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Reconstructing the Male Body

Ina Zweiniger‐Bargielowska

in Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain 1880-1939

This chapter explores the reconstruction of the male body against the background of wartime casualties and revelations of extensive unfitness by the National Service Medical Boards. Men's military ... More

This chapter explores the reconstruction of the male body against the background of wartime casualties and revelations of extensive unfitness by the National Service Medical Boards. Men's military fitness was linked with their usefulness as workers and citizens and the healthy and beautiful A1 citizen was held up as an ideal. Apart from stunted unfit men, obese sedentary businessman represented an alternative countertype. They were urged to reduce to regain hegemonic masculinity. The iconic status of the fit male body became a powerful national symbol during the interwar years and the chapter discusses the relationship between fascism and the physical culture movement. There were competing conceptions of masculinity. Most physical culturalists eschewed the hyper‐masculine misogynist fascist man and they embraced greater companionship between the sexes. Men's dress reformers extolled the new female fashions as hygienic and attributed men's resistance to change their attire to vanity.Less

The condom, gender and sexual difference

Nicole Vitellone

in Object Matters: Condoms, Adolescence and Time

Chapter 5 showed how theories of porn have inadvertently naturalised the male body and heterosexuality as primary and authentic. This chapter shows how, in the context of AIDS, sociologists and ... More

Chapter 5 showed how theories of porn have inadvertently naturalised the male body and heterosexuality as primary and authentic. This chapter shows how, in the context of AIDS, sociologists and social theorists have similarly produced a naturalisation of the male body and male heterosexuality in their interpretation of the condom in the context of AIDS.Less

Masculinity and the Absent Presence of the Male Body

Diane Railton and Paul Watson

in Music Video and the Politics of Representation

This chapter examines the very different status and function of the body in the construction of masculinity. It is suggested that it is precisely the absence of the sexualised male body that not only ... More

This chapter examines the very different status and function of the body in the construction of masculinity. It is suggested that it is precisely the absence of the sexualised male body that not only comes to define masculine subjectivity in music video but is also an important process through which hegemonic masculinity maintains its power. The representation of black masculinity in D'Angelo's untitled (‘How Does It Feel?’) is simultaneously typical and atypical of the way in which tropes of raced and sexed identity are inscribed on the black male body. The presence of masculinity is predicated on the absence or deletion of the male body. Quite ironically, the rewritten and re-authored marginal black masculinity of untitled is perhaps more aesthetically complex and politically important than hegemonic masculinity's continual reiteration of its own past successes.Less

On Spirit and Sperm: Eroticizing God, Sanctifying the Body

in Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination

Confessions are, to a large extent, soul work that is read and inscribed into the body, mirrored in it, and practiced through performances of the flesh. The male body is a common theme in male ... More

Confessions are, to a large extent, soul work that is read and inscribed into the body, mirrored in it, and practiced through performances of the flesh. The male body is a common theme in male confessiography, such as in Tom Driver's soft, white, and “useless flesh” of his thighs; in Michel Leiris's “auburn hair” and “incipient baldness”; and in James Broughton's androgynous breast and “neglected backside.” Intimate exchanges of bodily fluids are mentioned in the confessions of St. Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Carl Jung. This chapter explores the personal dimension of the male body in gay men's confessional writings, supplanting the heterosexual anxiety around masculinity with a sexual and eroticized male body that is to be befriended rather than rendered non-absent. It examines scholarly texts with strong confessional moments authored by contemporary American gay men such as Scott Haldeman and Donald Boisvert. In discussing gay hagiolatry, the chapter looks at Haldeman's theological essays on the intimate male body and Boisvert's defense of the gay eroticization of Jesus Christ.Less

Trois Contes

Mary Orr

in Flaubert: Writing the Masculine

In this chapter, Trois Contes (TC) uncovers the contradictions of the interpersonal within political, legal, or religious frames. It undertakes a new reading which investigates the morality of TC not ... More

