The Male Body and Masculinity: Representations of Men in British Visual Culture of the 1990s by Monika Pietrzak-Franger (2007)

Abstract

“Is all this attention to the body a good thing?” Laurence Gold-stein asked in a 1994 anthology on The Male Body (p. viii). Since then, various volumes dealing with the history of the male body have been published, and a journal titled Masculinities was launched (and discontinued shortly after). In addition, the male body has become a common presence in advertising, film, and television. Despite this emphasis on the male physique in contemporary culture, the male body has still remained a terra incognita as far as the depth of analysis in academic literature is concerned. “Within cultural practice generally,” philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone holds, “a male’s body is not anatomized nor is it ever made into an object of study in the same way as female bodies” (as cited in Bordo, 1999, p. 18). Although Sheets-Johnstone’s statement is certainly exaggerated, it is safe to say that today there still is a huge gap in academic writing on the male (and primarily White and heterosexual) body. While there have been studies on the male body in U.S. culture and film (Bordo, 1999; Lehman, 2007; Neale, 1993) and even books on the representation of masculinity in Spanish cinema (Fouz-Hernández & Martinez-Exposito 2007), British contemporary culture has been widely omitted from these interpretations. The studies by Jeffrey Weeks (Against Nature, 1991) and Richard Dyer (Only Entertainment, 2002) come to mind. However, they do not tackle “masculinity” as an overarching social and cultural construct but rather deal with the particular aspects of heterosexist norms, gay subculture, and the subversive aesthetics of the male body.