Marking the Canon: The Image of Masculinity after the Sexual Revolution
PAPER PROPOSAL
Eli S. Zadeh | State University of New York, Stony Brook
Marking the Canon: The Image of Masculinity after the Sexual Revolution
While feminism and queer art have successfully revealed the performative and contingent nature of gender, discourses around the engagement of heterosexual male artists with their body and identity, prioritize a universal unmarked status. As an attempt at queering the canon, this paper will examine the representation, and at times relaxation, of hegemonic masculinity in the work of male artists who were responding to the impacts of queer art and feminist movements in the United States. I will show how during the 1970s and ‘80s, artists who were usually identified as heterosexual male, embarked on their personal experiences and deployed a wide range of tropes invented by feminism and queer body art to create a heightened awareness about the conditioning apparatuses that produce a system of domination. I will focus on works by artists like John Duncan, Eric Bogosian, Bruce Nauman, among others to explain how they are structured on reflexive performances that speak to the newly gendered understandings of masculinity. In all of these works, failure as the most important sign of emasculation points at the precarious nature of masculinity and reveals the machinery needed to maintain its ascendancy. These artists turn to masculine rituals both as stand-ins for social relations regulated through bio-power, and as contributors to the modern sense of subjectivity.