I've been trying to make sense of the ways in which men's
bodies are visually presented in Western societies. And by that I
mean the referencing of male embodiment within both elite culture
(via, for instance, painting, sculpture, ballet, fine art
photography, etc.) and popular culture (via, for instance,
advertising, ****ography, television programming, no/minimal clothing
athletics, etc.). This has been going on for at least a decade now.
As you might imagine, it's been an uphill struggle. Although at
times it's faded, my hope remains to find online others seriously
interested in exploring the matter. As with anything else, it's
likely that greater headway could be made the more people become
involved. Are there any such individuals belong to this group? My
sense is that, at a minimum, the project requires a capacity for
intense self-reflection, as well as keen powers of observation and
interpretation.
Let me be frank: although few firm conclusions about specifics have
been reached, the overall inference that's taken shape over my years
of research is that visual culture typically MISrepresents what it
means to be a male human being. And it does so monstrously.
Although, thankfully, there are more than a few exceptions, the
depiction/performance of male embodiment strikes me as usually
radically inadequate and misleading. More often than not, our
physical makeup as men is delivered as nothing more than a pose-able
corpse. Seldom does it appear to have any connection with the living
flesh of actual men. Take muscularity--which plays a major role in
both the fine arts and mass media--as a case in point. From the
perspective of most visual representation, men's muscles are inside
our bodies, under the skin. Located within that interior space, they
are defined in terms of their anatomical functions and material
dimensions. Such muscles, both with respect to location and
definition, are muscles about which we can know theoretically and
scientifically. And, to my mind, on the whole that's a good thing.
Such muscles, however, are NOT the muscles with which men live in
the world of concrete experience.
>From the viewpoint of the male body as living flesh, one's muscles
are not under the skin but within the world. They ARE
our "situation." As such they are not anatomical functions and
material dimensions. Instead, they are human activities. I know my
muscles in and through the heavy boxes carried upstairs here and now,
in and through the embrace given to and received from a friend, in
and through the ball just thrown to my nephew. These muscles, unlike
those of the pose-able corpses occupying much of visual culture, are
not neutral or detachable from one's living environment-just as my
mind is not at this moment an interiorized mechanism more or less
locatable in my brain, but rather my present activity of thinking and
typing these words.
In much the same fa****on, the male body of living flesh never exists
in neutral space, unlike the "artistic" pose-able corpse ordinarily
shown in an homogenous expanse filled with uninfluenced and
uninfluencing objects. Don't our bodies experientially "generate"
space--more akin to the realities in Einstein's universe which move
and sculpt space rather than Newton's universe where space is the
container for things? For example, a man who's in love walks through
the world in such a way that his movements carve space into so many
places of proximity to and distance from the beloved, into areas of
warmth and intimacy, into zones of quiet whispers and shared
conversations. Even when it is the focus of a composition, a man's body
may well show up in a ****trait, or an ad, or a movie looking
essentially the same as anything else in view. My impression is
that both elite and popular cultural forms still tend to stick men as
autonomous
forms into a Newtonian universe.
In raising questions about visually representing the male body, I
acknowledge
making certain well-considered assumptions. For instance, I'm convinced
that the
meanings of any type of representation are never reducible to
subject, content, design, or technique of execution. They are not
accessible through any purely formal, stylistic or iconographic
deciphering, nor through referencing biographical details about the
image-maker/performer. Rather, they are inherently and essentially
attached to their socio-cultural and politico-economic contexts, as
well as to all the subjective and objective inter-dynamics of
production and reception. At every moment our bodies embody all our
relation****ps with others. I also assume that representing men
without clothing is (at most) only tangentially about the
biologically-given *** of maleness. Rather, it appears to always
relate to the ideologically-shaped gender of masculinity--regardless
of whatever else such representation might be about.
I would argue that, for most of its history, visual culture in the
West has been dominated by "the male ****," a distinct invention of
ancient Greece, to which the Roman Empire provided a few final
touches. Only during the last couple centuries was "the female ****"
moved to center stage. This was done so that it might serve a visual
economy suited to the power-relations of bourgeois modernity. The
iconic male bodies produced pre-nineteenth century have recently
reappeared as the compelling emblems of so-called postmodernity. In
psychoanalytic terms, it might be said that they mark "a return of the
repressed." Only now they have been "tweaked" and re-encoded with
meanings pleasing to the potentates of commodity culture (rather than
royal, civil or church powers).
It seems to me that the ideologically-sanctioned representations of
the male gender basically depend upon two generic archetypes: the
heroic, masterful and controlling mesomorph; the easy-going,
yielding, sleek-bodied androgyne. It might be helpful to think of
these as (on the one hand) the Farnese Hercules--Michelangelo's David-
-Sylvester Stalone's characters--the Calvin Klein Olympian type and
(on the other hand) the Hellenic Faun--St. Sebastian--Leonardo
DiCaprio's characters--the Calvin Klein waif type. Although these
archetypes may be interpreted along the lines of active-passive and
macho-fem, there is solid historical foundation for considering it
crude oversimplification to see this distinction in necessarily
homo*****c terms.
In fact, one of the primary means of legitimizing "the male ****" as
ideal form has been, and continues to be, the reining in of its
*****cism by de-cor****ealizing masculinity. Since the dominant
imagery of the male body routinely strips men of their bodiliness,
Ideal Man possesses an etherealized body--emptied of tactile,
affective and kinesthetic experiences--and armored in "****ity." This
is as true today as it was during much of the heyday of "the male
****" (such as Renaissance Italy, Revolutionary France, Third Reich
Germany). My reading of history makes me wonder if "idealized"
imagery of the male body isn't more likely than not to coincide with
intensification of homophobia and misogyny.
Inspired by the women's movement, there's been a flurry of activity
over the last few decades aimed at de-constructing the ways women's
bodies have been represented in visual culture and re-constructing
new ways of doing so. The men's movement (admittedly much younger and
weaker) has accomplished comparatively little along these lines for
the male counterpart. In fact, most of the advances of which I'm
aware arise out of disparate disciplines like cultural anthropology
and media studies. My mental health practice has of late centered on
men's wellness. (None of my clients are mentally ill; they are
ordinary men like you and me who seek counseling due to not untypical
stresses.) The lives of most of these men are in various ways
cramped, misshaped, or otherwise damaged by the dominant male
imagery. I realize that I too (largely unwittingly) have struggled
against its pernicious influence.
So, please consider this posting an invitation to any of you who
prefer to look beneath the surfaces of the prevailing visual
representations of the male body and share with us what you find. If
you'll pardon my bluntness, I've no desire to trade in trivialities
and stereotypes with those still under the spell of the dominant
image. So, are there freethinkers among us who care to speak up?
Cheers,
Dan
For a listing of some of the writings made use of in my research
to date, see
"The Male Body in Western Culture" at
http://hometown.aol.com/heis****/myhomepage/business.html
For some of my views on various aspects of this subject, you're
invited to check out any of the following:
"Art Comes from the Body" at
http://hometown.aol.com/heis****/myhomepage/howto.html
"The Male Body: All Over in the Altogether" at
http://hometown.aol.com/heis****/myhomepage/writing.html
(the top section, "Basic Reference Points," deals with the sources
and a typology of male **** imagery; the middle section, "Yesterday"
concerns the traditional and modernist fine arts; the final
section, "Today," addresses the unclothed male body in contem****ary
popular culture and mass media.)
"Ideal Dead or Dead Ideal" at
http://hometown.aol.com/heis****/myhomepage/beautytips.html
"Thinking about Human ****dness" at
http://hometown.aol.com/heis****/myhomepage/garden.html
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