In this chapter, Trois Contes (TC) uncovers the contradictions of the interpersonal within political, legal, or religious frames. It undertakes a new reading which investigates the morality of TC not through the religious or ethical, but through its anthropological strata. It looks at the three male body-parts which signify ‘life’ in order to investigate the public conscience of man, not his subconscious.Less

Suffering Triumph

Kent L. Brintnall

in Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure

This chapter attends to representations of violence—specifically, violence generated by and directed against male bodies—in Hollywood action films. Linking the “violence” of action films with the ... More

This chapter attends to representations of violence—specifically, violence generated by and directed against male bodies—in Hollywood action films. Linking the “violence” of action films with the trauma of war, however tangentially, may appear as obscene and problematic as Bataille's celebratory turn to mystical self-annihilation in the midst of World War II, but a connection between the action genre's pleasures and those “drawn [from] the combat aspect of war” can be seen. This chapter then considers some of the clearest examples of the male-body-in-pain's ambiguity. Featuring narratives of the suffering but triumphant hero, and containing spectacular displays of the male body, action films present all the issues and questions that motivate this study.Less

The Indian Male Body and the Heroic Ideal: Tecumseh and the Indians of Parkman and Cooper

Chad A. Barbour

in From Daniel Boone to Captain America: Playing Indian in American Popular Culture

Chapter one examines the existence of the Indian male body as an object of admiration and repulsion. On one hand, the Indian male body is glamorized as a specimen of Classical beauty, an ideal of ... More

Chapter one examines the existence of the Indian male body as an object of admiration and repulsion. On one hand, the Indian male body is glamorized as a specimen of Classical beauty, an ideal of physical and aesthetic form. On the other hand, that Indian body possesses the potential for danger and physical harm. Examples such as Tecumseh, Uncas, and Francis Parkman's descriptions of Native men demonstrate this contradictory balance of admiration and repulsion, a dynamic that both embodies and disembodies the Indian male figure. This chapter shows how American art and literature in the nineteenth century attempts to neutralize the perceived threat of the Indian male body through artistic objectification of that body, an objectification that aims to construct an ideal for white manhood.Less

Sex and Gender: The Meanings of the Male Body

in The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England

This chapter discusses the importance of the male body in the concept of masculinity in medieval England. It explains that masculinity was a physically expressible feature and that the male body was ... More

This chapter discusses the importance of the male body in the concept of masculinity in medieval England. It explains that masculinity was a physically expressible feature and that the male body was more on display during this period due to changes in men's attire. Men's clothes displayed both wealth and a desire to be in fashion, and affirmed a man's social presence among others. The awareness of being on display expressed masculine self-confidence; it confirmed the way the wearer felt about himself as a man and the way he wanted his male peers to perceive him.Less

Crucifixion Representation

Kent L. Brintnall

in Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure

This chapter examines the theme of crucifixion or the reduction of flesh to meat in Francis Bacon's work. It reflects on his depiction of the male body and the alluring beauty of its vulnerability ... More

This chapter examines the theme of crucifixion or the reduction of flesh to meat in Francis Bacon's work. It reflects on his depiction of the male body and the alluring beauty of its vulnerability and collapse. It traces the relation between the violence of crucifixion and the violation of representation in his paintings to explore the inherent vulnerability of the male body on display. Meat has something to teach humankind, but as Bataille's comments emphasize, society works very hard to sequester the slaughterhouse and suppress its lessons. Bacon's painterly corpus can be understood as an attempt to make meat speak again—even in the form of a choked, strained, guttural scream.Less

Non-absent Bodies and Moral Agency: Confessions of an African Bishop and a Jewish Ghetto Policeman

in Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination

Confessiography includes a narrative background about already-lived experiences against which the male confessant wishes to be judged and forgiven. Confessional texts come with an implicit moral ... More

