I've signed up for the ‘Pass on your Passions’ project, which involves designing a book about something you are passionate about or that interests you, in a way that will interests others, using content taken entirely from the internet.
I thought about it a little over the Christmas break and decided it would be interesting to use the project to interrogate (gay) pornography, or at least, erotica, and the politics of viewing, perhaps exploring the problematic association between pornography/erotica, and art.
My first stop was to check out the some of the works of the publisher Taschen, which includes erotica in its titles, and to gather some images which could arguably be said to tread the line between erotica and art, for example the artist Tom of Finland...
As the target audience is creatives I also decided to stop by design-oriented bookstore Magma. One thing that intrigued me was a calendar for ‘Butt’ magazine, a publication which is almost entirely compiled from readers’ own articles, pictures, etc.
I checked out their website and blog and gathered a few more images, throwing around some ideas about perhaps exploring self-published erotica, or the desire to present oneself as erotic.A link on the Butt blog diverted me to ‘Brief magazine’, a site which features all things brief, from pictures of people in various states of undress, to snapshots of moments in time and bygone trends and fashions. Both Butt and Brief struck me as ‘indie’ in their style of erotica – with the focus on real people and their bodies and the erotic impetus behind this dynamic.
This impetus intensified in the next site I stumbled across via Brief: a flickr site for ‘Quinnford and Scout’ a gay couple who are documenting their entire relationship online, from the day-to-day mundane to the sexual and intimate. Again, it was the notion of erotica being a part of everyday life, and the real people behind the images which interested me.
I am aware that a book on erotica needs to have some sort of theoretical foundation, in order to avoid becoming a book about porn, for porn’s sake, and so I checked out ‘jstor’ an online journal site, and procured a few essays on the politics of looking, the male body and photography and more specifically gendered viewing of pornography, ie, the different ways (straight) men and women respond to pictures of nude females and nude males. One essay found that, whereas the sexualised female is familiar and commonplace, as a culture we have no cultural script to deal with the sexualised male – men avoid discussing it for fear of their heterosexuality being into question, and females are uncomfortable in the role as sexual agent as it compromises their role of passive female.
This might be a way of approaching the book, anticipating and presenting readers’ reactions to the sexualised male and then presenting them with the nude/sexualised male in such a way that will encourage them to consider their own reactions and the reasons for them.
That said, I am still keen to consider the ways in which the politics of viewing an image change if you know the subject is a real person, rather than an anonymous nude model...
The first tutorial with Steve has confirmed to me that I need to focus in as soon as possible and, again, that I need to find a way to make the book interesting, or at least intriguing to an audience of both heterosexuals and homosexuals, and both men and women.
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So, I went away and did a little more image collection, continuing to keep some ideas about what the focus of the book will be floating around my head, but not consolidating anything just yet. I gathered more images from ‘Brief’ (which is updated frequently) and read more essays about pornography and art, hegemonic masculinity and the homoerotic and the politics of the male body.
To further my exploration into the idea of the ‘real’ nude male image vs. the ‘staged’ nude male image I looked at the websites and blogs for more independent gay magazines such as Pinups, Pisszine, Kaiserin, Kink and Spank.
Although I've found some interesting images, I've been struggling to find any essays or journals on this topic which would give the book the focus and depth I want, and so after the second tutorial with Steve, in which we had to settle on a title (or at least, a subject matter), I've decided that there is probably not time to sufficiently research the politics of the ‘real’ v ‘staged’ nude, and so I've opted instead to focus on the gendered reactions to the sexualised male, as I think this also has more mileage as something that will interest a wider audience.
The next step is to start populating the InDesign templates will copy and images...
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