradictory ways), we interpret the Dadbod as key to a certain kind of narrative of male retreatism from the increasingly anxious ethos of bodily regulation and age transcendence. The Dadbod suggests an alternate, possibly more radical, incarnation of the ‘body positivity’ which more commonly serves as a regulation-by-another-name discourse for women.