Acceso usuarios
Jonathan A. Allan
The male nude has been the subject of recent studies, such as, Patricia Lee Rubin's Seen from Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art (2018), which cheekily and playfully considers the body from behind. Anthea Callen argues that "human anatomy, together with its modern offspring anthropology and morphology, played-and continues to play-an active role in the construction of the modern male body" (10). In his book, Argentine, Mexican, and Guatemalan Photography: Feminist, Queer, andPost-MasculinistPerspectives (2014), David William Foster observes, The female body has long been photographed in the nude as part of an abiding tradition of the fetishizing of her body by the masculinist gaze of the camera, a gaze that wanders all over the erotic map in the many ways, the many perspectives, the many close-ups available to imagining the female body. To begin to answer my questions, I turn to Foster, who has argued that "in the case of male nudes, while there is certainly an art tradition that would accord an aesthetic beauty to the male body, it always comes off as distinctly marginal," and thus, he contends, "the proposition that there is inherent beauty in the male body comes off, for most, as masked homoerotic desire, and the fact is that the display of the male nude in all art forms, and especially in photography, can ultimately be traced to an interest in a fetishizing of its homoerotic parameters" (Argentine 84 -85).
