CAKIRLAR, C; (2011) Masculinity, Scatology, Mooning and the Queer/able Art of Gilbert & George: On the Visual Discourse of Male Ejaculation and Anal Penetration. Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory , 34 (1) 86 - 104. 10.3366/para.2011.0007.

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Abstract

The aim of this essay is to investigate the intersections between masculinity, shame, art, anality, the abject and embodiment by focusing on a particular period of the British art duo Gilbert & George's work in the 1990s. In their series The Naked Shit Pictures (1994), The Fundamental Pictures (1996) and The Rudimentary Pictures (1999), the duo's artistic self-performance opens a scatological narrative territory where the male body encounters its own abject fluids strategically magnified. Situating itself within the boundary between queer theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis with a particular focus on the phallus and the abject, this essay argues that Gilbert & George's art-works mentioned above could be regarded as visual commentaries on and queer interventions into bodily anxieties of normative masculinities. It thus reads the artists’ visual discourse of performative hypervisibility as a queer/ing one where the conventional male masculinity confronts simultaneously its ejaculatory bliss and its fear of anal penetration.

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