Confessiography includes a narrative background about already-lived experiences against which the male confessant wishes to be judged and forgiven. Confessional texts come with an implicit moral expectation that a sympathetic reader would willingly accept. Given such implied morality, the confessant's subjectivity and moral agency come into focus. This chapter argues that the issue of moral agency is intricately linked to the representation of the male body and that moral agency is hidden by the non-absence (that is, textual disappearance) of the male body in male confessiographies. It examines the texts of two very different men, St. Augustine and Calel Perechodnik, and looks at common themes in their confessions. These themes range from choice and control to morality and faith, guilt and forgiveness, hope and despair, human failure and the (im)possibility of redemption, and their relationships to God and their loved ones including their parents, spouses, and children.Less

Bodies and appearance

Melanie Tebbutt

in Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-war Years

Chapter 3 compares and contrasts anxieties and concerns which surrounded the clothed and unclothed male body. Male bodies had a powerful cultural resonance after the war, in rehabilitative ... More

Chapter 3 compares and contrasts anxieties and concerns which surrounded the clothed and unclothed male body. Male bodies had a powerful cultural resonance after the war, in rehabilitative initiatives and emerging consumer industries. By the 1930s, the physical power of the masses, from the Bolshevik Revolution to images of crowds at play, was informing a national iconography of controlled and disciplined youth, very visible in newsreel footage from the 1930s of the Scouts, BB, boys' clubs, and totalitarian youth movements in Germany and Italy. At an individual level, young men's physical sense of self was coming under the growing influence of visual forms and commercial leisure trends, bringing working-class young men into contact with new models of personal behaviour and social interaction which made many sensitive to style, fashion and appearance. This chapter examines how working-class young men mediated the feminised connotations of consumption in negotiating these new physical images and ways of performing masculinity.Less

Corporeal Intentions

Stephen Amico

in Roll Over, Tchaikovsky!: Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality

This chapter explores how male homosexuality is suggested via the presentation of the sexualized male body as object of the gaze—an objectifying gaze placing the male in the position of the ... More

This chapter explores how male homosexuality is suggested via the presentation of the sexualized male body as object of the gaze—an objectifying gaze placing the male in the position of the “feminine.” It looks at the efflorescence of images of male physical beauty in the musical discourses of numerous singers and bands in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in Russia and how these images were conflated with homosexuality or homoeroticism. To this end, the chapter examines instances of the male body's foregrounding in the work of Andrei Danilko, the groups Hi-Fi and Smash!!, and singer Dima Bilan (focusing on his appearances at the Eurovision Song Contest). It highlights not only the variable of the body's visibility (and, concomitantly, questions of power), but also the interrelated and phenomenologically inflected dynamics of intentionality, proximity, and orientation. It shows that visible male bodies, invoking the possibility of the homosexual, provide a sight/site for Russian gay men and also serve the goluboi.Less

Male Pregnancy, Matrix, and Hospitality

Irina Aristarkhova

in Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture

The topic of male pregnancy, which at first glance seems irrelevant and is generally known as plain impossible, is currently being regarded as merely another biomedical breakthrough. Research on male ... More

The topic of male pregnancy, which at first glance seems irrelevant and is generally known as plain impossible, is currently being regarded as merely another biomedical breakthrough. Research on male pregnancy is gaining momentum particularly due to Thomas Beatie, a transgender man who kept his uterus and became successfully pregnant. This chapter delves into the potential of male pregnancy to raise questions regarding the male body and its hospitality, specifically the question of whether male pregnancy is just another case of a desire for ectogenesis, or that there is something more to it that could be useful for the analysis of the matrix and hospitality. The chapter looks at the increasing number of biomedical practices addressing the definition of masculinity as distinguished from birthing, mothering, and femininity.Less

Schreber and the Penetrated Male

Jonathan Kemp

in Deleuze and Queer Theory

This chapter explores how Gilles Deleuze's critical energy and concepts can be marshalled into challenging the totalising notions of masculinity and the body. It offers an interpretation of the case ... More

This chapter explores how Gilles Deleuze's critical energy and concepts can be marshalled into challenging the totalising notions of masculinity and the body. It offers an interpretation of the case of Daniel Paul Schreber as a DeleuzoGuattarian becoming-minoritarian/woman/queer that shattered the neat and stable confines of the concept of man. The chapter also explores one aspect of embodiment so far ignored or misunderstood within critical theory: the penetrated male body.Less

Blind to Sameness

Asia Friedman

in Blind to Sameness: Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies

This chapter focuses on those bodily details that are cognitively filtered out of our perceptions or eliminated through polarizing display practices. It presents evidence that “male” and “female” ... More

This chapter focuses on those bodily details that are cognitively filtered out of our perceptions or eliminated through polarizing display practices. It presents evidence that “male” and “female” bodies are proportionately more similar than different, but that we are socialized to be blind to sex sameness.Less

Homoerotic Spectacle and the Monastic Body in Symeon the New Theologian

Derek Krueger

in Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline

Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), arguably the most important Byzantine religious thinker between John of Damascus in the eighth century and Gregory Palamas in the ... More

Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), arguably the most important Byzantine religious thinker between John of Damascus in the eighth century and Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth, often presents salvation as a heavenly marriage. Scholars have long noted Symeon's frequent use of erotic and nuptial imagery to explore the relationship between the monk and God. What scholars have generally failed to notice or account for is that much of this imagery reflects homoeroticism. This chapter uncovers in the writings of Symeon the New Theologian evidence of a startlingly rich homoerotic imaginary that foregrounds the male monastic body as the site of erotic transformation or deification. The chapter detects possible echoes in Symeon's work of the teasingly cloaked erotic exchange between Alcibiades and Socrates with which Plato's Symposium concludes. While Symeon often invokes divine eros in his understanding of the process of deification, it is debatable whether this parable and its interpretation are “consistent with the New Theologian's use of nuptial imagery elsewhere”.Less

The Black Male Body in Early African American Science Fiction: The Experimental Case of Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio

Marlene D. Allen

in The Male Body in Medicine and Literature

Marlene Allen’s essay explores the bodies of Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave through the focus of late nineteenth-century debates about race determinism. Sutton Grigg’s Imperium in Imperio ... More

Marlene Allen’s essay explores the bodies of Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave through the focus of late nineteenth-century debates about race determinism. Sutton Grigg’s Imperium in Imperio extrapolates the nature and nurture dichotomy into a fantastical counter-history of race war in America, refuting pseudo-scientific discourses of black intellectual inferiority.Less

‘Sons of Belial’: Contaminated/Contaminating Victorian Male Bodies

Lesley A. Hall

in The Male Body in Medicine and Literature

Lesley A. Hall examines the fear of the sexualised male body as a vector for diseases capable of disrupting both familial and social dynamics. While academic research has tended to focus on the ... More

Lesley A. Hall examines the fear of the sexualised male body as a vector for diseases capable of disrupting both familial and social dynamics. While academic research has tended to focus on the potential for damage caused by the sexually diseased female body, Hall redresses the balance by considering the pariah status attributed to those, such as soldiers and sailors, considered to be over-sexed or lacking in self-control. But the prejudice was extended to those men in general society either afflicted by syphilis or gonorrhoea or regarded as threatening through their moral laxity the reproductive healthiness of family life. Hall shows how this threat became increasingly public in wider culture during the last decades of the nineteenth century, bringing about both general condemnation and legislative amendment. Reinforcing such anxieties about wayward male concupiscence was an equally virulent condemnation of masturbation as consciously self-harming. Hall asserts that masturbation was considered more than a personal vice, being viewed as potentially contaminative – seminal loss producing not just a range of frightful pathologies for the individual but a transmission of harmful agents to others.Less