Politi-clavicular state: when political masculinity espouses protest masculinity through the male body and looksmaxxing

Abstract

What if the male body has become a political platform? This paper examines the figure of the looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular as a mediating node between political masculinity and protest masculinity within platform cultures. Drawing on scholarship on political masculinities, protest masculinities, and manospheric cultures, I conceptualize the ‘politi-clavicular state’ as a diffuse regime of bodily governance operating through aesthetics, affect, visibility, and algorithmic culture. Rather than relying on explicit ideological persuasion, Clavicular’s influence emerges through charisma, bodily credibility, and transformation narratives centered on ‘ascension,’ discipline, and masculine self-reinvention. The paper argues that looksmaxxing functions not merely as an aesthetic self-improvement practice but as a political-affective infrastructure through which masculine grievance is redirected into bodily labor, self-surveillance, and constant body-modification. Particular attention is given to the role of visuality, mimicry, and platform aesthetics in normalizing assumptions surrounding hierarchy, lookism, competitiveness, and gendered value within manospheric and incel-adjacent communities. Ultimately, the analysis demonstrates how political masculinity and protest masculinity increasingly overlap through ordinary digital practices of watching, comparing, imitating, and optimizing the body in contemporary platform societies.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. NORMA, 2026 · DOI ↗