The Abject Gaze and the Homosexual Body
Flandrin'sFigure d'Etude
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3639272 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Camille (University of Chicago, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1994 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 161-188 |
| Publication date | 1994-09-15 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Homosexuality (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0091-8369 • E-ISSN: 1540-3602 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1300/j082v27n01_08 |
| PMID | 7798601 |
| OpenAlex | W1971569383 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
This article charts the history of the reception, reproduction and appropriation of a single image that has recently become a kind of "gay icon"--the Figure d'Etude in the Louvre, painted by Hippolyte Flandrin in 1835. Initially no more than a neo-classical academic exercise, the formal emptiness of this picture meant that it could be re-invested and reinscribed with new meanings and new titles at every turn. Emblematic of the anxious visibility/invisibility of the newly discovered homosexual body during a period when the gaze still had to be kept a dark secret, Flandrin's image only "came out" in its later photographic reworkings by Frederick Holland Day and Baron von Gloeden. After being reproduced for a specifically homosexual audience early this century, the popular Romantic pose of the young man curled-up in profile became a standard one, reappearing recently in the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. The inactive, abject and inward-turned isolation of the figure with its narcissistic self-absorption makes it, in my view, a profoundly negative stereotype of the gay gaze and the homosexual body. Flandrin's figure nonetheless appears today on gay merchandise world-wide as a sign of our separate and secluded subject positions and our community's unwillingness to radically alter older imposed and inherited classical stereotypes
Aesthetics · Art · Emptiness · Gaze · Icon · Invisibility · KISS (TNC · Male gaze · Object (grammar · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Romance · Sociology · Subject (documents · Decadence, Literature, and Society · European history and politics · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2023 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |