‘There is no Zyzz’: the subcultural celebrity and bodywork project of Aziz Shavershian

ABSTRACT

Aziz ‘Zyzz’ Shavershian was an Australian bodybuilder and internet micro-celebrity who died tragically at the age of 22. Shavershian was famous for his body and his internet-based practices of self-representation. This article will examine Shavershian’s practices of representation in terms of his online persona, ‘Zyzz’, as a celebrity bodywork project. We argue that ‘Zyzz’ is the aspirational ‘image’ that Shavershian himself embodied and expressed. Followers and fans of ‘Zyzz’ do not simply want his ‘body’, they want to live his aspirational bodywork project. We engage with and critically analyse the bodywork project as a unique discursive object characterised by the circulation of affect and enacted through embodied activity. Of interest to us is thinking beyond the individual Aziz Shavershian to appreciating ‘Zyzz’ as a shared homosocial project that we map in terms of an ‘aspirational’ trajectory out of the conditions of ‘protest masculinity’. The resonant singularities of the ‘Zyzz’ project circulate in this homosocial cultural context as thresholds of qualitative transformation: there is a transformation of the ‘worked’ body, a mobilisation of the ‘enthusiastic’ body, and a valorisation of the ‘respected’ body.

KEYWORDS:

• masculinity
• social media
• bodywork
• homosociality
• enthusiasm
• subcultural celebrity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. No exhaustive account of the emergence of the ‘Aesthetics’ scene exists, but it is possible to discern a discursive context for engaging with the ‘Zyzz’ subcultural celebrity persona as a measure of subcultural valorisation by examining the material trace of his presence on forums. A detailed search of threads on bodybuilding.com forums started by Zyzz or about Zyzz indicates that he joined in 2005 and his profile developed in 2007 and 2008. He became a celebrity as the Aesthetics scene developed around him from 2008 through to what is arguably the peak in popularity in 2010. Many threads have been deleted from the forums, but many threads remain that discuss the pros and cons of Zyzz’s ‘Aesthetic’ practice that were posted in 2010. The Aesthetics scene has an international following but Zyzz’s crew were all from south-western Sydney, Australia, and were often referred to as the ‘Aussie Aesthetics Crew’.

2. See discussion of ‘singularity’ and ‘threshold’ in Fuller (2015b, p. 76).

3. In early 2016 a new magazine titled Aesthetics was published in Australia. It is largely produced by Aesthetics scene member and designer ‘Phil Ray Ho’. A substantial analysis of the magazine cannot be included here, but it is worth pointing out that all of the functional qualities of mid and late-twentieth-century magazines examined by Moorhouse (1991) and Fuller (2013) to serve as part of the discursive infrastructure of a subcultural scene have been reproduced here in print form.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Glen Fuller

Glen Fuller is an assistant professor of communications and journalism and member of the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra. His three main research interests involve the media cultures of enthusiast discourse; the episodic reconfigurations of discourse within media events through the interaction of digital media and platforms; and critical accounts of technological innovation and the pedagogical implications of ‘permanent disruption’. Glen is also the course convenor of journalism at the University of Canberra and an editor of The Fibreculture Journal.

Catherine Page Jeffery

Catherine Page Jeffery is a PhD student and associate lecturer at the University of Canberra. Her research is concerned with how parents manage and negotiate their children’s digital media use, as well as parental anxieties in relation to the sexualised self-representation practices of teenage girls online.